I Miss My Childhood

Harvest Moon
Image by pixieclipx via Flickr

On nights when the incessant traffic noise mysteriously vanishes and the sound of a dog barking echoes outside my window, I miss my childhood. My heart reaches back toward sight of the full moon rising swollen and orange behind rows of corn and the smell of burning leaves at the end of the driveway, burrowing into cotton and denim and polyester, permeating thick hair for days.

I long for the feel of the concrete porch under my pink nightgown, the cats rubbing up against me as I filled three-ring binders with poems, stories, and the drama of a blissfully mundane life.

I ache for the heady freedom of sitting atop a ten-foot whitewashed fence at sunset, of lying back on a corrugated tin roof as it radiates the heat of the day into the cool night, watching the endless sky fade from sunset to first stars to bejeweled. I feel again the warmth and good smells and brightness upon opening the door afterward, the smell of bread promising love and security.

I miss games of badminton in the big yard that were about conversation, not sport. On a good night we had to move into the pool of greenish-white below the security light to keep going past dark.

I miss the simplicity of those days: mist rising from creeks to east and west, breezes through the treehouse, sunsets turning from sherbet to russet in the still surface of the pond, and the ghostly roar of the grain dryer running at night, waxing and waning with the vagaries of the night breezes. On what did I squander those precious hours? Now, everything is a responsibility, even hobbies.  And the kicking inside my pelvis reminds me that the responsibilities are only on the rise.

It’s hard to remember, on nights like this, with the windows open and the orchestra of crickets carrying me backward in time, that I wasn’t cognizant of what lay all around me.

(the silence, the space, the distant bellow of a cow and the ghostly sound of feeder lids tapping tin)

That most of the time I was so busy focusing on something else that I didn’t realize how deeply the impressions were engraving, shaping me,

(the uneven boards of a treehouse built of platforms, my own brain child, the day we were washing windows and I impulsively carried my ladder from the west side of the house to the tree at the corner of the driveway)

that in my life now there are moments of equal beauty that I overlook in the mad rush to accomplish other things,

(dark almond eyes in the orange of street light, the smile of a little girl who never fails to be delighted that Mommy responded to her midnight cries)

moments that skip right over my awareness and embed themselves within, shaping me, drawing me inexorably along the continuum from who I am today to the woman I will be a few years.

I miss childhood, but it’s a gift, moving on.

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Published in: on September 6, 2011 at 5:01 am  Comments (7)  
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Scared To Death

List of national animals

Image via Wikipedia

I really thought that November had at last settled in, and I was about to take off on novel writing. And then came this weekend. I will spare you the details. Suffice it to say, it involved a stomach virus and everyone in the family. And book signings. And NFP class. And let’s just say that not one word got written this weekend.

So today, I’m going to share a story I can’t believe I’ve never shared, because it’s canonical in my family’s household.

My mother was a city girl through & through, but she embraced her role as a farm wife.  When I was a kid, she raised chickens and sold the eggs. It was almost a daily occurrence that someone along the gravel road would come knocking on the door asking to buy a dozen or three. Feeding and watering chickens, chasing them inside at dusk, collecting eggs–we were never more clearly farm girls than when we were doing hen chores. (Except, perhaps, when we were playing on grain trucks and jumping off hay bales. But I digress.)

So, after a few years, Mom decided she’d get a rooster, and save the money she spent every spring on pullets for butchering. Well, it didn’t work. The rooster spent most of his time perched in the tree outside my parents’ window, crowing at progressively more annoying times. And by annoying, I don’t mean 5a.m. I mean 3 a.m., and 2a.m. Finally one night, my mom flipped out. She grabbed a broom, went outside and hurled it up into the tree. The rooster flew down squawking and took off running into the pitch blackness outside the security light. Mom chased him screaming until she couldn’t see where she was going.

We never saw the rooster again, but the next summer, Mom uncovered a pile of feathers down by a grain bin while she was mowing. And that’s when we started telling the story of how Mom scared the rooster to death. :)

Published in: on November 15, 2010 at 8:02 am  Comments (4)  
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The Weekend In Gratitude

You know how you take the weekends and you cram them full of stuff, expecting to accomplish a ton, only to end the weekend in frustration because virtually nothing got done?

This should have been one of those weekends…but it wasn’t.

There was Beauty and the  Beast on our friends’ front lawn, with popcorn and a deep dark sky full of stars, and Julianna sitting on Daddy’s lap mesmerized and screaming with delight at the movie, and Nicholas flinging himself backward in my arms to point at the darkened, twinkling sky.

Saturday was Suburbia Meets the Farm, which can only full be shared in pictures:

Julianna, as I expected, took to the tractor like oil to water. When it cam roaring toward us, she attached herself to my neck so tightly that I actually had to pry her loose so I could breathe. Hugs from my girl are not nearly frequent enough, so scared or no, that was its own little blessing.

And then there were the boys, trekking off to learn about field corn with Grandma…

And at last the combine came roaring up to dump its load and pick up small riders.

It was a busy day, far too busy for us to spend the proper amount of time to properly appreciate the smell of harvest, that half-sweet tang of yellow grains mixing with the slow smell of fermenting stalks. Far too busy to sit beneath the maple tree back at the house and enjoy the cool shade and the soft quiet of wind whispering in the maple leaves. But while we were occupied with roaring monsters and grandparents, Christian played golf in the quiet and got his best score ever.

And then we drove back home to have hot dogs and s’mores cooked in the fire pit, and a backyard campout adventure for the big boys. I sat and scrapbooked on Saturday night at our big desk, listening to the rise and fall of their voices below the window as Alex interrogated Christian on something or another.

And then on Sunday, it was NFP class and making Alex’s family page for school and a family photo shoot and novels group.

Not a perfect weekend. There were arguments and kids misbehaving and all the usual, but on the whole, a good weekend. And on the days when the irritations and frustrations seem most troublesome, that’s the most important time to be grateful.

holy experience

Published in: on October 11, 2010 at 7:09 am  Comments (2)  
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Home

Not everybody has one–this place called “home.” Not the place where you hang your hat and sleep, not even the place where you create your Christmas traditions and bring your babies home to. I mean the place you grew up, the place where your parents still live and work and sleep within the same walls, to the same routines, that they did when you were a child.

In this mobile day and age, not many people have that.

And that makes it so much more precious, knowing that I do.

It’s the warm gold of ripening soybeans threaded with emerald, glowing softly below a steel-gray sky.

It’s the tranquil fuzziness of the pond that reflected all my nightly celestial wanderings.

It’s the comfort of knowing, in a world constantly shifting, that some things never change: the same hulking behemoth in red, visible from half a mile away, needing work, as always. Being coaxed back to life, as always, by a man wearing the same blue snap shirts, the same jeans and the same suspenders as always.

It’s Grandpa and forklifts and tractors.

It’s visits with distant aunts (mine) who give wheelbarrow rides.

It’s piles of dust and dirt that attract tiny bottoms with some magical, unstoppable magnetic force.

(I don't think you're going to get it clean with that, Julianna.)

It’s the realization that in a world of insider trading and Senate seats bought and sold, the dirtiest work is sometimes the cleanest.

Linked to On, In and Around Mondays…

 holy experience

tuesdays unwrapped at cats

Published in: on September 20, 2010 at 5:13 am  Comments (12)  
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A Harvest Harangue

My dad has had kidney stones for…a while. I’m not sure how long. Being Dad, he didn’t complain about it to us. He got up, he went to the field, he ran the combine, he fixed the combine, he unloaded grain, he fixed the grain auger, from sunup till after dark, trying to get the harvest in. He kept at it until he couldn’t get out of bed anymore.

And now the last 50 acres of grain are stuck in the field, and it is four days till Christmas.

This has been a difficult harvest season. Hard for me to watch, because I am stuck on the sidelines. I used to go help him–I’d drive the grain cart, spend a day with him–those are memories I really treasure. Even after the first kid or two, I would go and at least help move machinery. But now, all I can do is stand aside and watch, helplessly, as they struggle to bring the “harvest home.”

Which leads me to my main point. I am so frustrated with how oblivious people are to the situation of the agricultural community. Every single week at church, we pray for the troops overseas. Which is fine–obviously soldiers in harm’s way need prayers. Every week we pray for somebody’s tough economic times. But how, how, I ask, can they fail to recognize the difficulties faced by families trying to remain in the farming business?

Yes, I live in a city of 100,000 plus. It’s a city. But it is a city with an MFA exchange in it. There’s a soybean field four blocks from my house, surrounded by subdivisions, banks and fast food. People here focus on organic, locally-grown produce. When the peach crop froze a couple of years ago, everybody knew about it. And yet people don’t notice if the weather affects soybeans and field corn. This spring, it rained, and rained, and rained, and rained, and the crops weren’t planted by the 4th of July. The local TV news interviewed my dad, but otherwise no one made note of the situation.

The whole point of the national Thanksgiving holiday was that it took place after the harvest was in–in thanks for the harvest. In our area this year, harvest was well shy of halfway done. Did anyone notice, except the farmers themselves? Not as best as I can tell.

I remember one Christmas when I was a kid, my mom’s family all came to our house. Dad was in the field that Christmas Day. He came in for Christmas dinner, and went right back out. That would have been some time in the 1980s. It was an eventful Christmas because that night there was a thunderstorm and the power went out, so my cousins and I went to bed by kerosene lantern. And the next day my great-uncle’s barn burned. At least, I think that was all the same year.

I bring it up because I’m really tired of the urban-centric mentality. We raise money for hurricane victims; we send food to earthquake-riddled areas of the world. We pray for those who lose homes to wildfire in California, those snowed in in Nor’easters. We pray for everyone except the agricultural community. Okay, so this isn’t a farming community. Okay, so soybeans and field corn aren’t a product we use directly. But how can people completely ignore their existence?

I don’t know who is responsible for the prayers of the faithful at our church; I think it’s probably several people. Once, I sent a note about this. The next week, they threw in one awkward, hasty prayer in the middle of ten long, poetic ones on issues of world importance. The next week, they went right back to ignoring it.

It’s not that farmers need to be on the prayer list every week. But during harvest, during planting–when the rain drowns fields, when the sun scorches them–if we can pray every week for the soldiers, is it so much to ask that we be aware enough of what goes on outside the city limits to pray for farmers when the situation is dire?

Published in: on December 21, 2009 at 1:52 pm  Comments (6)  
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The Work of His Hands

It is fall, and in the mornings now we run in the dark. I am beginning to see pinpoints of sky among the sycamore trees, and that wonderful smell of leaves giving themselves back to the dust from which they came is just starting to make its presence known…only a subtle whiff, as yet, but the promise is there.

It is the time of year when, up at the farm, the combine sits in front of the shop for its pre-marathon physical. The time when all the richness of nature hurls forth one final, all-consuming burst of energy in a blaze of fire. Verdant bean fields morph into a rainbow of red, orange and yellow. Sweet corn spends its last morsels of gold and slumps over in a gray-brown mess, its job complete. The whisper of leaves in the breeze turns to a crackle underfoot.

For a farmer, it is the fulfillment of the year’s work. “You have crowned the year with your goodness,” as Ps. 65 says. It is my favorite time of year, and full of the most vivid memories of life on the farm. I remember taking lunch and supper to the field. Lines of trucks waiting to dump at the grain elevator. The overwhelming roar of the grain dryer, and the ghostly roar of the combine crawling back and forth in the darkness, its lights little more than pinpricks, viewed from the house. The sweetish smell of corn chaff teasing the nose, covering everything in pink…the ear-splitting treble as the grain began to fill the auger.

Although I no longer live by the rhythms of the farm year, as I did when I was a child, the awareness of what lies outside the city is a constant part of my consciousness. At this time of the year, when the gaudy beach ball colors of summer give way to the mustard-yellow of school buses, I feel the richness of life more than at any other time. The promise of childhood and the bounty of summer culminate in the harvest.

And this is the time of year when I appreciate my dad the most.

The Work of His Hands
K. Basi

He tills the land, plants the seed
And he watches the green fields
Grow tall as the seasons pass over the land
And he works, and he prays
At the end of each day
That the Lord will bless the work of his hands. 

He is strong, he is proud
But he melts at the sound
Of his two-year-old grandbaby’s beautiful laugh
And he looks at his family
Now grown, and he asks
That the Lord will bless the work of his hands. 

From the dark of the womb
To the sweet golden rain
Of the final harvest,
He knows that the Lord
Is the force that moves his life.

When his work is complete
And he offers the Keeper
Of Heaven and Earth the best that he has,
May the fruit of his labor
Then lead the Creator
To bless this man for the work of his hands.

Dad and Julianna, at Nicholas's baptism 4/26/09

Dad and Julianna, at Nicholas's baptism 4/26/09

Published in: on September 22, 2009 at 1:16 pm  Comments (5)  
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Field Trip

There is no machine cooler than the combine.

I’ve known that since I was a very little girl, and I’m delighted that Alex is now old enough to agree with me. Ever since wheat harvest ended (in mid-July), he has been asking when Grandpa would get the combine out so he could take another ride. The combine came out last weekend; we have been counting the days all this week. And today was the day.

It was a beautiful drive from Columbia to Moberly, a drive lined with cornfields half-harvested and soybean fields spangled with gold and red. When we rounded the last corner on “the bumpy road,” there were the two grain trucks and a tractor and grain cart lined up along the edge of the “hundred acre” field. Alex could barely contain himself. It was everything a boy of two could ask for.

Autumn is my favorite of all the seasons. It’s the colors, the bracing air, the sense of fulfillment—“the crowning of the year.” Although I know this every day, every fall the wonder overtakes me again as if I’ve never felt it before. The air today was cool, filled with the smell of corn stubble—sweet, in a way that you can’t equate with food. I got Alex out of the van, and he shrieked as the big red Case 2100 came toward us, chewing up the rows with a roar and spitting out chaff behind it. He fairly danced in place, giggling without self-consciousness or self-control.

We rode (and played, while Grandpa fixed the combine) for nearly two hours, all three of us, with my dad. Alex loved it. Julianna looked around with placid disinterest at everything but me. (I got smiles.) After lunch, Alex went for a solo ride with Grandpa while I nursed Julianna. As the combine slowly sank over the hill, the incessant bellow faded to a muted roar, and then to silence—a brief, perfect stillness. Up sprang a tricksy little wind, and a funnel of long dead leaves and stubble went swirling into the air. A miniature tornado, there on a perfectly clear September day, whirling its way across the cut rows, then spinning over the tassled heads still standing.

And then came the subsonic rumble, and the outermost row of corn at the top of the hill began to thrash. A moment later the dark fork point of the header emerged, then the Big Top riding above the brown rows, and at last, the cab clearing the tall stalks.

We got back on the road about 2:30, and the first time I turned around to glance at my children, they were both fast asleep. If only naptime were this easy every day.

Published in: on September 15, 2007 at 1:54 am  Comments (2)  
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