In the Bleak Midwinter or...Gathered 'round the Boob Tube

I hate to admit this, because I sound like the quintessential baby boomer, but what I most remember about the month of January is.....television.  Saturday afternoon television to be precise. Per A.A. Milne, 'When I was Very Young', Saturday mornings were for labor: home repair and improvement, the trips to the lumberyard and hardware store that these entailed, and the household chores small children are responsible for.....dusting furniture and around knick knacks, scrubbing the tub and, lastly, cleaning their own rooms. I can clearly remember dusting; my olfactory recalls the scents of weed killer and turpentine associated with the hardware store much more than my mind's eye can bring up the arrangement of its aisles.  The railyard was across the street and Sherwin-williams covered the globe with color on the exterior sign.  Then as now, there was always a project underway: I remember the divider my father built with 2x4s and maple veneer to create a dining room from the open kitchen/dining floor plan of our tract house.  The book shelves on the dining side held novels by Mary Renault, Ernest Gann, art folios, and other titles I can picture but not remember.  I know my father's set of Will and Ariel Durant lived in the dining room but I feel it resided between the two large teak stereo speakers that bracketed our meals with the FM classical stations of Chicago.  I know for a fact that the two volume set of A. Conan Doyle sat on that homemade shelf, as did the complete Mark Twain.  Those volumes are somewhere in my folks' collection still, I am certain, but they would never pass muster with a collector.  Despite sturdy cloth binding and stitching, the rustling pages are indelibly stained with......popcorn butter.  Winter afternoons in my mind are associated with a heaping green Tupperware bowl of buttered popcorn, paper napkins and a vinyl tablecloth, and the Texaco Opera quiz, erudite and as foreign to me as Hindu expounding from the teak speakers.

On those short and dark winter afternoons, we caught a respite from outdoor activity consigning cold and snow to the Saturday editions of Wide World of Sports.  ABC was a recent network addition in the '70s, joining NBC from Columbia and CBS in Jefferson City.  From the sandstone house deep in the country, we could practically do line of sight from the butterfly antenna on the black and white to its transmitter. As the wood stove in the kitchen snap, crackled and popped, we'd partake of such exotic offerings as ski jumping (the Norwegians had it), downhill skiing (the Austrians won and the Americans wiped out gloriously) .  Everyone was a critic, especially when the subject was figure skating.  Costumes, music, axels, death spirals, general artistry: we had our favorites and our superheroes.  We were deep in the Cold War and knew without saying that the Communist judges would never play fair.  Peggy Fleming created her own gold standard in skating.  It was not the first time in my life I recognized that the old saw "you can be anything you want to be" was a blatant lie, but it may have been the most obvious example.  No matter how much I FELT I could be a figure skater in a sequined costume and sleek color coded skates, I was always going to be lacing my skates over two layers of socks so tight I cut off the circulation.  I would always be that close to tripping over the teeth and winding up with a mouthful of frost.  And no glory.

Those early winter evenings left plenty of time for type of old fashioned picture show.  My folks would pull out the flat grey metal suitcase of translucent slide images.  The old projector fed the slides in one by one with a satisfying mechanical clatter of metal.  The blindingly white screen yielded to the larger than life, crystal clear, jewel bright hues of a  fall walk in the woods, or Buckingham fountain, Abraham Lincoln's home in Springfield, light playing on the waters of the Lake of the Ozarks, laughing family gatherings, or the wildflowers of Mt. Rainier.  We would exhale audibly, ahhhh, like folks do at a fireworks display.  It is difficult now to remember how marvelous color slides appeared to eyes accustomed to black and white CRTs, photography, newsprint, even the color photography of the National Geographic

Laura and I were permitted to watch the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday evenings.  The staple tale often involved an anthropomorphized critter, usually a mildly cute furry one, and the trials and effort of its daily life and interaction with other more threatening critters, two legged or not.  The closeup photography was fine, but dogs, otters, and even horses, paled in comparison with animation.  Second best would be a remake of some classic tale like Pollyanna. I still remember watching Haley Mills play multiple parts in various permutations of the Parent Trap.  An accent seemed to make for a much more interesting life!!

Speaking of accents, I fondly remember my introduction to Masterpiece Theater.  Sir Kenneth Clarke brought his well considered examples of the very best Western architecture, music, art and philosophy appeared in our living room each Sunday during prime time.  His exposition of the great flows of ideas across the Continent and the English channel combined with filming intricate ornament and detail to bring the genius of the famous and the anonymous alike to this 20th century girl.  Gothic, Romanesque, Baroque, Rococo:  I was entranced with the lexicon of style and amazed at the artistry that existed pre Industrial age.

Quite the other side of British television was the weekly angst of the Forsyte Saga.  Set in the transition between the Victorians and the Great War, it was a guilty pleasure to eavesdrop on this unhappy family, peek through the lacy curtains of their well to do home, and dream wistfully of the elegant hats and delicate fabrics of the ladies' costumes.    The subject matter could be quite adult and I always felt I was almost getting away with something as I hung on every nuance laden conversation.

This all sounds more educational and less fun than it actually was.  Even in the Chicago area, there was very little television by today's standards, but that made everything we watched memorable.  My kids watched the Smurfs; we watched Huckleberry Hound, also blue.  Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, Fred and Wilma, Quick Draw McGraw: all paled in comparison to the cast of the Rocky and Bullwinkle show.  The animation may have been simple and two dimensional, but the humor was not......or at least I thought there must be more to it when I watched my father snicker and laugh a dozen times each show.  Does anyone still play these shows?  Surely there is room on the hundreds of channels for Natasha and Boris, Fearless Leader, Dudley DoRight , Snidely Whiplash and Nell.


"Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65t-OzhlmvE&feature=player_embedded#!

Fast Away the Old Year Passes

Happy New Year!!

Each year the extended Hurst family gathers just before Christmas to pray and eat...or eat and pray, depending on the ability of the youngest family members to withstand hunger pains in relative silence. It has been tradition for Millie and Charlie’s grandchildren to read the story of Jesus’ birth from a family Bible. This reading used to end at the verse ‘and Mary pondered all these things in her heart’, but now extends beyond the initial verses in Luke to include all of Matthew 2.  When the youngest great grandchildren learn to read, we may have to begin with verse 1 of Matthew 1: ‘The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham’!  The moms and dads beam as the grade school kids navigate King James; the grandmas and grandpas close their eyes and remember these same young parents reading the same lovely words.

After Scripture we hold hands and offer prayer.  We thank our Lord for watching over us all during harvest, travel, exams; we are grateful for our health, children, homes.  It is a time of reflection and, to quote the liturgy, ‘altogether meet and right so to do’.
But some years are just better than others.  Fortunately, Bella prayed early on and spoke the words we were all thinking:

‘Thank you, God, that the Cardinals won the World Series’.


We wish all of you the very best in 2012.

The Ghosts of Christmas Past

Something old, something new.

Lee and I cooked homemade caramels yesterday afternoon.  Patiently I stirred , switching from left to right hand.  Periodically, Lee bent over to read the candy thermometer.  It smelled heavenly and burnt my finger when I scraped the spatula. Today the caramels were still in the glass pans, as smooth as troweled concrete and just as hard.   Except for a few fractures on the edges made by Lee's knife with the newly bent tip.  Drat!  What to do? Lee was loath to consign her 8x8 Pyrex to the trash; I hadn't planned to get her 8x8 Pyrex for Christmas!  We set the unyielding confection on a pan of boiling water to warm and finally peeled the now flexible candy and freed the pans.  Hurry!  A pizza cutter balked at rolling through the entire surface, but quick action with the poultry shears yielded shiny squares, promptly wrapped in waxed paper.  The candy looked great, but the wrapping pretty well screamed amateur.  Something new.

After that escapade, it was a relief to fall back upon the tried and true.  We experimented for several years with different sugar cookies before settling on a Harms' family recipe. With the help of Silpat, every tray of bells, candy canes, snowmen, and angels comes out perfectly. Those too hungry to wait for frosting now have to depend upon the fragility of reindeer horns, or Santa hats, or camel feet for their warm cookie fix.  From experience we bake one day and decorate the next, knowing from Christmases past that the fun factor drops like a stone as cookie baking and frosting enters into its third hour. Something old and familiar

Cookie frosting and sprinkling takes place after Ann gets off work and the kids are up from their naps.  Its Annie and Matt's anniversary, a memorable one with a zero at the end. On one of our zero anniversaries, I hauled mums somewhere northward in Iowa, listened to Clint Black on the radio and picked up a frozen shrimp cocktail at the HyVee in Shenandoah.  High times.  Ann and Matt take a similar tack, opting for a home cooked meal and basketball: in the midst of the Christmas season, they take a pass on the night out but celebrate nonetheless a momentous occasion: Josh's first steps.  Something new.

I made six loaves of apple bread this afternoon.  After frosting the cookies, my jeans threatened to stand by themselves.  Today I broke out the Hoe, Hoe, Hoe Christmas sweatshirt: I'll attempt to wash out the food coloring and powdered sugar and re-don my gay apparel once again on Christmas Eve.  The kids, gratifyingly, noted the trowels and carrots trimming the tree and the wellie clad scarecrow atop acting angelic.  Tomorrow I'll overdo on dairy, producing a cheeseball and cream cheese coffeecake or two.  Tradition!  Something old.

This past week I was happy to see my parent's little Manger scene laid out amid burgundy fabric and cedar branches even though they haven't trimmed a tree in years.  Much of our extended family will gather for wine and cheese and family prayer, reminding me of Grandpa and Grandma Hurst, who never attended this particular get together.  Annie was Grandma Nelson's first great-grand child to wed; I treasure the pictures from that ceremony and the memories of Christmas Eve visits to her home. After soup and crackers together to celebrate Grandpa H's Christmas Eve birthday and family communion at our candlelit church, we'd head north to the St. John's neighborhood. A burst of steam would escape the front door as we'd step in; the biggest pile of coats ever were flung willy nilly across her bed.  Every available corner, cushion and arm rest was occupied by some family member, local or just visiting.  Christmas Eve wasn't complete until we'd dropped by Bruce and Janice's commodious home to deliver apple bread, pick at the dainties laid out on the kitchen counter and pin our wishes on the Yule log smoldering in the huge hearth.  Happy ghosts of Christmases past.

Here's a Christmas Eve tradition new to you, I'll bet:  the annual Christmas Eve Hurst family greenhouse covering.  Yup, while other families are traveling, or finishing up their shopping, or wrapping presents or baking up a storm, this family tends to gather in the morning fog or frost to pull 30x100 or 22x100 sheets of 6 mil plastic over slippery metal frames.  Our early Christmas prayers are for calm winds; we are vocally grateful when blessed with a still morning.  There are worse ways to head into a holiday feast than to work up a decent sweat and complete a completely crucial task.  Family bonding anyone?  A tradition older than our greenhouse.

The blessings of togetherness will have to wait until New Year's this year.  The good news is a plethora of weddings beginning with Brett and Shelby's...ready made New Year's Eve party!!  The bad news is waiting for Ben and Kenzie to be in Tarkio.  More good news:  stretching out the days of celebration nearly to the lauded dozen of song and tradition.  Ample opportunity for a houseful of guests filling the table with conversation and the rooms with laughter.  Having company will make deconstructing the tree less melancholy. The New Year will be upon us with its unpredictable mix of ups and downs. We can consider ourselves fortunate: there are already a couple of celebrations built in.  With our family, church, jobs and friends, we are the lucky ones....no Mr. Magoo Ebenezer for us!  Our ghosts of Christmas past are loving ones and while we laugh over the dry Christmas when the cow fell into the well, or the cold Christmas with the power out, the inedible chocolate pies and the obnoxiously loud toys gifted and re-gifted to families with youngsters, out of sight but not out of mind are parents, grandparents and friends whose absence is most acute when we are most together.

How trite is the trope that Christmas is for children?  'Yet in the dark streets shineth the Everlasting Light'.  The Kids Korner kids donned white gloves for the finale of their program, then the audience oohed and aahed when the gym lights dimmed and the white gloves fluoresced under the blue light.  The music played 'Silent Night' and the children's gloves danced the lyrics in sign language.  But tears came to my eyes when I watched my grandchildren mouth the old familiar verse as they made the motions with grace surprising for four year olds.  Out of the mouths of babes. Something new.

I don't know which year in particular births this memory:  it is a crunchy Christmas Eve and we are on our way back from Grandma Nelson's.  It must be snowy.....it can only be this frigid with snow on the ground.  Besides, we are all five in the pickup so route B is hazardous.  This is before the days of crew cabs.  Lee would have been straddling the gear shift scrunched next to her dad with Annie squished in the middle sharing her seat belt.  Ben was on my lap with my two arms around him.The defrost roars in a vain attempt to keep up with all that breathing.  Back in those days, KMA's programming on Christmas Eve consisted of replays of various school Christmas concerts.  Orient-Maxwell, Carson-Macedonia, Red Oak, Clarinda, Lewis Central....fuzzy tapes of middling quality featuring soprano voices in carols familiar and foreign.  The kids were  sleepy and quiet.  Orion blazed brighter than the pickup lights.  The road was dark and silent but for our passing.  Our little family headed to its warm home and beds with thoughts of Bethlehem and the Babe in Mom and Dad's heads.  This night is imprinted on my heart.  It comes to mind every Christmas Eve as I turn down the fire and turn out the tree lights.  Something so old.  Come ye, Lord Jesus.

Hard Labor

Monday afternoon I was threading my needle and preparing to sew candy canes onto Abbie's costume for the preschool Christmas program when she pulled herself up next to me on a tall stool and asked, 'Grandma, can I help?'  One of the blessings of grandparent-hood is the ability to say, 'sure, I wish you would!'  Unfortunately, with a sharp needle as a tool and an index finger already bleeding, I was forced to decline Abbie's generous offer and received a crestfallen countenance in response.  I hated to break her helpful 4 year old heart, but was buoyed yet again by her willing spirit.  For any parent, or grandparent, or teacher, or any other adult, rejoices to hear the request: 'Can I help?'  

There is a magic moment in a child's life when he knows he is no longer a baby and believes he is equal in many respects to mommy and daddy. ( This belief is apparent during daylight hours, but disappears inconveniently after 10 o'clock at night.)  Kids don't mind making their beds, will put their dishes in the sink, might attempt to put their clothes away, and even go through the motions of picking up toys.  I can remember this stage, because my vision of a clean room was so diametrically opposed to that of my father.  Unfortunately, this stage doesn't last.  All parents know there is an inverse relationship between a child's age and his willingness to be a useful contributor to the household and society past some critical point, probably not long after first grade.  Not surprisingly, this may also coincide with the Biblical age of accountability 


(Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Genesis 3:17). Toil is one of those words that sounds ugly, invoking sludge, mud, repetition , brain numbing, Sisyphean and even pointless labor.  It contrasts, at least to me, with the word 'work', which implies movement to a goal, an accomplishment, something of value and worth.  The good news is that most children do not recognize the nuanced differences between the words, 'toil' and 'work'.  The bad news is that, the older they get, they most certainly realize that 'toil' is not only hard, but also the only kind of work they are given.


This long muse is a result of powers way above the level of parental intervention.  The United States government wishes to take the burden of taskmaster off the shoulders of moms, dads, grandmas and grandpas as far as farm work is concerned.  No more of that nasty toil, dirt, grime, heat, cold, and other character building adjectives.  Nothing should be too hard for 'the children'.




I could regale you with tales from my childhood.  My father was in charge of hard, hard work and my sister and I kept our feelings to ourselves whenever he called us out and assigned us our chores.   I learned  to complete a task and maintain a stoic, if not cheerful, expression at the same age I learned the meaning of the word. Even while working on our own, we assumed our parents were omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent, just like the Trinity, as far as work was concerned.  Unlike cleaning our room, we took our farm work quite seriously.  I do not remember ever attempting to 'slide by' on any assignment my parents gave me, though their memories may differ.  

In many cases, working FOR our parents meant working WITH our parents.  That's how Blake grew up and that has been the experience for all three of our children.  It is difficult to feel picked on or punished when working alongside your father, grandfather, mother or grandmother.  Our greenhouse business has been the incubator for more than one work ethic.  When we first began building, there would be a kid on one end of the string making the straight line for posts.  There would be a kid fetching tools.  Or a kid holding the ladder.  Early on, covering a greenhouse was a family affair....even the youngest was heavy enough to sit on a corner of plastic and keep the wind from getting underneath.  Everyone took turns filling pots with potting mix; everyone was expected to help carry pots and flats.  The cardinal rule was: no bathroom break, no coffee break, no lunch break, until your plants or seeds are watered in.  Not all work is life or death, but some is.

When kids work, its not just about productivity or the bottom line.  One of Grandpa H.'s favorite aphorisms still holds true:'A boy is a boy; two boys is half a boy, and three boys is no boy at all!'  No, kids work for a host of reasons, very few pecuniary.  Moms and dads "take a kid to work" to keep them out of trouble; to teach by example; and, to spend time together.  The hardworking dad at our place confessed more than once that he recruited his kids' help because he liked the company, not just because they were "good help".

On weekend mornings in the spring, its hard to keep track of all the kids at the greenhouse.  Aaron is old enough now to be commandeered by his daddy to help feed pots or trays into the dirt machine, or help at the transplanter,   He's eight; he's spent parts of every spring of his life in these structures, crawling through the potting mix, untagging tagged flats, watering constructively and destructively moment to moment.  When his kindergarten class came to visit,  Aaron was the proud in-house expert.  I am proud of his knowledge and of his parents for starting him out right.  The younger kids will be almost five: too young to really work, but they will still push buttons on and off, help tag sporadically, push carts along the sidewalk, and plant the occasional flat of petunias or impatiens.  What they will mostly do, and quite responsibly, is take care of themselves and each other.  They'll amuse themselves, secure in the knowledge that they are on home turf and mom, dad, uncle, aunt, cousins, and grandparents are all within shouting distance.  

A farm, or a greenhouse, admittedly, can be a dangerous place.  So is the rest of the world.  But whatever rules and regs are imposed upon small businesses and family farms will not make them safer than the schools, playgrounds, shopping centers and parking lots kids frequent.  All work and no play may make Jack a dull boy, the nursery rhyme says, but the lesson our kids learned early and often was to never let on, or speak the fateful words: 'I'm bored!'  Working with adults builds ties that bind closer than gifts or treats.  The kids "own" their accomplishments; they know what Dad and Mom do for a living, and have a sense of how difficult it can be. If you spend your weekend holding sheetrock on your head, or straddling the metal framework of the  endwall of a greenhouse 16' feet in the air,  or watering the same 3000' sq.ft. of tomatoes that you watered the day before, you truly appreciate Sunday afternoon off.  And you will also know, for a fact, that you have accomplished something tangible.  These are lessons taught by life, by moms and dads who seem heartless and tone deaf, to kids who will suffer these torments, silently or no.  These same tales of hard work and "hardship" will pass into family legend, to be resurrected for the edification and example of the next generation of kids drug away from the cartoons to hold the tape measure or fetch the socket set.  

 Why do kids work with their folks?  


'What's bred in the bone...'

Day by Day

 When I am deeply engrossed in a good book, I struggle to focus on the tasks at hand, to remember where I am and what I should be doing, to separate myself from the reality of the world in my mind.  It is a mixed blessing to lose oneself in an alternate creation.  More than once I have carried the feeling of loss and exhaustion from an emotionally taxing tale into my oh-so-prosaic and predictable work-a-day world.  Irrational?  Of course.  As time passes, I gradually regain my footing during the day and sleep without dreams at night.....


The text in late October was from Kenzie.  With her characteristic blend of dedication and enthusiasm, she sent out a call for companions to join her in a reading equivalent of an eight hundred meter race: read the Bible in 90 days.  Why an eight hundred?  No time to stop; not much time to slack off.  Not a marathon; not a sprint.  A commitment with rewards unmeasured, but known.


Impulsively, I answered right back.  Yep, I said, I'll take this on.  I took it as a direct hint, something louder than the still voice after the whirlwind.  Ok, Kenzie, I'll join you.......and everyone you jostled with the notion.  Here's the website; here's the app.  Pick your version; pick your reminders, or not.  Here's God talking to you, right on your iphone.  Just in case His own holy Book isn't close enough.....


Forgive me if you find this conversation irreverent. With excitement and a sense of adventure and anticipation I dove into the familiar words of Genesis 1.  I played with several translations before settling.  I tinkered with the website's features,watching each chapter check off electronically as it was completed. 


Genesis flew by.I was there among the people listening raptly by fires under the stars.  These are not written words; these are spoken tales, handed down from generation to generation.  Exodus: tyranny, slavery,origin of a people wandering from land to land. Here was all the drama of great literature: testing, trials, blessing and ingratitude, crime and punishment, the eternal and ongoing struggle of a virtual and literal wilderness.  


As the days wear on, I find myself falling into the rhythm.  I read in the car, while I heat water in the microwave, while coffee is brewing, while I wait for the car to fill with gas.  The Bible is habit forming in the finest sense. The cadence carries one forward, even if the words consist of names so unfamiliar they might be people or they might be places.  The rules of Jewish law and sacrifice roll off the tongue of the reader, wave upon wave, long distance breakers past to present.  

And not just history.  Passion, loyalty, love, betrayal.  Hope.  War.  Strength. All the agony and ecstasy of humanity's paradise lost. Kings and queens, prophets and seers, blood and glory and heroes wage epic battles on the pages of the Old Testament long before Shakespeare was a glimmer. Reading Job, I found myself constantly bookmarking some of the loveliest, most muscular poetry in literature.  


I am yet but forty percent through my 90 day pilgrimage.  It is a journey of discovery and re-discovery.  We are accustomed to our Bible in anecdotes, but  it gains additional mystery and power read page by page.  The rigid and artificial schedule has unexpectedly led to a lyrical, vivid and lively reading experience.  Is it disrespectful to have both a Facebook and a Bible app on the same screen?  Not when God's word leads you to read Psalms........rather than checking your status.....

The Decline and Fall of the Fluff Salad

Here in central Missouri, November belies its pedigree.  The viburnum remains vibrant; the pastures green; the oaks bronze not brown.  It is 60 degrees by day and the last rose lingers like a Redoubte' painting in the the courtyard of my parents' house.

Yet November can be a cruel month.  More than twenty years ago, we stood around Grandma Eunice's casket in a fierce windblown rain.  It rained three quarters of an inch that day, violent but brief, buffeting the tent and the  family within.  It was a drought year; we memorize our losses, weather included. Grandma would have appreciated the rain.  

Just last week we mourned another grand lady.  A pillar of the community, admired for her many contributions and talents, present and past.  A woman of style and substance, she was blessed to be eulogized by people who knew her very well.  Instead of a snow white dove, she was gathered 'cross the river on the wings of music, heartfelt, soulful, iconoclastic, God's most universal and unexplained blessing poured out on humankind.  When we can't find words, we play..........

If you stay in one place long enough, you bury your ancestors, blood or cultural.  You bury your Sunday school teachers, the ladies your mom played bridge with, the woman who "ran" 4H, the person who handed you library books, the Republican ladies, the Democratic ladies, the election judges, the doyennes of the garden club, the missionary ladies............

According to Herodotus, prince Cadmus brought the alphabet to the Greeks.  In mythology, he slew the dragon guarding the spring of Ares.  The goddess of wisdom, Athena, told him to sow the dragon's teeth and fierce warriors sprang from the ground.  In small town life, our bringers of civilization bear no arms (unless a sharp tongue qualifies!), but they have always seemed to spring up straight from the ground like the dragon teeth warriors of old.  Where are our Athenas for the future?  Will we "look upon (their) like" again?

I don't intend to wax morbid or to imply a failure of community leadership or decomposition of the foundations of civilized society in the hinterlands.  But a recurring theme popped up yet again this past week and there is no good way to answer this question: who will be the church ladies?

Who is going to make the fluff with mandarin oranges and nuts?  Who will perpetuate golden glow salad?  Who will mix pineapple, lime jello, cream cheese and Cool Whip?  (I even had to look this one up!)Who will persist in mixing vegetables, shredded cheese, and orange jello?  I still have the frozen cream cheese and cherry molded salad recipe from my mother, but I have never taken it to a church or funeral dinner.  Nor do I prepare the cherry jello mold I adored when I was young.  But the same women who brought multi-hued salads whipped into peaks with mystery fruits and nuts disguised amid the Miracle whip and marshmallows led every conceivable volunteer organization in our little town and most big towns outside the formerly male bastions of Lions and Kiwanis.  One need not be a statistician to correlate the declining population of our cultural underpinnings with the reduced number of female produced and consumed fluff salads.

I don't know the answer.  The women I know keep the balls of family, vocation, volunteerism, and homemaking in the air to an amazing extent.  They do all this and keep up on Facebook too!  We scale back where we must and double up where we dare.  They fly...........by the seat of their pants when necessary.  It isn't easy to be unselfish with time, our most limited resource.


As I wipe the syrup from the tables of our fellowship hall, or wander the kitchen looking for the right drawer for serving spoons, I will continue to admire the iron and lace, stocking clad standard bearers of our past even as I admit how far my efforts fall short.  As they reap their heavenly reward, I'll raise my spoonful of Snickers salad and think of them partaking in..............ambrosia.

Red Barn

Redbarn has never been my home; my parents lived up Nelson Drive in the late seventies, not far from the State Highway Patrol headquarters.  The house on Nelson was a perfectly pleasant, rock solid red brick ranch built on  an east facing slope like most of the homes in Jefferson City.  The grassy backyard was terraced twice, but that did little to mitigate the struggle of summer mowing.  In wet weather, water ran into the basement like a burbling spring from the base of Missouri bluffs. In the summer, inhabitants of the red brick house baked like loaves in a New Mexican hornos.  Despite these shortcomings, the straw that broke the camel's back was development across the creek below their home, at the bottom of that big back yard.  They had traded the land in Calloway county with its fossil filled creeks and fescue fields for the pastoral landscape of pasture and crop of Moniteau county.  This farm boasted a lovely topography with an upland pasture wending down to a classic limestone creek rimmed with a riparian meadow.  The north field was planted to milo in those days.  Across route T, a gravelly track curved steeply down to the bottom lands of Moreau Creek. A spring did bubble out in the middle of the small field.  The wood at the base of the bluffs was especially lovely in the early spring, before the underbrush and bugs kept interlopers out.  Early spring was the best time to hunt arrowheads as well.  The geology changed across the Missouri; no more brachiopods, no more crinoids.  But a wanderer with her head down could still spy treasures of the past in the ground and I rarely hiked back up the hill without some knapped stone in my hand.

Projects were an integral part of my upbringing.  Whether this situation was a natural result of German frugality or a desire to make everything better than when you started or both is not a question that need to considered.  Suffice it to say my parents always saw diamonds in the rough, and when that didn't pan out, they made the absolute best of what they had to work with.  The farm in Moniteau county certainly met that description. The ponds were surrounded by thickets of impenetrable honey locust; the fields were riddled with ditches; the fencing was in need of repair.  The outbuildings were solid but peeling.  The last owners had attempted to operate a dairy; there was a solid little concrete parlor, a tin pole shed and an immense Dutch barn surrounding a paved lot.  These were all assets in my father's eyes despite their disrepair.

The house was something else. In retrospect, my folks like to say they should have pushed it over while they had the chance.  But that has never been their way.  It was a shotgun house built around the original two room cabin, with high ceilings and tongue and groove cabinets built in for storage.  There was a big bay window facing east in one front room.  Three different front doors opened onto the south facing porch.  The main features of the front yard were two antique cedars posted as sentinels on the west side of the house nearest route T.  The previous owners had cobbled together a bath of sorts and put in some ugly cabinetry surrounding a new kitchen sink.  The back part of the house was a labyrinth of dark little rooms that I assume had originally been the kitchen. The heating system comprised two propane stoves.  It wasn't a very hospitable place, but it rested squarely on limestone blocks. The house wasn't a factor in the purchase of the farm, a not unusual situation.

I was in college then but spent time on the farm during holidays and helped haul brush, paint barns, and weed the garden my folks established with the aid of my grandfather's aged tiller.  The little red and gray Ford tractor from the Calloway farm took up residence and the brush hog was put to use.  I walked the fields with my father to hear of his plans for rebuilding the battered fields, fencing the ponds and designing a cattle handling facility in the lots around the barn.  My parents used every bit of the aged manure in the barn to doctor the garden spot near the house; interestingly enough, it was very nice soil for mid Missouri. There was the requisite percentage of chert chunks, but not the tendency to slab.   I'm spoiled now, of course; when I dig here at home, I may turn up chunks of brick, but I can hardly remember what its like to hit rock!

Over time the old house got a new lease on life.  My folks built an addition with a full basement, a heat pump, a nice big kitchen and a master bedroom with bath.  They tore up floors and poured concrete beneath to keep the outside from taking up residence.  It has been a constant battle to keep coons, mice and other vermin from crawling in the walls, dying, and stinking up the place. The ceilings have all been paneled after one fateful winter night when the entire plaster ceiling of one front room collapsed.  The lovely old furniture from my grandparent's home, much of it built by my grandfather, settled gracefully into the light filled rooms of the old farm house. Stained glass windows in the front door and the guest room door as well as a rose window in the library gave the place a touch of elegance.
 Our family visits were joyful occasions.  An orchard marched in tidy rows in the field south of the house.  North of the house, a well maintained hay field had replaced the milo. Up on the ride beyond the creek grew a new warm season grass pasture.  We would pick walnuts in the fall, hike the creek, or down the road to the bottom, or through the woods to see the big new house the neighbor had built.  We would walk behind my mom's new four wheeler to pick boxes of apples to take home or store in the market.  At Christmas time we'd fill the house with family, Laura and Mark in the library, Blake and I in the big blue guest room, Lee and Ann in the little alleyway bedroom in between. Ben slept in our big room when he was a baby, but graduated to the day bed in Grandpa's ham shack when he was older. The wood stoves would crackle; the propane stoves would glow and our boisterous family would fill every room with laughter and noise.

The orchard is much reduced now: advancing years and the unforgiving humidity of Missouri both contributed.  But the cattle facilities are still used, the pastures maintained and the sprouts and windfalls held at bay.  The milking parlor is now an observatory and the market still serves as a shady spot for a mid morning refreshment and summering houseplants. The basement is a proxy for a life of varied interests: canning jars of fruits, QSL cards from all over the world; a virtual operating museum of old radio equipment, some hand crafted; a library of music and collection of instruments; a full ping pong table sized model train display with my mother's childhood train and the Missouri river bluffs as scenery; a wood stove to keep all dry and cozy in the wintertime.

One Christmas I made a barnboard sign for my folks' farm.  Laura and I pondered long and hard what phrase to paint and finally settled on 'Ruhegarten', German, we hoped, for a place of contentment and bounty.  Years of working land and maintaining gardens has led me to understand better why my father turned that sign over and painted another motto: "Erhalt!"   Conserve!  We will never rest in peace and contentment on this side of Eden; we must be vigilant, with spade and hoe in hand, or clippers, or Roundup, or hammer, or paint, or portable drill with self tapping screws.  Disorder lurks outside the gates like a ravening wolf.  Maintaining the status quo is the daily grind, but making your mark on the land is a life long pilgrimage. 'Erhalt!' is a worthy motto for the folks at Redbarn, who consider stewardship of land and the works of builders past God's own work.