Dessert?

Happy Thanksgiving everyone. I hope that it was enjoyable. I and the family units had a great time in the greater Story City, Iowa area, the Mayberry of the Mid-west.  This blog was started  the day after Thanksgiving.

The day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday, the day that was tacked on to Thanksgiving because the powers that be knew that they couldn’t get us back to work after stuffing our faces with stuffing. What was honest Abe thinking; giving into Sarah Hale’s 30 years of persistence and making the 4^th Thursday of November Thanksgiving? 

“Look at you Abraham. You’re all skin and bones. Sure the last 7 presidents have said no. “No national holidays on Thurdays in November. It’s cold, rainy, the days are short, my cable provider doesn’t have the NFL channel.”  But if anyone needed a national day of gluttony it is you Abe. Look at you. You’re all skin and bones.”

“You know Sarah. I would love a big ole slab of pecan pie, but…”

“No buts Abe. The women of America would love to get up early in the morning to start the turkey, with stuffing, and roles, and mashed potatoes, and mac and cheese. I know how you love mac and cheese Abe.”

“I really do.”

“And Abe after that complex carbohydrate love fest, we’ll push ourselves into a coma with 2 slices of pecan pie.”

As the many of the families that made up the 2010 Hoover Thanksgiving, were gathered around the Comfort Inn’s breakfast table on Black Friday morning making plans for the day, I shared that my plan was to hang out at the hotel and try to write the blog. Someone commented that I had plenty of material to draw upon from this weekend to make this a great blog.

I demurred and pointed out how that would be a disaster. A large percentage of the participants in the Thanksgiving festivities to be written about are my loyal readers. Never make your core demographic mad by telling the “truth” about them is one of the first dictums that any successful blogger knows. I hear that to write a successful blog, you have to write the “truth” about all of the other people in the world, make them mad, and let your core demographic feel the warm glow of superiority and affirmation. Besides, I would have too many witnesses to the exaggerations that I might make in these paragraphs, and the family would know that these pages are filled with lies and damned lies.

And you know, I never finished that blog. I tried and tried. Worked, edited, erased and it would not be written. And I think that was because the weekend had not had it’s dessert yet.

It had been a great three days. The travel out, while rainy and a bit icy in a spot or two, was not dangerous and went without a hitch. Wednesday evening was fun, watching the dance, dance revolution participants, catching up on college exploits, eating the exquisite rolo-chocolate, crack cookies, and talking smack about the epic dodge-ball game that was to be held on Friday evening. It is a game whose build up has been so great that the family generated pages of facebook, smack down, comments in anticipation.  The uncles figuring out the new arithmetic when they found out that nephew Ben likes Miller Lite too and turned 21 in July. The food, the pie, the spirited Demons game Thursday was a blast too.

Black Friday was spent doing a little shopping, watching some TV, eating leftovers, and napping, getting ready for the epic dodge ball tournament. It was huge. The anticipation had mounted for a year. A dodge ball game was promised a year ago but due to cutbacks in the Story City recreational equipment budget, no dodge balls were found in the big chest of balls in the corner of the gymnasium.  Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed when one crazy uncle suggested that the basketballs could be used instead.  Finally, the competitive juices were somewhat sated with a vigorous volleyball game. But let’s be honest, vigorous volleyball while somewhat alliterative, pales in comparison in vigor and shear excitement to dodge ball. A game so dangerous, that one according to one Stilger nephew, an Illinois Jr. High Gym teacher claims that it is illegal to play dodge ball in Iowa. Well let me tell you that the Hoovers, Stilgers, Rathmachers, Sharritts, and Pyles say nuts to the nanny state. We love our dodge ball. And YES YOU ARE STILL OUT IF IT HITS YOU IN THE HEAD!

This kind of unrequited passion does not go away with the passage of time. So when the Facebook invitation went out in October for the second annual “volleyball” tourney, it was game on. No budget cuts this year. Play ground balls were bought and transported across state lines, some one found a professional grade dodge ball distributer (who knew), and a referendum was passed in Story City to be used for the purchase of balls. 

5:45 came. Face paint was applied. Leftover plates were put away and a gang of ruffians so noisy that every dog in a 4 block area was barking as the infernal hoard of hellians, tramped through the sleepy alleys of the Mayberry of the Midwest.

Crashing through the doors at 5:55, teams were picked. The balls placed on the center line. The rules explained one last time. YES YOU ARE STILL OUT IF IT HITS YOU IN THE HEAD. I SUGGEST YOU GET TALLER IF THAT’S A PROBLEM. An impartial bystander was chosen to yell 1, 2, 3, go.  And the games began. Teams against teams, Aunts and uncles against cousins, Boys against the girls. Always just one more game.

“Sarah, can we have whipped cream on that pecan pie?”

“You got it Abe. All the whipped cream you can eat.”

“I Love Thanksgiving. You can have it any old Thursday you want.”

Take care.

Roger

Turkey in the Straw?

I am often asked if I miss farming. I don't. That doesn't mean that I love my new career, or have found some new task to fill a hole that stopping farming left. I haven't. I do not miss farming because none of it was romantic for me. At least the romance was worn off very quickly by the harsh realities of scrambling to out wit the weather, the bugs, and the market.

That paragraph isn't completely true. I miss farming one day a year. I miss farming the Monday before Thanksgiving each year, which was the day we would butcher the range turkeys that we had raised since June. The following is a narrative about that day. I hope it captures the romance of that Monday before Thanksgiving because it is the one day each year that I felt awe while farming.

Frost under the moon making the 100 yards to the barn a silvered landscape. Hunting for the light switch flicking it. That light blazing against the deep 5:00 a.m. dark in the old milk parlor where his grandfather and father had held the daily ritual of harvesting what God had provided. That twice daily ritual, which he himself had participated in through high school, had taught the lesson of a long obedience in the same direction with unerring certitude to all three men. The harsh barn lights illuminating the fog of his breath as he set up the barn before the crew arrived at 8:00. The scalder had to be filled. Standing close to the scalder to stay warm while doing the final honing of knives, he would listen to the hiss from the burner underneath the scalding pot and be enveloped by its steam as its temprature crept closer to the feather loosening 145 degrees. After the knives could shave the hair on his arm, he would move on to sanitizing the knives and every square inch of equipment and counter top that he could find.

Every element of the ritual of preparation;  the hour, the cold, the breath, the hiss, the steam, the peripheral warmth, the smell of the bleach, would hone his thoughts to the task at hand. He would contemplate those sleeping birds, roosted in the barn after being herded in from the range last evening with the kids in the slanted dusk of late November.

He had learned through the years that a good turkey butcher started in early June when those 3 day old poults would come in a box to the back dock of the post office. Chicks so fragile, it takes constant attention and perfect care to only loose 25% over the 1st week. Perfect care rarely happened on this farm. There was the one summer where the intern, trying to help, shut the 4 week old turkeys up in the brooder allowing no ventilation. Remembering he could see, Jim coming to the house, ashen faced, saying "come quick something is wrong with the Turkeys." Going out on a run, opening the brooder lid and seeing what good intentions and lack of attention had caused. Jumping inside the brooder picking up the young turkeys, caring for the ones that could make it, piling up the ones that would not. Watching Jim weep from his mistake saying he was going to quit. "You can't quit now. You have to work hard enough the rest of the year to earn back what we lost this morning." was the only reply he could muster through his anger.

How could he forget the Saturday morning loading out for farmer's market, Doug coming to the barn, out of breath panting that a dog was in the turkey coop. Hopping on the 4 wheeler, racing the quarter mile to the pasture field where the mobile coops were located, finding a big old German Shepard had pried up the protective poultry wire and was just pouncing from one turkey to another. Grabbing them in its slobbery jaws and with one powerful shake; kill it, drop it, and chomp the next one. Picking up a stick swinging at the dog getting it on the run and chasing it through the town to its owner’s house. Pounding on the door bringing a bleary eyed, leopard print, boxer short clad, man to the door. Having to explain that those feathers around his dog's mouth came from his turkeys and leopard print would have to pay for them. He would be back with the tally in the afternoon; 27 dead - 5 maimed to not recover - 8 week old turkeys, half way to Thanksgiving. Him knowing from reputation that none of the $640 due in compensation would be collected.

No there were many years that the work to be done on the Monday before Thanksgiving would count less than 75 from the 100 poults that arrived in that box. Each year's setbacks were with him as he made his way to the barn; making the day that would stretch out before the crew feel like a miracle.

At 7:30, the crew would start to arrive. Bleary-eyed and not quite ready to go, they had self-selected over the years, so that they were all returners with a friend or two they had brought along so they could share where that Thanksgiving turkey really came from.  By 8:00, the preparations all made, and jobs assigned, the first cut would be made.

He knew that objectively the business at hand was messy, smelly, hard work. And on an industrial level, many argued that it was dehumanizing for those who participated. At this level and with these people, he had never felt more alive. Each person took care to do their part well and quickly, taking time to share their lives with each other, often through silence as the day wore on.  

That silence disappeared at lunch. His wife, a farmer’s daughter, would create a spread fueled by memories of hard working families coming together to put long past harvests in the barn. A practice that was lost in one generation of industrial farming that migrated a rural population of producers to an urban population of consumers, and left the farmers that remained as competitors and not community.

After a time of sharing lives, he knew the crew was coming back to the task in the barn when someone would ask, “So you think that we are half way done yet?”  He had made sure that they were. He knew from experience that it was always best to break a little past half way. It was hard work for him and for a crew that spent most of the day thinking and not doing physical work it was doubly so. He knew that it was best to push hard in the morning when you were fresh and then “coast” during the afternoon. So while 40 of the birds had been finished in the morning, four long hours of work remained during the afternoon.

So back to the barn, and back to work, they went with stomachs full. As the day wore on, the silences grew longer. The novelty wore off and it just became work. Wasn’t that what summer had become? The dog days of summer wore on through the weather changes of September, October’s Indian Summer, and November’s short days, killing freezes and low gray clouds until this day and the job was done.

The sun was down. The barn washed down. The birds were in the cooler. The parts hauled to the wood chip pile where the alchemy of composting would break everything down to a rich compost for use next year as the farm woke from its winter solace. The chill had returned to the barn, and the harsh light illuminated the clouds of breath as he turned to the door and turned the lights off.

Turning to the house, he was thankful that another long obedience in the same direction had blessed his life.

Take care,

Roger

Bee candy?

A bit of business first; I want to thank everyone who passed last week’s blog along to your friends. The feedback that I got was fantastic and frankly is one of the reasons I sit down every week for this therapy.

Also, to the right is a button that you can click on that will let you follow “You said what, Roger?”.  I don’t know what happens when you are a blog follower. I do not think that there is a decoder ring, but I did not try it myself. I thought it would be a bit silly to follow my own blog. It would be like the dog chasing his own tail. It’s fun for a while. Everyone paying attention, laughing, saying cute dog, but after a while you get tired of looking at your butt and you start building up static electricity from that hideous green shag carpet in the basement and then your master touches you on the nose and then he wonders why you are reluctant to come when he calls.  When you click the button, I suppose that you get a notification that I have posted a blog and you can read it if you like. So don’t think too long about the above simile, and sign up to follow if you want. Off we go.

Bill couldn’t stop crying. The moment his mom called to tell him that Mr. Walls had died the tears caused his vision to blur and built until they started running down his cheeks. The call wasn’t unexpected; just unwelcome. As he closed his phone, he was thankful that his mom hadn’t used skype. Watching her face react to his tears would have made it that much worse.

As he sat there awash with the loss, Bill’s mind filled with the spring that started his apiarian love that lead to his proposed vocation. He was 9 and Billy then. He had just started 4H and had run into the project hall looking and hoping for a blue ribbon on the circuit board that he and his father had put together at the last minute. The ribbon wasn’t blue. It was red and while no amount of words would make it better. It wasn’t so bad that it kept him from noticing the working bee hive that was on display in the back corner of the hall.  The frames all lined up behind plexi-glass. You could see the brood, the queen, the honey, and all of those bees. Constantly moving, buzzing, taking pollen and making something as good as honey. You could watch the bees travel through a tube through the wall; going out clean coming back yellow with pollen. And the thrumming; even behind the plexiglass you could feel them vibrating. Alive filling that corner with life and there was Mr. Walls patiently answering questions about what bees eat, how they make honey, showing the queen as she worked at laying eggs. Billy was transfixed.

Mr. Walls lived down the street. He had been on the periphery of Billy’s life. They were older than his parents, but he and his wife were friends of his mom and dad. Billy’s dad would visit  as he borrowed tools. His mom always credited Mrs. Walls for her killer pie crust recipe. (You have to use Crisco.) And there was always the story of how his dad called Mrs. Walls one night when his mom was gone and Billy would not stop crying. She came down just to help him rock that inconsolable baby  and  listen to the exercising of some very healthy lungs; because “sometimes that all you can do.” Mr. Walls saw Billy and offered to let him get really close to bees if he was interested.

Billy had always been too busy to notice the hive on the back corner of his lot. But that next week, He was at Mr. Walls’ house early on Saturday morning. Mr. Walls said that while he usually did not work the hive much during the summer but “it wouldn’t hurt anything if we worked it early in the day before the heat came on. They were there at 6:00.  Mr. Walls didn’t use gloves or a bee veil to inspect a hive. He said if you go slow they won’t sting. . . very often. Jerking his head up looking at him wide-eyed and paler, Billy saw in his face that look that he came to trust more that his words. A kind smile and a liveliness in the eye that told Billy “Don’t pay any attention to that. It will be okay.” And somehow it was okay. He used his hive tool to pry off the top and invited Billy up to look. It was okay. He didn’t know why but there was no fear; looking in that hive, letting the bees come and go and just a breath away. It was okay.

He was hooked. 9 more years of 4H and while the bee project was often put off. Mr. Walls prodded Billy like his mom and dad could never do. He learned all there was to learn about bees. And there has been a lot to learn about bees since then; mites, foulbrood, and now colony collapse syndrome. Nervous, Billy was sure that Mr. Walls’ bees were on the brink of extinction. Billy was always imploring Mr. Walls to make bee candy in the spring, mite strips in the fall, and antibiotic year around.  “Bee candy? Billy you want to make those bees lazy? They are supposed to make us candy. Where do you think the saying “busy as a bee” came from. Not from a bunch of sissified bees eating candy. But from bees busily working in their colony.” He would scoff at the use of all of those other remedies because his bees weren’t sick.

Finally, Billy found Mr. Walls’ secret. He had learned in biology that bees can trek over 5 miles to get pollen for honey. When sharing his knowledge with Mr Walls one April as he was inspecting the hive, Mr. Walls asked, “5 miles?

“Sure. Not often. But sometimes and most of the time it is at least two miles.”

He told Billy of a way to track bees in their flight. He had learned it as a child and it always worked. He wanted to know if Billy was game. “Sure.” Mr. Walls  suggested that he go home and get a bike because that would make it easier to keep up with the bee tracking. Running home and back minutes later, Mr Walls was coming out of the house with a cotton ball and a bit of glue. He reached into that hive, pulled out a bee and glued that cotton ball to it’s belly. He took that moment to encourage the mounting of the bike and to prepare Billy for the ride of a lifetime. 1, 2, 3 go and he threw that bee into the air and Billy was off. Looking around for that white ball of cotton and there it was. It was flying around in a circle to get its bearing and it was off. It headed off 10 yards to a patch of early snow peas (pees see last weeks blog), landed on those white-pink blossoms and did its thing. Crashing, Billy nearly ran through the garden fence. Mr. Walls came over and picked boy and bike up. Chuckling with that look, he said, “I guess bees only go as far as they need to go.”

Take care of yourself and find what you need close.

Roger

The best?

I had a great Tuesday this past week. Our work gets off on election day and I must admit that it was the best election day that I have ever had. In fact, its greatness coupled with the memories that I shared in last week's blog triggered the memory for the second best election day of my life.  I was in 2nd grade; attending Ingalls elementary. The polling place in Ingalls and Green township was held in our 2nd grade classrooms. As a consequence, the 2nd grade class got the day off on election day.

Well the fall of 1969 coincided with my 2nd grade year. Second grade was a great year for me. Mrs. Manifold taught us about homonyms that year. She had a large piece (peace) of butcher paper that she would write, (right, rite) the homonyms, discovered by we students, on and keep track of them during the course (coarse) of the year. She would spur us on to greatness with (I am sure in hindsight) bogus comparisons with other smarter classes that she had taught. We were proud of ourselves when we came up with the biggies; two, to and too, (The two boys were too smug until they had to go to the principal's office.) there, their, they're, (They're over there looking for their books.) Then at the 104th entry I pointed out on a dare that but and butt were homonyms. Mrs. Manifold's non-plused response do my definitions that "yes, butt is also the end of a cigarette." emboldened me that dam and damn should go on the list. (Is it any wonder I consider myself a word smith?) And  to her credit it went up there (they're, their). Number 111. I lost interest after all of the risque words were used up.

The spring of my second grade year also saw my father make the required Sharritt male (mail) sacrifice to the limb gods. Three fingers on his left hand in a farming accident were his generation's contribution. I have been fortunate to not make my contribution yet. I remember being picked up by my grand mother who said that he hurt his hand at the elevator. I remember saying that it was impossible for him to hurt his hand at the elevator. However, she insisted that it was the elevator where he hurt his hand. I was right of course. He couldn't hurt his hand at the elevator but the forage chopper was another story.

Finally, my second grade year gave me what was until last Tuesday my favorite election day memory. It had been an incredibly wet fall. We had not gotten all of the soybean cut and put into the bin and it was November. Which meant that it would be January before we finished picking corn. Picking corn in January is no fun. It was election eve. The beans weren't combined yet. It was just drying enough from the last rain to get back into the field and the weatherman was promising heavy rains (reigns) for the next three days. We had a farming acquaintance that had finished combining soybeans already and was willing to earn extra money doing combining for (four) other farmers. Dad acquired his services and the race to get finished before the rain was on.

Mom took dinner to the field that night. I went with her and I convinced dad to let me stay with him since I did not have school the next day. I don't remember much until around 9:00 when we had to change fields. The farm that we moved to had, like all farms in the 60's, fences around all of the fields. The gates into the field were 10 footers plenty big enough to accommodate our modest farm equipment. But, 10 feet (feat) was too small for the 12 foot header on the machine doing the work that evening. We tried everything. We tried putting one (won) end through on an angle and then turning the wheels sharply to wiggle the head through. No (know) go. We tried blocking one side of the combine up thereby tilting the head so that it go through on the diagonal. That would not work either. So dad decided to cut the fence, pull it back and let the combine through.

I remember his anguish at doing that. First, he believed that you could never restore a cut fence. It was never as tight after the splice. The splice added weakness to the fence. Second, every time he drove by (bye) that fence he would see that splice and its sight (site) would remind him that he had introduced that weakness to it. Third, no matter how late he worked that night, the job wouldn't be done until he came back on a later date to finish the job by fixing the hole (whole) in the fence. I (eye) remember him actually voicing these items one by one as I held the flash light and he worked feverishly with a pair (pear) of pliers cutting and pulling that fence apart.

Later, after getting the combine into the field, all of our wagons were getting full and we were not going to beat the rain because we had no place to put the beans. Fortunately the farmer who was combining the beans was willing to allow the use of his wagons to finish the harvest. So we hooked dad's 1954 cherry engine red (read) to the front of one of our wagons and take off for his farm. This farm was amazing. The patriarch had made all of his money in heavy construction. Though long dead, his family refuse to sell all of this huge construction equipment. The farm was a bulldozer, excavator, and crane graveyard. They were everywhere and huge to a seven year old.  And then dad took me into a barn that housed a complete saw mill that had not (knot) been operational for 15 years, but was the most amazing thing that I had ever seen (scene). There was a huge amount of equipment and was all powered by a single engine through (threw, thru) a series of pulleys, belts and shafts. I can close my eyes (ayes) even today and see (sea) a giant buzzsaw hanging from the ceiling that was so perfectly balanced that it would transit its arc (ark) with the slightest nudge of a finger.

The empty wagons made (maid) their way back to the field in time for the race against the rain to continue. And about midnight the low clouds had made their way over South Madison county. The reflected Indianapolis lights off of  those hanging clouds portended how heavy they were burdened with the rain that was on its way. That is when dad started to doubt that the race would be won. But we keep on. We shuffle 3 full grain wagons back to various barns, wondering if there will be enough wagons and enough time.

I remember subcuming to fatigue around 2:00 a.m. The study thrum of the old truck. The luminous dials on the dash. The light from Indy reflecting off of those lowering clouds were getting the best of me. Finally around 2:00 a.m., dad had fixed the heater in the truck. This heater rarely worked. I swear it was a post market add-on to this truck. Can you imagine if our cars had heaters as an option? This heater had to be fixed every fall because it's exposed position in the cab made it vulnerable to the kicking feet of restless boys. We were getting cold around 1:30. Dad found some wire, crawled up under the dash and went to work. 15 minutes later we had heat and I was laying down on the fake leather seats, whose holes were covered old scratchy burlap bags, with eyes too heavy to continence the race any longer. 

Those eyes fluttering open at 5:30 that morning; wipers beating on the window. Ears hearing "go back to sleep. We got done. "And I was carried into bed.

And until last Tuesday that was my best election day memory. Now it is second.

Take care.

Roger