Maybe it was during my first-ever sleepover, on a farm, that my little hostess, innocently sharing a family ritual, led me up for a good-night hug and kiss from her father. I couldn’t take my eyes off the hook where his hand should have been, and I probably grimaced or cowered. At any rate, my hostess’s mother (standing by for her turn) swooped in, catching me up in her own impressive bosom and exclaiming sympathetically.
Her great size was self-explanatory to me at the age of six or seven: She was comfort. After Sunday worship, phalanxes of her type delivered baked beans, ham with pineapple, scalloped potatoes, and bar cookies onto long tables. The teachers of her shape were the veterans who demanded your best but accepted whatever that was.Wives of that shape were immovable; there were no farms that I knew of in fertile northwest Ohio without them. The rare single rural man lived in a downsized dump, overgrown bushes blocking his front door, a dog chained in the back next to a mossy water bowl. In the sixties and seventies, when I was growing up, farm wives were the women of highest status in this region, working, laughing, eating cookout burgers, working, yelling at children, working, eating homemade pie, square-dancing, working, eating curious marshmallow or pickle dishes from the spiral-bound anthologies of recipes they sold to each other for church fundraising, working. It was mostly muscle on them—not that they protested in those terms, or at all; they had no explaining to do.
