Once In A Lifetime

Today, was an amazing day.  It wasn’t amazing because any extraordinary gift arrived at my door, or because someone said something wonderful about me or my family.  No, It was amazing because I, for once in my life, followed the plan.  I’m writing another post about plans… that will come later.  Suffice it to say that I make plans just to watch God wreck them.  It’s a running joke between me and God.  Today, I switched things up and just went with it.  I started out finding my son packing butter knives in his hips straight out of the bed (more on that in another post as well) and having him defy me about wearing a jacket.  I can’t follow him around like a clothing stalker, so I just had to let him suffer the consequences.  Of course, there weren’t any consequences on a day like today.  It was a beautiful day.  After I dropped the kids off at school, I headed to the church to hang out with some amazing women and work toward a common goal in the mission room.  After a good two hours and much sifting, I rushed off to pick up my son from school.  I was late, but he and his teacher had a lot to tell me.  I’ll share that in another post too.  I had an errand to run in town, and then “decided” to stop by the home of a man who never ceases to surprise me with his energy and heart.  His wife will be facing surgery on Wednesday, and I wanted to offer some support.  I also wanted to check in on some paperwork that has been long overdue to pick up.  Once my car was loaded down with “stuff”, I took my son, who played so nicely while we worked, and headed home.  Driving east on the highway, rounding the corner past the Wal-Mart and the John Deere store, I made a mental note about the harvest “fog”, the dust that stains the sky, floating around thick and smoky.  I thought to myself how wonderful it is to live in the Midwest during this time of year.  Continuing, I noticed a few tractors and combines in the fields to the north and south of the highway.   Then, as usual, I glanced over at Uncle John’s homestead.  I noticed the houses and the grain bins, some shiny, some rusty.  As we passed the last bin, I pointed out the trucks to D, lined up like toys in the field, they waited as the combine broke open the field, ready to hold the crop.  “Look at the trucks and tractors D!  Isn’t that cool?” I asked excitedly.  “Yeah mom!  Look at the combine too!!”  he replied.  He could see it there, in the distance, sweeping the beans into the hopper.  I continued to drive, and as I passed over the bridge, the combine was headed south, toward the highway.  I squinted to see who was in it… I saw two bodies and knew instantly who it was.  I waved frantically, as if they could see me, or even would know my vehicle from their position in the field, verses mine, running a good, legal clip down the highway.  And in that instant, I realized that this was one of those moments which would either pass me by, or I would seize.  I chose the latter.

I told D that we were going to go home and get the camera, that I wanted to go back and get a picture of this.  I needed to have a picture of this harvest.

We raced home, grabbed the camera, some more juice for the road, and made a pit stop to the potty.  We headed back to the farm, to be able to go up on the hill by the shiny new grain bin, north of it actually, and just off the concrete, as it turns to open field, I was able to capture this…

and this…

But I wanted more.  I wanted to get closer, to be able to snag a memory of the two faces in the combine, so I drove down into the field road.  I went in, as the combine headed south again, making a second pass down the open field.  They saw me, and my camera, but I still doubted that they knew who I was.  So, knowing I had a good thirty minutes before Sis was dismissed from school, I decided to go down and take some more pictures of the equipment.

The combine continued around the field, and I assumed it would turn around and head back my way…

So, I waited… and D waited…

We talked about why those wagons were sitting there, attached to tractors with no drivers…

We talked about this farm, and how I used to play here when I was D’s age.

I promise you I did not know that today was going to happen like this when I dressed him this morning!!! Here, he is “feeling how strong the wind is” and asking me about every single weed on the ground.  “Will this one hurt me?”  “What about this one?  Will I itch from this one?”  “Mom, I have an itch, but it’s not from this weed.”

And then he played in the rocks while he waited.  Because what else do boys do on the farm when they aren’t in machinery?

We talked about the way wind sounds as it whips through dry corn stalks…

It sounds crunchy and soft all at the same time.  Like tall grass, but louder.

The wind was so strong at times, it almost blew us over!

He kicked rocks, and I made him clean them off the culvert, because that killed some more time until….

I have lived through 40+ harvests.  There is nothing like seeing the top of a machine you’re waiting on.

Following it as it bears down, you see the shape of the driver.  It looks a little like an alien ship, and it signals the coming of the end.  It’s all closing down now… the weather will turn, and we will all hibernate like tired, stuffed bears for the winter.  These machines, spinning and threshing in the fields from dawn till dusk are the clocks of the field.  We know what happens by their presence or absence.

You can see them, there… just sitting and working… turning what was once a tiny seed into a multitude of products… with this process, the harvest.  I admire these people who give up their lives on the farm, in the fields, the livestock, the crop, the machines.  They sacrifice their days and nights and special events so that they can do this one thing that courses their veins and drives them to try and try again.

That’s my uncle Bill and his father-in-law; my uncle John in that combine.  They are working together this harvest.  My heart made me run home and go back to get this exact picture.  Of course, I didn’t plan that Uncle John would be waiving me backward, telling me to get out of the way, because hey, the hopper’s full and they need to auger out.  No, I didn’t imagine it like that, but it’s just like me to be in the way.

It was a fantastic opportunity to get another shot that I hadn’t taken the time to capture before… the filling up of the trucks…

Like golden oil spilling from the auger, it flows into the trailers.  It was so windy, I worried that it would overshoot the box and fall tragically to the ground.  But Uncle Bill has been doing this for a while, so he operates very smoothly.  Not a grain was lost.

Uncle John got out and came down to talk to us.  He asked us if D would like a ride.

Of course, he did.

They waited for the hopper to empty, and soon they would be off.  Uncle John and I discussed whether we would be going to stay outside and talk or if we’d go sit in the truck.

I wondered what Uncle Bill was telling D, or what D was telling Uncle Bill.  Either way, this was the last shot before they took off…

Uncle John and I talked outside for a bit, but when he had to catch his hat twice, we decided to go sit in his truck.  I walked over to my SUV to grab my cell phone and call my friend, to have her snag my daughter and keep her after school for me.  I might be late, but I doubted I would be too late.  Maybe 20 or 30 minutes…

I made small talk at first, because that’s what you do on the farm.  You open with the small stuff.  

He asked about D, did he like the farm?  Was he excited to see this?  I told him he was.  D has all kinds of green tractors and wagons, and occasionally plays with them.  When he got his model combine, he ran the bean and corn heads into the wall so many times, they don’t even stay on.  Then he just started using the plastic bean head rows to smack his sister with, so I hid those in the laundry room cupboard.  He asked if D is a chatterbox like me.  I told him the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.  He asked about Sis.  Does she like school?  Does she chatter like me too?  Oh yes.  She does and she does!  We talked about his children and grandchildren.  He told me about the future he has secured for them.  He told me he had to make a decision a few years back, and June wasn’t here to tell him what to do, so he just did what he thought was best.  I told him how wise and generous he is.  I told him he did good; she would be proud.
“It’s been 10 years you know?”, he said, his voice sounded achingly lonesome.
“Yeah, I know.”  I spoke.

Thinking about my Aunt June is like thinking about my Nanny.  It’s hard and painful and I sometimes try to avoid it.  Right now, as I write, there is a train whistle.  It reminds me of overnight visits when it was just me and my Nan, and the train would blow by.  Nanny and I, eating popcorn and having an RC Cola, watching The Golden Girls and maybe having a dish of vanilla ice cream with Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup if there was enough time before bed.

He told me that he reads The Washington Evening Journal.  He gets that and the Farm Bureau paper.  He said that he sees the people who are dying.  Some of them 10 years younger; but the other day, he saw one that was 57, and noted that was 30 years younger.  He said he sees that, and he just thinks, “Why?”.  His voice faint, his heart aching.

“The selfish side of me says it’s so that we can sit here and talk, so that you can teach more of us to be ornery.  The other side says that there’s gonna be a wonderful reunion someday.”  I tried to sound hopeful.
“I don’t know if I’m gonna get in.” he teased.
“I’ll bet Aunt June has the doors barricaded open and she’s holding the gate saying, ‘One more, just one more!’ until you get there.”
“Ya think?” he teased.
“I do.”  I nodded for good measure.

I asked him if this was the plan for the rest of the day, and he said so.  I asked if he would work till dusk.  He said, “Maybe longer.”  Then we talked about how long farmers work.  We talked about that bridge; how narrow it is over Long Creek.  I asked him what he did back then, did he keep everything on the other side of the bridge?  “No”, he said, that was before equipment.  They had horses.  I couldn’t imagine the length of time it must have taken them to harvest with horses.  He said his dad put him to work and that and they always had a “hard” (read: hired) man.  I asked if my grandpa was one of those hired men.  He nodded.  And then, it was if he could see it happening, like a movie replaying in his mind.

Uncle John said his dad placed an ad in the Bloomfield paper.  My grandpa had just returned from the war (WWII), he had stayed with his dad a couple days, but that didn’t work out, so grandpa went to stay with my uncle Harvey.  “Did you ever know Harvey Craig?” Uncle John asked me.  I remembered a little bit, maybe.  You know, my mind has played tricks on me, and since I have about a hundred different cousins in my extended family, I couldn’t be for sure, but I remembered Harvey’s wife, my Aunt Ruth.  Anyway, Uncle John said that grandpa and Nanny had gone to stay with Harvey and that Harvey had read the ad in the Bloomfield paper.  Knowing that grandpa was looking for a job, he asked if grandpa would like to go for a ride and check to see if he would like this job.  So, Harvey and Ruth, Max and Wilma headed up to Washington to check on a job for Grandpa to be a hired hand for Mr. Kennedy.  Uncle John isn’t sure what happened, but he thought that it must have been a good meeting, as his dad hired grandpa.  He said Nanny was about 19 then, and he was six years her junior.  So, my uncle John at 13 met my grandparents.  He talked about how my grandpa worked for them until the day he died.  I guess that’s worth something.  Working like that, side by side with your brother-in-law.  Oh yes; because of that chance newspaper ad, the fact that grandpa hadn’t found a job in the few days he was home, and the happenstance that Mr. Kennedy hired grandpa; my grandparents moved up to Iowa from Missouri, and that’s how my Uncle John met my Nanny’s sister and decided to marry her!  They made their life here.

Uncle John found a candy wrapper on the floor and asked me how far I thought it’d go.  I told him that I guess that piece of chocolate wouldn’t last long, before I realized he was talking about distance, not time.  He rolled down his window and let it fly.  The wind took it about 25 feet until it rested on a downed stalk and waited for the next gust; like a boat with its sails set.

He asked me about my grandpa.  “Did you know him that well?”  he inquired honestly.  “No, not as well as I’d have liked.” I confessed.  “Uncle John, if I had anything I’d like to do over, and there’s not much I’d do over; I would have spent more time with them.  I’d have asked more questions and listened to what they were saying more often.  I was so busy playing outside with the kittens, the puppies, and the chickens.  I was too busy moving that I didn’t really get to know them.”  The honesty which poured out shocked me a little.  “He was gentle and kind to me, like a grandpa should be, but he was quiet. I don’t remember us talking much.”
“Did you ever see him without his shirt?” Uncle John asked, half prodding.
“Heavens NO!” I insisted.  My Nanny never came out without a robe – even when we spent the night.  I don’t remember ever seeing my grandpa without a T-shirt on.  Not even a “wife beater” type T-shirt, it was a full, sleeved T-shirt.
“So, you never saw the scars?” he asked, scandalously.
“No, did you?” I asked in a hushed tone.
“Yeah.”
“Did you ask him about them?” I asked, piqued.
“I did once.”  He said.
“What did he say?” I asked, impatiently.
“Well, you know those Germans had them bombs that exploded in the air, they called them (Uncle John said a name I can’t remember, UGH!).  Max said he and a buddy heard it coming, the explosion, and they ran.  Well, he said his buddy made it back to the foxhole first, and so he just dove on top of him.  I asked him if it hurt, and he said, ‘Yeah, a little’.”

Uncle John rubbed his thumb to his index finger.  “There were lots of ’em.”  He remembered.  “About the size of my fingertip, all over his back.”  Uncle John rested his back against the pickup seat.  I noticed that instead of PRNDL on the console, it said, LARIAT.  His right index finger made its way to the radio dial, “Not quite as big as this, but pretty big.”  He said, vacantly.

Uncle John’s cellphone rang, and he answered it, talking to whom I could only assume was his daughter, my Aunt Jeannie, on the phone.  He was casually talking to her, as if he hadn’t just shared with me a painful secret that I had never known existed.  The scars on the back of a man I never even knew had a purple heart until he died.  The scars that Uncle John saw with his own eyes.  The scars that a boy took on as the price of his duty to God, to Country.  Being upright and doing right gave him scars that I never even suspected were there.  The air in the cab blew at 68 degrees, not quite cool enough for me, but at least the air was moving.  I felt sick.  Flushed.  Living.  My heart hurt.  I was sitting here, in this moment.  Laughing one minute, reliving the past with my uncle the next.  “This is life.”  I thought.  “I am so grateful I did this.  It’s what we’re supposed to do.”

With that, the big, green spaceship slid up against the long, black box and the golden oil started to pour out again.  The cab door popped open, and down the tall ladder came my darling little boy.  I looked at Uncle John, weathered, with steel in his blue eyes.  “Thanks for visiting with me today,” I stammered.  “I suppose I ought to go figure out if he has to pee or if he’s done riding.” I said, wanting to end on a positive note. We both came out of the pickup and walked toward the combine, the wind blowing at our backs.  D came running to me.  I scooped him up in my arms; it had been an hour and a half since I had seen him.  Uncle Bill unloaded the haul and opened the cab.  I asked if my son was good or talked his ears off.  Uncle Bill smiled, “He was asleep after the second row, so I just kept on going.”

I am so grateful he kept on going.