Flowers of the Field

The stove is in the garage; the fridge is on the back porch; the microwave perches on a church pew.  The coffeepot still lives, parked on a plastic Rubbermaid tub with two plaster dusted mugs and a box of Starbucks pods alongside.  Our kitchen, always the heart of our house, is down to bare bones.

Forty years ago, my mother and father sold their land in Calloway county and bought a property with a limestone creek, a gabled barn, a milking parlor, some pasture ground and a couple of fields planted to milo. They had a vision and over the years they realized their plan, seeding the upland field to warm season prairie grasses, building ponds, and fences, and facilities in and around the big barn for handling cattle and storing hay.  The milo fields became a pasture, and an orchard.  The rundown outbuildings were painted red and roofed in silver, jacked up and leveled and put to use.  There was a bountiful garden with soil mellowed by well aged manure carted up a wheelbarrow at a time from the red barn floor.  Over time the rambling old home was remodeled; two greenhouses spoke to the resident green thumbs; a swing set was built for grandchildren and a telescope turned the former milking parlor into a planetarium.  Summertime and wintertime:  holidays and harvests: the farmstead was a lovely busy fruitful place.

But neither a house, nor a farm, really makes a home.  The couple who lovingly restored and improved and transformed the worn out ground and aged house are worn and aged themselves.  The gardens have gradually shrunk and the apple trees are bent and broken.  The place is still lovely; the pastures with well fed cattle, the grasslands without sprouts, the ponds fenced, the little trees planted decades ago now mature.  But there is an air of emptiness this spring as the daffodils bloom unnoticed and the early opportunistic weeds spring up unabated.

As a gardener I know only too well how quickly our most strenuous efforts at taming the land to our wishes can vanish.  It is a visual manifestation of the Biblical klaxon, a warning that:

15 As for man, his days are like grass;

         As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.

16When the wind has passed over it, it is no more,

         And its place acknowledges it no longer. 
(Psalm 103:15-16)

....or

For, "All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; 

the grass withers and the flowers fall,
(1 Peter 1:24)

  

Our works, our beauty, our efforts...ephemera. 

But... that is not all...  

To paraphrase St. Paul, " I will show you a still more excellent way...." (1 Corinthians 12:31)

In a desk drawer upstairs is a packet of letters tied with black twine addressed to a midshipman in the Navy from a young woman at Greenberry Road.  The bundle of letters has made many moves: from Jefferson City to Columbia to Chicago back to a farmhouse attic in Calloway county to an antique dresser on the other side of the Missouri and now safely stowed in a desk my mother's father made out of hard rock maple.  I haven't unwound the twine string, but the survival of these letters after more than a half century and many more miles attests more loudly than any words to ties that bind.

When memories fail and words won't come, but she looks for him every day; when they hold hands while watching Wheel of Fortune each evening; when my father and mother still kiss good night; these are the times I catch a glimpse of the more excellent way, a merest hint of the eternal within the mortal, a reminder of the next chapter, 1 Corinthians 13: 

 4Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

 These two people are not perfect, not always patient and kind, at times provoked, but they are faithful. They care for each other....even when they cannot care for themselves. This and every other long marriage testifies that love bears much and endures all.  Gardens lie fallow and houses stand empty; bodies become fragile and break.....

"for now we see in a mirror dimly...but then face to face." 

 It's a promise.

     

Stuff*** My Dad Says

My dad is searching through the freezer case at the big HyVee for supper.  He finally settles on some organic, non GMO, nondairy stir fry.  He's eighty years old and not making any kind of statement: he just needs his food to be gluten free and this store has a variety.

Over in the regular freezer case he chooses a Banquet pot pie for my mom; I pick out a frozen pasta meal of tortellini.  It is a Tuesday night, practice night for the Lake orchestra...and I am getting a chance to sit in.

The chicken pot pie makes me smile.  We always had home cooked meals when I was growing up, but every once in a while she would serve up chicken pot pies in the little tin pans.  Despite being a picky vegetable eater as a kid (in preference, not practice: we ate what was good for us with no comment) I liked the pot pies..... unless an errant lima bean leaked out in the gravy like the proverbial fly in the ointment.  I liked the cubed chicken and especially the way the steam escaped when you pierced the crust with your knife. Banquet pot pies are still just a dollar, but back in the sixties you could buy them 5 for a buck.  

We watch the news and weather, waiting to go to band practice, visiting about food.  The Hursts have always been beef people with roasts and hamburger and steaks at the ready in the freezer;  beef is the pinnacle of our food pyramid and our first choice.

My father is the oldest of five kids, born in the '30s.  He leans back to recollect the protein on their table, 'We ate stuff like pigs feet...and brains....it was awful.  We kids knew this was terrible stuff.'

'The first time I went to eat at your mother's house, her mom fixed veal birds.' My mom chimes in, 'Remember Schulte's? Well, Mr. Schulte would call your grandma whenever he got a nice piece of veal.' My dad laughs, 'That was the best meat I'd ever eaten..'  

I remember my grandma making veal birds, just like I remember my grandpa eating 'mush' every morning for breakfast.  These were exotic antique foods to me, foods one only ate at one's grandparent's.  I have looked up veal birds but have yet to find pictures or recipes that are exactly as I remember my grandma's.  

Grandma's veal birds were pan fried like her chicken and served with mashed potatoes and gravy. I can believe my tall skinny father thought he'd been offered a feast....

Both sets of grandparents lived on Greenberry Road.  My dad had a paper route and rode a bike; my mother caught the city bus to school.  Her parents had a car but my grandfather also took the bus to work every morning.  I remember the 1964 Dodge they drove when I was young, but when I ask my folks what car preceded that one?  'A 1938 Pontiac', my father offers instantaneously, 'People didn't buy cars during the war.  You were only allowed 2 gallon of gas a week...that wouldn't take you very far.'  

My father says he used to ride with his father in their 1933 Chevrolet  from Jefferson City over to Cole Camp to visit his grandparents  The road was paved the forty miles to Versailles but gravel the remaining 21 miles to Cole Camp.  The Chevy had no heat, so his Grandma Renken would heat a rock in her big black wood stove before they started home, wrap it in a rug, and put it on the floor board to help ease the chill.  My dad said the rock almost stayed warm til they arrived home. 

When I was a kid, my sister and I loved nothing more than to read my mom's yellowed copies of Judy Bolton mysteries and Cherry Ames nursing books.  These books were cheap even when they were new..cheap materials during a time when anything of value was conserved for the war effort.

  We counted 1943 and 1944 pennies from the piggy bank...gray pennies of steel, not copper.  We played her Monopoly game, Chinese Checkers, and a horse race board game with Man O'War, War Admiral, Whirlaway and Seabiscuit..  Her childhood seemed like a treasure chest...we had no conception what ordinary families sacrificed during those years or what it was like to be children during the 1930s and 1940s.

 From pig feet to organic GF right in your freezer case, five minutes from the microwave to table. From 60 miles without a heater to a weekly visit for orchestra practice and quiet night's sleep in their comfortable condo on the Lake.........this is what my folks have experienced....and I think I've seen change in my time!

   This evening, I am just thankful to have been along for the ride.....