The hand pump was a fixture on the large back porch of the big farmhouse built in 1869. It was the house where my mother was raised, and where I started going in 1965. My grandparents, John R. and Janice Day Watson, lived there for some 55 years. Before that my grandfather's parents, Garfield and Ellen Barker Watson, lived there.
The last time I was at the farm was yesterday, to pick up the hand pump that I won in the Watson Auction.
The Watsons are my kinfolk. My mother, Sandra Ellen, was a Watson before she married my father, Fred McDonald. Her brother, David, and his wife, Kathy, and their two children now own all of the Watson farm. My late aunt and uncle, David and Peggy Ruppel, and their children used to also live on the farm.
I paid $121 for the hand pump. Why? Because it means something to me. It's a part of my memories of the farm. I haven't been in the farmhouse since 2018, after my grandmother died, to collect a few things. After that the house was gutted and renovated.
The back porch was removed. The hand pump was saved, I was informed when I asked about it.
Last week I saw it in the online Watson Auction.
I never resided in the farmhouse but for 50 years - until the middle of 2015 when grandmother was sent to a nursing home - I was a reoccurring visitor.
After my mother died in 1968, my grandparents wanted me to live with them. But my father did what he thought was best for himself and me and he placed me with his parents, Fred and Ruth DeVol McDonald, in Caldwell while he lived and worked in Columbus.
Dad made certain that I saw my mother's family.
Dad remarried and started a new family but he made sure I had a relationship with my mother's family. And I did.
Over the years I came to love to go to the farm and I made memories there to last a lifetime.
Some of the memories I have are in photographs taken by others and some I have taken myself.
In July 2012 grandmother and I visited on the back porch and before I could snap a picture of her my rechargeable camera battery was exhausted. Earlier in the day I captured the empty rocking chair, hand pump, cat and the view.
I had this photograph made into a canvas that hangs in my house. This image invokes a strong memory of the farm, porch, farmhouse, grandmother, cats and LOVE.
See grandmother, in her nightgown, feeding the cats a day after her 87th birthday in 2013. There's the hand pump.
The hand pump is on the porch, circa late 1940s, where grandmother and her sister-in-law Dorothy who married my grandfather's brother Harry, pose. They have picked strawberries and are in front of the porch of farmhouse where their in-law's Garfield and Ellen Watson reside. Grandmother and Grandfather later moved into the farmhouse.
I'm sure my love of cats started at the farm. They seem to be in a lot of photographs, especially when I was little.
Today is National Cat Day!
As far as the hand pump, maybe it will be come a garden water feature at my home. Stay tuned.
