22. The Snow and the Neighbor ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

A winter came with snow that would not quit. Relentlessly, layer was added to layer with no single storm that would qualify for the record books but with freezing temperatures that permitted the snow to deepen inexorably.

Joe, Charles, and Robert trudged through narrow pathways to the barn to feed the cows. Although there was still plenty of water in the tank for the cattle to drink, Joe hoped there would be a break in the weather soon, so that he could start the Minneapolis–Moline Z and haul water from the well by the house to the tank beside the barn.

School was cancelled …

… and snow kept falling. Now no pathway existed. Only a shallow depression in the snow …

A day dawned bright and cold. Joe had just entered the house from the enclosed porch, where he had removed his boots and the first of two denim coats. He was still wearing one denim coat and his cap with the earflaps down. His nose and cheeks were rosy.

“Here’s something you won’t see every year,” Joe said to Robert while turning on the burner beneath the tea kettle and meticulously measuring Maxim instant coffee into a cup.

“What’s that?” Robert asked, looking up from reading Macbeth.

“Just come outside with me and take a look—after I warm up with a cup of coffee.”

While Joe sipped his coffee from a teaspoon, Robert wondered what was so extraordinary that his father wanted him to see it.

When Joe was ready to venture back outside, Robert donned his heaviest winter coat and his stocking cap. He put on his boots before stepping from the enclosed porch into the wintry landscape beyond the door. With an effort, Joe and Robert plodded in front of the shop building, their boots descending through only the top layers of snow and coming to rest precariously on lower layers.

“Well, what do you see?” Joe asked.

Robert squinted against the light reflected from the whitest of snows extending to an indistinct horizon of blowing glitter.

“Nothing,” Robert replied. “Just snow.”

Robert glanced at the maple tree and at the openings into the old garage appearing to be two small caves in a mound of snow.

“Nothing,” he repeated.

“That’s right!” Joe said. “Where are the fence posts?”

Robert turned toward where the road and the posts along it should have been. Nothing indicated that a road lay beneath the snow, and the posts had vanished. For a split second, Robert thought of asking where the posts had gone, but then he realized that they were under a blanket of snow. He could walk on snow above the fences!

“Wow!” was the full complement of his response.

If Robert half closed his eyes, he could detect slight waves and ridges formed by wind in the snow’s surface.

“Seldom does the snow get so deep that the tops of the fence posts are hidden,” Joe commented.

Several days passed. One morning, Robert looked through the picture window and saw a line of raisins through the snow. Suddenly, he realized they were not raisins but the tops of the posts along the road. The snow was melting!

Later—precisely when all that snow melted—the spring rains poured down as if the heavens were giant water bags that had burst.

School was cancelled …

… for mud! Rain kept falling, transforming the gravel roads into impassable corridors of mud. Vehicles mired and were abandoned.

During a deluge, Robert stared through the picture window. The widely spaced creeks and ditches in the flat land could not carry away the water fast enough, and the house, shop, and old garage appeared to be on an island in the middle of a lake.

The Rhode family’s nearest neighbor was Agnes Moore. She was in her eighties, but she enjoyed complete mobility and was so active that she seemed much younger than her years. Every sunup, except on the coldest days of the winter, she walked briskly down the gravel road with her black Spaniel, Lady, by her side. In the stillness of daybreak, Robert heard Agnes’ footsteps crunching the gravel road. “Agnes is up,” thought Robert.

Along with playing piano for the Methodist Church, Robert worked with the Vacation Bible School. Agnes served as an instructor. Each morning, Robert picked her up and drove her to the church.

Agnes taught the youngsters to make churches by gluing Popsicle sticks to milk cartons. Meanwhile, she and Robert designed a more elaborate structure of their own. After a few days of diligent gluing, their Popsicle church was a veritable cathedral!

At about the same time, Agnes called Joe to ask him to use her gun to drop raccoons that Lady had treed in Agnes’ apple orchard. Robert thought, “A lot of good that will do! Dad doesn’t know anything about guns.” Ida did not permit guns on the farm, as she was afraid of accidents involving children. Joe walked up the road to Agnes’ farm. Soon, Robert heard two light reports of a gun, so he thought he might as well go to see if Dad had had any luck. Robert met Agnes and Joe at her door. She was putting her gun away.

“I heard only two shots,” Robert commented.

“That’s all it took,” Joe said.

Seeing Robert’s look of amazement, Agnes asked, “Don’t you know that your father has always been a crack shot?”

Robert felt like Scout learning about Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. Back when Joe was a lad, he trained himself to be an excellent marksman. Given Ida’s proscription against guns, Robert had had no cause to discover Joe’s skill.

Agnes provided another link to Joe’s past, for she had remembered his ability with firearms. Agnes was also a link to the community’s future through the lessons she taught to the children in the Vacation Bible School. Little by little, Robert came to appreciate how remarkable Agnes was and how fascinating her life had been. Robert came to learn that she and her husband, who predeceased her by many years, had built the tidy house that Robert often visited. Overlooking the kitchen on the ground level was a higher living room accessible by a few steps and bordered by a neatly turned railing. Until Robert discovered that Agnes and her husband had planned and constructed their house, Robert thought that it might be another of the pre-packaged houses that Sears had sold in the early 1900s. The excellence of the craftsmanship and the high polish of the woodwork reminded him of Sears houses. On several winter mornings, Ida sent Robert to deliver fresh baked goods to Agnes’ door. Robert enjoyed the pleasant warmth of Agnes’ wood-burning stove and the coziness of the home that she had created with her own two hands.

Even during the most isolated periods when snow or mud kept Robert from driving anywhere, he had only to look to the east to feel that he and his family were not alone. There stood Agnes’ comfortable house, her perfectly maintained barn with its bright red paint, and her well-designed garage nestled beside rows of apple trees.

18. The Art Class ... THE FARM EAST OF PINE VILLAGE

It was an exciting day! Ida had just bought a new pocketbook at Sears. It had plenty of room! There was even a place to stick her crossword puzzle books! Best of all, it was bright red!

Ida had purchased the masterpiece of consumer art while she was waiting for Charles and Robert to take their block printing class at the Art Museum in Lafayette. Ida had enrolled the boys in the six-week course that had begun just after school was out.

The boys’ instructor was an expert at woodcuts and was slowly making a cut the size of a small table top that depicted a European cathedral. He taught the class of youngsters to make linoleum cuts. Ida had obtained the necessary supplies at the bookstore near the Purdue campus. There were slender boxes that contained wooden handles into which various knives could be inserted. Some of the knives were straight; others were curved. There were tubes of special ink in black, red, and green. There were brayers to spread the ink on a surface such as a glass pane until the ink became tacky enough to roll onto the linoleum block. Then there was the linoleum.

It had presented a problem initially. The instructor had called for the students to acquire battleship linoleum—so named because it was used on battleships. While many homes had flooring of battleship linoleum, Ida had a difficult time finding any. Ultimately, she purchased a big roll from a flooring store in Lafayette. It was dark green.

The boys looked forward to art class each week. The instructor gave just enough explanation and then let the students work at their own pace without much intervention. Robert was making a horizontal rectangular piece measuring about eight inches by six inches that he called “Four Faces.” He had designed four profiles overlapping in a row, each different from the others. The faces were modern—not all the way to Picasso but getting there. For surfaces of the cheeks, chins, noses, foreheads, and necks, Robert used various knives to form lines, dashes, dots, and circles. The knives removed material from the linoleum, which was backed with a coarse burlap weave. Even though the linoleum was thick, the knives were so sharp that they could cut all the way through to the backing. The trick was to cut away enough linoleum that the ink would become applied to the “hills” and not the “valleys”—without cutting past the linoleum and into the burlap. Sometimes a “valley” was shallow, and the ink would touch ridges in the valley. The resultant print would have lines showing the tops of the ridges.

Making the prints was fun! When a student was ready to print from a finished block, he or she rolled the ink on a large glass surface with a brayer until the ink became so tacky that the brayer would hiss each time it was rolled along. Next, the brayer was rolled onto the linoleum surface to apply ink in a thin but substantial layer. The student then carefully placed a sheet of fine quality paper, cut to a size somewhat larger than the linoleum block, onto the block. The paper could not be moved, once it had touched the ink. The student then rubbed the bowl of a teaspoon around and around on the paper with just enough pressure to transfer the ink from the linoleum to the paper without damaging the paper. Ultimately, the paper was peeled off the linoleum, thereby revealing the art.

Robert was always intrigued at how different the art looked from what he had carved. The picture was backwards from the one he had been cutting with the knives! On the day that he made his first print of “Four Faces,” he laughed to see them looking in the opposite direction.

The instructor came by and said, “Your faces are very good. What do they represent?”

“They are facets of one person,” Robert said. “The first face is the one everyone sees. The next is the one only loved ones see. The third is the one that only the person sees, and the fourth is the one that God sees.”

“Well!” the instructor said, nodding, with the thumb and forefinger of his hand on his chin. “I like your explanation! Good!” The instructor walked on.

Several prints could be made from one application of the ink, but, eventually, the ink would become patchy. More ink had to be applied to continue the print making.

The instructor taught the students to number their prints in pencil with a first number indicating the application of the ink, a slash mark, and a second number representing the print made from that application. So 2/4 would mean the fourth print taken from the second ink application.

Working in the presence of other artists gave Charles and Robert the opportunity to witness the expressions of creative minds. The works of art ranged from masterly to spontaneous.

The boys waited for their mother outside the Art Museum’s new addition that held the classrooms and studios. When Ida drove into the parking lot, Charles and Robert dove into the seats for the ride home. They showed their mother that day’s prints, for which she had only praise.

Once they were home, Robert took a seat at the kitchen table while Ida set her old pocketbook beside her new one and began piling the contents of the old one in a heap in the middle of the table.

“What will you do next week?” Ida asked Robert.

“I need to cut out a few of the areas a little more so the ridges don’t show in the print,” he replied. “Then I get to print again!”

Absent-mindedly, he was looking over the items that were rolling downhill from the mound of materials that could never have fit inside the old pocketbook! A Revlon red lipstick in a brassy gold cylinder almost cleared the edge of the table. Several Bic pens and at least one Sheaffer cartridge pen spun this way and that. There were pencils galore, most of them with no eraser left! A brown and yellow tin of “Genuine” Bayer Aspirin slid down. Three hankies, somewhat crumpled but none the worse for wear, clung to the slope of the heap. A Stratton powder compact with mirror and a rose motif slipped out. A plastic bottle of Jergens hand cream and a jar of Noxzema cold cream came out (both headfirst). A baby blue wallet with a snap clasp fell heavily forward. Two pairs of sunglasses—one hopelessly tangled with a clear plastic rain cap with pink trim—lent their bulk to the pile. A small creamy white bottle with a dark coral cap cascaded to the back of the pile: To a Wild Rose by Avon. A stack of dog-eared crossword puzzle booklets fell topsy-turvy. Creased notes in Ida’s dashed-off handwriting stuck out at crazy angles from the booklets. Shopping lists and checklists caught Robert’s eye. Stacks of folded Kleenex tissues, with sheets of stamps adhering to them, tumbled out. A square squeeze-type coin purse advertising a crane service in Muncie did cartwheels. It by no means held all the coins in the pocketbook because pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half dollars rolled every which way. Most of the silver coins were silver all the way through, but some were the new “sandwich” variety with the tell-tale copper edge. There were hairpins by the handful. An opened and somewhat sticky roll of Life Savers joined the accumulation. Somehow, a silver flashlight and a pair of nail clippers were in the mix. A tin of Band-Aid bandages appeared from deep down within the old pocketbook. A spare red vinyl belt uncoiled like a snake. Robert wondered why there should be a belt. Maybe you just never knew when you might need one?

A Valentine’s Day card depicting a rabbit holding a carrot fell forward. “If you carrot all for me, be my Valentine,” the card proclaimed. Before Ida saw what Robert was doing, he turned the card over. In handwriting on the back were these words: “From Mr. Bunny to Mrs. Bunny, Love, Joe.”

Robert stared at the words. He knew that his parents loved one another, but seeing the fact in handwriting was arresting.

Ida glanced over. “Oh,” she said. “I forgot that was in there. I meant to put that in my drawer.”

“Dad gave you a Valentine?” Robert asked.

“Yes, as he does every year,” Ida said in a tone that was not without passion but was not overly expressive either.

Robert smiled slightly. “Mr. and Mrs. Bunny?” he said.

“Our names for each other when we aren’t talking to you,” Ida said, gently taking the card from Robert and setting it to one side.

“Mr. and Mrs. Bunny!” Robert thought, trying to fit the concept within his comprehension of his parents.

“We’ve always thought bunnies are cute,” Ida said. “When he was a boy, your father raised rabbits.”

Seeing that Robert was still musing on the topic, Ida said, “If you ever had the least doubt that your father and mother love each other, you now know better: you know that they do and always will! And we love you and Charles, too. Just don’t let me catch you calling me ‘Mrs. Bunny’ or your father ‘Mr. Bunny.’” Ida burst out laughing. “I would love to see the look on your father’s face if you were to call him ‘Mr. Bunny’—but don’t you ever do that! Those are our names for each other, not your names for us.”

Robert already adored his parents, but, with the revelation of the Valentine’s Day card, he now felt a reverence for them.

Ida began stuffing the new shiny red pocketbook with all her necessities mounded so high on the table—including the card!

Christmas

A child in the late 1950s, I was accustomed to Christmas presents that were fewer and less expensive than those received by children of the generation after mine. One of the best presents that Santa left for me was a collection of hand puppets. For years, I told stories with them. Those cuddly toys helped me become a writer later in life.

My Family Visiting Santa at Sears in the 1950s

But I am ahead of myself, for this blog is about the days leading up to Christmases when I was a kid. Each year, the music teacher at the school planned a program of celebration, and, as a piano student, I was expected to perform. Each year, in the week before the event, I fell ill with flu and stayed home. Throughout grade school, I was never well enough to attend the Christmas program. I was not shirking my responsibilities; I was just a flu target.

I always recovered a few days before Christmas. Every year, my parents zipped my brother and me into our parkas, bundled us into the back seat of the 1957 two-door Chevrolet Bel Air, and took us to see the Christmas lights in Pine Village and Oxford, Indiana. As I could get car sick in the back seat, I had to take precautions, secretly rolling down the window a little so as to obtain fresh air, but I always enjoyed seeing the lights. In those years in such small towns, the light displays were modest. Outdoor strings featured large bulbs in primary colors. Wrapped around a living pine tree, such lights filled my heart with delight. Often, we could see the family Christmas tree with smaller lights and lots of crinkly metallic tinsel just inside a bay window or a picture window. I still remember the year when the Oxford doctor outlined the roof and windows of his ranch-style house in blue lights. We marveled at the color, as we had previously seen only multiple-colored strands. Also, we had rarely run across a house with its architectural features outlined in that way.

A day or two closer to Christmas, my parents took my brother and me to the Masonic lodge rooms on the second story of an old building on State Route 55 in town. The stairs were in the back and were dimly illuminated. I found them scary, creaking at every step. When we entered the main hall, we found the huge pot-bellied stove radiating tropical heat, melting the frost on the tall windows. The chairs were pushed back around the walls, and we kids sat quietly, waiting for Santa. Soon, we heard him ho-ho-hoing. He burst upon the gathering to the applause of the adults. Quickly, he handed small toys and candy to the assembled children. I looked upon him with awe.

On Christmas Eve, my family visited the Methodist Church. I recall the flickering light of candles in the stained glass. The scent of evergreen wafted into the sanctuary. In the candlelight, everyone’s eyes appeared large and mysterious. The adults wore smiles but were quieter than they were at a typical service. In the hush, the minister invited the congregation to sing carols to the tune of the organ. Tears well up in my eyes when I recall my mother’s soprano voice singing good old Christmas songs while she stood beside me and held my hand in that church so long ago.

At home in bed that night and barely able to shut my eyes from anticipation, I was always surprised to discover that I had fallen asleep and that the sunshine of Christmas morning was streaming through the windows. Tossing the covers aside, I dashed into the living room to find that Santa had indeed visited our house and had left presents for my brother and me!

My father in his overalls had already done his chores on the farm and had shaken the snow from his boots. He sat in a chair beside the Christmas tree with his coffee cup in his hand. My mother had already served breakfast and helped us kids to open our gifts. My grandfather, who lived in Indianapolis, was on hand. His eyes sparkled with the joy and hope of the holiday. I wish I could help you see them all as I see them in my vivid memory, for they were wonderful people. Later that morning, my grandmother and my great aunt joined us for “dinner,” as the noon meal was called. And what a magnificent dinner it was, with yeast rolls, fresh butter from our dairy, ham, peas, carrots, corn, and every good thing that my mother had canned from her garden.

If only I could return to that close family circle again! The promise of the Christmas story is that, one day, I can, and I hope I will.