Irene Estella Stephens

My Childhood in Montana Irene Estella Stephens

My Childhood in Montana is a warm, simply told, and vivid memoir of how a modern day Pioneer family survived and thrived on their remote dryland wheat farm on the barren plains of Central Montana during the Great Depression. Each brief chapter recalls an aspect of how her family and their neighbors lived, including Irene and her sister and brother riding their horses to school despite severe Montana blizzards, even sleeping on the schoolhouse floor during the worst part of the winter; searching with her parents for bee hives and gathering wild honey; eking out a living by making their own cheese, sausage, sauerkraut, and much more; roasting wild sage hens and pigeons and raising their own livestock; and canning and storing in a root cellar enough food to make it through the year. The memoir describes neighbors helping each other in hard times, and community celebrations complete with fiddlers and hand churned ice cream made with ice blocks cut from the creek and stored in an ice house from winter. The stories evoke the unique sounds and smells of Irene's Montana childhood, and the families' closeness to both wild and domesticated nature. The stories are beautifully illustrated and brought to startling life by William E. Shumway, a nationally recognized artist who has exhibited his paintings in galleries throughout the U. S. for 60 years.