It seemed like something I could do for the cause when I heard myself volunteer to host the farmer’s family reunion. What could be greater fun than a house – our house -- full of hungry in-laws? His family’s shindig either would have the makings of a great feature for Southern Living -- or for America’s Funniest Videos.
The farmer was so excited about Saturday’s covered dish lunch that he started taping the weather. Readers who are weary of my going on ad nauseum about the farmer and the weather should live in a house where the background noise comes from the 24-hour weather channel.
Using my best “steel magnolia” voice, I let the farmer know that the weather was the least of our hospitality worries. I gave the farmer the following storm warning: he was advised that our 45 or more guests would need somewhere to sit, something to eat, and a some way to enter the house without falling into the briar patch blocking the front door.
My “steel magnolia” routine worked. When the heat subsided, the farmer pruned the shrubbery and actually carted off the prunings. I had to produce a pretty hefty payoff, of course, to get the prunings carted off. I had to agree to his cutting down my prize 10-foot viburnum -- and to his shaping my giant, naturally shaped forsythias into 4-foot balls.
Inside, the house had the makings of a briar patch as well. In the good ole days, company’s coming called for the kitchen to be cleaned from cupboard to cupboard. That was when entertaining centered around the kitchen stove, not the home computer.
However, the granddaddy of all the company’s coming cleaning I faced last week was the reorganization of the computer room. There were last year’s Christmas cards to be put away. Followed by April 15’s tax memorabilia. And the printed e-mails from acquaintances across town and across the world.
The night I spent clearing off the computer desk was time well spent. For on the day of the party, I threw a dishtowel over the computer monitor and perched the breadbasket on it.
The ladies in our family had pitched in, Southern style, which meant more casseroles, congealed salads and deviled eggs than I had counter space for. Ultimately the computer’s tower, scanner, and printer would hold Southern cuisine.
Using the computer desk as a sideboard turned the computer into a conversation piece. The farmer’s first cousin wanted to know what brand of computer I was entertaining with. The answer was that we had milked Holstein cows for 16 years. It shouldn’t take a computer geek to figure we would go for a computer shipped from America’s heartland in those cute black and white cow boxes.
The farmer’s cousins also pulled several pranks, including making a gory phone call, advising me that the media were coming to do a feature story on our Southern family reunion. I said, “Send ‘em on.” Any steel magnolia worth her salt carries a tube of lipstick in her pants pocket and could go on television on a moment’s notice. The media had the decency, however, not to crash our party.
By day’s end, the family gathered up their lawn chairs and casserole dishes and headed home. “We ought to do this more often,” they all said.
The farmer agreed, saying we ought to have reunions till the cows come home. “There’s not too much to do to get ready,” he observed.
“Just ask Kathryn.”
After Bandit’s death, I broadcast to the world and especially to the farmer that the last thing we needed in our family was another dog. But the newsprint had scarcely dried on the column on the death of our housedog when the farmer came down with a bad case of “New Dog Fever.”
Specifically, I came down with a bad case of “New Dog Fever.” This has taken some getting used to. From childhood, I have preferred cats to dogs. I tolerated dogs because I married into a dog family. By marriage, I have become the mother of collies, bird dogs, coon dogs, Australian healers, a Brittany, and a rat terrier. Plus I’m the mother-in-law of a Jack Russell Terrier.
How long should the mourning period be for a housedog you’ve spoiled for 10 years? Frankly speaking, it does seem that at least a month would be appropriate.
But I was still missing Bandit on the day a coworker up and mentioned that he and his wife had entirely too many dogs. It was breaking his heart, he said, thinking what would become of Toby, since they didn’t have enough space for a large dog. “What Toby needs is to be outside, in the country, on a farm,” Tom sighed.
“Well, OK,” I said, taking the bait. “You can call my husband if you want to…but I can assure you we won’t be getting another dog. If the farmer wants a dog over at the barn, he might consider Toby as a barn dog.”
I shouldn’t advertise the fact, but the farmer has a soft spot for dogs, especially homeless dogs. However, he definitely prefers registered breeds. Since Toby is purported to be half Chow and half German Shepherd, I warned Tom that Toby probably wouldn’t get past first base with the farmer.
This is not how it turned out. For Cline and Toby, it was love at first sight. Possibly the highest compliment I can pay my husband is to tell you that he adores dogs, babies and children. And they adore him right back.
That night over fried okra, the farmer began singing the Toby’s praises. What most impressed him, he said, is that the dog has good manners. “He does what a dog’s supposed to do,” whatever that means. “I even think he could work for us here at the house.”
“Well, OK,” I bit this bait. “You can bring Toby over for a trial visit, but just remember that we don’t need a dog at the house.”
That was 2 weeks ago, and Toby is waiting by the back door, wondering when he’ll be given a couch and/or a bed. Maybe a hamburger steak.
Two weeks ago, early on a Sunday morning, the weather news was chilling. “In the South, the heat index could hit 115 degrees. “ So the farmer said, “We should head to the mountains right after Sunday School. It’ll be cooler there.”
I’m counting on you not to tell Mama or the preacher what happened next. To make a quick getaway, I wore slacks to Sunday School. The farmer loaded the horses and buggy. And we tempted his brother and sister-in-law to join us on this impromptu trip to the farmer’s favorite destination, the Moses Cone Carriage Trails.
We got off to a wonderful start, eating sausage sandwiches, drinking Pepsis, stopping for ice cream. My sister-in-law assured us she had packed everything we would possibly need on the carriage trail, including fingernail polish. This made my day...
Despite the intense heat, the air conditioning in the Ford pickup was working fine as we started pulling the horse trailer up Highway 321 outside Blowing Rock. Then, all of a sudden, the Ford stalled. Cline and his brother exchanged chilling looks, a dead giveaway that we were in deep automotive trouble. On the positive side, the Ford had had the decency to blow its transmission at the entrance to a gas station.
By now, it was 1 PM and the heat index was over 110 degrees. The farmer ticked off several options: saddle up the horse and buggy and go home; back the truck home; or call our boys to come rescue us. The farmer opted for the latter. But it would take hours for the boys to get to the mountains with the necessary roll-back and pickup trucks for hauling our rig back home.
My sister-in-law announced that she and I would not survive the afternoon stranded in the backseat of a Ford doolie with a blown transmission. She said there was just one viable alternative: go shopping.
But how? We were 6 miles down the mountain from Blowing Rock. Brenda said not to worry, somebody would give us a ride into town. Sure enough, when we went inside the Mountain Stop gas station and told our sad story, a man eating a Fudgsicle said he’d be glad to haul us up to Blowing Rock. But would we mind riding in a pickup? We assured him that a pickup truck was our preferred method of transportation, hands down.
So, we left our husbands by the side of the road with the horses, the buggy, and the broken down Ford truck, and jumped in the pickup belonging to our Good Samaritan. “Everybody calls me ‘Cal,’” he said. He began his life story by admitting that he wasn’t a native of North Carolina.
“Actually,” Cal told us, “this is the very reason that I moved up here from Miami. Down in Miami,” he explained, “ no way would two women your age ever hop in a truck with a strange man and ask him to carry them to town.”
Brenda and I exchanged worried looks. But I say if you can’t trust a Fudgsicle-eating, Dodge-driving, Fiftysomething Floridian named Cal, whom can you trust?
Our instincts were right about Cal. We ended up with a new friend - and new brass picture frames from Blowing Rock.
Ultimately, the farmer ended up with a new transmission. It’s not the trip we planned, but for a few brief hours, we thought of challenges other than the heat index.
Based on your feedback, last week’s column on gardening hit a home run. Just as I thought, readers of the Shelby Star go bananas over tomatoes.
In the South, however, it takes more than a bumper crop of Big Boys to make a memorable summer. To put it bluntly, Cleveland County Man cannot live on on Bost Bread, Dukes Mayonnaise and Big Boy tomatoes alone. There is also okra. And corn. And crowder peas.
When I married the farmer, I can assure you I vastly underrated the significance of these delicacies. Especially roastin’ ears.
Indeed, if there is one thing that will excite the farmer, it is an ear of sweet corn. So with the onset of summer, the farmer sets off on his annual quest: to find the perfect roastin’ ear. In Cleveland County, that means Silver Queen white corn, of course.
Never mind that I grew up in a culture that put yellow corn up on a pedestal. Since my mother hails from the mountains, our family actually considered limbercob corn to be a delicacy. Imagine my shock when my new husband stated that limbercob would choke a hog.
In the farmer's search for the best corn on the planet, the most my favorite, Merit yellow corn, will rate is a 4.
I can’t speak for the wives of wine tasters, but the wives of corn tasters have a hard row to hoe. The farmer rushes to the house with his latest corn sampling, shucks and silks it on the spot, then puts 3 ears apiece on to boil.
One night last week, it was 10 PM at night when we had a corn tasting. Unfortunately, on a scale of 1 to 10, that corn was just a 7. “A shade too filled out, “ the farmer ruled.
The farmer’s love affair with corn goes way back. I reckon it’s a miracle that our marriage has survived. For no sooner did we get off our honeymoon than the farmer announced that it was time to freeze corn. He got the wash tubs, called in the family and the hired help, and ordered a deep freeze.
I told him to count me out, that I needed to finish writing wedding thank-you notes. He let me know that if I didn’t join in the annual corn day, there might not be any more thank yous to write.
Thinking the farmer had lost his mind, I called his mother and asked her to try to talk some sense into her son. “The last thing we need is a deep freeze,” I remember crying into the phone.
Her response stunned me: “This is wonderful news, Kathryn. There is no way you can get through the summer without a freezer. Don’t worry about there not being room in your trailer for the deep freeze. Cline will just have to build a shed to put it in.”
And Cline did. In fact, it is the only freestanding structure the farmer has ever built.
The farmer does not think this is a bit strange. Good corn? He says it’s to die for.
If you are reading this newspaper, you are familiar with the saying that “you can take a boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” Furthermore, you probably know a 50-year-old man who is living proof of the truth of this cliché.
What is equally true is that “you can take a girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl.” However, until women streamed out of their houses and into the workplace, it was probably less obvious.
Thank goodness, a county like Cleveland County lets you get away with hailing from the country. “Country” is acceptable even at work. If you doubt that, scoop out your workplace. Have you had squash giveaways this summer? Have the tomato donors come through this year? Has someone brought figs, plums, and/or canteloupes to share? At our office, we’ve had all of the above, plus cucumbers, corn, raspberries, blackberries, and green beans. We’re still waiting on the watermelons.
From what I hear, some local companies go whole-hog. They sponsor pig-pickings, horseshoe tournaments, and fried chicken picnics. In most cases, I suspect that these events are not reported back to the “brass” in New York or San Francisco. You could be labeled “backwoodsy,” or worse.
Last fall, on the eve of a business trip to New York City, I stayed up till midnight freezing 2 sacks of collards that the farmer had hijacked. I am confident that I was the only one of approximately 400 managers who had frozen collards right up to the flight. Can you imagine what would have happened to my career had I said, “While I was washing collards last night, an idea came to me about improving customer service?”
Last week, however, I let my guard down. When I left the house for a meeting with a VP or two in Charlotte, I noticed our kitchen counter full of luscious red tomatoes that our son, Miles, had grown in his garden. Around here, there is no better way than to cement a good business relationship than with a poke of your best red tomatoes. Would this work in the Southpark area of Charlotte? I was fixing to find out.
So, in addition to toting my laptop to the fifth floor suite, I toted an Ingles sack with big red tomatoes. “Hi, Kathryn,” the men said as they stared at the deviance in my dress: the poke.
“Well,” I spoke up, “I brought you guys something. Tomatoes fresh from our son’s garden.”
The VP and friends, who do not hail from the South, looked at the tomatoes, speechless. Finally, one of them said, “Somebody you know actually grew these?”
“Yup, we have a garden out back of our house. Our 17-year-old son planted it and tends it.”
You would have thought I had announced that Microsoft had just broken up.
To be helpful, I said, “These tomatoes will taste great in a sandwich. All you will need is bread and mayonnaise.”
Instinctively, I then shut up, which means leaving out the info about Dukes mayonnaise, but maybe JFG in a pinch, but never Hellmann’s in a real tomato sandwich.
The business meeting went great. However, I’m not sure the tomatoes had anything to do with it. Those tomatoes probably ended up in the miscellaneous recycling bin.
I don’t know about you, but I am grateful that l live in a place where tomato sandwiches are a delicacy and where teenage gardeners do not represent an alternate lifestyle.
Pass the Dukes.
In the 1950s, spring-cleaning was something to which women devoted the best 2 weeks of the year.
Spring-cleaning was terrible while it lasted. I remember helping Mama with the washing and starching of the dining room’s lace curtains. My job was to place the lace panels over the nails on the stretchers, which were set up in the back yard for the curtains to dry.
Inside, the kitchen’s red linoleum had to be stripped of 1950’s weekly application of floor wax, so that fresh wax could be applied and then removed the following year.
Everything had to be taken out of the kitchen cabinets so that the shelves could be washed. In a good year, new shelf paper was put down. (A good year in the parsonage occurred when Daddy was paid to preach 2+ revivals.)
The windows and their screens were washed, and the lone silver platter was polished. The furnace room had to be swept clean of coal dust.
These are a few memories of my participation in spring cleaning, Baptist parsonage style. These two weeks were bad enough in the city -- I can’t imagine what spring-cleaning must have been like for our peers living in the country.
My brother, on the other hand, simply had to walk about the yard and pick up twigs.
This inequity helped prepare me for entrance into Wake Forest College, where I got demerits for not making my bed on the same morning that the college was paying housekeeping to make the boys’ beds. You bet I marched on the president’s office in the 60s.
Which helped prepare me for the glass ceiling - which is just one more thing for women to Windex.
Away from political dirt and back to the nitty gritty of cleaning. Here we are, a half century later, and there are generations of women who have never heard the term “spring cleaning.” They not only ignore, they even poo poo, the eleventh commandment added by somebody’s grandma along the way: “Cleanliness is next to godliness.”
Now that spring-cleaning has become optional, spring is devoted to more enjoyable activities: golfing, gardening, or jogging. Nowadays, the only reason a woman would feel compelled to clean her attic after Easter is so that she can have a May yard sale.
Thank goodness we women are no longer held hostage by our mop buckets, by floor wax, and by deans of women with demerits notepads. Cleaning is still done, but often it’s by somebody else, possibly even a spouse or significant other.
Several years ago, one of the most brilliant decisions I ever made was to put out a contract on our house. Which means I literally pay folks to come in and clean up the house after I have cleaned it up. This is progress, 1990s style. To my knowledge, Mama has not disinherited me.
Maybe even Grandma would approve. But it’s probably just as well she didn’t live to see the sweeping changes in “woman’s work.” In her memory, I reckon I ought to pay somebody to oil the sewing machine and go through the ragbag. But what for?
You probably have heard that the empty nest syndrome begins when the children leave home and the dog dies. That’s just another catchy phrase until it happens to you. Our 9-year-old dog died July 4, and I still have a catch in my throat just thinking about Bandit.
Bandit, a small rat terrier, was the only house dog we ever had. Although I had repeatedly vowed NEVER to allow a dog inside the house, Bandit eventually wore me down.
The oldest son gave him as a pup to our youngest son on Miles’ 8th birthday. How could I kick the three of them out?
Of course Bandit was a registered dog. When it comes to dogs, the farmer has drawn a firm line in the sand. Only full-blooded dogs need apply for residence at the Hamrick household. Years ago I wrote that if you were to come visit us, you might be hit in the head by a flying shingle, but the dogs in our yard would be registered.
Having made his debut to canine society, Bandit joined us about the time the farmer and I reached mid-life. Mid-life is the time when you quit sweating the small stuff. Which meant that Bandit was one lucky dog. He slept with Miles, ate with the family, and watched TV with the farmer. He appeared in family movies. His picture was on the refrigerator. A web page for him was also under consideration. We had never taken him on a trip with us, but we were headed in that direction...
Just the week before he died, I had sat by the living room window and smiled as Bandit sat erect, guarding Miles and the farmer while they picked green beans. If he could have strung the beans, I am confident he would have.
Bandit had a pleasant way of participating in family activities without getting underfoot. Maybe that’s how a small dog learns to survive.
I am NOT a dog person. But as the years passed and the children began leaving the nest, Bandit and I became closer. Lots of time, there were just the two of us left at the house. Please don’t mention this to my mother, but I had taken to spoiling this dog. When I fixed my bowl of Cheerios, I fixed Bandit a bowl as well. To my credit, I never gave him fresh strawberries.
However, he was served the finest canned dog food. Sometimes I even microwaved it to bring it to room temperature! He preferred, instead, our best leftovers. He also appreciated the occasional chunks of cheddar cheese and bowls of homemade ice cream with which we indulged him. We think his favorite flavor was peach.
Someone wrote Billy Graham, asking whether there was a place in heaven for dogs. This does not concern me. Bandit, like most family pets, knew heaven while on earth. He received better food, medical care, and accommodations than many of the world’s people.
He did what he could to relate to us and make those enriching contributions only a dog can make. We miss him – a lot..
However, I have told the family to take notice: Since Bandit can’t be replaced, he won’t be.
The farmer has always said it’s ironic that he got married a week before Independence Day.
To symbolize his loss of freedom, on the eve of the wedding, his friends locked a 20-pound iron chain and iron heart around Cline’s neck. They threw away the key until the morning of our wedding.
If there’s one perk a farmer must have, it’s independence. The iron chain was quite a wake-up call. So it’s a wonder that I didn’t end up jilted at the altar. I remember my father, older and wiser and the preacher, telling me that Cline was a good man. “Don’t worry. He’ll show up for the wedding,” Daddy said.
Along the way, the iron heart and chain has, for better or worse, become a family tradition. Ask our nephews and our sons.
Before we married, the farmer and I worried about different things. Freedom was the farmer’s main worry; specifically, he wondered how much quail hunting he would get in. I had sworn on a stack of Bibles that I would be game about his hunting.
However, no sooner did we marry than I had the bird dogs on his living room couch recovered - in green tweed. Then he decided to go into dairy farming. Eighty Holsteins pretty much took the farmer off the quail hunting circuit..
Early on he suspected, too, that he might be stuck with a “Hamburger Helper” wife. Would I ever learn to cook like his mother? He asked this several times. Eventually, I woke up and smelled the coffee: his mother was a great cook and she was willing to tell me her secrets. As a bonus, she taught me how to make liver mush and rhubarb cobbler.
I’m sorry that she didn’t live long enough to see me master gravy. That took 16 years of marriage. Of course, you know what happened next. After years of mastering the steps involved in preventing lumpy gravy, the doctor said that more people had died of gravy than were killed in all the world wars….
The farmer said “I do” with dripping sweat and a forced smile. Jitters about would happen to his freedom and his stomach had him tied up in knots.
As for me, as a 1970s bride, I worried about getting fat. I should have worried about getting pregnant instead.
I worried about whether the my new husband would adapt to my cat. I should have worried about whether he would take to fatherhood. I worried about whether I could do my annual spring cleaning to suit the farmer. I should have worried about whether the annual spring crop would come up.
Looking back on it, we approached marriage, overly concerned about stuff that never materialized. Which is the essence of the folly of worry. And we were clueless about the impending challenges and opportunities.
When we said “I do,” we honestly believed that we were willingly trading in our personal freedom for togetherness. Twenty-nine years later, we have ended up with heaping amounts of both freedom and togetherness.
Although I don’t dare speak for him, the farmer will tell you that he is a married man but he is NOT on the chain gang.
If he doesn’t, let me know -- so that I can ground him.
The more researchers study fatherhood, the more researchers learn what mothers have known all along: fathers hold most of the trump cards. And how they play them has a profound influence on the children -- and on the children’s mother.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that recent research has revealed the tragic fact that a high percentage of the people in prison were raised in homes without fathers. Maybe instead of focusing on reducing the numbers of guns we should work on increasing the numbers of fathers.
I’ve been very lucky, and know it. My life has been enriched beyond measure by the steadying influence of a father figure, every day of my life. First my father and then the farmer. The farmer says I really ought to appreciate him: that if it weren’t for him, I might be writing this column from a jail cell.
So how do you express appreciation to fathers? I’ve been tempted to give our children’s father a copycat gift. Maybe an arrangement of roses charged to his credit card. Or a pair of sheer pajamas. Or maybe a juice extractor?
No gift, however, can adequately repay fathers for what they mean to families. Especially when they are having good hair days.
Fathers serve as the single most important backup system in the house. In the long run, they are more critical than an extra fuse in the drawer or a spare tire in the trunk. If the children question Mom, Dad can set matters straight. If Mom can’t be there, Dad can be. And if she gets a virus, he can feed the dog.
My suspicion is that most men aren’t keen about their next backup role: as a backup for the Maytag repairman. Dads are expected to fix everything, and right now. “Everything” ranges from car radios to floor lamps to drain lines. They have to crawl under the house, climb up on the roof, and scoot under Chevrolets in all kinds of weather. It’s a definite plus if they can spray the yard for fleas, change the oil in the car, and hang doors, pictures, and wallpaper. How fathers do it when most of them can’t keep up with a hammer, much less a ladder, is one of life’s great mysteries.
I don’t know about your house, but at ours, Dad also serves as a surrogate to the Homework Hotline. My nerves simply cannot deal with boys who do not grasp how to do fractions or how to diagram sentences. Our boys soon learned that Dad would get them through their homework with dispatch and without a lecture on what the world is coming to because children don’t know a participle from a gerund.
Lastly, of course, fathers serve as role models. Our boys have great fun imitating their dad. They especially imitate how he laughs, eats, and talks on the telephone. However, the joke is really on them. For unbeknownst to them, they are performing an imitation act of profound significance. They are patterning most aspects of their lives after their father.
Fathers - what a force for good they can be, and must be Today they deserve honor - as well as a new tie AND a set of wrenches. Maybe even a little home cooking. Start with mashed potatoes.
If pride goes before a fall, I really ought to be in the hospital today with multiple fractures. However, up until several months ago, I had prided myself on doing a fair job of keeping pride under control. Then came the invitation to my high school class reunion.
I’m not too vain to tell you which one: it was our 35th. Thank goodness the invitation came 4 months early. There would be enough time.
When I told the farmer that the reunion would be held at the Agricultural Center of Rowan County, he said to count him in. He suggested that we plan to arrive in his horse and buggy. “That will really make a statement,” he said. I told him that making a statement was not important at this stage in life. I lied.
How long does it take a woman to get ready for her high school class reunion? Four months, minimum.
First there’s the weight loss regime to implement. Finally I opted for the low fat regimen the doctor had been advocating as the way to extend my life and health. If there’s one thing that will turn your taste buds against a bacon cheeseburger, having to face your classmates will do it.
To get ready for our reunion, I consumed 16 bags of baby carrots. There was an extra plus: the carrots gave my skin an orange hue. Therefore, the only reunion investment I was spared was a tanning bed membership.
I strongly considered activating my YMCA membership and/or buying a treadmill. Instead, I opted for a walking program. Walking, combined with the 16 bags of baby carrots, took off 13 pounds.
But weight is not the only evidence that a person has been out of high school for 35 years. There are other physical clues. However, it seemed sensible to postpone plastic surgery for our 40th reunion. This time I’d get by with lots of help from bottles: the hair color bottle, the nail polish bottle, the makeup bottle. It took a month of appointments, but I finally got colorized and accessorized.
About this time, our company came out with a wonderful brochure entitled “The New Me.” I ordered this informative material and followed the instructions: resetting my biological clock to get enough rest, drinking water, and controlling stress.
As the day of the reunion loomed larger, the stress became harder to control. What would I do about my hands? After nearly 2 decades of splitting, stacking and loading firewood, my hands screamed, “These are the hands of a wood stove woman.” About that time, I stumbled upon the magazine called “Allure.” The feature article was how to take years off your hands. “Coat them with petroleum jelly, then sleep in gloves,” the article advised. All I had were rubber gloves. When my husband felt the rubber glove pat his shoulder, he was flabbergasted. “I’ll bet you won’t put that in the paper!” is all he said.
Lastly, a high school reunion requires new clothes. BLACK clothes. Black clothes cut on the straight grain. Black is to women what camouflage is to deer hunters.
The big night arrived. No sooner did I walk in the door than one of my male classmates observed, “But Kathryn, you are so well-preserved.” I reckon he smelled the formaldehyde.
If it weren’t for holidays, I wouldn’t get much work done. Especially around the house. In fact, I keep a mental list and as well as a written list (lost somewhere among the ruins) of the tasks saved for the rapture, the next legal holiday, or my next operation.
Therefore, as Memorial Day approached, it was exciting to think of the items I could blast off my list. Would I defrost the freezer, clean the attic, or refinish the piano? The farmer, whose role is moral support from afar, stated that the bear meat in the freezer wasn’t hurting anyone. And he said he certainly had not lost any sleep over our Christmas decorations, which had been thrown up onto the attic stairs January 21.
Instead, the farmer had the bizarre notion that Memorial Day would be a good day to rest. “Finish your book on Gandhi,” he suggested.
In retrospect, of course, he was right. Weather wise, Memorial Day is not the optimum time for attic cleaning. By noon, the temperature was 100 degrees and climbing. The heat index was 130.
I had started with the hardest task, sorting through our grown son’s memorabilia. There were the Cub Scout uniforms and Pinewood Derby cars, the teddy bears that survived the trampoline, the leaf projects, their kindergarten silhouettes.
They don’t make attics big enough to keep everything. I reckon that’s why God gave mothers such big hearts. As I rearranged the memories, tears mixed with perspiration steamed my glasses. In the end, all I could throw away from their childhood were the melted crayons and a gross of firecrackers.
The next section of our attic is the Mason jar wing. As long as I retain fantasies of bringing home blue ribbons for okra pickles, I will stockpile canning jars. And since my beloved mother-in-law believed in freezing corn and peaches in freezer jars, we also have an extensive collection of wide-mouths. To rearrange this section, I stashed the 480 Mason jars in the giant boxes the Gateway computer had arrived in.
Which brings me to the main attic dilemma. What do you do with all the boxes? The farmer does not understand my cardboard box fixation. Evidently the Depression did not go as rough with his parents as it did mine. My parents also believed in prohibition: they prohibited us from throwing away anything that might have any conceivable use by anyone at any future time. Certainly boxes fit into that category.
Indeed, on Christmas morning, I keep my eyes on the boxes (and bows), stealthily moving them to safety lest someone inadvertently crush or trash one. But, the end result is an attic stuffed to the gills with boxes.
Folks have hinted that this is crazy. Why, if you ever need a box, they say, all you have to do is go to the liquor store. Now there’s a winning idea! (Reread the previous paragraph.)
By the time I got around to the sewing section, it was 5 pm, and I had sweated off 8 pounds. Possibly I was borderline for heatstroke.
That’s the only explanation I can give for what happened next: I pitched the Butterick, McCall’s and Simplicity sewing patterns dating back to 1967. Skirts, maternity dresses, tunics, bell bottoms – out these patterns went.
Only one pattern escaped: The grandmother in me held back the pattern for a boy’s cowboy andIndian outfit. We’re expecting our first granchild in September. I know the odds.
The cowboy pattern was a keeper.
Of the many dumb words that have come out of my mouth, undoubtedly the dumbest were the words I told Mama before the birth of our first son: “Mama, I’ll be glad when the baby gets here. It will be all over then.”
Twenty-eight years and 4 children later, I’ve learned with certainty that parenthood is never “all over.” Thank goodness.
For along the way, there are so many large and small victories to celebrate.
At this season, it’s graduations that bring us joy. This year, as our 3rd son prepared to graduate from NC State, our wired family kept the AOL Messenger Icon busy. (Computers have done more for family togetherness and arrangements than they are given credit for.) In anticipation of Spencer’s graduation, Raleigh motel reservations were made, film was purchased, and the pick up trucks were washed up and cleaned out. Ultimately, our family caravan to Raleigh would include Grandma, 2 pickups and the family car.
My sisters came from as far away as Knoxville and as close as Raleigh to join the festivities. Our graduate had decided not to go to the big graduation over at Carter-Finley stadium. He said that the School of Engineering’s afternoon graduation would allow him to walk across the stage and hear his name called out, and we agreed that was the best route.
These festivities began with a free, pre-graduation brunch hosted by the engineering students. “There should be plenty to eat,” Spencer announced. “Our quantitative analysis indicated that 99 graduates and their extended families would require 400 subs, 200 pickles, and 405 cookies.” Warning bells went off in my head, but Spencer, our graduate, reminded me that engineers were trained to calculate to perfection.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened next: we had free pickles and cookie crumbs for lunch. Until several newly minted engineers redid their formulae and sent out for more subs.
On the positive side, waiting for brunch gave us the opportunity to chat with several of our son’s professors. “We’ve been wanting to meet you,” they said. “Not only has Spencer told us a lot of funny stories about his family, you should see the imitations he does. Actually, he’s been the stand-up comic for the university’s engineering society. You would be so proud.”
The farmer was pleased as punch…though he couldn’t imagine what the boy could find to imitate.
What an engineering department might not know about putting on a brunch they more than make up for in what they know about putting on a department graduation. We took our row of seats and settled in for the duration. The moment we had long awaited was nigh. What we didn’t know was that the moment we had waited for would take just a moment.
Without music, fanfare or programs, the head of the engineering department rose to the occasion. He basically thanked parents for their biological and financial contributions, announced a few statistics, and asked the dean to pass out the diplomas. This graduation took about as much time as a shotgun wedding. Nobody shed any tears; there wasn’t enough time. Five years and 15 minutes later, we have a graduate.
In conclusion, how many engineers does it take to pull off a graduation? All of them.
For better or worse, I married a man who believes in taking life for better or worse. He cannot conceive of a more profound time-waster than worrying about the future. Back in 1960, he got sick over his college course load. To cope, he awoke one morning and drew a line in the sand: he would never worry about anything again.
My husband has stuck to that vow -- and it has served us both well. It’s just no fun to worry all by yourself.
So, of course, the Y2K problem is a non-event to him. He believes that the sun will still come up on the first morning of the next century, that the Snack Shop will still fix his breakfast, and that the American flag will still fly over the White House. The only thing he has remotely considered hoarding is coffee, just in case.
Therefore, the farmer has no use for “what-if” Y2K hysterics. Since we can’t talk about Y2K, my thoughts have centered around how we might spend the last New Year’s Eve of this century. The farmer says we’ll just perk the coffee strong enough, then see if we can stay up long enough to welcome the new century.
On the sly and over the Internet, I have been reading of end-of-century trips to exotic places – like Honolulu or Havana. Somehow it seems like the new century demands a change of locale.
Then the call came from the Uptown Shelby Association. Hopefully I am not letting the cat out of the bag, but the uptown crowd is planning some sort of New Millennium celebration in uptown Shelby. And they’ve invited our family to be on hand with horses and buggies. In essence, Uptown Shelby wants to help you usher in the next century by offering New Millennium horse and buggy rides. What a town!
The farmer hesitated, not sure if Y2K would be a non-event to his horses. You never know what can spook a team of horses. Eventually, the farmer weighed the pros and cons and accepted the invitation.
So it looks like we’ll usher in the new century in that most exotic of locales: Shelby, North Carolina. I’ll be toting perked coffee to the farmer, and he’ll be toting some of you around the court square in a buggy. It should be a Millennium Kickoff to remember.
Let me take at least one Y2K load off your mind. The farmer and our sons are planning to stick around long enough to take everybody back home.
“We are going to make a killing riding people back to Casar and/or Kings Mountain in our horse and buggy, ” the farmer told me. “Just think: when they get back in their cars and the cars won’t start on account of their computers being down, we’ll get to tote ‘em all back home.”
Since childhood, I had often wondered whether I would live to see the 21st century and how I would celebrate it. Never once did it cross my mind that the new century would find me in horse and buggy --somewhere on DeKalb Street!
