Four Advent Movements

1

I’m driving across the brown fields of north Missouri...and nothing makes me happier.  The fields are empty but for the quiet searchings of cattle for dropped and broken ears.  No more standing grain, no more grain carts or combines or trucks….just the ruts remaining as evidence of the drenching rains that made 2018’s harvest as stressful as the dry summer that preceded it. Now, Thanksgiving snows are memory and no one in our part of the state is longing for a White Christmas.  

2

Winter’s pale bright air spotlights every Christmas display, every billboard, every red barn.  Deep ruts squirming across a field are a sure sign some farmer will have to forego no till in 2019.  These level fields bring to mind holiday travel across Illinois so many years ago. Every field was black, ridged and frosted with snow like an Oreo cookie.  The crusty drifts in the ditches reversed that color scheme with a dusting of windblown soil clinging to the icy ridges. The snow invariably disappeared as we drove south, finally revealing tawny pastures and clear still farm ponds across the Mississippi.  Kids in Missouri were the lucky ones; they seemed to get out of school for Christmas earlier and go back to school later that we Illinoisans did. Christmas back then was a beloved story read over and over again that we never tired of.

3

Advent. Wreaths and the gradual parting of the wintry darkness as each candle is lit and the prophecies assure us that the Messiah is nigh.The interior of our little Lutheran church was dimly candlelit during Wednesday evening services.  Unlike the Lenten hymns which were unrelentingly slow with a multitude of dolorous verses to remind us of our sins, the Advent hymns, while minor, seemed to me beautiful with ancient longing…”O Come, O Come…”

The choir loft of Christ Lutheran was hot in the summer and hot in the winter, but the organ and pipes were there and my father directed the choir, so we sat up there often.  From the back pew you could look down and see the ropes for the church bells and watch them go up and down at the beginning and end of the service.

My granny and grandpa’s house had only two temperatures: hot and cold. A story and a half brick house with metal framed windows that grew  icicles in the winter. During Christmas though, the combination of pots boiling on the stove and a houseful of guests defrosted the windows until rivers of water puddled on the sills.  

Grandma Nelson’s old house hissed and fizzed on Christmas Eve while the floors creaked under the load of aunts, uncles, cousins and more cousins and the air was redolent of wet coats and boots.  I wonder….with churches full and fires stoked, was Christmas Eve the only night of the year our ancestors were warm?

4

Scripture is so ingenious in introducing the life of Christ with a tale that would captivate any and every child.  Who would not be amazed by the shepherds in the fields and the angels in the air. The mysterious travelers following a star in search of a king.  The baby who spent his first night with the animals in the barn. We all have our favorite hymns, like Levi’s ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’ and ‘We Three Kings.’  Lee just wants carols she can sing...no more 'Angels We Have Heard on High' for her.  I used to tire of ‘Silent Night’ and ‘Away in a Manger’, but these days they bring tears to my eyes.

This week, we will sing the old songs, loud if not well, and listen again to the beloved story we never tire of …..

Mary and Martha and the Christmas Cookie Plate

The Bible holds multitudes. Take, for example, the subject of Christmas cookies and the other similar confections we concoct during this season for gift giving: caramel popcorn, homemade Cherry Mashes, peanut clusters, fudge, and anything using Hershey kisses. And the lesser treats: Chex mix, frosted pretzels, candy canes and dark chocolate M&Ms. When I look at the building blocks of all this sweet bounty, brightly colored like a mosaic, on special end caps at the grocery, then spilling out of the plastic sacks in the kitchen….maraschino cherries for one recipe, almond bark for another, condensed milk, Rolos for unwrapping….all those ingredients one only purchases for holiday baking….what else can I possibly see but “good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over.”? Powdered sugar...cream cheese….candy canes for pounding...and so much butter I’m embarrassed to enumerate it.

I pray using this verse from Luke, the very words of our Lord in the Beatitudes, is not sacrilegious.  But, in some tangential way, I consider the making of Christmas cookies akin to Mary pouring the expensive perfume on Jesus’ feet...and then wiping them with her hair.  Christmas cookies, lavished with chocolate and nuts, or cunningly shaped and decorated, aren’t just simple constructions of flour and sugar and shortening. We know they are treats….not necessary, but extravagant….and sometimes so lavish, so sweet, and so rich as to be inedible!  But that’s why we give them: to be just a little bit over the top ….in decorations….in calorie content. “Good measure….running over.”

Martha, Mary’s sister, not maligned so much as not up to snuff in her choices as a hostess,  is also a Christmas cookie kind of gal. Anyone with a sibling knows Martha, from her all too human aside to Jesus (“Lord, don’t you care that Mary isn’t helping!”) regarding her sister to her desire to have everything just right.  This story is in the Bible for all of us through the ages who get so wrapped up in the worry of serving that we miss the fun not just of giving, but of receiving too.

So be a little Martha and a lot of Mary. Bake that Christmas dinosaur.  Don’t sweat the plates or presentation or the angels without heads.  Give the kids the honor and glory of making and baking. Spread the sprinkles. On this earth, we won’t always be able to give the people we love what they most need.

But we can always give them cookies…..

Do You, Do You Remember These....?

 

Look at those lapels. Oh if only this album cover were

in color! Do you,oh, do you remember these? The Statler

Bros. released 'Do You Remember These?’ in 1972.  

Ten years later, I took this picture.

Look at these cute little girls posing amid the trees

of Tan Tar A.  Heck, I think some of those same patio

tables and chairs are still in service down there.  Coming

down to the Lake is fun: the weather is nicer than in

Tarkio; they get to stay in a hotel; and, after she

gets off work, they get to play with their grandma.

Sure, Dad has to go to meetings, and sometimes

they have to sit in quietly and color, but they

also get to go swimming so it's still

pretty much like a vacation.  

Do you remember 1982?  I do...it was one of the first Farm Bureau meetings Blake and I attended.  It was before his mustache phase. The two little girls, Lee and Ann, were just three and two that December. They haven’t missed very many Missouri Farm Bureau annual meetings in their lives.

You can do the math.



This past week I stuffed a whole bunch of envelopes with a letter from Blake asking you to grant him another two years as Missouri Farm Bureau president.  I don’t know everyone...or even every little town....Missouri has so many! But I recognize a lot of those names and addresses….and it does my heart good to see envelopes with the names and addresses of your families, too.  Just like Lee and Ann who are in their third decade of Farm Bureau meetings (So many pancakes! So many escalator rides! So many pages of resolutions!), Farm Bureau committees, speech contests, and leadership roles are filled with a mix of old traditions and new energy.  

Each year we come down to Tan Tar A to work..but also to mingle.  We love seeing how little ones have grown and we mourn those no longer with us.  Once upon a time, we chased kids down the hallway…..oh wait!

We still get to do that!

Don't Know Much About....

There were hats.  Almost everybody wore one.  As the women filtered through the doors one or two at a time, the Wednesday Club might have been a hiccup in the time space...or was it a time-place continuum:  a dignified, brick, white columned place with a boardroom, a century plus of history, and a structure which charged each member with a task: from pouring coffee to running the state of the art sound system to inviting the guest lecturer in one of twelve different disciplines.  Two women in the restroom adjusting their Halloween finery were discussing the whereabouts of a third: ‘Has anyone seen her yet?’

‘Well, no, and I called at eight and there was no answer….’

Oh no! I thought, imagining an injury or bad fall…..

’But she may be playing tennis…’

So much for preconceived notions...my mental vision is shattered by a two handed backhand...

Our hostess is a member of Missouri Farm Bureau and has read Blake’s opening articles in the Farm Bureau’s Show Me Magazine.  In one of her introductory letters, we learn she and her husband have a farm in Crawford county and they understand that cattle need protection from predators and the elements and why some people need to harvest three deer  “to make it through the winter.” In her words, “this is likely not know by many in the city”. Blake’s talk will have to deal, at least tangentially, with the approved topic in the History section: Omission in U.S. History in the Media.  Whew!  Because it is very clear that discussing spitting contests and name calling, whether social media present or yellow journalism past, is beyond the pale of the good manners and propriety of the Wednesday Club, Blake’s talk mentions what the media gets wrong, but its main focus is what agriculture gets right.

 Every day and in every way, today’s agriculture overcomes obstacles of weather and climate, disease and fertility to feed the people of the world. But you have to get past the “bad news” to learn about this a modern day miracle.

Fortunately, the women (and man) of the Wednesday club are receptive to this tale.  They are folks of a generation that understands science; many have been associated with medicine or Washington University in their professional lives.  They are also of an age to enjoy or at least tolerate multiple pictures of cute grandchildren and to poke gentle fun at the minor technological snafus posed by holding a mouse backwards.  This is an audience unfazed by the science of genetic modification, but a little ouchy about ethanol; after all, one of their previous guest lecturers was from the Danforth Plant Science center. Someone asks about food deserts and another member seems quite concerned when Blake mentions that we have been using no till farming for twenty years on our highly erodible soils.  Turns out her farmland is in Illinois where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the soils are deep, black….and flat.

Off to lunch, where, in a flashback of nostalgia,  I halfway expect to be served a cottage cheese filled pear on a lettuce leaf.  Didn’t happen. Instead, I compliment the coffee and eat my Halloween hued cupcake, enjoying the cheerful chatter from the tables all around.  When we were first married, I accompanied Millie to a couple of meetings of the neighborhood Morning Sun Extension Club where the ladies were primarily of Blake’s Grandma Hurst’s generation with names like Eunice, Gertrude and Velma.  And, later, I was a faithful member of the Atchison County Republican Women and an erratic attendee of the Tarkio Garden Club with stalwart women all a generation or two older than me. But kids and work took precedence over civic groups and meetings and I hardly noticed when local organizations like these faded away.  The women of the Wednesday Club shore up their volunteerism with a hearty dose of accountability and duty; surely the full tables this Halloween are indicative of a relentless and iron willed civic spirit. Today’s individualistic bent allows us to tailor our self improvement on our own at any time and place of our choosing.  But associations like the Wednesday Club keep the “community” in “betterment”. The past of our grandmothers, if not the hats, lives on at the Wednesday Club, and the culture of our future is better for it...

Bach to the Future

Way back when in 1968, the Cardinals got beat in the World Series by Mickey Lolich and Denny McClain. The Democratic convention got the best of Mayor Richard Daley. And the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey confounded anyone who saw it.

I didn’t see game seven of the World Series..it may have been a day game, I don’t know. I saw the newspaper coverage of the demonstrators and police in downtown Chicago. And I didn’t see the movie…..but I was curious enough about it to get Arthur Clarke’s book out of our school library.

Sitting here on my couch, typing on my iPad, it takes some imagination to recollect how very strange the date 2001 sounded back then. Men in spacesuits were part of our vernacular; my dad worked with the massive computers of the day; but the next century was farther in the future than Dwight Eisenhower, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman were in the past. The movie was rife with symbolism and ambiguity and I admit feeling so uncomfortable with the part of the book when HAL goes rogue that I skipped past it as quickly as I could.

It’s funny what the mind chooses to remember. Apes and aliens aside, it is the music that remains after all these years. 2001 made Richard Strauss popular for a season as his brooding and melodramatic tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra introduced the black monolith that is one motif of the film. But deep into the book, when Astronaut Bowman is rocketing deeper and deeper into the Solar System all alone, he talks about the music that has been his company: progressing from the Romanticism of Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Brahms to the Classicism of Haydn and Mozart.  Finally, he says, he settles almost exclusively on Bach, finding inspiration and comfort in his infinite variety.

It is only now in my musical journey that I’m beginning to appreciate that observation. I'd always felt aggrieved for my favorite geniuses, Beethoven and Brahms, not as much for the dismissal of their grand concertos and symphonies, but because Arthur Clarke seemed not to admire the almost modern dissonance and complexity of their later chamber works.  But these days, while I’m road tripping over familiar highways, a Bach cello suite, sonorous or sprightly, is the perfect companion for making the miles fly by. And if I’m practicing my clarinet and open the Bach book to an Allemande or Bouree with a bunch of accidentals and some tricky fingerings, it’s far better music than I deserve…..

Hardware

Back in the day...before Lowe’s or Home Depot or Costco or Overstock.com...or LampsPlus or FaucetsDirect...or a whole laundry list of online suppliers catered to the persnickety or bargain oriented home renovator….there was Vic’s...and Friendly Boys….and Curfman’s.   

Yes, back in the day, you couldn’t sit in line at the elevator, or watch the auger, pull up a website, and pick out a gift for your wife’s birthday…. which happened to fall smack dab in the middle of harvest.  No, the opportunities to shop ranged from null to void...unless something broke down and you had to run to John Deere for parts. And then, your options were….Vic’s…. or Friendly Boys….or Curfman’s.

Many a year I received something practical for my birthday from the hardware store.  Even more likely was a Christmas present from Curfman’s especially if their Daddy took the kids shopping a day or so before Christmas. Ann remembers being particularly partial to kitchen items. Nearly every Christmas there was a cheese slicer in my pile of gifts, the perfect item to replace the previous cheese slicer, which had met an untimely demise sometime earlier in the year.  I’ve often wondered if Cathy ever noticed all those cheese slicers, or perhaps, whether....with a sly smile... she was the one who suggested them year after year!

Curfman’s almost always had what we needed...if I plopped down a bolt or tap, they found it, slipped it into a brown paper sack, and you were on your way. Paint supplies, brooms, buckets, rope, chain, shovels, batteries, fuses, extension cords, various plumbing parts or electrical parts for whatever was ‘broke’ at that time.  Cathy or Ivan knew the place for everything, even the contents of the shelves that towered into the dim reaches near the tin ceiling. Lord only knew what amazements were hidden on the upper floors or in storage in the basement. After all, there was a Curfman Hardware before there was a town of Tarkio…

Alas, after some years, Cathy retired from small business and took her pleasant demeanor and even temperament to the halls of the Tarkio school system.  Sure enough, a century of rural history emerged from the bowels and storerooms of the old brick building, a time capsule, a snapshot of what a farming community used, broke, fixed, and finally, replaced decade by decade.  

The most amazing artifact was the brand new full sized windmill top complete with vanes. It was enormous.  I don’t remember the manufacturer..perhaps it was Aermotor, but it might well have been a Dempster, hometown Beatrice, Nebraska.  I pined for that windmill, every time I stopped by and still wonder what lucky soul got the opportunity to top their tower with a “never been out of the box” windmill.

After Curfman’s closed, we had to move down the street with our hardware needs.  We bought a dryer at Vic’s and lumber and nails for all kinds of repairs in the twilight zone that was Friendly Boys.  I’ve asked Blake how long the lumberyard had been “Friendly Boys”, recollecting the personality of its longtime proprietor, but the answer seems to be lost in the past.  Vic’s is a derelict building now but the former site of Friendly Boys is a bright and shiny new grain facility, built out of the reach of the occasional soaking by the Tarkio River that used to warp the bottom boards at Friendly Boys.  

And, never fear, we still get the wherewithal for our myriad repairs and quixotic projects large and small at a place with the same “yeah we have it here somewhere...let me look” attitude of the hometown hardware stores of yore….we just have to drive a little farther.  As a matter of fact, the phrase “going to Burke’s” has become something of a family catchphrase, and the result of any trip there is almost always “something we can make work” or at least a good story.

Wonder if they’ve got a windmill stashed away somewhere?

Frost Free

"They must hunger in frost who spring-time have lost."
German saying

 

Mostly Cloudy

Low: 36 °F

Thursday

Comes around every year….yes, yes, it’s mid October and several days beyond the average first frost for Tarkio, but don’t we all postpone the inevitable when it comes to cold weather?  Who turns on their furnace, or rolls up the garden hose, or winterizes the lawnmower...in September? At any rate, the night time temperatures this whole week will be settling into the mid-30s, dropping, dropping before making that final fatal plunge to 31 degrees on the 14th.

My birthday.  That comes around every year too.  

The proverbial “spring cleaning” is a no-go for folks in the flower business, leaving those long harvest evenings as the ideal opportunity for home improvement projects in this household. I’ve just wound up the living room painting project, covering coffee spills and assorted furniture divots.  I even had the pleasure of rearranging the furniture….as much as one can in a room with three doorways, a window, and a giant pocket door.

My folks clearly had different theories about birthday gifts.  Gifts my mother picked out: pretty sweaters, fuzzy jackets, dangly earrings, a whimsical watercolor print of geraniums and a baby robin that hangs in our kitchen.  

Gifts my father picked out: a step ladder, long handled pruners, waterproof shoes, a rain jacket.  My mother always told me, “Your father prefers useful gifts.” Sometimes there would be compromise, like the pair of blue lamps for our bedroom, but especially when I received pottery:  mixing bowls or serving bowls or platters that were not just serviceable but beautiful as well.

One year they broke with this pattern, unwrapping a beautifully finished 3 foot long slab of cherry with a single autumn hued handmade tile mounted on one end.  The tile they had purchased at a gallery on one of their local travels, but the slab of cherry was an heirloom of sorts, a piece of wood my father had inherited with my grandfather’s woodworking tools. My Grandpa Froerer had purchased the cherry somewhere in Illinois years and years ago.  The rest of the board was left open for me to decorate with tiles from future travels.

 This object is no lightweight.  As a matter of fact, it’s always made me a little nervous, hanging above the bathroom door as it does.  My father screwed two hooks into its back, very firmly, and, in typical frugal fashion, re-purposed what I’m certain is chain from the swing set he made for his grandchildren.  The board sits atop the crown molding on the door, so the plaster walls do not bear the full weight, but I’ve never felt the engineering was quite up to the standard of redundancy my father usually executed.

So, with all due respect and appreciation, I bought a picture hanging package designed for items weighing between 75 and 100 pounds(more weight than I could ever lift overhead!)

I unscrewed the twisted and bent hooks (yikes, they weren’t in danger of pulling out, but they weren’t straight anymore, either!) and drilled into the beautiful cherry with the proper hardware.

I replaced the swing set chain with picture hanging wire, doubled up and tightly wound.  It was a labor of love. I put my tools away after I finished.

Now, barring a direct lightning strike or a bigger earthquake than we’ve experienced thus far, the birthday gift from years ago is safe and secure...and the folks that pass through the bathroom door are too!

And what about that freeze on the 14th?  Well, the houseplants are happily situated in their winter quarters as well...all except for the big jade, a two person job.

 My mom’s house plants always summered in the screened comfort of their market barn and were moved back into the house and greenhouse well before the first freeze.

I’ve never been that organized and often have fallen upon the mercy of the weather gods in praying for a night that DOESN’T QUITE FREEZE while I promise to move the posies to safety TOMORROW.  Not this time. This year all the hand me down begonias, the antique hoyas, the hibiscus as tall as I am, and the succulents I can't quite part with will have been carried up the stairs two by two to their botanical equivalent of the ark.

Using the right tools for the job?  Moving the plants in before it freezes?  Is THIS the birthday I get not just older...but wiser?