Lucky Thirteen

How can it be that the blond tyke creeping step by step up my back stairs now skis down mountains and teeters across obstacle courses high above the ground.

That the babe in his grandma's arms, too little to know he's perched upon a shiny new toy John Deere Gator, is now the take charge guy for family mowing, the original assistant Pig Keeper, and general factotum in the greenhouse and dirt shed....

That the little boy who once wore red....and then black....has grown up enough to wear red....and now black!

That the number of birthday parties and birthday cakes...and candles on those cakes...is now adding up to thirteen.

That this young man with the great big smile has somehow managed to grow up....right under our noses!... and become a teenager...

How can it be?

Happy birthday, Aaron....We love you !

Cherry-o

Entropy. Anyone remember entropy from high school? I was introduced to the term in freshman physical science: it was an enlightening experience and, along with original sin, explained much about the workings of the world. Entropy: the gradual but unpredictable decline of order into chaos.

Entropy explains August in Missouri. Our gardens have slumped; the maturing fields of grains are marred by leaf disease; weeds poke up through the canopy. Lawns are a mass of rampant water grass. Disorder. Chaos. That will be the state of our landscape until harvest ends the madness and the world settles into winter.

In the fruit country of northern Michigan, August is harvest. Driving through this lovely countryside, you pass row after row of trees laden with apples, blushing gold and pink, and fruit stands with baskets of peaches and pints of sweet black cherries. Ahh..we Missourians cannot resist a sweet cherry; we wait eagerly each summer for them to appear in our stores. On a whim, we pull over to a serve yourself (help wanted!) fruit stand and buy a pint, enjoying the sweet treat and pitching the pits out the window as we drive….

Cherry immersion! Salmon with cherry barbecue sauce for supper and later on, an afternoon of golf on a course built through a cherry orchard. Tourists we may be, but we are also farmers, and curious about cherries as a crop, not just as the raw material for one of Lee’s summer pies.

This is just the tip of the cherry iceberg. I can’t resist taking home jars of cherry salsa and the barbeque sauce, unmistakably cherry chunky and cherry red, but you might eat a Michigan cherry as dessert in your holiday fruitcake, your black cherry ice cream, or in a myriad of other treats topped or decorated with a Maraschino cherry!

Many of the best beloved cherry concoctions are as man made as the machines that harvest them. The rarity and expense of true ‘Maraschino’ cherries encouraged cherry processors to democratize the treat by brining the fruit until it was a pale version of its former self, then infusing it with syrup and color until every cherry was the beloved hue children envision atop a hot fudge sundae. Candied cherries are super sweet, too, one of the reasons a fruitcake passes from generation to generation.

Cherry harvesting is an intricate mechanical ballet. Machines drive alongside the cherry trees through the rows, stopping at each tree. One enfolds the trunk; both are fitted with baffles that direct the bouncing fruit toward the conveyor in the middle. When the machines are in place, a vigorous shaking ensues, but for mere seconds, then the machines separate, and move on to the next tree. The fruit runs up the conveyor into bins of water; each bin can hold 1000# of cherries. The water allows sticks and leaves to float to the top and be picked out before the cherries leave the orchard. Another type of picker drives up to a tree, unfolds like an umbrella or dragon wings around the trunk, then shakes the tree and gathers the cherries onto a conveyor. These harvesters can picks 4 trees a minute. It takes me a half hour on a ladder and dozens of cherries on the ground to fill an ice cream bucket! Whether combining corn or harvesting fruit, the imaginations of the engineers have devised some amazing labor saving machinery:

 Cherry Harvest Leelanau Fruit Company

In today’s supercharged food climate, it is deemed insufficient to be beautiful and tasty; a food must cure what ails ye as well. Dried cherries and cherry concentrate (especially from tart cherries) are touted for its antioxidants and melatonin, as well as helping to ward off Alzheimer’s. I’m all for sleeping better, and Lord knows, forgetfulness is a plague, but something as versatile and miraculous as a cherry, or any fruit that appears like a Christmas in July present, shouldn't have to wave its flag like a medicine man.

Cherry trees begin bearing between three (for tart, or what we call, pie cherries) and seven years (for sweet varieties). We saw orchards in all stage of life, from three foot saplings with drip lines to ensure success to trees nearing the end of their 25-30 years of useful life. At any age, they make a graceful landscape, a testament to husbandry at the highest level.

‘The sweet things in life, to you were just loaned

So how can you lose what you’ve never owned?

Life is just a bowl of cherries

So live and laugh at it all.’

Ray Henderson and Lew Brown

In other words, just enjoy Blake's personal favorite, the cherry fudge…

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Jack and Elvis and Thirty Nine Years

Three hundred and fifty eight thousand. That's what rolled up in green lights this morning on the odometer of our 2002 Dodge Ram. Three hundred and fifty eight thousand miles. I'd sure like to see it turn over to 400,000. Picture a distance runner with the finish line in sight. Every time I climb in those creaking doors, buckle up and push the plastic seat belt holder back into the front seat, I'm rooting for the old darling to rumble on and on. Fourteen years and three hundred fifty thousand miles is quite a lot.....but not enough.

As many years and as many miles of gravel, terraces, interstate, and two lane oiled state highways as the brown pickup has traveled, they are just a drop in the bucket compared to the miles and years accumulated by this pair of middling married folk. Thirty nine years is the tally this year...thirty nine years! That's the sum made famous by Jack Benny...perpetually thirty nine years old after declaring "there's nothing funny about 40" ,(how about it, Matt?) and adopted thereafter by legions of adults facing the imminent departure of youth and arrival of middle age.

Soo...what about thirty nine years ago...that would be 1977, right? What was going on in 1977, the spring we went to a jeweler one afternoon and picked out a ring, that I ate lunch with my mother at Katy Station and told her we were engaged, that Blake and I wrote letters (snail mail!paper!)every day I was in D.C. and talked on the "Watts" line (remember that?!) once a week?

January...Apple Computer is incorporated, it snows in Miami, and Jimmy Carter, newly inaugurated, pardons Vietnam era draft evaders.

March...Three Washington DC buildings are seized by Muslim gunmen who hold 149 hostages. Negotiators include three Muslim ambassadors who urge the gunmen to surrender, citing passages from the Quran.

April...The Mariners and Blue Jays play their first baseball. Optical fiber is used to carry live telephone.

May....Space Mountain opens in Disneyland. Star Wars opens May 25.

June...Jimmy Carter cancels the B-1 Bomber program (revived later by Reagan). James Earl Ray escapes but is recaptured. Apple sells its first Apple II computers. The Supremes perform for the final time.

August....Jimmy Carter signs a bill creating the Department of Energy. The Son of Sam murderer is captured. Groucho Marx dies at age 86.

And.... Elvis Presley dies at Graceland on August 16, age 42.

Sad to say, that last news item is the one indelibly imprinted on my brain. I'd spent my summer earnings on an unfinished table and chairs, a dresser, and a nightstand. The week Elvis died, I borrowed my parents' car to drive over to Columbia so I could stain and varnish our new furniture in our soon to be duplex. Solid Gold Elvis was the soundtrack of every radio station all day long, imprinting my ears and memory for, apparently, the next thirty nine years!

We have celebrated...and not celebrated...our anniversary in many different ways over thirty nine years. Many years, we have spent August 27 in some small town in Missouri, eating ham, or chicken, or brisket, with a roomful of Farm Bureau friends. Late August is prime time for both county annual meetings and delivering mums. And other years, it's just been another pleasant summer night to raise a toast over grilled steak or burgers...then watch baseball.

This year, August 27 is a golf date with friends and family in Mound City for our Community Hospital. Since we are celebrating thirty nine years, why not top this piece off with another bon mot by Mr. Benny, this time concerning golf....

Hey, I've got a great partner!

Here's to thirty nine years...

And beyond.....

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Movin' Out

Coleman's little sister said you better act right, Coleman
Daddy's gone to Louisville he'll be back tonight
He's gonna get another wagon and a good pair of mules
And we gonna move to Texas we just waitin' on you.

Now you all been movin' west since the day you got married
Well I'm gettin' off the wagon, daddy, I'm too old to be carried
Gonna stay here in Kentucky where the bluegrass grow
I'm gonna play it all night down the new cut road......Guy Clark
To catch you up on my progress along the Oregon Trail with modern day muleskinners Rinker Buck and his brother Nick, our heroes have spent the 4th of July at Fort Fetterman in Wyoming and are now restocking and repairing their wagon in Casper, getting haircuts and buying work gloves, preparing for the next leg over the dry high remote ruts leading up to South Pass. 

And in Tarkio, boxes are stacked and marked, carried upstairs and down.  Plastic tubs and dresser drawers, sleeping bags and high school trophies, winter coats and mantle clocks: all and sundry slid into the back of family pickups.  Sweating the big stuff: the hard maple dining room table, the new leather chair, the 8' long hand-me-down leather couch....legendary by this, its seventh to-and-fro through doors it was never designed to egress.

Movin' out, it's an American past time....and family trait, I guess.

Blake and I sit on our front porch and tally moves...kind of a parlor game, a trip down memory lane.  Our first move: to a duplex south of Columbia for our final year of college and first year of marriage. Contents: a turquoise couch, a double bed, a gold Maytag washer and dryer, the repossessed tv of a Nigerian college student. I didn't love the couch and immediately covered its tweedy glory with a nondescript brownish throw.  Foolish '70s girl!  That 50s/60s artifact is probably Pinterest fodder these days. Yeah, and maybe Harvest Gold appliances will be stylish again, too.



Next time, it's a short move into town, making room for baby number two.  We add a big old upright piano, its bulk establishing our family as solid, serious...... and settled.  Well, not so much, as that piano went out the door and down the three steps of N. 4th and up the three steps and in the front door of RR#1, Westboro just three years later.  

Let's talk about the kids. We took Lee to college and up the elevators of Jones Hall in one load. During four years at Mizzou, she lived in three different apartments after the dorm, all involving moves across town and two of the three involving flights of stairs.  No pianos, but I did make one trip north driving blind with my insides in knots and Lee behind me with her car's hazards blinking after the electrical system on the pickup and trailer threw craps.  I blew right by the scales with a hard luck story on the tip of my tongue and one stop by the Highway Patrol already under my belt. Some moves are more stressful than others.

Moving Ann to Washington DC for a summer didn't involve furniture, but is memorable as a classic example of being penny wise, pound foolish.  With an entire summer's worth of bedding, clothing and other indispensables compressed into a backpack, a roller bag, and a six foot long canvas duffel, we decided to catch a shuttle bus from BWI (cause we were saving money) to the train station (cause we were saving money) that would end up at Union Station in D.C. where we would board the Metro (cause we were saving money) and wind up walking the last six blocks to American University, our final destination (cause we were saving money).  Five hours later, blisters on our hands and feet and holes worn in the duffel from dragging it behind us, we limped into Union Station, whereupon I did not pass GO or collect $200, but put an end to the madness by hailing a cab.....Some moves are more stressful than others.

Ben's moves have both logged the most miles...and contained the most tortuous staircases. Soggy stairs at the dorm, narrow fire escape stairs on Wash Ave., dicey basement stairs on Clemens, and four flights up to the steamiest summer residence ever, the torture chamber just off Kingshighway.  Fortunately, St. Louis eateries reward those moving experiences with tasty meals and frosty mugs.....

The staircase tally is relevant because Ben currently holds the family record for furniture most likely to protect you in case there's a tornado, the 4 or 5 foot square massif of slate and wrought iron that is categorized as a coffee table and has proven impervious to all efforts to dismantle, destroy or discard it by those charged with moving it during the last decade.  It's a beast. I fully expect that coffee table to accompany Levi to his first apartment years from now...but I don't know who will volunteer to carry it!

For now, the dust is settling and the trucks and trailers will return to their normal duties of hauling pigs and hauling plants.  My piano left its own trail ruts in the hardwood floor at Spruce, but has now held down its corner of this front room since October of 2002, the same month Lee and Ryan moved into Lee's childhood home.  That winter, Ann and Matt made it three for three with their purchase of the painted lady on College.  That's the kind of transience our forebears recorded routinely in Oregon Trail days when kith and kin got the movin' fever bad and hit the road for new lands with high hopes.

A better place to call home:  to carry your house on your back, drag it behind you, set it down again, and ultimately, pull a Brigham Young and declare "this is the place".  

Movin' out.  Just the prelude to 'comin' home'.

You've been saying for the longest time that the time has come

You've been talking like you're of a mind to get some changing done

Maybe move out of the city, find some quiet little town

Where you can sit out on your back porch step

And watch the sun go down.......Mary Chapin Carpenter

 

This Old Porch and The Farmer's Wife

This old porch is like a big old

red and white Hereford bull

Standing under a mesquite tree

Out in Agua Dulce.

And he just keeps on playing hide and seek

With that hot August sun

Just a-sweatin' and a-pantin'

Cause his work is never done.

And this old porch is just a long time

Of waiting and forgetting

And remembering the coming back

And not crying about the leaving....

Lyle Lovett

               

There was a big crack in the southwest corner of the porch foundation when we moved to Spruce 14 years ago.  It didn't make me happy at the time; an obvious major project for the future, just another addition to all those repairs and renovations one comes across while living in an old house, to be dealt with depending upon the level of duress and emergency.  Example one: tree roots plugging up sewer line while wedding party stays at house over the Christmas holiday..major stress, red lights, sirens screeching, ambulance, 911, emergency repair.  Example two: leisurely removal of wallpaper from two different rooms with repainting as a pleasure, not a pain...a nip here, tuck there, touch up the hairdo, new outfit discretionary type remodel.

We lived with the crack for a decade or so, fixing other big ticket items...windows, a new chimney, guttering, a new paint job...but a few years ago, water began to run into the basement around the washer and dryer and the pier at that corner seemed to be settling underneath the massive concrete floor of the crown jewel of 502 Spruce, the front porch. 

Repairing our foundation climbed to the top of the to-do list....

Here is a short version of the efforts to secure someone to take on "This Old Porch":  Two different firms that made appointments to look at the job and make a bid...and not only didn't show up, but argued with Blake about the dates and times of the appointments they had scheduled.  One guy that wanted to be paid just to come look at the porch and provide an estimate. One firm that did look at the job and made a bid so over the top our mouths fell open in shock and awe....but when he didn't show up for six months to work on it we assumed he didn't need that much work no matter what the money.  

Moral of the story: Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys, but by all means, encourage them to become mudjackers.  They'll thank you when they retire to a condo on a beach or a dock on the Lake..with their future secure!

There is a happy ending.  This weekend Blake and I will sit in the shade of the sycamores under in the shelter of our newly repaired, square and straight, jacked up and squeezed together century old porch.  Yes, indeedy, the task was begun, interrupted, reconsidered, reconceived, and then completed, all within this week. The front garden took a hit, but, as I told the man in charge, I can always plant more daylilies...I cannot repair a foundation.

That was one to mark off the to-do list for this week...and another was scanning all six years of Millie's "The Farmer's Wife" articles and saving them digitally.  This task proceeded as one would expect: the computer running Windows 10 would not communicate with my handy scanner precipitating a return to Windows 7 (fine by me, I was forced against my will to "upgrade" as it was.) But once that hurdle was overcome, it was just a matter of feeding each week into the scanner and watching the images and stories appear on the screen.  

What a joy to revisit these pieces!  Like opening a grab bag gift or taking a bite out of that proverbial Forrest Gump chocolate! Sometimes she wrote about a chapter of local history like the articles about St. John's or the bomber that crashed east of Tarkio in 1944. She followed the perennial parade of the seasons with notes about the birds in her yard and garden and feeders, how the crops were faring, the work on the farm, the good weather, bad weather, drought and floods, storms and sunshine here in northwest Missouri. We kept up on the activities of friends and family...and whoever isn't part of Millie's family is her friend and laughed with her at the antics of her kids...her grandkids...even other people's grandkids.  Millie is a humorist of the most generous kind; she is never afraid to tell a funny story on herself.

But amid the humor, there are stories of great poignancy, reminding us that all the great lives come with sorrow and loss: the week she wrote about tearing down her childhood home, the week she remembered the fire that destroyed their house, the short tribute to one of her very best friends.  

We take for granted the ability to run a "Google"search whenever our curiosity is piqued. But my very favorite kind of history is this type of personal recollection; part experience, part storytelling, built on a foundation of ties to people and place. These are stories that celebrate "remembering the coming back" and "not crying about the leaving." I am so grateful Millie has saved all these 'hard copies' of her efforts in tidy chronologically ordered notebooks. Millie has always told us she'd write a book someday; I'm here to tell you she already has!