Heading out to Eureka, SD tomorrow. My Grandma turns 100 this weekend and there's a small family reunion and party taking place. Grandma is German, family from southern Russia. She was interviewed about 8 years ago which you can read about here.

As kids we would visit our Grandparents and our cousins in South Dakota each summer. Typically it involved staying a month and also cutting all of our hair off. Seems like the rest of the year we wouldn't cut our hair at all so it was one extreme to the other. God forbid if you didn't get the haircut before showing up, you'd be in for a long time full of ridicule and embarrassment. During the visit at our Grandparent's we would fish and swim in the town lake. The stays with our cousins consisted of milking cows, collecting eggs, cleaning things up, catching gophers (3 cent bounty per tail) and whatever else we could come up with for entertainment or our Aunt/Uncle could come up for work. The main farm we stayed at was about fifteen miles outside of Eureka, near an even smaller town called Artes. All of our SD relatives where extremely religious and we tended to get into trouble regularly for being bad or not Christian enough. Of course our parents getting a divorce didn't help at all.

Grandma and Grandpa's house was their old farmhouse which they physically moved into town after retiring in the 60's. No space was wasted and as such it was riddled with secret passages, closets, and hiding places. One thing that sticks in my mind about my Grandma was that she never believed that man had gone into space,. much less landed on the moon. Just couldn't accept it.

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