About > Jessica Siefer
Jessica Siefer
{Managing Editor}
I spent a week at my grandparent’s farm near Sidney, Nebraska every summer during my childhood. My grandparents moved onto the farm in 1948 when they were 20-years-old and newlyweds. They raised a family and lived there for twelve years before my grandfather got a job at a college in Iowa. From then on, they lived in Iowa during the winters and at the farm during the summers.
Breakfast was an integral part of each visit to the farm. My three sisters, brother and I slept upstairs in the bedrooms that once belonged to my father and his brother and sisters. We would wake in the mornings to the smell of pancakes, eggs and bacon—and cinnamon rolls if we were lucky—and we’d run barefoot in our pajamas down the staircase to the dining room. The dining room table stood in front of a window overlooking rows of golden wheat. The room was on the east side of the farmhouse so when the sun rose in the mornings, light poured into the room and put a glaze on the wooden floors. My grandmother woke before everyone else and filled the table with a feast fit for hungry farmers—as she had once done for years. My family and I would sit around the table and eat, talk and watch the sun continue to climb up the Nebraska sky. My grandparents sold the farm when I was ten. Since then, I’ve had a nostalgic hunger for breakfast on the farm that nothing—not even the best cinnamon rolls—will be able to fill.