Category: Families

Since most of us are not raised by wolves, we mostly start our lives in families. I like to think about how they can work better.

Mama Was a Rock Star

This post comes from a Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word challenge. The challenge word/phrase this time was “rock star.“ You should try it.

She starred with big band orchestras in cities along the Eastern Seaboard and around the Great Lakes. Then she married a Nebraska farmer. He moved her to a stark little square house with a hip roof in the middle of a howling wilderness. In less than three years, she ran back to city lights—nightclubs—singing all night. .

But she came back. She adapted to the prairie’s silences and its screaming winds, the outhouse, the washboard, and the tyranny of crops and livestock. She became a better farm wife than many women who grew up on farms—she rocked.

Snow-covered farmstead with little relief from stark white.
This is a few years later (about 1950) and some of Daddy’s trees had started to grow. The volunteer mulberry tree (bottom right) still stands.
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Categories: Families Our Prairie Habitat

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Attending Church

For my grandfather, prairie was church.

(Audio podcast here.)

Sundays he would wander his 480 acres, checking its health. He might walk the fences with a bucket of staples, fencing pliers, and a fence stretcher, or hitch the horses to a wagon with a roll of barbed wire and the other fencing materials.  Later, I can remember him going out with the tractor and wagon on the same errand.

George on right and another man in baseball uniform with gloves.
On Sundays, George also played baseball sometimes. His tight community was also a kind of church.

As he drove around the fenceline, he could hear the rhythm of the tractor engine and the jingle of stapes and tools bouncing in the wagon bed. When he found a breach, he’d turn off the tractor so he could hear grass wind, the smooth legato call of a meadowlark, and the gentle clank of the windmill pumping water at the top of the hill. A breeze might ruffle his hair and sing in the tightly-strung fence wires. He might be semi-conscious of pinpricks of wildflowers, blue verbena like tiny candelabras, purple poppy mallow hiding in the grass, and the persistent sunflowers. He probably carried a machete to cut them when he found them, releasing their strong, acrid scent. He would smell cool sweet-grass crushed by the tractor wheels, like sliced cucumbers.  

He could see the patterns of his mind on the land—terraces and waterways to hold the soil against tillage; a passage for cattle, from pasture to pasture, under the bridge; dams across the seasonal creeks to hold spring run-off; habitat areas set aside for wild creatures; osage orange posts and barbed wire confining cattle to the least productive acres.

I removed the last hedge post in 1992, remembering that it had been there for three generations—the very last of a carload he’d bought when he moved his family onto the home quarter in 1926. I imagined him digging the hole that post sat in for seventy years—by hand through concrete-hard yellow clay.

I found something spiritual about digging out the remains of that broken post, something composed of family and land and abiding mystery.

Categories: Communities Families Non-fiction

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The Home Place

At least I have Sylvia’s watercolor
  1. Two summers ago, I sold my share of the home place—the oldest part.
  2. My sister is furious with me.
  3. I did a land exchange for a place with no buildings and no well; only fences to maintain and volunteer cedars to remove.
  4. It’s closer to where I intend to live.
  5. I don’t have to watch the farmstead my grandparents built fall into ruin because I have no means to maintain it.
  6. The loss still hurts, but not as much as the ruins.

Categories: Families Non-fiction

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Sharp Chisels

Here is another Carrot Ranch 99-word prompt story. The word is Chisel.

Set of three chisels
Interesting how the light turns the steel blue.

I have a set of chisels. They are very sharp. I use them occasionally, but I don’t have the skill or training to use them elegantly. When I use tools, though, I think of my mother who could look at mechanical devices and understand them. She had the patience and natural talent to use tools effectively, but in the mid-Twentieth Century, she was never allowed the pride she deserved in her skills. My dad’s embarrassment (because the man’s supposed to fix things) gave him no ability to appreciate my mom’s solutions to farm problems—in the house and out.

Categories: Communities Families

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Buried in Snow

The winter of ’88 started late with an ice storm that took out tens of miles of power lines, snapping poles at the ground. Later, snow filled the windbreak between the corral, with its water lines, and the horses. My husband and sons dug a tunnel through the windbreak, but bits of drift persisted into spring. I was working the garden when my baby wandered off. I followed his cries and found him sitting in a puddle of snow melt. Normally, Ben didn’t like his bath, but that day he was really pleased to have a dunking in warm water.

Categories: Families Non-fiction

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What’s in the Trunk?

This is another of those six sentence challenges. The prompt word for this week is trunk.

Sometimes these old steamer trunks sat in people’s bedrooms, never used for travel, but for storing the most precious items.
  1. She died in February.
  2. Sometime later, we opened her steamer trunk.
  3. We found silk flowers, her favorite scent, her ruffled organdy dresses, a dental mold, and a detective’s license.
  4. Mom said she fell in love with a dentist who disappeared one day.
  5. She got her detective’s training and set out to find him—she did.
  6. He was married.
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Categories: Families Fiction

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Five Thirty-Two

Uncle George had had a few beers that night. Quite a few actually. Somehow, the topic of duck hunting came up and my son’s ears perked. He was ten or eleven at the time. He asked a bunch of questions and, before you know it, George had invited him on a duck hunt the next day.

“Now, you have to get up really early to hunt ducks,” George told him. “It’s not like pheasants that you can hunt in the afternoon. So I’ll meet you here at the bottom of the stairs at five thirty-two tomorrow morning. Do you think you can make it?”

Sean nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes. I can.” My boy’s eyes shone. He’d never before been invited to hunt with the men.

“Well, you’d better turn in,” George suggested. “Five thirty-two comes pretty early.”

Sean agreed and disappeared to one of the bedrooms. I don’t know if he slept that night. I know he had no alarm clock, but at five thirty-two he was sitting on the bottom step. Aunt Walleen nearly stumbled on him on the way to the bathroom that morning.

“What’re you doing here?”

“Uncle George said he’d take me duck hunting at five thirty-two.”

I wasn’t there, but I can imagine that Walleen grinned a wicked grin as she returned to the bedroom. She’d have shaken George’s shoulder none too gently.

“What? What’s the matter? Is the house on fire?”

“No fire, George, but you promised a kid you’d take him hunting.”

George rolled over. “Okay. Okay. I’ll take him hunting this afternoon.”

“He’s waiting on the steps, George. You told him you would take the dog and go duck hunting at five thirty-two this morning.”

“But I don’t have a duck dog.”

“Don’t matter, George.”

“Five thirty-two,” he mumbled. “Why would I say such a thing?”

“You were drunk, George.”

“Had to be.”

“Well, he’s waiting and you’d better pry that old body of yours out of this bed and take that boy hunting.”

So Uncle George pried his eyes open and lifted himself out of his nice, warm, comfortable bed and braved the ice on the lake to take my boy duck hunting. They did not bag a single duck. I’m not sure they even saw one.

But an old guy kept his word to a young one, even though he was a little late.

And that means something.

Categories: Communities Families Non-fiction

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Out of Touch

“Ella Mae, what’s wrong?”

My mother had not heard from her own mother for ten years. Not one word. She didn’t know where Grandma Mae lived. Still in Chicago, she thought, but how would she know? She had no address and no ‘phone number. Grandma had moved and left no forwarding address, but the night my father suddenly died of a massive coronary, Grandma called. She didn’t wait for “hello,” didn’t waste time on small talk. Her first words went right to the heart of the devastation in our household.

“Ella Mae. What’s wrong?”

Categories: Families Non-fiction

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The Long Walk Home

Charlie Mills at the Carrot Ranch Literary Community posts flash fiction challenges a couple of times every month. The current challenge was to write a story that includes buttons and uses 99 words, no more no less, to do it. I remembered one of my mother’s mother’s stories. Here are my 99 words:

“When my grandma Mae was a young wife, living in Akron, elastic had not yet been invented. She said she was walking home from buying groceries, past the local tavern, both arms loaded with groceries, when the buttons on her underwear popped. She said she hesitated for only a brief moment, glancing at the men lounging against the light poles and stumbling on the street. She never knew if her buttons came unbuttoned or if they popped off—because she simply stepped out of her underpants and walked the rest of the way home, leaving them on the sidewalk.”

How about you? Have you got a special grandma story? Does it have buttons in it? How about an old technology?

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Categories: Families

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