She misses the busy years spent working the farm — rebuilding the gullied, washed out landscape into fields so smooth you can drive a car across it, raising her children. And yes, when her husband, Don McCall, was at work, she raised the cattle — even pulling calves when the births were difficult.

Today the farming has been streamlined so that all the farm produces is hay, cut and put up each year by an area farmer. But McCall says she misses the polled Herefords that she and her husband raised together. It’s easy to picture Don’s fondness for the cattle when McCall recounts how he used to pull peaches off the peach tree to give them, one by one, by hand, to the bull.

Groundwork

“It’s all in grass now,” McCall said. “Which is wonderful for me. … but it was washing away when we bought it. There was not a terrace on this place. There was not a pond on this place.”

Gary Rader, district conservationist with Leavenworth County’s Natural Resources and Conservation Services, said this is the second time the McCall farm has been named a soil conservation winner.

“Normally we don’t give awards to people again unless something has changed,” Rader said. “In this case, she has added additional terraces and waterways and has everything seeded to grass.”

The result, Rader said, is there’s very little erosion.

“Grass is a natural healer,” Rader said. “That’s what was naturally here when the settlers came — it’s the natural protector.”

McCall said she’s been grateful, through the years, for assistance provided by the conservation agency.

“I don’t know what we would have done without them,” McCall said. “Because they helped us plan what to do where, and where to put our terraces and a good place for ponds.”

Making the most of it

In looking back at her years on the farm, McCall chuckles at how much things have changed — how the $8,000 she and her husband paid for the 160 acres, which included two houses, seemed like a huge price at the time. Today, that $8,000 would barely pay the price of a good used car.

McCall and her husband each put down $1,000 on the farm.

“So we only owed $6,000,” she said. “But honey, that payment once a year was hard to come up with in those days. Our payments were $200 a year, but you know, $200 was harder to get then than $2,000 or more now.”

The couple was frugal.

“We started out with what we had to have,” McCall said. “Like a refrigerator and a washing machine.”

Alone now for the past 18 years since Don died at 69 from leukemia, McCall is anything but alone. In the last year she split off her property, so that her three children will have equal shares of it when she is gone. In a house next door that has a connecting driveway live her son, David, and his wife, Beth. McCall’s daughter, Marilyn Marquis, and her family live on the south end of the property. And another son, Curtis McCall, and his family live on the west part of the property.

Fridays are fun days for Beth, Beth’s aunt Betty and McCall.

The three take off in Beth’s car, equipped with a cell phone, compass, maps and only a vague idea of where they may be going.

They don’t always end up there. For instance, a recent destination point of a mall in Kansas City never matured. But a fun trip to see the sights in nearby Atchison County did. It’s as much a delight as it is a goal for the women to discover something about a community they hadn’t known. It may be the best spot to stop for ice cream, a park long forgotten, now revisited, or scenery they may not have expected of a Kansas town.

But whatever it is, it’s likely that the journey rings with laughter. McCall’s face lights when she smiles. Her laughter is contagious.

She has few regrets — especially when it came to meeting the love of her life.

McCall was a high school senior in Carlsbad, N.M., when she met Don. He was in the army, seven years her senior. Three years later, when he completed his military service, the couple married and moved to Leavenworth where Don had worked at the Veterans Administration Hospital before being drafted. He had been raised in WaKeeney, west of Hays, but preferred northeastern Kansas.

“He didn’t like the country out there,” McCall said. “He lived through the dust storms.”

Her first months in Kansas were tough, said McCall.

“I missed my folks a lot,” she said. “I was the middle daughter and I missed my two sisters terrible, especially when Don went to work.”

Since her husband died, McCall has learned to live with the gnawing ache of life without him. But overall, she said, things have been good.

“It’s been a nice life,” McCall said. “I would still love every minute of it — I do love every minute of it, but it’s just sad that Don had to go so young. … He was such a good man.”