R-E-S-P-E-C-T

November 13, 2016.

 In the words of the old hymn:

"Come, ye thankful people, come,

Raise the song of harvest home.

All is safely gathered in

E'er the winter storms begin."

Used to be, we were disappointed, but not surprised, when the men of the family would get up after Thanksgiving dinner and head out the door from Grandma and Grandpa Hurst's house to pick a few acres before evening.  A couple of years, due to drought, or government programs, or both, we actually finished harvest by Halloween.  That was bad.  But more recently in terms of Hurst Farms lore, we fervently hope to bring in the last wagon load of corn...or, in wet years, soybeans, by mid November...because that is Charlie's birthday, giving us twice the license to celebrate.

It wasn't always that way. When Charlie was a boy, the crops were planted much later so the last pass with the plow would catch the late germinating weeds.  Without grain dryers or bin fans, the crop had to do all its drying in the field, so harvest lasted well into December. I reckon he got a cake (Grandma was a great cook!) but otherwise November 15 was just another day of work on the farm....

 Before we were out of college and back on the farm, Blake and I stayed with his folks on weekends.  As a rookie at the farm wife business, I wanted to make a good impression on my in-laws and did the only thing I knew how to do: I got up as early as I heard Millie stirring in the kitchen.  The kitchen was warm, busy, and smelled of coffee.  The table was the nerve center of the family and farm, a place where plans were made, stories were told, and sports were analyzed and deconstructed, years before that word was a part of the vocabulary.

Time passes, but the kitchen table still serves the same function for the much larger family that drops in for coffee, Sudoku, and conversation.  

Sports, from elementary volleyball, through East Atchison junior high and high school, to the collegiate black and gold of Missouri, and culminating at the pinnacle of fan and family allegiance, the St. Louis Cardinals, is subjected to a gimlet eye and partisan 's critique of the referee's and/or coach's judgments.  If one has attended as many sporting events as Charlie and Millie have, on hard bleachers, in cold mist or pouring rain, rooting for winners...and losers....one has earned the right to an opinion!  

2016 Fair

1995 Fair, Ann's steer

2014 Fair, Aaron's pig

And then there are all the 4H and FFA projects.  How many steers and hogs, meek and mild or crazy and wild, underfed or overfed, winning or losing, has Grandpa Charlie put up his hand and bid for.  How many times has the auctioneer sidled over to the fence and crooked his finger for one more bid while a granddaughter with a pie or cake stood in the ring?  So many county fairs...more seats in the bleachers....and more appreciation due than any thank you note can express.  

Chocolate cake 1990

Apple pie 1994

In 1978, Charlie helped these two rookie carpenters make a bare bones little tenant house with a toilet in one room, a shower stall in another, and no furnace at all, into our first home.  In 1986, he helped frame up, roof, sheet rock, and finish the addition doubling the size of our farmhouse so kid number three would have place to lay his head. Without his do-it-yourself ethos, I don't know that we would ever have attempted to build that addition, to take on even one greenhouse, much less the much larger projects that followed.  

1978

1986

16 By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles? 17 Just so, every good tree bears good fruit,  (Matthew 7: 16-17)

I've got a whole album of photos to prove this verse true.  There's a black and white with Millie and Charlie, Grandma and Grandpa Hurst. 

 There's a wedding photo, circa 1977, of Blake, his folks and his brothers at Trinity Lutheran in Jefferson City.  Sorry about the tuxes, guys; it WAS the '70s.  

Here's Millie and Charlie one Christmas in their old house, sporting personalized red and white Tarkio Indian polo shirts, all the better to endure nights of basketball games in an overheated gym. 

Wedding receptions too numerous to count.

  Cardinal baseball in Redbird gear of many vintages, including the classic set with "Together 19"on one shirt and "Since 56" on the other. 

 We've gotten a lot of laughs from the guy in Chicago who couldn't recall a Cardinal player named "SINCE". Here's Charlie hobnobbing with the Canadian Consul, 

at the podium in the White House West Wing press room, 

querying pundit Michael Barone at a Farm Bureau Foundation banquet,

 laughing with the Vice President at the White House Christmas Party,

 thumbs up at Brooks' college graduation, 

with Alissa at her high school graduation,

 signing the papers at Ben's commissioning into the Army

 and dancing with Lee at her wedding.  

Finally, a hilarious, chaotic  sequence shot at the 60th Anniversary party this past June, with at least one kid crying, one kid dancing, and who knows how many heads turned and eyes closed . 

 By  "these fruits" you will know the "good tree" at the base of our family tree: by good example, frugality, hard work, sacrifice, perseverance, honesty, and dedication.  

We can't fix the Missouri Tigers.

We can't fire Joe Buck.

We can't advise Mike Matheny.

But we can sure wish you a Happy Birthday!

Grandpa and his birthday buddy, Josh

Together they are '88'!

To Dust

By the time you read this, the voting will be over, the answering machine messages for and against will have ceased, and the finger pointers will find new targets.  

The dust will settle.  

Dust.  The common denominator of humanity.  From such we were formed and to it we will return. What a tidy play on words it is to sum up the total of a campaign season's worth of fuss and feathers! The entire enterprise is like the progress of a semi of grain down a gravel road: a plume in the distance; a rumble of wheels. grind of brakes, and choking cloud; and then the air clears.  

 "For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust." (Psalm 103:14)

That is dust as metaphor, metaphysical dust, Keynesian dust.

On this beautiful November afternoon, I prefer to ponder the many manifestations of dust in the short term.    I consider the subject as I sweep the wood floors of my house, building midden piles every 10 feet or so to be gathered by the dust pan and flung out of doors to be recycled...or tossed right back indoors by a gust of wind.  The measure of this "dust" reflects the harvest season and there are blessings to be counted in its contents.

Item: a couple of ladybugs/Asian beetle carcasses and some actively creepy Democrat bugs.  
Blessing: it's November and still warm enough that these creatures aren't hibernating. 

Item: bits of corn stubble. 
Mixed blessing: whether the corn in overall cuffs is the result of bountiful yield, or is debris due to breakdowns and repairs, a longer harvest is the result.

(Observation: Concentration of both harvest and garden detritus increases in the bathroom.)

Item: long blondish hair.
Blessing: Sure evidence that lovely imaginative artistic bookworms have been hanging out and shedding.  There are other bookworms, but their hair is much shorter.

Item: insulation off electrical wire, bits of copper Romex, dried globs from a hot glue gun, shards of a dismembered Bic pen.  Not the leavings of ordinary existence, but evidence that Aaron has been in the house, working on a some YouTube project.  He didn't meet with complete success, but the desire to build, the MacGyver-like impulse to make work and make do, and the DejaVu moment when I'm not sure whether the boy looking for #22 wire and a six volt battery at 8 pm on a Saturday night is 13 year old Aaron...or 13 year old Ben...is reason enough to smile.

Item(s): shredded cheddar, onion peel, Cheerios, Snickers wrappers. Flour. What happens when one batch of scalloped potatoes and ham (recipe says serves 12!) is deemed insufficient for this Sunday's meal in the field and a second pan is necessary.  Lizzie and Josh request a breakfast of  bread and honey; that means flour on the floor and a delicious homey fragrance of baking bread when bedtime arrives before the clocks fall back.

Dust. The big stuff takes a broom, but the grey fluff with no name is gathered with the Swiffer.   Running the Swiffer up and down the hallway and under the beds lets me sleep well at night.  

Dust.  It's what makes fall skies so brilliant, combines so flammable, and handkerchiefs a necessity.  It clings tenaciously to mirrors and windshields making Windex and paper towels tools as indispensable to harvest as socket drivers and vise grips.

  The people of Israel were led by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night: the bellwethers for bean harvest are combine lights by night and plumes of dust by day....

 Dust. Omnipresent and unavoidable. Like death and taxes.

  Show me your dust, and I will tell you what you are.

 I dust; therefore I am. 

 In the smallest of ways, it's a defiance of the demons of disorder, an attempt to establish an oasis against chaos.

Until it's time to garden, that is.

Let's Vote...to Keep a Good Thing Going!

Building terraces south of our house in 1987

Fifty years ago our family would load up long before daylight to make the drive south to Missouri from Chicago for Thanksgiving dinner. As the sun rose, the frost would gleam bright against the black furrows of plowed ground. Nary a corn stalk disturbed the unbroken furls as far as the eye could see.  Later, as snow fell and piled up windblown against the red snow fencing, the drifts would be crusted with black soil.  The spring thaw would leave another kind of drift: the topsoil that had blown free from the frozen and unprotected ground. It seemed wasteful to let that good soil fill the roadside ditches. Even though I wasn't very old,  somehow I understood that soil was more than the dirt washed off your hands before supper, more than mud on a construction site.

Perhaps that was because the contrast between the flat farm ground of northern Illinois and the rock strewn landscape of central Missouri was so drastic.  Tilling the big garden on the farm in Calloway county yielded a bountiful harvest of rocks.  Clay and gravel were less than a spade length away; digging a post hole was a major endeavor.  This wasn't soil: it was a foundation, a substrate;  what it grew was trees, fossils, multiflora rose.....and fescue.  Nonetheless, my father took his land stewardship very seriously, building ponds and seeding grass waterways on the thin chert ridden pasture ground.

So...imagine being transplanted to a place where ancestral winds piled up great mounds of glacial loam, where a drain spade slipped through the ground like a knife through butter...a place Lewis and Clark called the 'bald-pated prairie' after the tall grasses parting before the wind on either side of the great river.....

....A place where spring rains can run unabated through a tilled field, where a ditch will form anywhere a cow has walked two days in a row......a place so fertile...and so fragile...

No matter your landscape or your land use, the topsoil is a precious resource, one that takes generations to build up and but a few seasons to break down. Worlds reside within that thin upper crust: germination, decomposition, fertilization, aeration. The care and feeding of our soil is no small matter.

Long before the term 'no till' was common currency, soil conservation was a matter of structure, keeping the thin brown line in its place by reducing the velocity, the distance, and the slope of what forces moved against it.  Terraces, tile lines, diversions, and waterways were the tools farmers and contractors employed before chemists, breeders and  engineers gave us the means to leave the topsoil undisturbed while we planted, fertilized, sprayed and harvested. These long lived structures are costly, not quite the same magnitude as buying the kids a new pair of basketball shoes every year.

But our state cherishes its landscape: more than thirty years ago, the people of Missouri voted to pay a 1/10 cent sales tax dedicated to their State Parks and the conservation of Missouri soil and water.  Since then this tax has been renewed three times, a measure of the confidence Missouri citizens have in the application and efficacy of these monies to lands public and private.

Like other farmers, our family has been pushing terraces, building basins, plowing up diversions, and practicing no till farming on our lands for as long as we have been farming.  We are direct recipients of the generosity of Missouri taxpayers and we view the responsibility of maintaining and improving our soil as a calling, not a burden.  To us, every broken terrace and every rutted field entrance is a challenge; after a generation of conservation tillage, we take pride when the combine ride across a terrace face is as smooth as the proverbial baby's cheek.

Here's the pitch and the promise: next week is Election Day 2016.  Whatever your decisions about the rest of your ballot, please take time to vote for the renewal of the  Missouri Soils, Water and State Parks Tax.  Know that your vote will make the beautiful landscape and productive lands of our state better, as it has done since the first vote in 1984.

Missouri Parks, Soils and Waters Sales Tax Renewal 2016

Terrace building Hurst Farms version, 1987

Plowing and pushing up terraces on our farm 1987

THESE Things

All the things in this life that aren't politics. 

Fifteen years of Winnie the Pooh....

Aren't newsworthy. 

Aren't on the television. Or social media. In font sizes over 48. 

That aren't the Cubs......

That still make life rich, memorable, vital, and individual.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.  

Phillippians 4: 8

Think on THESE things.

Lizzie.  At the helm of the auger wagon, bouncing over the bean field on her dad's lap, steering and singing in her pink t-shirt and John Deere green french terry pajama pants.  Pure happiness.

Abbie and Josh. With armloads of fake autumn leaves and weeds, stringing a garland here, setting a pumpkin there,  every vase with its flower, every bowl with its gourd.  Finally, the TA-DA moment as I'm led (close your eyes, Grandma!) to the dining room to ooh and aaah over their enterprise.  Lovely, indeed.

Ryan and Lee.  Lee with her foot bound up and her big toe stitched.  Ryan taking the laundry downstairs, bringing her drinks and ibuprofen and making brownies. Putting dishes away.  Lee: "That's not where those g....oh....just put them where ever you want to!"  When your wife is laid up, where ever those  clean dishes are stacked is the definition of commendable....

Gabe and Abbie, Aaron and Lizzie, Josh and Annie.  After school and after work, the "knackers" come help clean up the leftovers of the fall mum crop.  With high spirits and a Tom Sawyer attitude (make work fun!), they give the dead plants the old heave-ho into the back of the green pickup, roll up the irrigation lines, make big nosegays of fragrant bronze blooms, and stack up the used pots; all for a 6 ounce Sunkist orange pop!  Well, except for Aaron, who takes advantage of the opportunity to practice his mad manual transmission driving skills in the '95 Dodge Ram five speed....Worthy...worthy of praise!

Aaron. First junior high basketball game.  His mother calls..."Keep moving...use the backboard!" Aaron, to his credit, not only meets his mom's eyes, but mouths.."I know".   I remember junior high basketball....and the girl who shot the basketball just so her dad would shave off his beard.... Whatever is honorable....Whatever is just.

Josh. A font of information and a sponge for knowledge now that he's in kindergarten. "I can count to 100, Mom." from the back seat. "Yes, and I'm so proud of you..." from the driver's seat.  From the back seat...."One zillion and one....one zillion and two....." Absolutely true... 

Levi.  At a fall hayride with his parents.  Riding the skid loader, checking out the John Deere tractor, watching the cattle in the pasture: "If this were a real farm, there would be a combine...."  Excellence...in story telling anyway!

Think...and smile....at THESE things....

Bob the Builder circa 2005

Construction guy circa 2016

Froggie suit circa 2014

Froggie suit circa 2011

Froggie suit circa 2004

Still Learning.....

'I am still learning.'.....

....is Michelangelo's famous quote, one that takes its place on my refrigerator with the postcards of faraway places, the snapshots of adorable grandkids, and a legion of magnets ranging up and down the tacky scale. I used this quote long ago in a talk to the Tarkio National Honor Society banquet in hopes of persuading the graduating seniors that a future in Atchison county would be as rewarding and challenging as any farther afield.  Nothing up to this date in 2016 has proved this assumption incorrect!  But that’s part of learning, right? To recognize that work and creativity can walk hand in hand in the most mundane of circumstances, the most homely of surroundings.

I have not mastered night photography....or the lowest notes of a saxophone....chipping onto a green....or growing orchids. I haven't read Paul Johnson's "Art" or plunked out a Scott Joplin Piano Rag(not too fast!), thrown a piece of pottery or successfully cast a fly. I cannot seem to remember the sails on a boat or ship nor the stars in common constellations. There are so many places to see...to read about....to understand. And there are gardens to plan and plant, an old house to treasure, a family full of energy, anecdotes, adventures, and minor miracles, and a husband and friend with whom to carom and careen through life....or rest, reminisce, and share.

I want to paint hay bales.....

...and circumnavigate our country...

http://www.wideopencountry.com/perfect-travel-route-across-us-according-science/

That's not all.....

As time wears on, Michelangelo's image of God bringing Adam to life holds a deeper meaning for me. I am still learning: still a student of what it means to be human and to aspire. Sixty is too old for lots of things...my eyes will keep me from hitting a fast ball; my knees from downhill skiing; my nerves from drinking coffee all night like I did when I was twenty. But God's word tells us it is never too late to seek His face, to walk His path, or to meditate on His word. Adam's finger reaches for the life giving hand of God, but it could as well be mine. Six, sixteen, sixty or beyond, we can never learn enough...

Posted with Blogsy

Time Capsule ....or.....Now We Are Six(ty)

" I don't feel very different, she said, I know it's strange....."

Back When We Were Beautiful

Matraca Berg

I remember the '57 Chevy...and not just the pictures of it, either. We drove it a long time. Laura and I were very young, but it seemed very big, and the only thing keeping two little girls from rattling around the back seat was the bubbly vinyl seat covering my folks put in to protect the upholstery. We stuck to it pretty good; this was long before seat belts in the back. The '63 red Dodge Dart didn't have seat belts, nor did the '64 Volkswagen Beetle.

We had the Volkswagen while my mother was attending night school to get her teacher's certificate. While she was in class, my father took us to the laundromat. I learned my multiplication tables and long division to the swishing and sloshing of washing machines in Naperville, Illinois. When we had completed our lessons, we got to share a bottle of orange Fanta from the vending machine....or maybe a Tab...while we were folding the laundry. Tab was new and it tasted terrible, but I remember feeling quite adventurous trying it.

Afterwards, Laura would curl up behind the back seat and I'd stretch on the back seat. The Bug didn't have a radio, but my father hung his AM-FM transistor from the rear view mirror and listened to one of Chicago's classical music stations while we waited in the dark.

I was hanging my coat up in the hallway outside Mrs. Erdman's second grade class when I heard President Kennedy had been shot.

When I asked my father whether he thought Mr. Goldwater or Mr. Johnson should be President in 1964, he said one would probably be a better president and the other would be probably be better for his job.

In 1968, our class spring field trip to either the Museum of Science and Industry or the Field Museum was canceled because of the rioting after Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.

Our family watched the first moon landing while gathered around a tiny black and white television  in the creek side rooms of a lodge in South Dakota when my father's work took him there for several weeks. We didn't watch much television that summer, nor did we stay up late: doing both in one night marked the occasion as momentous.

I remember when Harry Caray was with the Cardinals( til 1969); the first stumbling broadcasts of Mike Shannon(1972); our first air conditioned car, a 1968 pale yellow low slung Plymouth Fury with a cushy suspension but no power steering; and the epic collapse of the Cubs that broke the city's heart and paved the way for the Miracle Mets (1969). I got to see “The Sound of Music” on a theater trip with our Girl Scout group and “Mary Poppins” with our family at the theater in LaGrange." Dumbo" made me sad and "Pinocchio" made me scared.

We played whiffle ball in the driveway. I had a pair of roller skates that adjusted length and width-wise with a key; I loved to coast down the driveway and turn right onto the sidewalk of our long corner lot. After a while, sand and grit got into the bearings, or the metal spread and your wheels would either lock up or spill bearings into the street.

I got a social security number the summer I accompanied my father to practice and play several concerts with the Lemont Town Band under the direction of Mr. Nichols.  I dearly wish I could tell you more about Mr. Nichols.  My impression is that he had been a band director of some note in the hey day of John Philip Sousa and his peers. He was aged by then, a tall spare stooped figure of few words leading a smallish town band in the basement of the city hall.  His wheelchair bound wife always accompanied him to practice.  The sheet music was old, yellowed, black with fast notes and stamped with his name at the top.  When we played virtuoso chestnuts like “Norma”, “Carnival of Venice”, and original arrangements of “The Washington Post”, “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Colonel Bogey”, the band barely hung together through the multiple repeats and the trio, but somehow maintained its force and plunged with a flourish and much relief to the coda. I knew no one could really hear one small clarinet or had time to notice me foundering in my search for the key signature, or the fingering for some accidental an octave above the staff, but the experience that summer left lasting memories of a musical past just out of sight behind me, and what technical quick wittedness was required to make all those notes bubble out effortlessly.

I got three checks in the mail…$6 dollars each for playing with the Lemont Band.  It seemed an immense amount of money at the time for a player no better than I was. Those checks, with their official looking Social Security number, undoubtedly went directly into my savings account.  

Kids my age got chicken pox...and German measles (what we called the three day measles).  My sister and I got one of the very first measles immunizations, which has lasted all these years.  We never did catch the mumps despite being exposed to them many times.

 We went to the dentist every six months like we were supposed to...but instead of a new toothbrush and tube of toothpaste, we left the dentist office with one of those fruity suckers on a looped string!

When our family lived in Orland Park, it was a town of 4500 people with an IGA, a lumberyard, a laundromat, a Dog 'n Suds, a library, the Orland Bank, a new Methodist church, our church, Christ Lutheran, and St. Michael's Catholic Church and parochial school. A harbinger of the growth to come, I attended both of the elementary schools, Orland Park,in town with its 1950s addition to the brick school and 1930s rock gymnasium, and Orland Center, with its one room schoolhouse and 1950s building addition, set between the sod fields and hog farms. I could walk to both from our subdivision...over the railroad tracks and through the older neighborhoods...

......or past the vacant lots flooded during the winter for ice skating and hockey, past the little league baseball fields, under the Osage orange trees and across 151st Street.

We can't stay Six...or Clever as Clever either for that matter.  But Winnie the Pooh is full of wisdom...for a bear "of very little brain"....and has a solution for all of us six to sixty.....

So be it....