The instant I saw this, my grandma with the enormous flower garden was by my side. I could smell the sweet pungent mix of peonies and roses and other blooms, and feel the cool texture of the crock in my hands. Spring lives on forever.
Memorial Day Reflections
22 May 2013 11 Comments
A nostalgia piece from my original blog, in honor of Memorial Day …
During a recent nursery visit to replace trees and plants lost to our western Kansas drought and heat, the greenhouse owner snapped off a king-sized rose bloom and handed it to me. Magically, as soon as I caught its scent, my grandma was there beside me and an entire era presented itself for review.
We grew up across a gravel driveway from my paternal grandparents, on a sweet little farm in the middle of a great expanse of wheat fields and pastures. There were cows and chickens and a big barn populated by sleepy cats, but the best part of the farm was Grandma and Grandpa’s garden. It spanned acres, and included nearly anything organic you could name — potatoes, carrots, onions, radishes, rhubarb, asparagus, sweet corn, peas, green beans, turnips (yucky), strawberries and tomatoes (both of which we were allowed to eat straight off the vine and warm from the sun, taking advantage of the salt shaker Grandma thoughtfully tucked under the leaves); fruit trees including apple, cherry, and peach — and every kind of flowering thing. Peonies, mock orange, baby’s breath, tulips, daisies, columbine, cosmos, daffodils, lilies, phlox, snapdragons … and roses. That list is by no means complete.
All of this was surrounded by hedges that my grandpa kept trimmed and orderly — a tall one across the back, with openings into the orchard beyond, and shorter hedges along the front and sides, with shaped entryways into the three main sections of the garden. Back in a corner, close to the cattle pens, grew watermelons and cantaloupe, sweet and succulent. And a half-mile away, next to an irrigation engine, was a colossal watermelon patch (which became infamous in its own right — a story for another day) that produced enough for all summer and into the fall, including a rollicking annual community watermelon feed.
Outside the confines of the hedges sat my grandparents’ imposing two-story farmhouse, filled with antiques and decades of living, surrounded by a cool green yard with a hammock stretched between two huge cottonwood trees and a rope swing hung from a sturdy branch. The clotheslines where we helped Grandma “hang out a nice wash,” as she invariably declared it to be, stretched across the lush grass.
There was a cement and brick milk house where our dad and grandpa filtered the milk from the cows, skimmed off the heavy cream, and left it all in glass jars to cool in troughs of fresh running water brought up by the windmill anchored next to the building. A battered tin cup hung on a pipe so anyone needing a quick pick-me-up could pump a fresh drink of water any time. That water was life-giving to the farmer coming in off the tractor, the farm wife with an apron full of freshly-picked veggies, or the farm kid tired and sweaty from a hot game of hide-and-seek in the yard. We (my sisters and brother and I, along with cousins and neighbor kids) spent long hours in that yard and garden, held countless tea parties under the towering twin conifers set in the middle of the garden proper, and built more than one fort among the acres of fruit trees and evergreens out back. And on occasion, we worked.
When I think of my grandparents, he shows up in overalls and she’s wearing a homemade housedress and apron, tied at the waist and pinned to the flowery cotton of her dress at the shoulders. And she never went out, hoe in hand, without a handmade sunbonnet. A real lady had creamy white skin, and although Grandma never managed to achieve that standard of beauty, having been born with distinctly olive coloring, she tried. Grandpa, too, protected his head with a well-worn felt cowboy hat that he sweated through in nothing flat.
Thus they went forth every day equipped for work, intent upon it, dedicated to it. Those luscious fruits and vegetables out there in the hot sun were life, and life doesn’t wait. They did their best to corral us, to slow our head-long summer romp through the garden, to foist sunbonnets upon us and thrust hoes and rakes into our grubby little hands. I remember thinking I really should help out more, take more of an interest, learn something while I was at it. But the fork in the big tree behind the milk house was calling my name, my book was still stashed there from the day before, and I was hot and tired and needed a drink of ice cold water from the well …. and I never quite found time to own responsibility and discipline in any discernible way.
There was one time of year, however, when we all pitched in and did our part. I’m ashamed to say, it had a lot to do with the fact that we got paid for our efforts, but, well ….
Every year in the days preceding Memorial Day, my grandparents would cut huge armloads of tightly-budded peonies, wrap them in wet burlap, and store them in crocks of well water in the cool and spacious cement-lined root cellar. Other flowers, too, found their way into crocks, awaiting that early-morning observance at cemeteries around the countryside. Our job as grandchildren was to take old paring knives and snip daisy bouquets in counts of twenty-five, band them and put them into jars in the cellar. It was always a treat to go from the sunny garden to the damp coolness of “the pit,” and Grandma and Grandpa paid us a nickel a bouquet. We were suddenly rich, and Woolworth’s, McClellan’s, and Duckwall’s were a mere twelve miles away.
We somehow gained a sense of having contributed to something very special. The day before Memorial Day, which was known as Decoration Day then, and very early the morning of, neighbors and strangers from surrounding areas started pulling into the drive to collect the big flower baskets and smaller bundles they’d pre-ordered. And many, knowing there was always plenty, stopped by to see what they might pick up. The air had a special freshness about it and people invariably seemed happy and intent on their mission.
I remember feeling proud of my grandma for her ability to grow and arrange flowers into spectacular gifts, and a connectedness to all those people coming to embrace her talents. I felt firmly tied to all the generations being honored on those Memorial weekends, and I still remember snippets of stories from the conversations I overheard.
After all the paying customers had retrieved their floral offerings, Grandma let us kids have the leftover daisy bundles to place on the graves of the nearly-forgotten babies from the 1800s in our small community cemetery a mile from the farm. It always felt like we’d done something amazing by honoring those brief little lives, and the yearly military ceremony conducted by aging war heroes in a sometimes haphazard and ill-fitting assortment of service garb lent added poignancy.
If my grandparents were here now and could somehow read my heart (which I always felt they could), they would be gratified to know how much I actually did learn through their example and the privilege of living in their shadow. Things like hard work, respect for the living and the dead, a certain acceptance that no matter what happens life goes on … these things have stood me in good stead over all the years since Grandma and Grandpa left us.
As with most farmers of that generation they never became wealthy. But the things they passed along to us are beyond price … and well worth consciously appreciating as another Memorial Day rolls around.
Mother’s Day …
12 May 2013 Leave a comment
A Mother’s Day Tribute
08 May 2013 4 Comments
Brought forward and adapted from my original blog …
My mom has been in my thoughts all week. It probably doesn’t have anything to do with the fact that Sunday is Mother’s Day, but there it is.
My mother was a complex contradiction in terms, as moms the world over tend to be. She grew up all tomboy with six brothers and two sisters, while at the same time evolving into an indisputably voluptuous young woman. She was born and raised in a small Kansas town, went to tiny schools, and was afforded the limited educational choices that generally attach to such an environment; but curiosity, intelligence, and EQ were in her DNA, so she was on a quest for learning from the start.
Mother graduated high school and then earned what was known as an Emergency Teaching Certificate through a six-week course at the nearest state teachers’ college, 150 miles away. This was during WWII and the times called for desperate measures. At 18 years of age, she taught for one year in a country school where most of the older boys were taller than she. Then she met my dad and that temporarily ended her teaching career. She married a few months short of her 19th birthday, and three weeks shy of her 20th she delivered her first baby – me.
Four more babies followed, one of whom she lost during delivery, and what with being a mother and a wife and filling countless other roles, she didn’t get around to college again for a decade and a half. There was never a time, however, when she wasn’t reading at least two or three books and filling journals with her thoughts.
Finally, when I was a junior in high school, she enrolled in the local community college and graduated with honors. Then she went on to the local four-year college and matriculated with highest honors. With those credentials she taught English, Drama and Yearbook for several years at the high school my siblings and I attended. My two sisters and brother all experienced the genuine privilege of having her as a teacher. Later, she taught EMR (old label which stood for Educable Mentally Retarded) classes, and was one of a handful of women who founded the Learning Co-op for this part of the state. I was thoroughly immersed in my own life by then and didn’t keep up with everything she was doing, but I knew enough to be very proud of her.
Somewhere in there, Mother earned a Master’s degree, and had family circumstances not intervened it’s highly probable she would have gone on to get a doctorate.
Because of Mother’s love of learning and reading, my sisters and brother and I grew up in a household of books. When we were little she spent a lot of time reading to us, and later on carted us to the Carnegie Library every week or so and let us choose our own stack of books to take home. She had a small office filled with books, and her end of the couch was surrounded by yet more books and notebooks. Each of us absorbed her priorities and ended up with our own love of reading and writing.
Sadly, we had to say goodbye to our mother far too early. A sudden heart attack took her from us when she was just 67 years old. I often find myself wondering what she might be like now in her 80s, but I need only remember what her mother – my grandmother – was like into her 90s — beautiful, intelligent, interesting, kind, thoughtful, fun-loving and funny. I miss them both, and therein lies another story ….
Mommy & Me on Mother’s Day
Change is what life’s all about …
16 Apr 2013 Leave a comment
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/weekly-photo-challenge-change/
I can feel the mix of emotions experienced by the farm wife who, through the wonder of a time machine, finds herself standing in front of her former home — the one she watched her raw new husband build board by board, then furnished with the bare necessities of life and swept daily with a crude broom in order to keep the dust to a dull roar. I see her sending her stoic farmer for the mid-wife and birthing their babies in the same bed where they were made out of love and awkwardness-turned-to-familiarity. I see her well-tended garden gone to ruin and reclaimed by the elements. Her disbelief. Her chagrin. The ache in her heart. The incomprehensible change that overtook it all once she was out of the picture.
I see the change in my own life, moving from painful to sweet, that has brought me to the man who pulls off the highway, drives down a dirt road, and treks across a wheat field because he spots just the photograph I need for my blog.
I try to open-heartedly embrace change since I learned years ago that it’s what life’s all about. Once you get that far, it all becomes infinitely simpler to deal with.
Life is full of joys …
07 Apr 2013 2 Comments
Oh.My.Gosh. My husband spent time this morning building a killer playlist for my iPhone. Tears and chills … I could never get tired of this music. The closing track is the two of us on keyboard and mandolin, recorded several years ago in his studio. I somehow completely forgot we had it. Such an amazing gift. Bonnie Raitt’s “Feels Like Home,” playing now, says it all. Thank you, love … for everything.
A bunny tale …
01 Apr 2013 2 Comments
in Holidays, My Thoughts, Story Time Tags: be real, celebrations, family, food, happy stuff, life, living, love, loving, memories, Photos, relationships
Yesterday, for the first time in memory, Easter Sunday buried me under a huge pile of nostalgia. You’d think Thanksgiving and Christmas would have considered that their sacred duty, but no, it was innocent pastel little Easter that ended up blindsiding me.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m the eldest sibling in my family. Our brother is gone, our parents, too, all of our grandparents have passed away, a lot of aunts and uncles, a few cousins, and without warning yesterday a tsunami of loneliness sent me rolling end over end. My sisters, although close in spirit, don’t live nearby, my son and Kim’s are long hours away in different directions, so it’s just me and Pa, which is ordinarily more than fine. The Kimn8r himself is now an “orphan by default” — grandparents, parents, step-parents, sister all went off and left him via death. His niece and nephew, cousins and aunties live far away. So. We manage, and we have a very good time at it. Yesterday was just one of those days.
Oh, the growing-up years. Depending upon the whims of the calendar, Easter morning sometimes dawned sunny and mild, but more often cloudy, gray and chilly. Regardless, we four munchkins threw jackets and hats or goofy little headscarves over our jammies and ran across the driveway to our grandparents’ big yard where Grandma was waiting with our Easter baskets. The hedges and trees and other hidey-holes yielded up an abundance of chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, candy eggs and assorted Easter-y gifts until our baskets were overflowing. Then a breakfast of waffles and bacon, followed by a mad scramble to get into our new dresses (made by our mom), white anklets and patent-leather shoes. Our little brother was stuffed under protest into a pair of pants and a jacket, and the tie that always gave him a “church headache.” As for the three of us girls, we could be found complaining bitterly about the way Mother did our hair — it looked “dumb,” too curly, too straight, too not right. Caught up in the joys of motherhood, she continued the grooming ritual on the drive to church, straightening (or smacking) anything within arm’s reach and using Mom Spit to clean the ears of whoever was fortunate enough to grab the middle position, front seat. When she managed to get dressed is a mystery for the ages, but at least our dad knew enough not to sit in the car and honk the horn the way one of our uncles did every Sunday. I have to wonder if he would have lived to see another glorious Easter morn.
Once there, we sat in a row, with Grandma in charge of keeping order through the judicious application of Juicy Fruit gum, pencils and church bulletins. Our parents were in the choir shooting us the stink-eye if we whispered or giggled too much, while we sneakily pinched each other under cover of the pew in front of us. Grandma gave it her best shot, in her Sunday dress and hat and sometimes wearing a pair of earrings lovingly shaped out of flour, salt and water paste and gifted to her that morning. Grandpa went to church with us about once a year, at Christmas time. He always said he wasn’t cut out for church because “When I work, I work hard. When I go to church, I sit. And when I sit, I fall asleep.”
Our parents would leave the choir loft and sit with us for the sermon, during which time Daddy invariably found it imperative to clip his nails. That little task accomplished, his next aim was to free a piece of hard candy from its crackly cellophane wrapper. His painstaking efforts to keep the whole process quiet only resulted in its taking f.o.r.e.v.e.r. … one tiny explosion at a time. If I’d been the pastor I’d have marched down from the pulpit and thumped him on the head, but as a kid I hardly dared even think such thoughts.
Church blessedly over, we all piled back into the station wagon, our brother sighing loudly and claiming a window seat so he could stick his head out and breathe once again. Of course, he always ripped his tie off on the way to the car.
We’d come back home to the aroma of the Sunday dinner Mother had somehow put in the oven that morning — another mystery of time and space — shuck out of our good clothes, and start sorting our Easter basket haul. Little grubbers that we were, I’m sure we managed to stuff a goodly pre-lunch portion of it in our faces before getting caught.
The afternoon usually consisted of endless egg hunts of the boiled and dyed variety, culminating in the cracked and battered dregs getting thrown at whichever sister, brother or cousin veered into our line of sight. It was all fun and games until somebody put an eye out, of course.
I’ve been contemplating what sort of cosmic convergence might have set off yesterday’s blue mood, but nothing momentous stands out. Just a little too much, maybe. A little too much perfect day, a little too much sunshine, too much quiet, too much capacity for remembering, too much of not seeing people I love for too long.
The earth is back on its axis now, though, and life goes on …
That traumatic Easter when I ceased to be
an only child.
The Munchkins
The Power of Memory
17 Mar 2013 2 Comments
The sequel to my Raised in a Barn piece …
My son is an only child, so I asked him once how much he’d minded growing up “in solitary.” He told me he’d liked having his own room and possessions without having to worry about siblings messing everything up, and he enjoyed all the attention and the regular proximity to adults and their world, but his one regret was that he had no one to share his memories. There was no brother or sister involved in the events of his childhood, no one to corroborate or contradict now when the stories start, no contemporary to help keep the memories alive when Mom and Dad, grandparents, aunts and uncles are all gone. And implicit in all of it was the fact that there was no one to share the blame when things went south.
I, on the other hand, am blessed with sisters — two of them. And we had a younger brother whose memory is sweet beyond words. When my sisters and I are together it’s all about the memories. Even when we aren’t actively talking about the past it’s there, part and parcel of who we are.
We had no shortage of memory-making opportunities during our growing-up years. We lived on a farm, across a gravel driveway from our grandparents, so we had plenty of space, including two good-sized houses, for inventing make-believe. We built forts in the barn and tent cities in the house, decorated dollhouses upstairs and down, strung paper dolls, Baby Linda dolls, Barbie dolls and their wardrobes from one end of the house to the other, set up tea parties in Grandma’s garden, made mud pies in front of the playhouse. Whatever fantasy world a child is capable of creating, we most likely did. And possibly the most interesting, compelling, and fabulous fun to be had was playing dress-up in Grandma’s attic.
Getting there was a bit of a trek. The stairway was hidden behind a wall in the kitchen and accessed by a door. Once we stepped up onto the landing, the view was straight up the narrow staircase, with not much hint of what lay beyond. It was always perfectly still up there and the air felt heavy. We could hear wasps buzzing in the windows, but we knew from experience that if we left them alone they could probably be counted on to return the favor. Every once in a while Grandma would go up there with a big pair of scissors and methodically cut off their heads, which we found deliciously cold and efficient on her part. Of course it only added to her cred, and we already tended to obey her faster than we did our mom. This is the same grandma who pinched the heads off the red and black box-elder bugs she found crawling across her floors and feared neither snake nor spider in her garden.
There was a shallow ledge parallel to the stairs which served as storage area for an intriguing assortment of items, both old and newer, but there wasn’t much time to take it all in as we had to concentrate on not tumbling back down to the bottom. At the top was a bookcase holding musty old volumes, including my first acquaintance with Gone With the Wind. It literally fell apart before I got to “Frankly, my dear …”. Also sitting on the shelves were several of our dad’s iron toys from childhood. Those heavy cars and trucks and cleverly-designed coin banks brought a nice sum years later when our parents held their retirement auction.
I don’t recall venturing up that staircase alone until about junior high. It wasn’t so much creepy up there as heavy with history and the weight of lives lived, and it just seemed better experienced in the company of others. Our dad’s model airplanes still hung silently from the ceiling of his former bedroom, and the pictures on the walls beckoned us back to an era we knew very little about. There was an old feather mattress on the bed in the biggest room, and everything had a patina of dust that made it seem as though nothing had been touched since the original occupants, our dad and his brother, went off to take up lives of their own.
The space held enough mystery to provide the perfect setting for make-believe, so it naturally followed that we and our friends would spend hours on lazy summer days assembling just the right outfits and posing for Grandma and her old Brownie box camera. We had a wealth of treasures to choose from, as the bedrooms included slant-ceilinged unfinished closets tucked under the eaves, full of a wondrous array of dresses, hats, gloves, jewelry, shoes, jackets and coats dating from the late 1800s forward. Flowing crepe dresses, hats with veils, long gloves, moth-nibbled fur coats and stoles, all of which we set off with bright red lipstick and old-lady face powder. Our grandparents’ house wasn’t air-conditioned so the upper story was stifling hot in the summer, but we didn’t mind. We were having far too much fun to worry about it.
It’s a simple memory, this one. No big drama happened, no momentous story. Nothing to see here, folks, might as well move along. Just ever-changing groups of young girls trying adulthood on for size.
Speaking of size, it strikes me that our feminine forebears must have been truly petite, delicate women. Incredibly, I see my four-year-old self wearing a dress that looks only slightly too large for me, albeit too long, and other photographs tell the same story.
I can only wonder at the patience it took for our grandparents to listen to us clomping endlessly up and down the stairs, giggling and chattering nonstop. And amazingly, I don’t remember any of us ending up in a heap at the bottom. Or maybe since it didn’t happen to me my brain thinks it didn’t happen at all. One thing we didn’t do at Grandma’s house was argue. At the first sign of trouble all she had to do was remind us quietly, “If you quarrel, you’ll have to go home, remember?” and everything was suddenly copacetic again.
When we finally tired of the game, I’m sure it was left to her to restore order to those magical closets, even though it was part of the deal that we at least try. I do know that we three sisters would give a lot to go back and thank our grandparents for all they contributed to our lives in countless ways. They were a huge part of the rich, full childhood we enjoyed and took for granted, and there’s really no way to overestimate the value of that kind of heritage.
My cousin Katie and I. She was eight or nine and I was four years old.
Me with my friends Karen and Jo.
Best Moment Award
09 Mar 2013 4 Comments
in Awards Tags: About Me, Awards, blogging, brave, happy stuff, humor, inspiration, life, living, love, memories, story, writing
Awarding the people who live in the moment,
The noble who write and capture the best in life,
The bold who reminded us what really mattered –
Savoring the experience of quality time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Oh my goodness, I can’t believe this! Wow. I don’t even have a speech prepared, I just came to the banquet with a friend!
Well … gosh … think! Um … well, first of all, thank you to the Academy, the Board, all my fellow bloggers, and especially to “Moment Matters!” It means everything to me to receive this prestigious award — I didn’t even know I’d been nominated!
I also, of course, must thank my wonderful son, and my husband, the love of my life, for encouraging me to start blogging. I have a lifetime of experiences, memories, losses, victories, pain, joy, the entire life spectrum, from which to draw. Many people who mattered to me are gone … many who make life beautiful are still with me and bring me deep happiness every day.
Special recognition like a “Best Moment Award” would seem to imply some sort of niceness in a person, which comes as a surprise to me until I remember that people can’t see the thought bubbles that appear above my head as I blow through life. Hahaha!
Oh dear, the music’s playing, I have to get off the stage, but thank you all SO MUCH! I will never forget this …
Out of the loop …
05 Mar 2013 7 Comments
I’m baaaaa-ack — didja’ miss me? Just one of those times when life piles on and full attention is required elsewhere. Changes get made, exhaustion takes its toll, adjustments are required, and life moves on. Had a wonderful two days away with my sweetie-pie, and a few other perfectly fine distractions were enjoyed, and now you get my smiling face once again. Hope all’s well in your world!
What I really want …
24 Feb 2013 14 Comments
… is to write funny. Funny ha-ha, not hieroglyphics. Ever since I was a precocious child entertaining my aunts and uncles with my fancy vocabulary (and how many jaded adults did I completely annoy the bejeebers out of?), I’ve thrived on making people laugh. I apparently told someone that my name was Agnes Opal from Constantinople (never underestimate the power of a mom who reads to you), and it stuck. To at least one uncle I’ll always be Agnes Opal.
That episode is vaguely embarrassing to me now, but the joy of spitting out genuinely funny stuff embedded itself in my psyche early on. I sit here every day and read the giggle and belly-laugh producing stuff my blogger friends post, and wish I’d thought of it. That’s me being honest, folks.
But life is life and truth is truth. And what I’m apparently programmed to write about is memories. I have a lot of them, and I now have the dubious distinction of being the eldest in my immediate family. Both sets of grandparents are gone. My parents are gone. All of my in-laws are gone. My brother is gone, and even though he was the youngest, he had the closest ties to the farm and would probably remember things I never knew. My sisters moved away fairly early on, and are both younger than I, so by default I’ve become The Keeper of the Secrets. For the most part, they’re secrets that need to be told for preservation’s sake … and the mission seems to have fallen to me.
The truth to which we’re all called to be faithful is this …
Tell me a story …
20 Feb 2013 2 Comments
Our big snowstorm seems to have arrived. Sitting here watching it come down, blow around, stick to everything, run down the windows, I’m remembering the huge blizzard we had when I was about ten years old. If I have this right, it snowed for at least three days without let-up and the wind howled the entire time. The power went out, of course, so my dad got kerosene lanterns from my grandparents’ house … I still remember what they smelled like when they were all lit. Living on a farm, we were usually pretty well prepared for whatever might come up, so I’m guessing there was plenty of food in the house. Anyway, I don’t remember going hungry. And we had propane heat, so the house stayed cozy.
I do recall playing lots of board games and card games … and we probably drove our parents crazy … four kids under ten years old cooped up in the house for days and nights on end. When the snow finally stopped and the wind died down, we emerged to find our world transformed … drifts up to twenty feet high with deep valleys between. I have no idea what my dad did about the livestock while the storm was raging, but they must have survived somehow.
It was several days before the county could get through with blades to clear some of the roads, and a few more before we could make it to school. The storm happened in March, so we ended up with a fabulous vacation out of it. We spent our time exploring the new snowscape, in awe over the fact that our neighbors could walk out their upstairs windows onto the drifts. Our grandparents’ orchard was one enormous playground, with drifts up to the tops of the tall cedar trees and plenty of big hills to slide down. Our parents definitely got a break from the craziness … except, of course, for all the snow boots and wet jackets and gloves and mittens and stocking caps and …
Sadly, the heavy snow broke most of the cedars and fruit trees, and the orchard was never the same. As kids, of course, the cost extracted by a storm like that didn’t register with us until much later. We just knew it was the most amazing thing that had ever happened in our lives to that point.
Me with my two younger sisters atop the drifts in the orchard, with cedar tops peeking through. Our little brother was in the house.
Playing for Time 
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