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.

Lucky Breaks: Blizzard on I 70

It was February 1, 1981—a Sunday. I had been visiting a friend in Columbus, Ohio, and was ready to return to Bloomington for the beginning of my last semester at Indiana University. I anticipated an uneventful trip along Interstate 70 to Indianapolis and State Route 37 to Bloomington. As I passed Springfield, Ohio, the wind picked up, and the first ominous snowflakes struck my windshield. North of Dayton, gusts rocked my Cutlass while the snow fell so fast that my windshield wipers could not keep up. Darkness quickly descended, and the snow was accumulating in such a way that I could no longer see the white line along the edge of the highway.

Blinding Snow and No Good Options

Courtesy goingslowly

When I reached Richmond, Indiana, traffic had slowed to a crawl. My car heater was unable to conquer the chill from the bitterly cold blasts. I wondered how long it would take me to get to Bloomington, and I worried that the snow on 37 would be a problem. The audacity of the impatient truck drivers amazed me, as the semis rumbled past within inches of my car. I knew they could not see any better than I could, and I could barely make out the taillights of the automobile ahead of me. The squalls were increasing to blizzard intensity as I crept along at five or ten miles per hour. I could see nothing but a hypnotizing pattern of snow as if my car were the Enterprise abruptly entering warp speed. Now and then, red lights flashed just ahead of my bumper, and I slammed on my brakes so as not to hit the car in front.

Somewhere near an overpass, the car ahead of mine stopped completely. I followed suit and waited nervously until the car behind me stopped. When I saw the driver emerge from the automobile in front, I released my seatbelt and got out. Drivers were walking forward, their heads down to shield their faces from the driving snow. We found a fender-bender had occurred, and one of the cars was disabled. We pushed the immobile car off to one side, and the driver of the working car kindly gave the other driver a ride. Fortunately, both had the same destination. We returned to our vehicles and slowly restarted our blizzard caravan.

When I came to Indianapolis, my radio announced that the state police had closed Interstate 70 because of the number of accidents, including a jackknifed semi, which was behind me. I had never been on a closed interstate before, and I wondered what the consequences might be. I approached a sign for the road where my brother lived and decided I would stay overnight with him, but, when I saw the condition of the exit ramp, I chickened out. It looked impassable to me. I had visions of becoming so mired in the snow that I would slide off the ramp. As I left the exit behind, I confronted the stark reality that I had no options left.

I knew that I would never make it to Bloomington, but I had no idea where to stop in Indianapolis. I saw a street sign with a name I recognized. I had once visited the home of a friend of mine in the IU Marching Hundred Band, and I remembered that he lived on that street. I wondered if I could find his house.

The exit ramp was level, and cars had bulldozed a lane along it. I took the exit. In the blinding snow, I kept watching for landmarks that might be familiar, even though I had been that way only once before. I could not believe my good fortune! I spotted the house, "a refuge from the storm"! I slid my Cutlass to a stop in the half foot of snow, hopped out, and rang the doorbell.

My friend’s parents were surprised to see me, but they quickly grasped my dilemma. They said it would be no trouble to put me up for the night. The mother brought me a cup of coffee—about the best coffee I ever had, especially because I was still shaking from the cold and from spending several hours in anticipation that my car would be involved in a crash. I joined my friend’s parents for dinner, and we passed the evening in conversation and laughter. As soon as I climbed under the covers of the bed in the guest room, I fell asleep and slept like a baby.

I had breakfast with my friend’s parents and stayed at their home until I felt certain that the streets were clear. To this day, I am grateful to them for sheltering me from the storm, and I consider it a lucky break that I could find my way to their house.    

Why I Plant Onions

The trick to growing onions is preserving them as long as possible after harvesting them. First, as the stalks of the onions begin turning yellow, you can leave the bulbs in the ground to be fattened for another week or, at most, two weeks. After that length of time, the onions may start to decay. Mine always pull out easily.

My Onions Dried and Hanging from a Nail in My Solarium

I stack them, stalks and all, on wire racks on a porch that gets plenty of sunshine in the morning and ample breezes throughout the day. I try not to let them touch each other on the racks. Depending on weather conditions, the onions need several weeks to dry. When the stalks are completely dry, I bunch the onions in clusters of five up to eight and tie clothesline cord or twine around the stalks. Next, I hang them in bunches over nails in my solarium. Whenever I want an onion for a recipe, I snip off a fresh onion from a bunch. By hanging them, I can keep the onions almost indefinitely. I have to be watchful because, occasionally, one will begin to rot—particularly if the drying period has been unusually humid.

The onions look homey hanging from nails all around my solarium. They remind me of my Quaker ancestors who, in the pioneer days long ago, put in good stores of vegetables and fruit to last throughout the long winter months. Although I am not necessarily a student of John Greenleaf Whittier, the Quaker poet, I admire his poem entitled “Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyll”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174758. If you have not read it, you are in for a treat! Composed and published just after the end of the American Civil War, the poem commemorated life on a New England farm prior to the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution. The poem has been described as nostalgic, and I can see why; but I think that “Snow-Bound” was written in an era when, for many readers, the experience of an uncluttered home life around a blazing hearth in winter was ongoing or, at least, still fresh. For me, the poem is more nearly a clear snapshot than a rosy memory distorted by the passing of time. Each day that I notice my clusters of golden onions, I think happy thoughts of my upbringing on a farm. The onions evoke the joys of gathering in my mother’s warm kitchen on a December morning.

My First Edition of John Greenleaf Whittier’s Book Entitled

The Panorama, and Other Poems, Published by the Famous

Boston Firm of Ticknor and Fields in 1856 and a Look Inside

 

Onions provided a strange chapter in my life as a writer. My first published creative writing was a prose poem entitled “The Book of the Dead,” which appeared in Artful Dodge when the journal was brand-spanking new and originated from the creative mind of its founder, Daniel Bourne, in Bloomington, Indiana (before its move to Wooster, Ohio): http://artfuldodge.sites.wooster.edu/. Just before I left Indiana University with a newly minted PhD in hand, I submitted a second prose poem to Daniel. It was entitled “Onion Liturgy.” For reasons that now escape both Daniel and me, it was never published, but both of us remembered that it was. Odd! Several months ago, I asked Daniel for a copy of the issue that had carried it, and Daniel found that the poem had escaped being printed. No wonder I could not find the issue in my library! I could have sworn that it was published, but it never was! I have lost the poem, which is probably just as well because it likely suffered from being a spin-off of “The Book of the Dead,” which, for its numerous faults, had a certain idiosyncratic charm. As I recall, my concept for “Onion Liturgy” was that philosophy is like an onion that can be peeled, layer by identical layer, until there is nothing left except the memory of replication. Profound? Hardly, but I was young.

My First Published Creative Writing in Artful Dodge in 1980

That Was Supposed to Be Followed by a Sequel Entitled “Onion Liturgy”

So when I notice my onions hanging from nails, I feel—with satisfaction and relief—that I have come a long way as a writer since the days when I was first trying my tentative hand at composing poems.