Her hands were raw, red and cracked

My mother cleaned with fierceness. She would scrub and scrape until her hands were raw, red and cracked, slathering them with lotions or bag balm only to start cleaning again. She would clean from habit and duty. She cleaned because it was ingrained in her culture, for Germans are a tidy people with a deep love of order.

But it was deeper than that. On the farm it seemed she cleaned determined to scrub away poverty and shame. She cleaned too to quiet herself, to wash the reality of her bad bargain and shameful mistake out of her mind, drive it away in a frenzy of work. Then too, she had six kids. Keeping them fed and cleaned was endless, especially when coupled with animals to feed, crops to irrigate and cows to milk. She had six children in 12 years, and at least one miscarriage. We were irrigating the watermelons when she told me. I was just ten, the summer after third grade. Through everything she kept working.

Rosemarie didn't drive. The few times the Old Man tried to teach her he lost patience quickly and started to berate her unwillingness to learn, her dense German stupidity. In his frequent absences we were stranded 8 miles from town, either relying on neighbors or packing the whole brood into a cab. On the way home everyone held groceries or a baby, or both. No one wore seat belts, and if Mr. Thompson or Mr. Douthit took us, the older kids rode sitting in the bed of the pickup. It was a much different time.

The start of her emancipation came in 1964 when he consented to buy her an ancient blue-green Nash, a squat four-door automobile with dusty beige seats that smelled a little from long storage.  A kindly family friend, Orville, patiently showed her how to work the break and the clutch. She practiced out in the pasture before taking to the road. Orville and his wife lived in Athena, a few miles east and then north. Hes invited one of the kids to stay at their home, but he only wanted the younger children. They had  chocolate graham cracker ice cream bars in their freezer, he said. Eager for adventure, I'd stretch up and say, "I'll go."

"I KNOW you would," he said, chuckling with his barrel-voiced, cigarette-soaked laughter. He only wanted the younger kids, but they were skittish about leaving home.

The Nash had a touchy clutch that had nearly worn out, so the standard practice was to roll through stop signs, including the one that led from East Walls Road to the main highway. Children were assigned as lookouts left and right, calling "Clear!" as mom sailed onto the main highway. A full stop and the car might die, and it was difficult to restart. Somehow we survived the clears.

Later that year she got her first job off the farm, working as a waitress at a truck stop in Umatilla, about 10 miles away. At 8 my sister Therese was in charge of the kids, oversaw bath times, made something for dinner. She did a marvelous, mature job, spooning baby food to Michael and then Monika, except for the time she coaxed Roger into drinking from a cup of bleach. Another science experiment, like the corn grown in a patch at the end of the trickle. A neighbor rushed him to Good Shepherd Hospital in town. The emergency room staff induced vomiting and he was fine. Years later the childhood near-miss is still holiday conversation. Therese, almost saintly in her devotion and maturity at that young age, still shrugs off her curious misstep. "I wanted to see what would happen," she said.

She had this prankster side, this coyote cunning that belied her bright, sweet disposition. One day I got a white straw cowboy hat as a gift and I was strutting around proudly as we played and then did the evening milking. She wanted to wear it but I refused. Therese snatched it off my head and plopped it in a fresh manure pile. Another time, she and my second-oldest brother (he's skittish about being identified on social media) were playing and climbing on some hardened stacks of concrete behind the milking shed. Therese pushed one onto to his head and it made him bleed, a gash, not serious.

How could anyone so ordinarily gentle and nurturing be full of so much devilment? Therese was a model student and startlingly bright. She's worked on the computers at the Portland Public Schools for 30 years.

We were a wild, brown bunch, scarcely ever wearing shoes in the summer. We outgrew them too quickly anyway. My smaller toes are still curled from wearing too-small shoes. At 20 I had the feet of an ancient.

In 1965 Rosemarie took the Nash to Pendleton, the county seat, to take a test for a government program called the MTDA, the Manpower Training and Development Act. Programs that don't exist anymore because they are "entitlements." She took me with her as moral support, to calm her nerves for the big day. If she passed, she go to Blue Mountain Community College and learn a skill, perhaps raise the family out of rural poverty.

In addition to the testing there were interviews, an entire day of qualifying. She wore her best blue dress. I was the smart one, her oldest child, a visual aid to show she wasn't merely a backward German with six children and her accented English. Yet all of my siblings have been more successful in their adult life.