I found this note in my mother's notes that I have been reading through this week. I thought maybe you might enjoy reading it.
-- Editor

A memory written in 1999:
A New Year!! Let's look back - for just one page. The 84th New Year I have welcomed. The first one, being wrapped in "swaddling clothes" - baby-wear back then. Mid winter rooms weren't warm clear out to the corners - doors opened to outside to let in a rush of cold air. No draft dare get on the baby. There would have been at least 2 blankets, but what did I care then. I didn't know that the year 1915 came in. No one has since told me about what happened that year's first minute, but I'm fairly sure that we all three were asleep in that 2 room homestead 20 some miles out from St. Francis, Kansas - 10 or less miles from little Parks, Nebraska. It took awhile to get anywhere in a buggy drawn by one horse. And COLD. Yes, I can be very, very sure we were in our warm beds as the new year came in.

I was unaware that WWI was affecting our family. Uncle Art (Bartlett) was in service, or maybe just before he was called, all I can remember back - is that he refused to ask to be excused because he was the farmer. Grandpa (George Bartlett) was getting old enough to be called ancient, I guess. It was hard for him to do the farm work alone. He was up near 70 and depended on Art to do much of the farming. Some neighbors told him to ask for a deferment and he did stay until after harvest, but he refused to try to stay home. The farm boys were held back to get in the grain that the country needed. He said that if he was deferred, some man with a wife and children might have to go in his stead. That is how my Uncle Art was all his life. He gave himself for his family and others. Years later, when I needed money for summer school, he came to our house and insisted on loaning me the money. He understood that an outright gift would be a putdown just as I was newly on my own. That lift meant a lot to me. More now than at the time. More than the share I got after his death.

Back to the service and basic training at Camp Funston, Kansas - then to New York. His company was waiting orders to ship out for Europe when the armistice was signed and the war was over. None of the wild celebrations could compare with the rejoicing in those little houses on the prairie of western Kansas.

I don't remember any of this, but the feelings became such a part of me that I feel now that I lived those times. Which I did -- toddlers absorb it all somehow. If we knew how much those early years make the person, we would take more seriously the environment we make for our little ones.

-- Written by Alice (Crabtree) Gregory