Halloween “Fun”

     Over one hundred people filled the north bleacher seats in the grade school gym / auditorium.  The school board had had to relocate from their regular meeting place to accommodate the citizens who wished to attend.

    The attraction?  The month before, the board had voted to prohibit Halloween celebrations in the public schools.  In the face of the public outcry, the board reversed itself.  They might have had better luck at cancelling Christmas.

     When I was a kid, Halloween was an excuse to do some serious destruction.  Pushing over the outhouse was the quintessential Halloween trick.  I remember one Halloween when main street of Genoa was nearly impassible due to junk that had been hauled into the street.  All that wasted energy expended by youth!  I deny having anything to do with such destruction.  (Accurate memory probably fails me.)     I’m sure I was an innocent bystander.  Mark Twain’s definition of “innocent bystander” is someone who doesn’t have sense enough to get out of the way.

       I do remember the old privy on the farm taking a spill or two.  It was a good excuse to dig a new pit and cover up the old one.  It was only for emergency use when the water system failed, anyway.

    Here’s another lame joke.  A father asked his son if he had anything to do with pushing over their outhouse.  The son replied that he could not tell a lie, that he had indeed pushed over the outhouse, whereupon the father took a hickory switch to his son’s backside.  When the son recovered enough to speak, he told his father that George Washington’s father didn’t punish him when he admitted to chopping down the cherry tree.  The father replied, “George Washington’s father wasn’t in the Cherry tree.”

     I don ‘t care much for destruction any more.  But it was time to get rid of the old kitchen cabinet that no one wanted.

      A little tiling back splash will take the dust of destruction out of your mouth.

   A visit to the farm to empty the grain bin put plenty of dust back in my mouth.  Worse than the dust was manhandling the auger by myself.

    The wheat got hauled, and we concluded our week by attending the scattering of Roy

Einspahr’s ashes.  The grandchildren were happy to do most of the work.

   It was a sunny, in the 70’s, windless day.  The family shared a potluck dinner with some of the neighbors prior to the scattering.  Time to catch up with folks we hadn’t seen in a long time.

      Back to Kansas where October is in the air.

Aura Lee

     We are back in Kansas and I am back in barbershop.  Thursday evening we went to Hoxie to put on a program at a place called “The Living Room”.

    It was a remodeled store with an open ceiling, a davenport front and center for audience seating (nobody sat in it), some fairly comfortable plastic folding chairs, and a back row of stools  so everyone would have a good view of the performers, who performed from the floor, no stage. 

    The owner-developer is an opera singer who seeks to bring a little culture to Western Kansas.  So why did she have a bunch of barbershoppers in her “living room”?  She has just completed the renovation, and she wanted to hear what a group of singers sounded like in her premises.  What better than barbershoppers who don’t need any instruments for accompaniment, and for the most part are pretty well behaved?

      So we sang.  The acoustics were great.  No need for sound equipment either.

    I was the MC and as usual found it necessary to tell a few lame jokes to spice up the evening.  So when we were done singing “Aura Lee”, I mentioned that the tune had many uses, such as Elvis’s “Love Me Tender”.  Much less well-known was the Dr. Jonas Salk version.  It went, “When you take your polio vaccine, don’t take it or-a-lee.”  Ha ha.

     Of course that joke set me to thinking about polio and what it meant in the early 50’s and what it means, or doesn’t mean, now.  The reminiscences of small pox inoculations in a previous blog aided and abetted the thinking process. 

     I remember taking two different polio vaccines as a kid, one a shot when I was in second or third grade (a classmate passed out after his dose), and another when I was in sixth or seventh grade, the second one being a sugar cube with a brown drop in it.  Both were administered in the school gymnasium.

     A little Wikipedia research reminded me (maybe I never really knew) that Salk and a fellow named Albert Sabin were in a competition to bring an effective polio vaccine to market. Salk, who really didn’t feel he was competing, won with his injection of dead virus, but Sabin, who saw Salk as an upstart trying to unseat him, had his day with the oral dose, too.

      None of that information was relevant at the time I was immunized.  What was important was that polio was no longer a terrible threat.  One classmate had had polio as an infant and suffered some health problems as a result.  Another fellow in Limon was permanently paralyzed as a result of polio.  I remember a movie trip cancelled due to the fear of infection after the Limon kid developed polio.  I don’t remember if there was a swimming pool at the time, but if there was, jumping into a public swimming pool would be strictly verboten.

      But the greatest fear of all for claustrophobic me was the iron lung.  I knew of the iron lung because of another nearly-forgotten exercise—fitting dimes into slots in a blue and yellow card.  Yes, the March of Dimes.  The flyer accompanying the cards, handed out in every classroom in America, possibly, showed a kid whose diaphragm muscles had been paralyzed by polio, lying in this contraption with only his head and feet sticking out, as I remember it.  Somehow, the iron lung would compress the lungs so that they exhaled and inhaled, thus preserving the life of the stricken person.  It seemed a horrible thing to me, for who knew how long you would be confined, really confined, in that machine before your muscles could recover enough so you could breathe on your own, if ever they would.

     So, we would all take our cards home, find dimes to put in the slots and return them to our classroom teacher.  Our family could have had as many as four of those cards at one time.  I do remember dimes being scarce, that nickels destroyed the slot, and one time taking a dollar bill folded into the card because we didn’t have the dimes.

     And then came the great vaccination.  We lined up and marched to the gym.  I would probably have been in the third grade. A nurse or two supervised the line and helped us roll up our left shirt sleeve.  Right before we got to the guy with the needle, a nurse swabbed the arm with cotton soaked in rubbing alcohol.   We got the shot.

       I didn’t care too much for injections, but I do remember a sense of relief when I thought that by taking that shot, I no longer had to fear polio and the iron lung.  In the Wikipedia account, there was a national burst of joy when it was confirmed that a huge trial of the Salk vaccine provided a 95% success rate  in immunizing kids to polio.  Salk became a national hero and went to the white house (President Eisenhower) to receive a medal of honor.  And the March of Dimes card became a thing of the past.

     All of this because of a bad pun, "don't take it Aura Lee".  Occasionally, I hear a cracked pot go off on the evils of vaccines and I want to suggest that that person move to Pakistan or Afghanistan where those vaccines have not done their marvelous work relieving parents of the fear of losing a child to polio or small pox.

      Polio vaccine will definitely be on my list of things I’m thankful for.

     Here are a couple of other things I’m thankful for (have to have some reason to upload a photo or two):

  

     Fall isn’t my favorite time of year even though it is beautiful—you have one foot in the snow bank, so to speak.  One of the rewards of Fall:  Sandhill Cranes creaking (always reminds me of the press wheels and chains on the old grain drill when they need greasing) their way south. 

     After the years of drought, any moisture, even snow is welcome.  It will be gone before 2 p.m.

We’re Back in Kansas, Toto

     Time to shut down the farm and return to “the land of the three sons”.     “Last minute details” take up about two days.  One job, grease the trees (using bacon and other meat drippings) to try to discourage the **** deer from rubbing and chewing on them (note the fall colors).

     Folks to the east of us wouldn’t call these trees.  These are cedars and you should encourage the deer to eat them.

     This one is an ash and might be considered a tree by most folks.  It was designed to shade the fuel tanks, but it had to start over about four years ago due to deer damage and other hardships.

      Check out the wheat one more time before departure.  It's trying to get up.

     Woops!  One of the drive chains came off.  Well, every experiment needs a control group.  Here’s what happens if your seeder isn’t seeding.

  Then, it’s time to get down to the business of making sure all water hydrants are off and drained, round up all the tools, clothes, hobbies, and other such impedimenta that have to be loaded. 

      All this activity was really secondary.  The real job was fly control.  We tried several things to try to attract them, things like wine, vinegar, sugar water, Clorox in water (they went for the golf ball cleaning fluid in the garage, but it didn’t work in the house).  The only method that worked was the fly swatter.  But even that wasn’t fool  proof.  Some that were presumed dead got up and flew away.  So, the Clorox water made a good final solution.

     The refrigerators have to be cleaned and the contents packed in coolers.  A little house-cleaning, shut up the place, and take off.

     When you get home, one of the first things to do is check out the answering machine.  Our 93 year old friend has found three shingles in her yard.  Can I come up and put them back where they belong?

     As long as I am here, can I remove the dead flowers?

      Done.  Well, I didn’t get too many things done because everywhere I went, I had to catch up on everybody’s summer.   Maybe this week.

The Garden

     We took a little trip to California Tuesday through Thursday of this week.  The Goodwife looked into going into business, the business of selling stuff to sewers and quilters and the like.  I looked into the golf course.  We had some great seafood and an all around general good time. 

     I’d love to show some pictures of all this, but. . . I left my camera in California.  Other than the golf course, I had some pictures of the newly planted wheat.  Of course they were the best pictures I’ve ever taken, but they got away.

     Well, the year is about over for the farming enterprise.  The wheat planting started September 19.  Social obligations and wet weather kept me at bay until September 26.  The first wheat I planted was coming up.  Again I had to leave to do a barbershop performance.  I returned to plant on the 29^th and finished on the 30^th.  If all goes well (it doesn’t rain a ton per minute), that job is done.

    So when we returned from California, the nice Fall days came to an end with a nasty cold front and the first frost of the season.  Can’t leave the tomatoes and beans out in the cold, or they’ll be no good.  So all day Friday, I harvested and cleaned up the garden.

      It looks like a nice day, but it was cold and windy and exhausting.  We fired up the old wood stove for the first time this season.  A bag of beans and a tableful of tomatoes was the net for my day in the garden.

       Nothing to do but sit by the fire with a plate of tomatoes and green beans and remember when it looked like this:

     It’s October so back to Kansas we go.  Suitcase Farmers!

Trees—Wait, Make That Elms

 

     It must have been back in the school year ’61-’62, I believe it was.  We were talking about our trees in the classroom.  Mr. Ekgren, our English and wood shop teacher, looked up and said, “What trees?”

    “Why Mr. Ekgren,” someone said, “all those trees,” and pointed out the west window.

    “Those are Chinese elms,” he said.  And so they were, all but a few locusts lining the east end of the Self lot across the street.

      Mr. Ekgren seemed to sense our ignorance. (We were too polite and restrained to ask him if he couldn’t see the trees for the forest, not to mention that we knew from experience that he had a fierce temper and could resort to violence in the right circumstances.)

     “Back in Minnesota, elms are weeds.  Every spring you must go along the fence rows and kill the elms or they will take over everything.  They will grow everywhere, in the rain gutters, in the flower beds.  They are nothing but weeds.”

     That gave us all pause to think, for we all knew something of the struggle to grow a tree on the high plains. 

     It must have been in the early 50’s, an early spring day when Dad and Mom went to the lot north of the house, Dad in his old distillate-stained overcoat, Mom in  her old red cloth coat and floppy bonnet, dressed against the bitter south east wind.  I don’t recall the conversation, but I think Mom wanted Dad to measure so that the trees were evenly spaced.  I’m pretty sure Dad didn’t see the sense in that.  He could step it off evenly.  He did that all the time with fence posts.  Besides, they were just going to put these sticks in the ground.  They wouldn’t grow.

    So off Dad stepped.  I wasn’t involved, too cold and nasty out there.  He went west pretty-well parallel to the house, stepping off  5 or 6 steps, stop, dig a hole, stick a stick in the hole, cover it up with dirt, step off again.

     That went pretty well.  But then he went back to the southeast corner and went north.  That east line wasn’t quite square with the south line, resulting in the “trees” in the northwest corner having quite a lot of space between them, while those in the southwest corner are crowded closer together. 

     Well, those “sticks” took off and grew, nearly all 100 of them, 10 rows of 10, all except those in the northwest corner (too far apart?).  Collectively, they became known as “the trees”.

     At first, there were problems cultivating.  Hoeing was too slow and depressing.  You never got done.  Uncle Ricky tried a sweep fixed to an old two-wheel cart.  Too slow.  Dad ran the oneway through them.  That left dirt piled up around the trunks and a hollow in the rows between the trees.  So Uncle Ricky took an old horse drawn tandem disk apart and tried pulling the back half, the half that pulls the dirt from the outer ends toward the center, through the rows.  That worked fairly well, but it was impossible to get very close to the tree trunk because the disk wasn’t as wide as the tractor wheels.  So the elms grew out of little hills.  Heavy rains left puddles in the center of the squares formed by four trees.  It is that way to this date. 

     After the ground had been cultivated, it was a great place for us to farm and build roads with our toy trucks and tractors.  The sapling trees provided a little shade with a breeze on hot summer days.  The damp soil we dug up contrasted nicely with the dry dirt on the surface as we paved our miniature roads.  It was a welcome change from farming the linoleum with our Tinkertoy equipment in the upstairs playroom.  We actually got to move some real dirt with our dump trucks.

      In a few years, cultivating was a moot point because branches shut down traffic through the rows.  Watering was another problem.  The squeamish had best skip this part.

    We had an old well converted to a cesspool.  It wasn’t terribly deep, and whenever we had sewer troubles, we had an old bucket on the end of a chain.  Down went the bucket.  Up came a bucketful of waste water, odiferous waste water.

     Sometimes, we dumped the water out and let it run away.  But why waste water?  A fifty- gallon drum in the back of the old Ford pickup sometimes, other times on the Farmhand fork (much nicer—you could set the fork on the ground not have to lift the chain and bucket so high) served as the water carrier.  Fill the drum by using the chain and bucket.  Drive out among the trees.  There were various stratagems to get the water out of the drum and onto the trees.  The one I remember was me up in the pickup, using a fruit juice can to dip the effluent out of the drum and pour it into buckets.  Uncle Ricky would take the buckets and give the trees a “good sewer-juicing.”

     Associated in my mind with “tree-watering” is a small pox vaccination.  In those days, the doctor scratched the skin on your arm up near the shoulder.  He then spread the serum on the scratched patch.  We kept it covered with gauze and tape.  A cheerio-looking purplish puss pocket would grow out and shrink back and eventually disappear over a period of weeks.  Many of us old folks still have that scar from that cheerio on our upper arms, indicating we are immune to small pox.  I’m not sure how they do it nowadays.  Maybe they don’t.

    Well sir, I had two of those cheerios.  All of us boys were inoculated at the same time.  We all had the shoulder cheerio simultaneously, but I developed a second one on my left wrist, right where my watch band goes.  Of course, I didn’t have a watch to wear in those days.  But when the cheerio on my wrist developed, Mom made me wear a gauze and tape patch on that one, too. 

   Now those purplish cheerios had a nasty smell which you noticed whenever you changed the dressing.  But I didn’t have to change the dressing on the wrist one to enjoy its disgusting odor.  It was available at any time by raising my wrist to my nose.

     What I remember is dipping the sewer juice out of the fifty-gallon drum, using my left hand part of the time, to hold the fruit juice can.  Which was more disgusting, the smell of the sewer juice, or of that small pox blister?  And how did I get that second blister?  Was it related to the sewer juice job?  I don’t know, but I often suspected they were related.  How did we survive all that?  Or are we as healthy as we are because we were subjected to such nastiness and our immune systems learned to adapt?

      I remember one sewer backup that had to be drained in the basement.  Dad would loosen the cleanout plug enough to let the liquid escape.  He placed a wash tub beneath the pipe.  When it was full, he tightened the plug and he and Uncle Ricky carried the tub up the outside steps into the tree lot.  Uncle Ricky insisted that most of the waste be poured on one tree three rows in.  Sure enough, that tree soon grew head and shoulders above its compatriots.  We called it Ricky's tree.  It did survive the sixties, but now is one of those awaiting the snarling buzz of the chainsaw.    

     Well back to the elms.  They provided us a lot of work and a lot of entertainment.  It came to pass that you couldn’t see through the tree lot, let alone drive through it.  It made a dandy place to play hide-and-go seek, or “cowboys in the dark”.  It was a great place to hunt sparrows (and a few other birds) with our bb guns.

    One time Brother Dave broke the bone behind his little toe and had to wear a cast and use crutches to walk.  He found out soon enough he could walk on the cast without using crutches, but he was severely warned he shouldn’t do that.  So he would drop his crutches, pick up his bb gun and disappear into the trees.  When he had enough bird hunting he would yell for Sister to find and fetch his crutches for him so he could three-leg it out of the shelter of the trees.

    Then came another great debate between Mom and Dad: to trim or not to trim.  Mom said yes, Dad said no.  Mom won. 

     We sawed branches away from the trunks to a height of four or five feet.  We used handsaws.  Worse than sawing was dragging branches out of the forest and piling them up.  We had a couple of huge piles for a year or two, until they dried enough to have a huge bonfire.  No more hiding in the trees.  You could see through the rows.  And the wind could blow through them too.  We didn’t realize we had gotten used to being protected from the north wind.

  Another big change came when many of them croaked during the sixties to Dutch elm disease.  The little wood burner in the kitchen has been amply supplied with elm firewood.

      I replaced most of the dead ones with cedars, trying to get them in to a straight line but having to follow Dad’s “footsteps.”  It took a lot of work cutting and hauling the wood and the branches, digging out the roots.  An overhaul of the septic system and the installation of a leech field rendered the former watering method inoperable.  Enough garden hose and some wet years helped the cedars thrive and once again the wind doesn’t blow very hard from the north. 

    Sixty years have come and gone since those “sticks” went into the ground.  Fifty years is about the life expectancy of an elm.  The twenty or so that survived the Dutch elm disease are starting to succumb to old age.  I bought a good chainsaw about fifteen years ago.  We had a McCullough before that.  Cutting a tree down is lots easier.  But disposing of the branches and stacking the firewood remains a time and energy-consuming task.

      Some just get a trim job, like the dead ones hanging over the garage roof.  The tin suffered a couple of dents during the operation.  I used the fallen branches for roof protection, but some of the falling wood found its way through the padding.

    Yet to come, the felling of this old friend, but that’s another story.  Would Mr. Ekgren consider this spruce a tree, I wonder.

          

       

    

      

Rain Aftermath

      Some years ago, in another real dry spell, we stopped one Friday afternoon at a truck stop in Burlington to grab a bite on our way to the farm.  While we were there, it began to rain.  Among the customers were several locals, some with three-year-olds or younger, and a couple of truck drivers from Indiana.

     As the rain drops began hitting the windows, many of the diners turned to look out the windows.  Some of the parents even took their children to the windows to watch it rain.  There was an audible expression of wonder and joy.

    The two truck drivers stopped their conversation, not to watch it rain, but to watch in wonder the folks who found rain so amusing.  Noticing the truck drivers’ amusement, I said to them, “Boys, we haven’t seen this in a long time here.  Those kids there have never seen it.”  They pretended to understand.

      There have been a few rains during this dry spell, but few enough that rain is still a wonder.  The actual amount we received while Northern Colorado was flooding was 2”.

     The rain had an effect on the golf game.

     Will the real golf ball please stand up?  The imposter mushrooms found the rain life-giving.

     Time to dig a few potatoes.

     In this lazy man’s way of raising potatoes, “digging” means pulling the hay away from the plant, being careful not to rake away any spuds with the hay.

 By Thursday, it had dried out enough to think about planting wheat. 

    This year, getting the drills ready to go didn’t take nearly as long.   The seeding mechanism turned easily.  I had planned to try it on Wednesday afternoon, but the fates interfered.  I noticed one of the tires had developed a bulge.  Well, it might work, so I aired it up.  When I got ready to go Wednesday afternoon, had the drills greased and full of wheat, I noticed the inner tube was beginning to protrude between the bulge and the wheel rim of that tire.  By the time I got the tire changed (finding a suitable tire in the bone pile took quite a while), Neighbor Lee showed up.  He didn’t stay too long, but it was too late to start anything now.

    So off I went Thursday morning and made a few rounds.  I had to put the toys away at noon, pack up and head off for Colorado Springs for our annual September family meeting.  Perhaps the fates were on my side this time.

    We arrived at the gathering place Thursday evening after a bout with the Garmin lady who probably previously had a job with the Sirens directing sailors to their deaths on the rocks.      

  

     Five couples stayed here, each with their own bathrooms, and a swimming pool.  Sister-in-law Julie always finds good lodging.

     Some of us took a horse ride through Garden of the Gods on Friday afternoon.

    It was ok to have the horse doing the walking.  All we had to do was hang on.  Friday evening we all attended a melodrama at a dinner theater in Manitou.

    Saturday morning, some of us took “the cog” to “the top of the mountain blue”, Pikes Peak.

     Political note:  The quarrel over what is causing the globe to warm is chaff.  We need to clean the atmosphere, regardless of whether the greenhouse effect is legitimate or not.  When I was a kid fifty-plus years ago, you could see clearly to the horizon where the earth curves beyond sight.  Not any more.  The permanent haze in the atmosphere limits the view to a few miles (the cog rail line is a little over eight miles long), not the hundred miles of yore.  The permanent haze limited the view from Mesa Verde the last time I was there, too.  This here is Colorado, not Los Angeles or Chicago or Mexico City or Shanghai or any of them places.

    Down from the Peak, we had lunch at a brewery.  Saturday afternoon was time to laze around and enjoy the beautiful day.  Following supper, a spirited game of Farkle happened.  A few tunes on guitars and fiddle by the siblings drove the in-laws to their beds.

  Breakfast Sunday morning, pack up and depart.  We took the Black Forest Road to gawk at the “burn scar”.  We saw denuded tree trunks standing black against the blue sky.  A lot of the ground vegetation has recovered, although there are still many bare slopes that have nothing to hold the rain water.  We saw very few charred remains of houses.  Most along our route have been cleaned up, leaving a vacant lot beneath the charred trees where somebody’s beautiful home once stood.

     Home to the planes where I can get back to wheat planting.  But wait!  It’s raining again.  Dang!  No wheat planting this week.  And what I have planted will probably have to be redone (the reason "somebody" interfered and wouldn't let me get started on Wednesday afternoon) .  And the neighbors all have their hay and prozo millet windrowed and some corn to harvest. 

   What a country!  Always does just the wrong thing.  Last June and July when we needed the moisture it couldn’t squeeze out a drop.  Now just look at it when folks have work to do!

     Woops.  The farmer in me is coming out again.  We need all the moisture we can get.  Maybe I won’t lose so many trees.  I won’t have to water them for while any way.  The subsoil needs a good recharging and. . . .