I don't remember actually moving to Earlimart. I just remember living there. Daddy rented a little house out on the edge of town with a huge empty field across the road. There was a crop in the field, but I don't remember what food it was. I do remember Mama gazing out across that field, smiling, and saying, "The Bible says the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose..."
It was a four room house, five if you counted the bathroom, which was not functional. There was a commode in there, but it was not hooked up to a septic tank so we used the out-house. That was interesting. I didn't like that part very much. There were wasps and dirt-dobbers in the out-house; I considered them not my friends. At night we used a chamber pot (The Pot) and dumped it in the outhouse the next morning. For bathing, there was a shower house shared with the neighbors, who were also members of The Church. Barrels of water sat on the flat roof all day in very hot sun, so you could stand underneath, turn on the shower spigot and have a warm shower in the late afternoon. A fence-like structure offered some privacy. But still the dirt-dobbers could come in there. I didn't like it very much.
A four room house is small for six people, but I don't remember that as being a problem. We kids were almost always outside, and Daddy was gone to work most of the time.
The eat-in kitchen was the biggest room. I remember the two-person dish washing routine: heat water on the stove, pour it into the two dishpans (one for soap and one for rinse); then somebody (often me) washes each dish with a dishrag in the soapy water, rinses it in the rinse water, turns it upside down on a clean cloth on the little counter top. The other person (sometimes me) "dries" the dishes, wiping each one all over with a dish-towel, and putting it away in the cabinets, so that it's ready for the next meal. Most of the dishes were breakable. We had to handle them with care. "Better not break anything," Mama would say. There were very few plastic items in those days. In 1955 no one had ever heard of Tupperware.
The other three rooms were filled with beds. The big back bedroom had two big beds for us four kids, Jim and Ray in one, little Richard and me in the other. Mama and Daddy had their own bedroom, a tiny one, and the "living room" had a single bed in it. It was mostly used as a couch. Occasionally when our older brother, Eugene, who was in the navy in San Diego, would come "home" on the weekends, he would sleep there.
Most of my time was spent outside that summer. The neighbor's cat had kittens. When they were big enough to run around outside, we each claimed one. They were pretty much all gray striped cats, so I don't know how we knew which kitten was whose, but we did. I loved to tickle the kitty's tummy, but soon abandoned that idea as the kitty's kicking back feet drew blood from my arms. Kitty would run away without looking back. So pretty soon I found other things to play with.
There was a nice fenced space behind the house dotted with climbable trees. Jim, Ray, and I each claimed a tree and determined to build ourselves tree houses. I think Richard claimed one, too, but he was too little to reach the lowest branch and actually climb up there without help. No problem. He just played around out there anyway. We didn't have toys. We made toys out of all kinds of things, mostly sticks, sometimes cans, bottles, or paper. I was big on paper dolls. Jim and I loved to read, and usually found the trees a nice quiet place to read or dream. Ray was not much for reading, but seemed to find things to do outside that summer.
One thing Ray like to do was boss Richard. The story goes that one of our parents heard Ray hollering out in the back, and arrived to find four-year-old Richard threatening eight-year-old Ray with a knife (Yes! a sharp knife he'd found somewhere, maybe the kitchen?) and had Ray backed up to the fence screaming. Richard's explanation was, "Well, tell Ray to keep his nose out of my business..." So much for the pecking order in the Ballentine family.
We wondered when it would rain. We learned that it does not rain in the summer in the San WawKeen (smile). If it does, it's a big deal. It did not rain in Earlimart the whole summer of 1955. But a lot of crops, watered from the canals, grew around there, and the vegetables and fruits were huge and delicious. The sheds would give away or sell very cheap boxes of "culls." Fruit like peaches had to fit through a certain size hole to be delivered to grocery stores. If the peach was too large, it was culled. Mama and Daddy took advantage of this by buying trailer loads of fruit and vegetables and canning them.
There was a huge "shed" with a flat roof out in the back of that property. Some time during the summer, our parents bought a huge load of peaches for a few dollars at a shed. There were too many to can, so they decided to dry some of them on the flat roof of the shed. Eugene, home on leave, and Jim were assigned to peel the peaches and also to climb up on the shed roof and spread them out to dry. Eugene got so sick of peeling peaches outside in the back yard, that when Daddy wasn't looking he would toss a peach or two over the fence. One less peach to peel. Jim observed this and smiled. When he and Eugene climbed up on the shed roof to spread the peeled peaches out, Jim picked up a handful and tossed them over to the backside of the shed.
"Hey!" Eugene hollered at Jim. "You're throwin' away the ones we've already peeled..." Jim just shrugged. I think he would have rather peeled peaches as climb up on that hot flat roof and spread them out. But to Eugene, it was peeling them that irked.
As years in California passed, we canned many, many vegetables and fruits. Mama became an expert. Daddy usually helped. Besides hooking up that trailer and taking it all over the Valley to get the food, he worked in the hot kitchen with her to preserve it in jars. Besides peaches and nectarines, they canned cherries, apples, green beans, all kinds of berries.
It was a long, hot summer, that first summer in California, as the Ballentine family bonded with each other and with our Church family. We moved several times in the next few years... Oh, but that is another story...
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