Summer Suite (with credit to J.S.Bach)

Prelude

Without a doubt the greatest flight of whimsy this summer was not taking a 12 passenger van of grandkids 1125 miles to the beach.  Nor was it running the bases during Levi's baseball night...though making contact with a Levi pitch is a considerable accomplishment.  It wasn't even believing that the Cardinal baseball game we will be attending September 28 might be meaningful....(sigh).

No, thanks to J.S.Bach, J.B. Hurst and YoYo Ma, I spent one moonlit summer evening under the gleaming curls of the Pritzker Pavilion while the great cellist captivated a crowd of thousands with a marathon performance of all of Bach's six concertos for unaccompanied cello.  It was mastery.  It was magical.  And it is the inspiration for this three part homily....a little suite ...

Being Consistent: A Fugue

Day after day I've been walking lines eyes moving left and right looking for something wrong.  A sudden fountain where some varmint, through thirst or orneriness, has chewed through the plastic tube that connects the emitter to the 3/4 poly pipe.  Or maybe a varmint has skittered through the lines, pulling the emitter out and leaving the plant high and dry.  Maybe the emitter or pipe is plugged...with an unfortunate spider or cricket...or sometimes, yuck., a petrified tree frog.  It's still July and there is room between the lines to walk, to watch, and to stop and pull weeds. Weeds grow around almost every pot: crab grass, barnyard grass, purslane, ground ivy, and an assortment of other annuals I categorize as 'mum weeds.'  

We water, we weed, we watch for telltale signs of insect infestation.  Beetles gnawing, caterpillars of a wide variety of sizes and hairiness.  It's not a scientific count, but a combination of gut feeling and the calendar that leads us to call in reinforcements when there are too many webs for comfort.

These are the summer chores.  And to be successful, we have to be consistent.  Same routine, every line, almost every day.  The weather changes and the plants grow, but, like a fugue, the melody is passed around over and over....

Being Persistent: Sarabande

Blake used to love tuberous begonias. And for several years, I attempted to satisfy this preference by planting them under the hostas in the shadiest spot in our large yard.  Alas, these prima ballerinas of the plant world sulked in the crumbly soil of this former ash heap. Then along came sunpatiens, bright and bloomy, resilient and tolerant.....and the begonias were history.  To paraphrase, happy husband, happy wife; the sunpatiens I have planted in the pots and flower bed near the patio where he sits after work in Jefferson City have always bloomed profusely from June til a hard freeze. 

But this year, the sun coleus towers over a flower bed of sunpatiens no bigger than when I planted them in late May!  The varmints quite clearly prefer Blake's sunpatiens to any other plant in the backyard, grazing them down to the height of the mown grass.  

Fool's errand or no, quixotic or not, the summer is long and I am persistent .  Like the stately  slow measured tempo of a sarabande in Bach's suites, I am willing to repeat my movements any number of times to finish the song....or outlast the deer that treat Blake's sunpatiens like hors d'oeuvres.

Take that, deer, and that, and that, and that..

Being Present: Gigue'

Bach Cello Suite #1: Gigue, YoYo Ma

One man playing one instrument in one spotlight on a stage designed for an orchestra under a summer moon and the skyline of a great city. It focuses all your senses...the stillness of the audience, their concentration an invisible wall against the sirens and horns and bustle of the surrounding night life.  After the somber and even atonal chords of the minor suites, the final movements are not so much light-hearted as affirming, an aural expression of the life force pulsing in our veins.  This single-minded focus on the music made time both stand still and flash by.  It was the universal and the unforgettable, the experience that makes one wish we could,  with Emily from 'Our Town',  "realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"

God's glorious creation can bring us to that revelation.  And so can the miraculous, if we recognize it.  But I don't know if anything but music can return us to that state of  wonder and focus and recollection again and again.  Being present and conscious of the marvelous in the mundane lightens steps and lifts spirits.   We take care to memorialize our big moments....but none of us, no matter how we wish to, can summon back all our small pleasures.....

like days of summer chores with dewy feet,

or garden flowers with the morning's first coffee...

but I know a Bach cello suite will always take me a June night in Chicago, the air alive with the music and nothing else....

“I can't look at everything hard enough!” 

― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

Important Enough: Field Notes

“Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”

- Thornton Wilder, Our Town

Whether the day is frigid or warm, dark or sunny, the first thing I do after I come down the stairs into the kitchen is make coffee.  Perhaps it’s the whole nine yards in the Bunn...or may be just a quick cup from the Keurig. I pour tumblers of milk, then either fill cereal bowls or cut a coffeecake for the two of us. It’s our breakfast; it’s what we do everyday.

But...as Thornton Wilder reminds us, what seems commonplace and routine to you may be fantastical in someone else’s eyes.

Some deep atavistic urge must well up after the autumnal equinox, else why would people flock to pumpkin patches and sunflower fields?  I understand the attraction of apple orchards and wineries, but piling up pounds upon pounds of picturesque but largely inedible squash as a proxy for blessings of a bountiful harvest?  Acorns...or potatoes….or, heaven forfend, turnips..are  a more rational option.

October is the season for news reporters and television producers to leave their urban enclaves and seek out those ‘raise the song of harvest home’  while they ‘safely gather in, ere the winter storms begin…’ Only harvest itself is as predictably perennial as the human interest story featuring stalwart farmers, dusty red sunsets, and the fascinating machines that transform standing stalks into hoppers, then truckloads, then bins full, of the golden grains that feed the world.

Hugh Sidey not only wrote about Presidents as a professional, but he was known and respected by the men and women of the White House as a friend.  Mr. Sidey had deep roots in Iowa; his brother ran the newspaper in Greenfield, and one trip west in 1994, he drove down to Atchison county to talk about agricultural trade with the Hurst family.  Blake and I considered him a celebrity...he was not just an icon in Time magazine, but also a pundit on several of the political shows we loved to watch on Sundays. We discovered he was also a sincerely kind and generous man, genuinely fascinated with agriculture and respectful of Midwesterners in general. (He treated our whole family to a steak dinner in Washington, D.C. producing the biggest tab I had ever seen, and bestowed books of history on each of the three kids….)

Back in the ‘90s, CNN came to visit us, hot on the trail of an encouraging heart-warming harvest story featuring a ‘real’ family farm.  From the sausage and eggs popping grease to the school bus pulling up into the driveway and the work clothes flapping on the early morning breeze, no homely detail was too small to be recorded.  They interviewed Blake in the midst of one of the prettiest corn fields on the farm, and made their story more theatrical and less honest when the whole family feasted under the big pine trees of Millie and Charlie’s front yard for the noon day meal.  

Years later, another early morning in a different kitchen, the cameras are rolling while Blake talks about technology in farming and I peel apples for a big slab pie for the midday meal.  Once again, the smallest of food details fills the lens and I’m as conscious of the string of Golden Russet peels as Blake is about the nuance of his explanations.  

Times have changed, but Charlie still drives the filmmakers across the wide bottom field while a drone hovers overhead and some of his great granddaughters sit in the stalks making corn husk dolls.  And we eat...it’s what we do!  Crock pots and corn chips, sandwiches and salads.  Pie.  Simple fare, the kind of food we sling into Tupperware and Rubbermaid every day of harvest.  But someone is watching; we are not alone. This Sunday’s meal is recorded, if not for posterity, then at least for our memory, which makes it important enough.

They were a rare and wonderful experiences when Hugh Sidey and the guys at CNN came to the farm; farmers typically didn’t attract the attention of major magazines and news organizations without a farm crisis or the natural disasters that are the staple of slow news days.  We were proud to host these visitors from another world to our family farm: proud of our family  as much as the farm itself.  There was no particular angle or ‘gotcha’ moment...no issue or practice we needed to defend or pussyfoot around.  Our big machinery, our terraces and no till practices, our productivity, and our hard work from generation to generation told our story.

The folks from Farm Evolution sought answers to complex and controversial questions, not a feel good story about families working together on the land.  Eating together was picturesque; the weather was beautiful; the grandkids playing in the dirt were endearing...and good video!..., but tell us about why we should trust you with this science called genetic engineering?

No doubt in my mind these fertile Missouri fields will host other curious visitors some future sunny breezy October day.  What will they expect as they film the harvest? Will they find our family farm quaint?  Confusing? Cold and technological? Will we be able to convey the bond between family and land?  The deep knowledge built of decades of experience and passed by stories as much as field maps?  Will they understand that our least important days...our routine days of coffee, dust, and paper plates …. week after week, year by year….are important enough.