An excerpt from Leif’s Legacy by Newell Searle, the second novel in the Alton County mystery series. The retired forest ranger is a man of opinions shaped by observation and hard experience. In this selection, he reveals something of his inner life to Boston Meade during the newsman’s visit at his farmstead at Tarn Lake:
The forester interrupted this reminiscing, drew on his pipe and pointed at the sooty terns and tree swallows that darted after insects just above the water’s surface. “See them? Notice how plants and animals support each other. A place for everyone. All equal. That’s how I come to forestry,” he said. “Studying natural science will reveal more about God and his intentions than what’s in the Bible or Luther’s catechism. If you’re looking for revelation, it’s all around you… in the creation.” –Leif Nielsen
Nothing reveals a person’s character like an argument that lays bare the emotions and underlying values through the choice of words and gestures. An argument is primal and shows who we truly are.
As a writer, I use arguments as a way of allowing each person to describe or define themself by what they believe. In my forthcoming novel, Leif’s Legacy, the Nielsen brothers struggle over the future of the family homestead on a pristine lake. Leif, an elderly ex-forest ranger, owns the property and lives alone. He is hospitalized with pneumonia after making a field survey. Harald, his much younger brother, is a doctor whose idea of a good life differs from Leif’s:
Harald stood at the foot of the bed and looked him in the eye. “You’re better already,” he said in surprise and checked the charts. “That’s an incredible rebound. You can go home in a few days.”
“Good,” he grunted. “I don’t like it here.”
“You better take it easy from now on. You’re not a young buck anymore. No more camping.”
“We’ll see about that,” he snorted and then started coughing.
“Be serious,” Harald pleaded. “Think about how to live your last years. Think about what happens to the farm after you’re gone.”
“Why?” he asked, testily. “I’m not dying any time soon.”
“It could happen. You’re at a point where it isn’t safe to live alone.”
“The hell I can’t,” he bristled. “I’ll live there ‘til I die—and that ain’t soon. Hell, even sick I’m stronger than you.” He sat straighter to make his point. “A life without struggle isn’t worth much. When the day comes that I can’t… that’s when I pack it in. I’m not—”
“—Think about this. If you sold the farm, you could get enough to buy a place in town. You could have someone to cook and clean for you,” Harald said giving Leif’s leg a gentle pat. “Think it over. Be sensible. You’re pushing eighty and—”
“—And I’m old enough to know my mind,” he snapped. “God-damnit, I’m not going to let you shove me into to a compost bin you call a nursing home. Jeez-zus Key-ryst! You ought to know me better than that. I entered the world at the lake and by God that’s where I’ll leave it.”
“Easy. Don’t get all worked up. I’m sorry. I just don’t understand your attachment to that place. It’s an old house on a lonely lake.”
Can you think of an argument that defined you or someone you know? What did you learn?
All stories take place in both time and space. Intriguing stories employ a keen sense of place as an integral part of the story and more than a backdrop. It must be a place that the stories’ characters enter and leave, places that sustain and threaten them, places they identify with or that repel them to the point of flight. Because stories can carry us across time and space if they occur in a place we can touch and remember. A good story needs a geography of length and breadth and height, signs of settlement if not civilization past or present, a place where plants and rocks aren’t generic but named. And, if it is Minnesota, the place needs some kind of weather. Being specific about the elements of a place implicitly conveys things that need not be said. If the action occurs in a valley woodland of maple and basswood trees, readers may sense without being told it is a cool and shady place. Or, if it is on a hillside grown to oaks and hickories, the reader may sense it is dry with mottled shade. Specifics both limit and extend the action.
Kirkus Reviews gave Copy Desk Murders a coveted starred review for, among other things, “a fine sense of place.” In the fictional Alton County, each setting reflects a specific locale in southern Minnesota whose details I know well. And it is the specific details of these that affect what the story’s characters think and do. For example: The intern’s corpse lies at the bottom of a ravine. The serpentine road down that wooded coulee suggests several plausible causes of death and differences of opinion that will drive the story forward. This coulee is real and I travel down it to ready a trout stream. The city of Featherstone with its Romanesque core of red brick buildings is a composite of several towns in the region. Then I borrowed the real Louis Sullivan bank (National Register) from one of those cities and added details from others. Though I didn’t grow up in a three-story house on a hill, the landscape visible in the novel it is an expansion of what I often saw from our farmhouse porch:
Grandfather Meade built the house among the bur oaks at the end of a low, limestone ridge he dubbed San Juan Hill. From there, he saw most of Featherstone a mile to the east where the late afternoon sunlight gleamed from the water tower, courthouse dome, church spires and grain elevators. From east to west, his gaze took in the fencerows that divided southeastern Minnesota into fields of corn and soybeans, oats and pastures interspersed with groves and farmsteads. He could see for miles until the countryside dissolved into the haze at the horizon. At this evening hour, long shadows stretched from behind the trees and fencerows. In the distance, a solitary thunderhead floated in the cerulean sky trailing a narrow veil of rain beneath it… he gazed intently at the landscape he had known since birth. He wanted to imprint the vista of this perfect summer evening in his mind as an eidetic memory. His eyes took in the details of the familiar longing for amazement as if seeing them for the first time. Then it was time to leave.
A sense of place begins with acute observation. Pay attention to the landscape but don’t judge it. I have driven across the Wyoming plains many times but didn’t truly see what was in the sagebrush until I shouldered a backpack and hiked the cattle ranges from Nebraska to Idaho. At a walking pace, the details of delicate flowers, insects and animals came into view. This wasn’t the sea of gray sage I saw from the car at 70 miles per hour. It was the real world up close and personal.
As you draft your story, find locales that appeal to you, that inspire curiosity. Go to places you think you know well and try to see them as if for the first time. What are their salient details and what stories do those details suggest?
In most if not all novels, the main characters have a backstory, a piece of their history or experience that acts like a gyro to both drive and inhibit them. We all have back stories It is often our dark side, that part of ourselves we would rather deny, ignore, forget or hide from others. At times, the shadow side can often liberate us and reveal who we truly are. In Copy Desk Murders, Boston Meade inherited his family newspaper and has just spent the first summer in twenty years in his hometown. He sits alone on the veranda of the family home disgusted with his last editorial on the evening before he is to return to Chicago:
He slumped in the chair, ruing his flawed valedictory, wishing he could reel in the words like a fishing line and cast them anew. After three months, they still treat you like an outsider. “They’ll be glad when you go tomorrow,” he whispered to the katydids. Glad but not as happy as you will be. You never could be yourself here, he thought. Not as long as everyone assumed you were Dad’s clone. Sure, you’ve got his build, patrician features and Roman nose. But that’s not who you are. But they didn’t accept that. Instead of Dad’s gregarious persona. you’re reserved like Mom was. You had to get out, go to Chicago as the only way to be yourself. For that, they criticized you for acting as if Featherstone and the Statesman weren’t good enough. Well, people see what they want to see, he thought. Being myself and outdoing Dad’s success, that’s what mattered the most. That’s what drove Vicky into her affair. That’s what led to the divorce. He shook his head as he recollected the June morning when American Outlook promoted him to its top job. And then learning of Dad’s death right after that. In less than an hour, he advanced to the career post he coveted as he inherited the job he had despised. “Jesus,” he whispered to the katydid. “The cosmos has an ironic sense of humor.”
It was only a box in marbled brown Bakelite plastic but it was more formative in the way I perceive and think about the world than any other medium of communications. Radio. Listening. Imagining. I have a blog and a website, I watch some television and read some on-line news, subscribe to magazines and a daily newspaper but it is the radio that makes the biggest impact. That and books. Of all these sources of communication, I rely most on the radio. Why?
When listening, I think much more critically about what I’m hearing than when I receive the same information on television. Radio engages the imagination, the inner person, while television is passive (and there’s science to back this). Perhaps my attachment to radio comes from growing up without television. I was 13 when we got a TV and 14 when I went off to a boarding school without it (but I had my radio) and then on to college. By then, my media habits were settled.
Humans evolved elaborate ways to transmit knowledge through oral communication long before they developed pictures or writing. Indigenous peoples around the world have accurately transmitted, across many generations, factual details of their ancient history that are confirmed by archeology. For centuries, the first books of the Hebrew Scriptures were transmitted orally until they were written . Listening and memory are closely linked. Listening entails making mental pictures that are uniquely personal and aid our ability to recall them. (“The movie isn’t as good as the book.”) The images are eidetic parts of us. I can’t say the same for TV. Nor has the technological capacity to accelerate the rate and volume of communication been matched by a comparable improvement in the quality of what we communicate. In fact, some technology seems to contribute to shorter attention spans and less time to digest what we are hearing.
Call me old fashioned, but the radio—the medium of the spoken word—requires careful listening. It began early for me (and many other children) when my parents read to me before I learned to read. Before that, I “read” books to my sister because I had unconsciously memorized the stories. Later, after I learned to read, Dad and I enjoyed historical novels that he read aloud. (No surprise, perhaps, that I studied to be a historian.)
Unlike the neighboring farm wives, my mother didn’t listen to daytime radio programs and didn’t join in discussions of A Brighter Day, Ma Perkins or The Romance of Helen Trent. She was a librarian cum farmwife, she read or worked crosswords when she had free time.
Dad grew up near Philadelphia during the Depression and the radio was a principle source of entertainment. On the farm at midday dinner, he occasionally listened to the stock market news. No, not the Wall Street market but the livestock market for canners and cutters, barrows and gilts, heifers and steers at the South St. Paul. At harvest time, he followed the status of corn and soybean futures and other information of no interest to me. On Friday nights, he tuned into the boxing matches sponsored by Gillette razor blades. Sometimes he mimed with his fists, a right to the jaw, a left to nose in the rapid-fire broadcasts.
My sister and I usually washed, dried and put away the supper dishes. And if I didn’t have lessons to do, I listened to Dragnet, The FBI in Peace and War, Suspense and Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons and other showsdepending the day of the week. My Saturdays revolved around broadcasts of Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch and, when I outgrew that, Dad and I listened to Gunsmoke, Perry Mason and Have Gun, Will Travel. On Sunday mornings, we often listened to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on our drive to church. In the afternoons during winter, my parents listened to classical music concerts by the NBC Orchestra while my sister and I squabbled playing Monopoly. At suppertime, we laughed with Jack Benny and Our Miss Brooks. Even after all these years, I can recall the theme music, the lead in and even bits of episodes.
Listening sharpened my critical thinking. As a writer today, I am still awed at the radio script-writers’ economy in using words to tell a complete story, limn a character and generate humor. Lately, I have begun listening to audiobooks as I drive and notice how the images I “see” in my mind are different from those when I read. It is the same with learning Spanish late in life. If I read “aloud” just under my breath, the ideas and images are clearer than if I only read visually.
Nature and culture have designed us for sophisticated oral communication. To think before we speak. It is still good advice. Listening to the radio helped.
May 30th is the 150th anniversary of celebrating and remembering deceased veterans. It began in 1868 as Decoration Day to commemorate the soldiers slain in the Civil War, and later those lost in the Spanish-American, World War I and World War II. As a child in the 1950’s, we celebrated the day in quaint ways that seem almost relics from another century. I remember Decoration Day (as we called before 1971) as a more solemn and communal occasion than it seems after changing its observance from a fixed date to the end of a three-day weekend on the fourth Monday in May. Along the way, we may lost much of the communal solemnity.
Decoration Day always occurred during the most glorious weather southern Minnesota can offer. A time to honor the dead at a season of new life. The trees were leafed out, wild phlox and geraniums bloomed in the woodlands, orioles and meadowlarks trilled from the fencerows and cottonwood groves. This day meant two things important to this schoolboy: my little sister’s birthday and the last week of classes before summer vacation.
My memories of our small-town Decoration Day celebration began with the sale of buddy poppies in the Rexall drug store, the Ben Franklin dime store and other shops. Veterans of World War II sold them to raise money for comrades disabled in conflict. At the age of 10 or 11, I couldn’t explain why I bought one except everyone expected me to. Like going to church, I did it because–well–everyone else did it. It was part of being an American to wear this icon of remembrance and sacrifice.
VFW Color Guard
On this day, the merchants of Janesville hung out flags and there was a parade led by the VFW honor guard carrying the American flag followed by the drill team marching along, the sun gleaming off their chromed helmets and the barrels of the Springfield rifles on their shoulders. Behind them came VWF Women’s Auxiliary and the high school band playing patriotic songs for this solemn occasion. If there were speeches, I don’t recall them but they weren’t things boys remembered.
Decoration Day meant a trip to the Janesville Cemetery on a knoll a mile east of town. In the days leading up to the celebration, families raked the ground over the graves, mowed the new grass and decorated the headstones with flowers (real or made of paper), and small American flags. Our family went to the cemetery with Aunt Faith to visit her father’s grave. On the headstones I saw many familiar surnames, the ancestors of my classmates and school chums. Even as a boy, I felt a palpable but still inexpressible link connecting me to those lying beneath the headstones.
Almost every man I knew when I was a boy had served in World War II in some capacity. Uncle Walter, our neighbor’s brother, lost an eye fighting the Japanese. Our dentist served in the cavalry (without horses), mother’s cousin was a B-24 crew chief and my uncle Rob ran an Air Force fighter communications network in China.
Mrs. Wegge, our sixth-grade teacher, prepared us for Decoration Day. I recall learning the first stanza of the famous poem, In Flanders’ Fields, written in 1915 by a Canadian soldier amazed to see the brilliant red flowers blooming in the hellish no-man’s land churned and pocked by shells:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
Belgium: Tomb of the Unknown
The poem’s elegiac meaning made little impression on me until the summer of 1961, after I graduated from high school. I visited Flanders in Belgium as part of an air cadet exchange with other NATO countries. Belgium is one tenth the size of Minnesota and a battleground during much of its history. Flanders lies north of Brussels, Waterloo, the site of Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, lies just south of it and Bastogne, a major battle of World War II, lies to the east. During that month, our Belgian Air Force hosts showed us historic sites from many wars. We laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown and our contingent sat atop the hull of a tank destroyed in the battle for Bastogne, sixteen years before. I returned home from Belgium amid a national mobilization for conflict with the Soviet Union over access to Berlin. War seemed very close.
The grief of the Civil War, the Great War and World War II touched virtually every American community and nearly everyone knew of a family that had lost someone. Congressional declarations of war and shared sorrow once mobilized the nation into a common effort. For 30 years, compulsory military service gave young men a common and transformative experience and every family a direct stake in going to war or opposing it.
John F. Kennedy’s call to “ask what you can do for your country” has lapsed with time. The abolition of the draft and reliance on a wholly professional military has made serving one’s country an option, a choice but not a shared responsibility. I fear this change has made us numb to the conflicts ostensibly waged for our protection. And with this disconnection, we may lose our understanding of Memorial or Decoration Day as a time of comunal remembrance.
In this era of on-line sales, after more than a century as retailing behemoths, the business press predicts the imminent demise of Sears-Roebuck & Company and JC Penny. Both are institutions founded in an age before rural free delivery, widespread telephone use and, certainly, the internet. These mail order hosues were fixtures in thousands of small towns along with the Ben Franklin five and dime, Rexall Drug, A & W Root Beer stands and Dairy Queen.
Growing up on a farm in the 1950’s, the Sears-Roebuck catalogue was definitely a “wish book.” With more than 500 pages, my sister and I would spend rainy afternoons pouring over the pages, selecting things we wanted but knew we couldn’t afford. One can dream. This catalogue was the Amazon.com of its day.
Every summer, Mom and I riffled through the catalogue, selecting the clothing for school in the fall and winter. I wore Roebuck jeans that didn’t have the same cachet as Levi’s. Of course, I had western-style shirts with pearl-like snaps instead of buttons. But no cowboy boots. Not practical, especially when my growth spurt started and shoe sizes expanded. Then it was my sister’s turn to pick her clothes. Before ordering, my sister and I stood straight as our mother measured our height, waist and chest to get the right size with room to grow during the year.
One of us carried the order in its envelope up the hill to the mailbox. Then we waited. And waited. And waited until the mailman blew his horn and dropped a box by the mailbox. Our clothes! The box was usually so big we had to fetch it in the pick-up. One by one, we took out the items. Ah, the aroma of new clothes. Then we tried on each item to be sure of the fit but we couldn’t wear anything until the first day of school. This was like an early Christmas!
You could buy anything from Sears & Roebuck—anything! The catalogue carried hardware, furniture, Kenmore appliances, Craftsman tools, sewing machines and even kits for houses. From 1908 until 1942, Sears sold pre-fab houses. The parts for the house were shipped in boxcars. Each house weighed up to 25 tons and contained more than 30,000 parts. Pre-fabs were cheaper to build and accommodated modern conveniences like central heating, electricity and plumbing. As I look at old catalogues (on-line) with pictures of the Sears houses, the designs look familiar and I wonder how many of those houses I have visited without knowing they were pre-fab? At least one house on a neighboring farm appears to a Sears house.
For many years, we didn’t buy a lot in the stores because it was cheaper to order goods from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. We did it for the same reason we order books, clothing, cameras, yarn and household good from Amazon.
There is a cycle to this, I think. The Sears catalogue business offered rural residents an alternative to the narrower selection and higher priced goods of general stores. As the Sears business grew, and the population became more urbanized, it invested heavily in stores at shopping malls after World War II while its chief competitor, Montgomery Ward, did not. Sears continued to grow and diversify. It became the nation’s largest retailer until the 1980’s with the rise of Walmart. Since then, its fortunes have declined in the face of discounters. Now Target and Walmart are hard-pressed by competition from Amazon.
A Sears catalogue became archaic almost as soon as it left the press because the next wish book was in preparation. Many a catalogue ended its life in the little house with a crescent-moon on the door. Our neighbors didn’t have an indoor toilet until a decade after they bought a black and white television to watch wrasslin’ matches between Hardboiled Hagerty and Farmer Marlin. For toilet paper, they used last year’s Sears catalogue. A sad end to a volume of wishes. As I said, things go in cycles and maybe the antidote to Amazon will be the ‘buy local’ movement. Time will tell.
Good Friday? As a boy, I wondered why they called it good? What was so good about getting killed? As a ten-year-old in the 1950’s, I took certain things for granted because adults didn’t encourage questions about basic assumptions. And besides, we lived on a farm and I had other, more immediate things to do—like feed the chickens. That’s just the way things were.
Our family shopped in the Minnesota village of Janesville, population 1,100. It had a stoplight, a town cop, a volunteer fire department, a public school and one of every necessary commercial service: grain elevator, drug store, coffee shop, gas station, furniture store-funeral home, hardware, dentist, doctor, veterinary, butcher, beer joint, five and dime, feed and hatchery. There were three active churches: Trinity Lutheran (Missouri Synod), St. Anne’s Roman Catholic and St. John’s Episcopal.
Janesville, 1950’s
In those days, your particular denomination defined you and your associations socially much more than it does today. Your church reflected your ethnic origins, beliefs, state of spiritual salvation (as seen by others) and whom you might marry. The German immigrants and their children attended Trinity Lutheran, the children of Irish and Polish immigrants went to St. Anne’s and the Yankees, like my family, belonged to St. John’s Episcopal. Ecumenism wasn’t in anyone’s lexicon and a “mixed marriage” was an anathema, a kind of cultural treason that could get your exiled from the family.
The Missouri Synod church was a particularly strict and conservative sect. When boys were invited to join the town Scout troop, the Lutheran pastor said “no!” because—God forbid—his boys might come into contact with Catholics! To keep the children faithful, the church had an elementary school (grades one to eight) conveniently located across the alley from the public school. We farm kids lived on adjacent to each other and rode the yellow buses to our respective schools.
During recess on winter days, we public school boys took on the ‘Dutchies’ (for their ancestry) in epic snowball wars across the alley. We organized. Those with the strongest arms threw and the rest of us packed ammunition. It didn’t matter who threw first. The tribal response always came in force and dense salvos of hard-packed snowballs flew back and forth. Sooner or later, someone laced snowballs with pebbles. Tears and blood followed. When the bells rang, the day’s war ended and we returned to classes gloating over our victories. Later, we boarded the buses and sat with the foes we fought so viciously earlier in the day. No one held a grudge.
Despite our sectarian prejudices, Lutheran, Catholic or Episcopal, we reverenced Christmas, Holy Week and Easter. That said, we had no ecumenical services until after Vatican II, and then only on a limited basis. Instead of ecumenism, and despite the narrower opinions and preferences of that time, we gave each other space to observe holy days and ceremonies without interference or criticism.
St. John’s Episcopal Church
Everyone celebrated Christmas in a cheery and quasi-secular way but Good Friday felt different. It passed as a subdued afternoon, as if a storm brooded, and adults said little and children were shushed. Whether by custom, ordinance or informal agreement, Janesville shut down between the hours of noon and three o’clock. The bank, drug store, five and dime, grocery and even the bar closed to observe the hours when Jesus suffered on the cross and darkness covered the land. Many of us sat in our respective churches, our altars bare, the crosses draped in black veils and listened to the Gospel lesson about betrayal, death and forgiveness—the same Scripture in each church. During these hours of sober self-examination rose the prayers asking forgiveness of our sins.
Now, looking back from a half-century on, I know our differences in ancestry, ethnicity and prejudice blinded us to what we shared in common. Maybe that’s why it was a good Friday. In those three hours, we were of one spirit in reverence for something we held in common even if we refused to recognize it. These days, three hours of publicly shared and reflective silence could help us all see something greater good we share lying just beyond our immediate prejudices and passions.
Thanksgiving occupied a special place in the year on our Minnesota farm and marked the end of the crop year. During the eight months between April and November, we tended the fields; tilling planting, cultivating, harvesting and then plowing. Every day, we minded the sky for the perils of the season—late spring frost, heat waves and drought, cloud bursts and flood, hail storms and early snow. Any one of these could wipe out a season’s labors. Most years, we sprinted through two months of fickle autumn weather as it slid from summery to wintery, picking corn, plowing stubble and culling the livestock before freeze-up and snow. After Thanksgiving, we relaxed a while.
Sometimes, snow on Thanksgiving
Our first on-farm Thanksgiving occurred in 1947 and the last one in 1997. I was four years old that first year when my mother roasted a goose and cooked the garden vegetables she raised. November snow fell early. Five acres of corn remained unpicked and the stubble stood plowed. Both must wait until spring. The cars didn’t start for several days. Yet, my urbanized New Jersey parents were grateful. They pulled up stakes that April to go farming in southern Minnesota despite the absence of agricultural experience. They were still in their twenties and still immortal.
We lived in a draughty house in need of paint. Rusty barbed wire fences kept livestock away from the house. Small hillside fields bordered with weeds ringed the slough in the center of things. A line of woods marked the winding river half a mile away. Nothing about this place predicted prosperity. But come it did. Drainage and tiling turned the slough into rich bottomland. Contoured fields arrested soil erosion, check dams formed small ponds and the woods improved under professional management. Wherever he could, dad planted trees and created niches for wildlife. Year by year, the farm became more productive of corn and wheat, deer and pheasants, songbirds and ducks.
The family at Thanksgiving
My mother shone in glory on Thanksgiving amid the roasted turkey, green tomato mincemeat pies topped with hard sauce, roast carrots, mashed potatoes, silky gravy and cranberry sauce. Cousins and aunts from town joined our table and afterward the adults played bridge and children played Monopoly and Parcheesi. For many years in the 1950’s, the television station ran The Wizard of Oz on Thanksgiving. We loved the tornado scenes.
As my siblings and I grew up and married, our spouses and children replaced the cousins around the table. But some things didn’t change. November is still the grayest month in Minnesota—cloudy, cold and damp. At times, depressing. On Thanksgiving mornings, Dad and I still went outside to do some light chores, such as splitting and hauling firewood while mother, sister and wife finished preparing the food. Out came the good china, the monogrammed silver and crystal. These familiar roles and routines gave as much comfort as the food. A confirmation. We knew who we were, where we were and why we were thankful.
Abundance– a bumper crop
When all was ready, we bowed our heads and dad said a grace over the important things. Then the platters and bowls circled the table and our plates vanished under piles of mashed potatoes, slices of turkey, peas and smooth gravy. Looking out of the windows, I saw our newly plowed fields stretching to the river. Sometimes snow dusted the furrows and sometimes not. Yet the cloudiness never dampened our gratitude. We had the fields, the palpable connection, the umbilical between our livelihood and abundance.
We celebrated the last on-farm Thanksgiving in 1997. Mom and Dad were retired, no longer immortal but as lively as ever and wiser for their experiences. Arthritis crippled my mother at 80 but she was still a game chef. Dad and I still went outside to finish some chores, fewer now than in years past.
The boy formed on the farm
Thanksgiving, between helpings of turkey and pie, I realized this was the last time I would sit at this table and see the furrows, black and rich, awaiting spring. Gazing out and across the fields, I saw for last time the farm as it had formed me. Come spring, a crew would seed the fields with prairie grasses and plant clumps of oaks. This pleased dad but I felt melancholy—like the death of a friend—the permanent loss of intimacy with the living soil that had long sustained us.
Was I thankful? Yes, always! But I was more than thankful. I felt grateful and my gratitude grew from our intimate relationship with the soil. Dad thought of loam as magic stuff, a community of organisms that, with the sun, released life-building nutrients to produce fields of corn, soybeans, wheat and alfalfa. He held the soil as in a trust. Now, he was retiring the fields he retired.
Gratitude comes with humility and humility comes from recognizing you aren’t so self-sufficient that you don’t need the aid of anyone or anything. We are all part of an interdependent web of life. Our soil neither promised nor gave us a crop unless we collaborated with its organisms to produce it. We were married to the loam and tended it so it could tend, feed and sustain us.
The last harvest — 1997
I said a bittersweet goodbye to the farm that Thanksgiving. After 20 years, I still miss the palpable fulfillment of feasting in sight of newly plowed fields dusted with snow. I still miss feeling connected to a plot of soil I worked to produce corn, soybeans and wheat. I miss the spontaneous gratitude that comes when we were spared the worst of the weather. Or, if we were struck, gratitude for our recovery from it. Most of all, I miss the sense of life living with the land and not off the land. And with that, I miss the simple joy of life lived knowingly along the tenuous margins of security. Thanksgiving on the farm taught me humility that prepared me to be grateful. On this day, a slice of humble pie still satisfies the soul.
Growing up on a farm in the 1950’s, the Sears-Roebuck catalogue was definitely a “wish book.” With more than 500 pages, my sister and I would spend rainy afternoons pouring over the pages, selecting things we wanted but knew we couldn’t afford. One can dream. This catalogue was the Amazon.com of its day. 
by the mailbox. Our clothes! The box was usually so big we had to fetch it in the pick-up. One by one, we took out the items. Ah, the aroma of new clothes. Then we tried on each item to be sure of the fit but we couldn’t wear anything until the first day of school. This was like an early Christmas!
For many years, we didn’t buy a lot in the stores because it was cheaper to order goods from the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. We did it for the same reason we order books, clothing, cameras, yarn and household good from Amazon. 
Loose Leaf Binder 