Ready to go

While breezing through pictures stored on my phone earlier this morning, I came across this picture of Dad.

I remember snapping the photo like it was yesterday.

Dad was waiting to be discharged from St. Mary’s cardiology floor, a place we visited many, many times during the nine months that I spent with him following his diagnosis for Congestive Heart Failure. With the help of my BFF Tanya, I’d taken him to the ER the night before this picture was taken, and he’d been kept overnight to receive fluids and a round of Dobutamine, a miracle drug that kept Dad’s heart pumping long after it might have shut down.

Dad grew frustrated by the “Hail Mary” trips to the ER, which occurred 1-2 times a week as he neared the end of his life. But diligent daughter/caregiver than I am, I was on top of every sign of distress I observed.

Extreme confusion, signaling a urinary infection.

Swelling ankles–more than usual–suggesting that his fluid intake was out-of-whack.

Severe unsteadiness, an indication that his medications might require readjusting.

“Those doctors keep saying the same thing,” he’d tell me following each trip to St. Mary’s ER. “Why do you come here? We can’t do anything more for you.”

Harsh as those comments might sound, they were spoken in the gentlest tones.

Dad would joke with the ER docs that he’d shown up to see whether there had been any new medical breakthroughs, something that might fix his woes. Dad had great faith in medicine and science and trusted that the best and the brightest would continue to figure out life’s mysteries, at least the ones we mere mortals are supposed to understand. His decision to donate his body to Loyola Medical School was an indication of his trust in doctors and the importance of supporting their steadfast study of human specimens.

Plus, as he frequently reminded me, “you get a discount on the embalming and transport of the body if you take the donation route.” Sigh.

When I look at this photo, taken in early November 2017, I see two of Dad’s most memorable traits.

• He was ready to go, to leave this world at any time. Every Sunday since he was a child, he prayed at the local Catholic church–long after his knees and hips prevented him from kneeling on a pew–asking the Lord to forgive him his transgressions and bless him and those he loved. Dad believed that when God comes knocking, you’d better be ready to answer the door. Don’t wait until the last minute to get your house in order.
• He was ready to head out to the fields, one more time or however many times he had left. On the way home from the hospital that day, like all the other return trips from St. Mary’s, I’m certain we drove by the fields to see what crops remained to be harvested.

 

Pallets, Rack Wagons, and Pens

Today consisted of more “lasts.”

The last time I would sift and sort through my parents’ lifetime of “things” in preparation of an estate sale.

The last time I drove from our farmhouse to the local auction house, following racks piled high with a host of family treasures–wagon jacks and bottle jacks; milk cans, oil cans, and gas cans; mowers; wrenches and saws and hammers and screwdrivers of every shape and size; seeders and seed bags; kerosene lamps, early 20th-century knife sharpeners, and assorted other memorabilia from previous eras, what the auctioneers refer to as “primitives.”

The last time I’ll pull into the driveway at the farmhouse or wind my way around back by the sheds to a place that has represented “home” for 56 years.

Plenty of tears have been shed during the past two weeks, since I arrived in Illinois for the final push towards “closure”–of the estate itself and of the emotional journey I’ve been on for close to three years, a journey that began when Mom went to the nursing home on the same day Dad showed up in our small-town ER with Congestive Heart Failure.

Still, here and there during these past two weeks. I discover plenty to smile over and laugh about. Sometimes when I’m alone, sliding into slumber. Other times when I’m surrounded by friends who show up to help in any way they can.

As I was leaving Martin’s Auction House for the last time today, tears and laughter came in tandem. After turning in my “inventory list” chronicling items clustered on every palett and rack wagon of goods we’d unloaded in the yard out back, I asked the employee at the desk whether she had any pens listing the auction house address and phone number. She nodded before handing me two pens, alongside a business card with the contact info I might need prior to the sale on September 5.

It wasn’t until I set the pens and card alongside my dirty work gloves on the passenger seat that I recognized the irony. Dad never left a place without picking up a free pen, a piece of candy, a matchbook. It was a habit born out of Depression-era mentality, a perspective that prompted him and many of his generation to take with them anything being offered that might come in handy.

Clearly, I am my father’s daughter, walking away with not just one, but two, new ink pens.

“I got a pen for you, too, Dad.”

Leaving home

We all–at least, the majority of us–leave home at some point.

I left my small town in Central Illinois the day after I finished high school. My last official day of classes occurred on a Tuesday, during which I gave a presentation in Mrs. Rinkenberger’s 12th-grade English lit class last period. The next morning I took off for the rest of my life–starting point: Chicago. Since that day, I’ve returned home plenty of times–for years, on my own, and then with my husband and eventually daughters in tow.

In recent years, the purpose and tenor of my visits have changed. No longer did I return simply to visit my parents. Rather, I came back to care for them as they aged, often during brief or extended illnesses or recoveries from surgeries.

The scope of “home” has changed over time as well, as visits to the farmhouse led to frequent trips to the nursing home where Mom resided for close to three years before we moved her to Alabama. And excursions home to care for Dad turned to business trips to tend to the farm and time spent at St. Pat’s cemetery to brush off Dad’s stone.

This Wednesday (August 12, 2020), I’ll leave home once again. While I anticipate returning many times in the years to come to visit friends and family and check on the crops during planting and harvesting, the place will never be quite the same once I depart this week.

When I shut the kitchen door Wednesday morning and lower the garage door before pulling out of the driveway to head South towards Birmingham, I’ll be closing a chapter in the history of my family home.

I’ll return next time to sheds and corn cribs emptied of the generations of equipment and tools that grew my family’s farm legacy.

To a house whose character has been revised to suit the tastes of its newest resident, my best friend who will move into the house once it’s been renovated.

The one thing that will remain the same?

Good people doing good things for their neighbors and friends.

Like family. Like home.

Foxes and rainbows

I’ve been at my family’s farm during the past five days, sifting through the remaining items in my parents’ house and sheds in anticipation of an estate sale. The days have been long and equal parts draining and uplifting.

As I pulled away from the house this evening, two images emerged in succession.

First, a beautiful rainbow visible above the roof of one of the out buildings that friends and I have worked our way through these past few days while contemplating the appropriate home for items ranging from shovels to milk cans to grain buckets to an antique hitching post for a horse.

 

The second, a small fox hiding in the grass that’s grown up in the orchard alongside the farmhouse, an area where I picked apples alongside my mom and grandmother when I was little in anticipation of a day of preparing homemade applesauce and apple pies. Just the head of the fox is visible, its body tucked into the grass safe from whatever creatures (large and small) might make an appearance.

 

 

Black lives in my hometown

For folks like me who grew up in (White) rural America, a story in today’s Washington Post strikes a chord: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/11/midwest-changing-demographics-black-lives-matter-protests/?

As I kid, I knew of one Black family in my hometown: the Covington’s. The dad, Curt, was the custodian at my elementary school, and he and his wife attended the Catholic church in town. My family often sat alongside the Covington’s, who regularly occupied the back pew at mass. Dad wouldn’t let us sit anywhere near the front of the church; he believed that people who positioned themselves there did so more out of show—”See, here I am, front and center!”—than devotion. Come to think of it, my parents began their slow ascent to the front pews at St. John the Baptist only in their later years, as Dad became harder of hearing (and refused to spend money on a hearing aid) and Mom’s disability meant she had to be maneuvered from her wheelchair into the pew and have the Eucharist brought to her seat.

The Covington kids were older than I, so I never really talked to them, ate lunch at their table at school, or visited their house. So while a hint of diversity came to my hometown, my world—and the worlds of many others in a farming community of roughly 7,000—remained monochromatic.

When I was in junior high, a brown family from Saudi Arabia moved to town to run one of the local motels. Khamal was in my class and a nice guy, though I can’t say that our paths crossed more than occasionally. He was shy, especially around girls; at least, that’s how I perceived Khamal growing up. Now, I wonder just how out of place he must have felt, from the color of his skin to his culture to his Islamic faith.

That was about it for black and brown diversity in my community in Central Illinois. When I ventured to larger towns like Bloomington or Decatur or Champaign with my parents or friends, I’d see people who looked different than me and sometimes talked differently, too. But I didn’t “know” them, and I certainly had no idea what kind of lives they led or challenges they met on a daily basis. In fact, it wasn’t until I left home at age 17 that I came to know people whose lives were nothing like mine (on some counts) and more like mine than I’d been led to believe growing up.

Even today, according to the most recent census, 94% of people in my hometown are White, 4% are Hispanic, 1% are Black, and another 1% fall under “other.” During more recent visits home, I have noticed a slightly wider spectrum—but not enough to shake things up significantly. What I do see is greater poverty, a wider divide between landowners, business owners, and educated professionals and those who earn hourly wages in a shrinking local economy.

 

 

 

To buy or not to buy?

The second installment of my column, “Farming from Afar,” for Prairie Farmer was published today on the website (the print version will appear in the July 2020 issue).

https://www.farmprogress.com/management/buy-or-not-buy-weighing-land-acquisition-afar?

This piece addresses my thinking process when faced with the prospect of acquiring more farmland some two-and-a-half years into my inherited role of absentee landowner.

COVID-19 on the farm

Holly Spangler, editor of Prairie Farmer, wrote an article about a commercial pilot and farmer in Illinois who was diagnosed with COVID-19. The piece reveals the ways in which the virus has affected one family in particular and rural America as a whole.

https://www.farmprogress.com/rural-health/grounded-how-one-farmer-pilot-battled-covid-19?

A long tail in the food chain

Prairie Farmer‘s editor Holly Spangler wrote an article about the “long tail” of the food chain that I think effectively explains how the shutdowns from COVID-19 affect so many. One by one, stakeholders drop out or change their behavior within the chain. The result can be devastating.

Holly has an incredibly engaging writing style, making her a great editor to work with. Read on to see how she’s looking at things from an agricultural perspective during the current crisis.

https://www.farmprogress.com/commentary/farmers-dont-break-supply-chains-do?/

Generational Wisdom

I came across an article on the Farm Progress site echoing the idea that we have to rely on generational wisdom passed down by those who have tackled problems both big and small before us. I like the author’s advice to write down these lessons, since you never know when a nugget of wisdom might resonate with a current or future problem-solver.

https://www.farmprogress.com/farm-life/learning-dads-wisdom/

 

 

Fortune cookie

Today, Bruce and I took our youngest, Helena, to Auburn to move out of her dorm room. Once it was determined that no one at Auburn–or any university in the U.S., given the rise in Coronavirus cases and deaths in recent weeks–would be returning to campus for face-to-face classes this semester, announcements went out asking students to pack up and take home the remainder of the items they’d moved into the dorm back in August.

It took two vehicles to fit in everything from Helena’s room: books and school supplies, wall hangings and family photos, clothes and shoes, towels and toiletries, mementos of football games and gatherings reflecting my daughter’s first year of college.

Once we’d loaded up, I climbed into Dad’s red pickup to head home while Bruce and Helena both hopped into the car. Dad’s been gone for more than two years now, but every time I step up into the cab I feel Dad sitting right beside me.

The two of us spent a lot of time together in that pickup, especially during the nine months when Dad was sick and I returned to Illinois to care for him. We’d drive by the fields and talk about the ears of corn sprouting on the stalks, evidence of deer nibbling at the end rows, patches where coverage wasn’t as plentiful. Those were special times for me, seeing Dad in his element and feeling the depths of his love. I knew that Dad shared his world with me because he trusted me to take over where he left off when the time came. He wanted me to know (without having to say a word) that he had done his best for his family.

On bluer days, I drove Dad to St. Mary’s in Decatur for infusions of Dobutamine, the drug that gave Dad strength and added time following a diagnosis of Congestive Heart Failure. As we passed other farmers’ fields of corn and soybeans from mid-summer through December of 2017, we saw crops gradually come to life and in time gathered by combines moving deliberately row by row.  Dad and I also witnessed the development of a wind farm as one after another wind turbine was brought in part by massive part and erected in a calculated pattern, changing our bi-weekly view from Highway 51.

These memories flooded my mind today as they always do when I’m behind the wheel in that little red truck. All it took for me to start tearing up was seeing the small slip of paper I’d tucked inside an opening on the dashboard some 18 months ago. It was a saying I’d discovered in a fortune cookie on a day when I was missing Dad terribly. I’d kept it because the message was something that Dad had reminded me of often: “Big fortunes [fall] from the sky. Small fortunes come from saving.”

Dad was a saver. From the time he started working for his dad on the farm, Dad put anything he could–sometimes no more than spare change–in a savings account. Later, he used those savings to purchase farmland and to invest in the stock market. Those meager deposits grew over 60+ years to a substantial amount of money by the time Dad left this world at age 81.

What Dad left behind for my mom and our family might be considered by some to be a “big fortune.” Thanks to his habit of saving and his refusal to spend money on the worldly things that he could well do without, Dad saw to it that we felt safe and protected without him in this life. That is, as long as we tended to the gift we’d been given and strived to create something for those we leave behind.

Through a slow stream of tears, I felt a smile coming on as I sat back and looked at the fortune from the driver’s seat. The slip of paper fit perfectly into the small opening on the dashboard, a space that the salesperson who sold Dad the truck would have tried to convince him to fill with a bell or whistle for his shiny new Chevy. Whatever it was, Dad wasn’t buying it.