Published: February 09, 2007 11:12 am            

Readers' Retreat: 'Eggs in Coffee' a life story we have all lived

Originally published in the February 9, 2007, print edition.

Marjorie Myers Douglas’ memoir “Eggs in the Coffee, Sheep in the Corn: My 17 Years as a Farmwife” is packed with good writing, good story and drama.

Her book was published in 1994 so I should have discovered this long ago. But the title put me off. The title seemed cute and sugar-coated.

I thought that a city girl who married a farm boy and went to spend a few years on the farm had nothing to say to me. I should have realized that the Minnesota Historical Society Press does not print cute or sugar-coated books. As is so often the case, the MHS Press has joined with a capable author to tell a story that is both historically significant and a pleasure to read.

Douglas left the suburban Twin Cities in 1943 for life on a farm near Appleton. In doing so she swam against the current of her times. The vast exodus from America’s farms was just beginning when she and her young husband chose to return to his family farm to help out his parents for a year or two.

Douglas’ husband, who worked in an armaments plant, may have embraced the decision but the author was reluctant to leave her family and her familiar surroundings.

“Reluctantly we made our decision to join forces with Papa and Mother Douglas ... for perhaps a year or two,” Douglas writes. “When the local draft board, more concerned in 1943 for food for a nation enmeshed in World War II than for bullets, approved the move, I knew this impossible nightmare was reality. As soon as Don could train a new man to take his place at the armaments plant, he hurried back to the farm.”

Once the author accepted that the move to the farm was inevitable she decided to try her best to adapt to her new life on the farm. At first she was a naïve a sweet young city girl. Upon arriving on the farm one of her first chores was to bottle feed a colt whose work horse mother died giving birth. At first she’s afraid but then she, and her baby daughter Anne, fall in love with the creature.

“His big brown eyes fixed us in his gaze,” Douglas writes. “We entered and timidly stroked his head, so wobbly on its slender neck. His legs worked convulsively, and suddenly he heaved himself up at the shoulders and gained his feet. I cautiously extended the Coca-Cola bottle with its huge nipple, but he let it slip away from his velvety muzzle. Remembering our instructions, I squirted a little of the diluted cow’s milk onto his lips. Almost at once he was sucking greedily, noisily, happily. We laughed and scratched his head and rubbed his neck.”

When the colt dies of an infection a few months later, and the corpse is hauled away in a truck, Douglas is introduced to one of the hard realities of farm life.

The fact that Douglas was a city girl thrown into a culture she initially didn’t understand allowed her to see it in a way that those born and raised in that culture were unable to. She was like an anthropologist. She marveled at the unexpected turn her life had taken and kept her eyes wide open.

Later she both embraced and rebelled against her new life. She struggled with the endless work and her family’s ever-increasing commitment to the farm. At the same time took pleasure in it in her newly emerging life. She became a member of a church and a broader community. Through that, and her farm work, she both discovered outlets for her creativity and talents and felt them to be unfulfilled. It was, in essence, a life in mid-century rural Minnesota.

One of Douglas’ most challenging struggles was with her father-in-law. She saw this difficult man dominate her beloved husband and smother her own dreams. She studied her mother-in-law’s strategies for relating to him.

Finally Douglas had a confrontation with her father-in-law.

The drama of Douglas’ personal relationship are interesting because many of us have had similar experiences. That is true also of her relationship to her farm and community.

That, combined with the portrayal of rural living half a century ago, makes “Eggs in the Coffee, Sheep in the Corn” a fine book.

You can get a copy from the Minnesota Historical Society Press by phone at (651) 296-2264 or at their website www.mhspress.org or you can order it from most book stores.

        

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