Her youthful memories remain vivid

GRANGEVILLE - Memories from the past century drift by in fragments for Bernadine Bruegeman, who turns 100 years old today.

The recollections from her youth are strong, but there are larger gaps in what she remembers from the more recent past. Yet still there are traces of the joy and pain she felt over some of the events of her life.

"I was my dad's pet," she repeats, calling up times when she helped her parents, Clemens and Elizabeth Wassmuth, on the farm near Greencreek where she and her nine siblings grew up.

As a young girl, Bruegeman worked in the field alongside her father harnessing and driving horses, seeding the fields, chopping wood and hauling hay.

She demonstrated an ability with animals, especially horses.

"Mom and I went to visit Grandma and Grandpa Jansen and Grandpa had a horse tied and he tried to get a bridle on and he couldn't get it," Bruegeman recalls. "And so he got so mad about it and he said, 'I'm going to turn it out with the rest of the horses.' "

"And then I told him, 'Now, wait a minute. I bet I can get it on.' And he said, 'If you'd like to do it, well, go ahead and try it if you think you can.' "

"And I went up to that horse and that horse held his head down and looked at me and then Grandpa says, 'What did you do with that horse? You got that bridle on so nice. And that horse come right to you and everything.' "

"And Grandpa gave me that horse and then my brothers couldn't get along with it. They didn't like it, the horse didn't like them. He was a woman's horse."

Bruegeman remembers helping her mother cook and sew for the family and tend to the younger children. One time, she said, she lit a fire in the smokehouse when her father wasn't there and accidentally caught her clothes on fire.

He mother smelled smoke and ran out and helped Bruegeman put out the fire.

She was burned, but she says, "Mom didn't take me to no doctor, neither. She doctored it herself and it healed up real nice, too."

When she was in the seventh grade her father took Bruegeman out of school for a time to help on the farm, but when he tried to send her back, she refused to go. She never got any more formal education, but the lessons learned through hard work on the farm have sustained her all her life.

"Maybe that's why I'm still here," she says.

In her early 20s Bruegeman attended a local dance and met the man who would become her husband, Fred. The couple married in 1932 at Greencreek and had six children.

As a young mother and wife, Bruegeman baked lots of bread and pies, canned fruits and vegetables and raised currants to sell for jelly making.

Most of her life was hard work - "I never had no fun," - she says, but occasionally she and Fred would attend dances where she taught him to dance.

"I learned him how to dance, and then when he learned how to dance he wouldn't dance with me," she says.

One of her regrets is that she was never taught to drive a car.

"As old as I am they never taught me how to drive a car," she says. "I had to go on with horses all the time. Never drove a car. They wouldn't teach me how. All the rest of them learned how to drive, but not me."

She and Fred lived on the family farm near Cottonwood until he died in 1983. Bruegeman lived there by herself until 2007, when she moved to Grangeville to live at the Grangeville Health and Rehabilitation Center.

She still attends communion services at the nursing home every Sunday and is noted by the staff for her persistent smile. A covered-dish dinner will be from noon to 5 p.m. Saturday at the Senior Citizens Center in Grangeville for friends and family.

And Bruegeman will close out the century with the treasures of her life as a farm girl, mother and wife.

"There's a lot more I don't remember," she says.

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Hedberg may be contacted at kathyhedberg@gmail.com or (208) 983-2326.