This is Pingree, Idaho. This is where a great deal of my Italian relatives live, including my Grandparents. This road that runs right in front of their house, before it was renamed, was called Rossi Road. Pingree, Bingham, Idaho (as known in the census records) is a farming community. A lot of our relatives are retired farmers and many farms aren't in working order. There is so much history in this community that it amazes me.
There is a sense of actually community out here. People trust each other with their homes, families and children. Traditions are made out here and family values are taught. Less than thirty years ago it wasn't unheard of to see the children of these farmers helping them out in the fields, with the animals, the gardens, moving irrigation pipes or in the potato cellars picking potatoes. Children were taught at an early age how to farm and what a good day of work is worth.
A good day's work started out before 5 a.m. A good farmer has to get up and feed and milk the cows, feed the chickens, gather the eggs, and feed the other animals. While the men were busy out on the farm the women completed the housework, did the gardening and tended to the children. They cooked the food every day. Dinner was the biggest meal of the day and was always something delicious.
There is a sense of actually community out here. People trust each other with their homes, families and children. Traditions are made out here and family values are taught. Less than thirty years ago it wasn't unheard of to see the children of these farmers helping them out in the fields, with the animals, the gardens, moving irrigation pipes or in the potato cellars picking potatoes. Children were taught at an early age how to farm and what a good day of work is worth.
A good day's work started out before 5 a.m. A good farmer has to get up and feed and milk the cows, feed the chickens, gather the eggs, and feed the other animals. While the men were busy out on the farm the women completed the housework, did the gardening and tended to the children. They cooked the food every day. Dinner was the biggest meal of the day and was always something delicious.
Now this is weird, kind of. My father explained to me one night on the phone that the farm was once ran by two families. This old chicken coop used to be a house where the other family lived. Now it's just a broken down chicken coop. I think my Dad said that the farm has a total of 180 acres. Then it was a beautiful running farm but as we get older things have gotten a little run down. How I would love to restore all of this farm and get it back to running order again. It would take a little too much work for me to do and since we all have our own families it's just a dream. I never knew there was another family that lived here with my Grandparents.
This is the Grain silo. We used to play hide and seek in it when I was little. It was great for that unless it was filled with grain, of course.
Every time I see this picture I always think of the beginning of the movie The Wizard of Oz. The scene with the rickety fence and Judy Garland singing "Some Where Over the Rainbow."
This is what used to be the barn. It is now called the rabbit hutch. Dad raises rabbits and sells them, I guess. It used to make Mom so mad. I don't know if she actually did it but she'd talk about letting those rabbits go when Dad left. I hope she got a chance to free them once or twice.
I remember when this building was a working barn. I remember 60 cattle, at least wandering around the farm. I remember having to chase cows back into the gates or some of them getting loose down the road at a relatives house and having to go help them to get them back in. In fact it didn't surprise us a bit when when we had to drive up the big hill and break for a cow staring at you straight in the face.
One of the best things ever at Grandma's house is this old yellow caboose. You can't see it but there used to be a club house right next to the old yellow caboose. My sister, Kathy, Tony (my cousin) and I used to play there all the time.
It'd been thirty years since I'd been to my Grandmother's house. The doors were a lot smaller, the walls were depleted, and spiders were every where. It's so sad.
A long time ago there was a potato cellar that sat a couple hundred yards away. My Dad said that my
Grandparents brought that caboose there to house some of the people that used to work at the potato cellar. I remember when we were little we used to think that because there was a very old stove and a few other things (like the pictures hanging up on the walls) that maybe someone lived there.