Little Girl Lost
The first time I almost died... (subscriber exclusive)
Thank You!
Thank you for being a subscriber to Roots and Revolution! Below is an excerpt from my manuscript for my memoir called Crazy Circles: How One Family Bet the Farm on Soap and Lost it All.
I welcome your stories of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s and of the realities of farming today and/or Multi-Level Marketing (examples of MLM companies), too! There is so much hidden shame in both farming failure and MLM flame out that we often do not talk about. But we can only create change and hold the systems responsible accountable by speaking our truth.
More excerpts will be coming in the future so please forward this to someone you think might identify with my story or might like to know more.
Chapter 1 Excerpt — Crazy Circles: How One Family Bet the Farm on Soap and Lost it All
I have this thing I do, late at night when I can’t sleep, now that I am all grown up and haven’t moved in more than a decade. I close my eyes and mentally walk through each home where I lived growing up. For a person who came from a family that moved more frequently than the US government conducted the Census, I have libraries of distraction to choose from.
Each home, from the sprawling ranch split level situated in middle of a county in the bottom tier of counties in Iowa, to the creaking stucco craftsman that had gone from family home to funeral home and back to family home before we moved in on the coldest day in January 1981 — each home held not just our memories and joys but our struggles, our shame and our fears.
I want to tell you the story of each of those homes and in the process, open a door to the story of my family, unique in its sorrows and joys and at the same time, common and basic in its struggles as farmers, as Midwesterners, and as members of the working poor.
My parents died believing they had failed at the very thing that made them Americans – the achievement of some kind of amorphous dream of “financial independence.” Their failure was not, as they believed, due to lack of effort, smarts or luck. If hard work and luck alone really could produce the bounty they were promised, this would be a very different story.
Mom and Dad were both victims and perpetrators in a system designed for their failure; a system designed to extract their wealth (what little they had) and exploit their labor to enrich those much higher on the food chain. Their breakneck quest to get ahead led to disastrous consequences and left a trail of hurt and trauma that has reverberated through our family in the generations since.
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The red split-level ranch, located just a few miles outside of Leon, Iowa, a tiny town of about 2,000 one hour straight south of Des Moines, Iowa’s capitol and largest city, was of the newer homes we ever lived in, only about a decade old when we moved in in the early 70’s. The house sat at a slightly odd angle to the road, not enough of an angle to look intentional but just enough of an angle to notice how it differed from all the other farmhouses which stood face out, squared shoulders straight to whatever dirt path, gravel road or hardtop highway that went past.
That was our house, slightly askew to the world, sitting on 240 acres of very mediocre farmground, surrounded by a scattering of outbuildings and a farm pond with the long gravel driveway customary to farmsteads.
The main level of the Split Level Red house held the living room, the dining room and the kitchen – a kitchen Mom always said she hated. It was a galley-style, bisected by a hallway, awkward and tiny. As I mentally walk through the home on my sleepless quest, I can see the dark wood kitchen cabinets and the flooring, some kind of 60’s melange of earth tones. I see the fancy refrigerator, one dad bought mom when they were high on the hog. A harvest gold Whirlpool with a wood-toned elongated “O” shaped handle that split in half, one side of the handle to open the refrigerator part, the other to open the freezer above. It was Mom’s pride and joy which is why for the next 15 years, we would haul that refrigerator everywhere we moved. She couldn’t bear to part with it and we scarcely could afford to replace it.
In my mind, I run my hands across the 200 pound butcher block in the center of the kitchen that served as a makeshift cooking island. It is the thing I love most about the room and the thing I most wish I still had. Mom bought it at an auction and it became another prized possession. Originally from a butcher shop, standing about waist height, it was a substantial cube of solid maple, 3 feet square, worn and chipped and cracked in places, showing the marks of a thousand chickens, steaks and pork chops carved out and wrapped in white paper before it came to rest in our kitchen. It weighed as much as a grown man, but unlike a grown man, the legs could be removed for shipping. Considering how often we moved, it’s another thing I am surprised she held on to it for as long as she did but to me it was an icon of our family, strong and solid and dependable, right in the center of our lives, even if everything else was chaos. Maybe mom felt that too. It was where we rolled out pie dough, pieced together 4-H projects, and painted our nails on its worn surface.
The rest of the house is just a few short steps up or down from the main level. That’s the fun of a split-level, always running up or down stairs or committing the cardinal sin of placing items on the steps to be carried up on the next trip.
Laundry baskets, toys, and books of all sorts became tripping hazards and reasons for hollering at each other for a misplaced Golden Book or an errant jacket.
One evening, my sister hosted a sleepover and ill-advisedly left a pile of records on the steps after she and her friends spent the evening listening to their favorite tunes and gossiping about boys (probably).
At some point in the night and for reasons we never fully understood, Dad got up to go downstairs to the kitchen and in the dark, stepped on the pile of records which slid out from under him. In the pitch black, he skidded down the stairs, hollering and cursing every kid, pet and extended family member before finally landing on his backside in the living room in an angry heap.
After gathering himself, and waking up half the house, he marched to the kitchen to get a drink in the dark. Mom, wanting to prevent further mishap, silently slipped out of bed and gathered up all the records to safely deposit them back in my sister’s room. When Dad returned to the staircase in the living room, he was more confused than before. Whatever had made him ski down the stairs was gone, leaving him wondering if he’d dreamed the whole thing.
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The basement level, accessible via a set of steps off the kitchen, held a large recreation room with a big brick fireplace and a giant, twangy upright piano the previous owner, the local veterinarian, had left behind. It made a great place to play in the winter and a great place to hide from tornadoes, a somewhat frequent occurrence in southern Iowa.
Off the back was a good-sized redwood deck with coordinating deck furniture, though using a back deck is always tricky when you live just a few hundred feet from livestock with their stink and their flies. We didn’t spend a great deal of time out there but mom did plant marigolds in pots outside the sliding glass door. For years and perhaps for the rest of her life, Mom would see this home as the pinnacle of the heights to which the family had climbed financially.
It was the farm at Leon where I got my first horse. In fact, because times were high, everyone in the family had a horse. Just steps off our back deck was a whole world for a little kid to explore, including a paddock full of horses of varying sizes, all broke to ride Western saddle.
My horse was an irritating little dappled gray and white Shetland who was good when dad was looking and a pistol when he wasn’t but Tammie and Lyle liked to dress me up in cowboy outfits and put me on her back for pictures.
For my part, I saw nothing to fear on the farm, no reason to hold back or hide. I loved every cat and dog, every pig and cow and horse. The smells of the barns felt comforting to me and in truth they still do. Warm, fresh, sweet clover hay. The vitamin-y odor of animal feed. The distinctive aroma of horse or cow. The pigs, despite their raunchy pungent scent, were fun to watch, almost human-like with their curiosity and intelligence and social drive.
One summer morning, Mom became engrossed in a call in the kitchen on the avocado green rotary phone with the 20 foot cord. Who was she talking to? Who knows. Maybe grandma or her sister. Maybe a friend. Or maybe a bill collector.
Regardless, she turned her back and seeing an opportunity, I slipped out the sliding glass door and toddled into the farmyard as fast as my four year old legs could take me. Of course I have no memory of this event but my whole life, Mom told the story of my disappearance with the same level of fear in her voice as if it was still happening.
Dad was gone for the day, off farming somewhere. Todd and Tammie, not close at hand. Mom was alone and now I was missing in a thousand acres full of hazards that could kill me. She said she screamed and screamed and screamed my name looking for me in every barn and outbuilding with a million nightmare scenarios in her mind. She never could remember if this was before or after Lyle drowned but farm pond drownings were so common as were drownings in stock tanks and creeks and most horrifying, in manure pits.
There were animals that could trample me, farm equipment that could roll over me, grain bins I could fall in and be sucked down under 1000 pounds of suffocating grain in seconds. There was fertilizer and other chemicals I could ingest, power tools and equipment that could pull off a limb in a moment. I could wander into the road to be waylaid by a farm truck or be crushed by a hay bale.
Beside herself, mom ran back in the house to call for help, first ringing our neighbors, Julie and Raymond (Peppy) Peppmeier. Peppy was dad’s closest farmer friend and one of the kindest souls to walk the earth. Pep was like a second dad to all of us kids but especially to me. I’ll never forget his big strong farmer arms and his patient, sweet laugh. Mom said he rushed right over in a panic in his green pick up truck. Peppy thought the world of our family and I held a special place in his heart.
Mom and Pep called for me and searched all over the farm, growing more and more desperate by the moment. By now I had been missing close to an hour. Mom was prepared to call the sheriff when finally one of them spotted a little head bobbing in and out among the horses in the pen in the farmyard. Weaving my way in and out between their long, powerful legs, playing with their tails and petting them while I sang and made toddler noises. Of all the things that could have happened, I ended up in a relatively safe place among gentle horses that I knew and that knew me.
Mom scooped me up, crying, and held me to her, both of us covered in dust and sweat. Tears streamed down her face though, according to her, I was entirely unbothered by all the commotion and confused at all the fuss.
Peppy was relieved. Tragic accidents were and still are all too common for farmers and their kids. Nearly every family in our community had been touched by a mishap of some kind – drownings to be sure but also more minor accidents too like losing fingers or eyes, chemical burns or frostbite. Farming was then and remains one of the most dangerous and most deadly occupations in the United States, outranking both firefighters and police for the number of fatal injuries annually to say nothing of the chronic diseases farmers can develop from exposure to chemicals, dust, and other environmental toxins. Kids are especially at risk with more than 100,000 children injured and more than 100 dying from farm accidents each year. Children four and under are at the highest risk of fatality. I was very, very fortunate.
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We said goodbye to the Red Split Level in 1981 after the bankruptcy was finalized, moving out in the dead of winter to Breda, Iowa. Eviction is an ugly word but it seems even uglier when there’s two feet of snow on the ground and a 40 mile per hour wind.
It is not unusual to still be awake after a mental tour through my first home. Insomnia is a feature of a nervous system always in overdrive, a byproduct of a childhood pock-marked by chaos, loss, instability and trauma.
©2026 Amber Gustafson. No part of this book excerpt may be used without my express, written consent, including for the training of artificial intelligence or large language models.