ANNIVERSARY

Posted on September 26, 2011 by snowbirdredux

 

When Alice called that week she began to tell me of the places she had taken my son.  “Kevin loved the Santa Barbara Mission, of course” she said, “and I took him to the beach at Carpenteria and all along the creek down our canyon.”

At first I thought that she was telling me about the places they had visited during their  years at the University. But then she mentioned the antique silver spoon and added that she planned to take him to Paris the next month when she attended a theatre conference highlighting one of her own plays.  That’s when I realized that she was talking not about experiences in the past, but about scattering his ashes.

When it had come time for the memorial, my daughter, Noelle, and I had purchased small golden cloth bags with appliquéd flowers and tassels hanging from the drawstrings, and handed them out to special friends who did, indeed, take his ashes to points far and wide – New York City; Colorado; Long Beach, California; and of course, Santa Barbara.  I had forgotten.

There was so much I had deliberately forgotten.

Eventually Noelle and I took our own golden sack to Big Sur where Kevin had lived and worked one year while he took a sabbatical from his studies.  It seemed to us that the perfect memorial repository would most certainly be  Pfeiffer Beach, that most famous of coastal sites along a memorable and rugged coastline.  And, too, Kevin had lived on Clear Ridge during his sojourn which happens to climb precipitously above that very beach so that  he would have heard the waves from here each night, crashing through the massive portal in the boulder near the shore.

We arrived one spring afternoon, turning off of Highway One and onto the three mile winding Sycamore Canyon Road to it’s end,  parking among the Monterey Cypress, older and more windswept than I had remembered, and walked out onto one of the most notably photographed beaches in, perhaps, the world.  It didn’t disappoint.

The wall of cliff still rose abruptly to the left, closing off any passage further south,  but the beach spread out wide to the right, strewn with rocks and little tidepools to ford, becoming soft and sandy as it wound and undulated along the ridge going north. And the enormous rock.  The one with the hole big enough for a small boat to crash through.  The waves forced through that opening still exploded onto the shore.

I, too, had brought an antique silver spoon for the task and we picked our spot just at the water’s edge and began to take turns, ceremonially tossing the last of the golden bag’s content into the air and towards the sea.  But I had failed to remember the strength of the wind which comes up in the afternoon on Pfeiffer Beach and the ashes flew back, into our hair and our eyes, onto our coats and the sand.  Then we were crying and laughing all at once and there was nothing to be done but close up the sack and poke around the shore for a memento.  A pebble, a shell, an amulet.

And then we left the beach and drove back along the highway to Nepenthe where Kevin once worked  and ordered two martinis, for that is what he would have done, and toasted him knowing that all the time he would be chuckling and saying – “You silly girls”.

As we left, walking across the stone terrace, tourists dining with eyes all the while upon the sun sparkling Pacific and fabled Big Sur cliffs, I thought of my son dancing upon that very spot at the annual Bal Masque one year, robed and bangled, his skin painted blue for Krishna.  That was the year I was a Mime and his godmother Melanie was a Unicorn and T.M. was Himself in the Fifties, Harris Tweed with leather elbow patches.

And I opened the golden bag as we passed by and sprinkled some of that magic dust upon the Phoenix statue by the stairway – in memory.

So Kevin has been taken around the world.  And I know he would particularly enjoy Paris.

   

Posted in faith, Family, In Memorium, introspection | 5 Comments

TIME WARP

Posted on September 25, 2011 by snowbirdredux

 

In my youth it seemed that the lifetime stretching out ahead was enormous in scope.  No need to hurry.  There was plenty of time. If for some reason I chose not to become a Broadway actress, I could always become a children’s librarian.  Or apprentice to Joseph Campbell.  Or write for the New York Times.  And there would be plenty of time to explore the mysteries of deepest Africa and visit the relatives in Norway.  And someday far in the future, even become someone’s grandmother and pass on The Secret Garden and Tolkien and Oz.

And life inched on slowly, with many dreams unfulfilled, along with  a multitude of unexpected pleasures.  And always it seemed that there was time, until just recently. I’m not certain exactly when it changed or just how it happened, but time speeded up on me at some point and is now racing ahead at a break-neck pace.

I’m told that I’m not alone.  That it’s a common condition, part and parcel of this process deemed getting old.  Older.  You go along, thinking you have all the time in the world and one day you realize that the vast expanse of the universe, the length and breadth of the cosmos (thank you Carl Sagan) is not so infinite after all.  And like a runaway train, is speeding way too fast into some unnamed oblivion before you had half a chance to become published, or get to know cousin Petra in Tromso.

I was a great fan and adulator of Doris Lessing in my pre-midlife, and I was  recently struck by these sentiments – “The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in 70 or 80 years.  Your body changes, but you don’t change at all.  And that, of course, causes great confusion.”

So along with this frenetic cosmic flipping of the calendar, the blur of days too fast, the consternation of braking without control – there is that.  And it’s true.  There is a point when you look outward from who you have always been and feel no different than you did at 20, or 30.  Really.

But if age is a high price to pay for maturity, then hopefully it has been worth the bargain.  T.M. reminded me just today that Ram Dass was right all along when he said – “Be here now.”

And so I am.

And too, I am here and there.

 

 

 

 

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AND THEN THERE WERE 15

Posted on September 23, 2011 by snowbirdredux

 

I’ve written before about my longing for family.  Having grown up in California, I wanted so much to belong, to be included in family photos and romp about the farmstead along the banks of the Red River of the North with my cousins.

Now we are here in the land of prairie and lakes at last and times are changing.  On my Mom’s side of the family there are four of us – all girls, three of us sisters.  It has been over 20 years since we were all together and this past weekend we did it again in Stacy, Minnesota just north of the twin cities.  Maryanne and I are the oldest, and then Marlene, followed by Margie (Margaret Jean).  It was wonderful and what was particularly significant was the story and truth of genes revealed.   I grew up apart, but the same course of quick energy flows equally amongst us.  We’ve all spent a lifetime talking fast, moving fast and wanting things done “just right”.  Not unlike my mom, their Aunt Harriet, who throughout her life suffered from numerous broken toes simply because she hurried with passion through life. And we all take after Grandma Marie who gave us the gardening gene to the max, and because of her, we just might win extra brownie points for our innate and consummate cleaning skills as well.   Being with them that day only proved to me the truth of the consequence and reality of the link that is family.

 

Marlene and Maryanne, Diane and Margie

On my father’s side there were 15 cousins, of which I am the second in age  and three are now gone.  The first to leave us was  Jennings who was named for my dad who died just as young Jennings was being born. I’m sorry that I didn’t have the  chance to spend more time with him. Or either of them for that matter.

The first Jennings - Daddy

I was here two years ago for cousin Chuck’s funeral and felt with all my heart  what it was for Aunt Lil to lose a son too young.  We know and share together the depth of that experience.  Chuck was going to take us to the Lake of the Woods in far northern Minnesota to experience fully the phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis.  We’re going there some day soon to see for  ourselves and celebrate his memory.

 

Celebrating Chuck - Lower Wild Rice and Red River Cemetary

Chuck's truck, parking lot - Shepherd of the Prairie Lutheran Church

This week my cousin Ronnie was the third.  Ten years younger than myself, it was one of those deaths of which could be said that “it was a blessing” but  however much that might be meant to assuage the living, it is never easy to witness a difficult ending to a life.  Ronnie’s memorial however, occurred with an immense group  of well-wishers, a retinue of motorcycle enthusiasts, a military send-off with all the appropriate ceremony, a luncheon at the Hickson center and a final sprinking of ashes at the family homestead.

Ronnie's car at the memorial

Son, Justin, sprinkling the ashes of his dad

Johnson homestead today

Debbie and Justin. Ronnie's final memorial.

Time, it seems is speeding up.  Now we are fifteen.

 

Posted in faith, Family, In Memorium, introspection, minnesota life | 2 Comments

THE GIFT

Posted on September 18, 2011 by snowbirdredux

 

When I was young I loved the wow, twist of fate, surprise endings of O’Henry short stories.  I especially sighed over “The Gift of the Magi.” It told the tale of the young, but impoverished couple who worried over finding an appropriate and financially obtainable Christmas gift for each other.  The husband had a watch which he prized and the wife was known for her glorious hair.  And so the husband sold his watch in order to buy the perfect decorative comb and the wife sold her hair to buy him a watch fob.  I’m guessing that O’Henry meant it to be the ultimate sacrifice for love and an admirable scenario at that, but looking back now I have to wonder if it wasn’t rather superficial or something of a mean joke of fate.  And I do know that literary “tricks” are not usually given an A in creative writing courses these days.  But it was a good read at the time and I always think of the tale when I think of the act of “gifting.”

When I was visiting Aunt Lil a few years ago, she happened to tell me that her mother had believed you should not bother to give a gift that you hadn’t made yourself.  Easier said than done, for how many of us regularly partake of arts and crafts or even have the time for homemade trinkets.  But when we got home and I asked T.M. for a suggestion about sending her a thank you for her hospitality (I was thinking soap, lotions, something from the Post Ranch Mercantile), he immediately said – “You better get out your knitting needles!”  And I made her a scarf.

She of course, had already given me, for no particular reason, hand embroidered dish towels and a lovely tatted handkerchief.  But she, however, is very clever and regularly does partake of hand crafts and has made phenomenal quilts for all of her children and grandchildren and I know, in fact, that the upstairs Blue Bedroom’s closet holds a number just waiting to be claimed upon the occasion of their nuptials.

 

I am a niece and by marriage at that, but Aunt Lil has given us the ultimate gift.  I feel so honored.

She usually asks for one’s favorite colors and she and cousin Debbie pick out the fabrics, but I thought it would be a bit of creative fun to choose and combine by myself, all that was needed for the log cabin pattern.  I hadn’t bargained for what was in store.  I hadn’t conceived of the very enormity of the task.  I had no idea just how difficult it really is to find the perfect mix and the moment we walked into the maze of Joanne’s Fabrics I felt overwhelmed and terrified of making the wrong choice, any choice, and T.M. soon bolted for the car.

But I persevered and wandered about with this bolt and that, edging the array of colors up to each other, plying combination with nuance, flash with softness, bright with darkness, all the while continually abandoning and regrouping, up and down the aisles time and again.  Finally a sales clerk took pity and wheeled a cart my way, propping the ever growing mass of bolts upright and with her expert eye, weeded and guided me through to what seemed like a good conclusion.

We took the resultant fabrics to Aunt Lil that very day, and then the waiting began, all the while wondering if I had been bold enough, had selected colors that “pop” against each other, if we would be disappointed after all the labor that was entailed in making a quilt.

This past week cousin Debbie and Rick, son Kenny and Aunt Lil came for lunch and a game of croquet and no one said a word about the quilt.  I had made sure that what we were now calling the Quilt Room, which was actually the downstairs guest bedroom and opened onto the living room which would afford a perfect view, was all ready and waiting.  I had hung old family portraits on the wall, assembled the writing set my father brought back from India in the 1930’s, along with his baby and Service photos, classroom  pictures of both mom and dad, and made sure the floor and furniture were shining clean.  Just in case.

And not a word – until just before it was time for them to depart and cousin Rick began apologizing for failing to remember to put the quilt in the car, and Aunt Lil seemed chagrined – and then they all laughed!  And the quilt was promptly revealed.

Thank you Aunt Lil.  This IS the ultimate gift.

Aunt Lil - serious in the presentation. Me - blubbering.

The eye-popping perfect conclusion!

Unknowingly "dressed to match!"

THE GIFT - in the Quilt Room

Posted in Family, favorite things, In Memorium, introspection, remodeling | 1 Comment

THE HOUSE CAR

Posted on September 17, 2011 by snowbirdredux

Our friends Budd and Marguerite Andrews were the hit of the Dalton Minnesota, Pioneer Thresherman’s Show and Fair last weekend and they didn’t just exhibit their 1922 House Car, they brought it to life with tales of it’s past and the open road.  We once owned a 1952 Silver Streak, which we pulled  with a 1964 Land Rover all the way from Portland Oregon to Big Sur, California, and the same quaint and cozy interior, the intimations of lives long past that we found in our old trailer, were alive and well in the Andrews vehicle.

 

As an adult Ag teacher, Budd Andrews would visit farms around the area, and each time that he arrived at Ed Schleske’s place, south of Maplewood Park, he looked at this old wreck rotting in the grove, and undoubtedly saw the diamond in the rough that most had missed.  Harrah’s in Reno had seen it too, and offered $1100 (a great deal at that time) if Mr. Schleske would bring it out to Nevada, and in spite of the thousands of miles cross country that had already been logged, it was more than a feat given its current condition.  For $350 Budd snapped it up and lovingly restored the car between 1972 and the 1980’s. and at some point  during the restoration  he discovered a 1936 Christmas card in a bottom drawer addressed to Ed Isaacson which matched the monogram EAI on the radio grill, and that opened the door to the old car’s history.

What the Andrews discovered is that this wondrous old relic was originally built in 1922 as a city bus on a Chevy Chassis but subsequently made into a house on wheels sometime in 1925, by Ed Isaacson, who together with his brother Charles owned and operated the Fergus Floral Company in Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

Because Ed and Christina intended to travel far and near and  in order to be able to ascend the mountains in between the prairies and the ocean, he replaced the chassis with a Federal Knight Truck and a rare Sleeve Valve engine.  The Isaacsons then  traveled each November to March and logged up to 10,000 miles a year.

I feel a special kinship to the Isaacsons, not just because we had traveled at opposite ends of an era in classic vehicles, but because of  the pictures on display at Dalton which brought us round in a synchronic full circle. With the exception of one long panorama set in Florida, the photos  highlighted the old house car in San Luis Obispo – our most recent place of residence, and in Long Beach, Ca.  – our home town!  And now we live in their town.

When we grew up in Long Beach it was a few years after the devastating earthquake of 1933 and T.M. and I both remember that the schools, which were particularly hard hit, still had piles of rubble piled behind chain link fences.  As it turns out, the Isaacsons were visiting that frightening day and Ed wrote “I thought a friend was announcing his arrival by shaking the bumper and I was going to step out and to tell him to quit – but the street we had just come through was littered with debris and fallen bricks.”

Marguerite has filled the vehicle with all the right touches of the era, even down to filling the flower vases with flowers that are “in keeping” with the times – sweet old fashioned posies, and because she found that Ed enjoyed going to the opera and always kept a set of tails in the closet, she keeps Budd’s old tux hanging in its place.

(Note the EAI on the grill)

In fact, the photographs that they have now unearthed of the Isaacson’s on their travels, show the men in suits, ties and hats and the women in dressy outfits – hardly what I would wear for camping cross country.  Ah.  Another era.  How many times we have watched an old black and white film of the 30’s and 40’s and marveled at the dignified garb. Not that I’m all that sure I would give up my comfy clothes so easily, but it does bespeak of a more civilized time and values that more often than not have fallen by the wayside today.  Budd and Marguerite make it all come back, in more ways than one.

 

 

 

Posted in COMMUNITY, favorite things, friendship, In Memorium, minnesota life, MOVING, remodeling | 3 Comments

FROZEN STORM!

Posted on September 14, 2011 by snowbirdredux

 

I’ve just this week been really reaping my tomato harvest at last.  The bushes are loaded and every day I bring in heaping bowls of Big Beef, Golden Jubilee and especially that good little trouper, Juliet.  Finally!  We even took a bowl to the UU Church on Sunday, mixed with sliced cucumbers, onions, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and whatever herbs were handy – basil, mint, chives and dill.  And with two family gatherings this weekend – I thought I was all set.

And then the headline in the Star Tribune this morning – GARDENERS BEWARE EARLY PERFECT FROZEN STORM!  What?

It goes on to say that “a bummer summer for gardeners could come to an abrupt end tonight” and “That’s a freeze, not a frost, as in limp black basil and cold-scarred tomatoes that rot instead of ripen”.  I feel like whining.  I followed the article’s guideline and pulled all the basil and intend to cover the tomatoes and those darn impatiens with sheets and hope for the best.

On another page of the paper, it advised me to “Grab a sweater.  And the hose”.  Evidently the lawn and perennials and all the trees need a good soaking now so that they are “well hydrated to handle the winter”.  I’ve watered the tomatoes and herbs on a regular basis, and also the lovely rose, Sven, but I must admit I’ve treated the rest as if I was “dry farming”.  So now I’m really in a panic.  And with one lonely hose bib, I’ve set the sprinkler to cover one section per hour and just hope that’s enough. It also goes on to say that I should have fertilized in early September, but I can still do it this weekend as long as I’ve kept up my watering.  Oops.

And as to the sweater part, I know I will be subjecting myself to guffaws and I-told-you-sos from  many a Minnesotan, but right now, I’m really cold.  And, yes, I know this is not COLD yet.  But it is as cold today as it gets in the middle of a California winter and we haven’t even ordered our coats and boots from L.L. Bean yet. The birds know that somethings up.  They have been eating us out of the proverbial house and home of late, and I swear we are spending more for seeds and suet than we are for bread and torsk.  I’m assuming that they feel the need to put on lots of fat in preparation for the long flight south or just to withstand the approaching season and I’m hoping that the same porking-up treatment is not in the works for us.   But right now it’s time to grab a sweater and go outside and change the water.

 

 

Posted in Birds, favorite things, food, Gardening, minnesota life, storm | 14 Comments

PIONEER THRESHERMEN

Posted on September 13, 2011 by snowbirdredux

 

This is a term you are not likely to ever hear in California.  Threshermen.  It sounds imposing and serious.  It conjures up a fraternity of like minded fellows, engaged in a pursuit of the grain. Something like the Knights Templar of the Prairies.

But then, you really know you’re in Minnesota territory when the first page of the local paper notifies the opening of dove, rail and snipe hunting on September 1st, to be followed by sandhill crane and early goose, and then in succession – small game and archery deer, pheasant, duck, prairie chicken, firearms deer, ending with Take a Kid Hunting Weekend. We’re learning and adjusting every day.

Growing up in Southern California, long before the advent of Disneyland, we had our Knott’s Berry Farm which started as a berry stand by the side of the road and evolved into a full scale fried chicken and berry pie restaurant with an Old West Ghost Town as the main attraction.  Today, I’m sorry to say, Knott’s has become a full blown thrill ride destination, out to compete with Uncle Walt’s kingdom and Magic Mountain and no longer the quaint, if recreated, old western town I loved.  I’m sure the steam railroad cars are long gone and no longer chugging around the park.  The great thrill on the ride was to anticipate the actors who, cap guns blazing, always arrived on horseback and held up the train.  And just in time to exit and enter the Calico Saloon for a sasparilla and watch the flashy dancing girls, or poke about the dusty graveyard, peek into the jailhouse at poor, sorry Deadwood Dan and finger the dry goods at the General Store and pretend you were on a town trip from your own little house on the prairie.

I thought of that innocent time this weekend when we went to Dalton, Minnesota for the  58th annual Lake Region Pioneer Threshermen’s exhibit and fair, which is held in and around a site of real historic buildings – a saw mill and train depot, a blacksmith shop, Lavern’s  general store, the little red schoolhouse and Bountiful Harvest Church, along with three fully furnished log houses, belonging to the Brandvold-Sagene’s, the Spitsberg’s and the Nelson’s, and much, much more.  It honestly outdid the Knott’s Berry Farm of my youth.  I want to go back and see it all again and imagine I’m just in from my little house on the prairie.

The first Threshermen’s event began in Dalton almost 60 years ago when brothers George and Ralph Melby and their nephew Kenneth Bratvold decided to harvest some of their grain the old fashioned way, by threshing.  That first year they used a 25 horse power single cylinder Gaar Scott and a 75 horse power Case for the engines with a 36” Minneapolis thresher.  With no advertising, 500 people showed up and an annual event was born.  We arrived this Sunday, just as the Parade of Giants was beginning, followed by tractors of every shape, size and color as far as the eye could see.  There was chainsaw carving and blacksmithing and tractor pulls and yes, a steam railroad giving rides “when the boiler is hot and continuing until the steam runs out”, and all manner of exhibits and food and fun.

Threshing is simply a process of loosening the chaff from the grain, and it has been done through the centuries by simply beating the heck out of a stalk by hand, or with the big old fashioned equipment on display at Dalton, and finally in the modern world of farming, by a combine, which simply means a very expensive machine that both harvests and separates at the same time. In any event, threshing has served as metaphor, Biblically and elsewhere, for the absolute necessity to separate things of value from those of no value so that we may feed upon the good part and grow and thrive. There’s a lesson to take to heart.  I say Hail to the Threshermen.

PARADE OF GIANTS

THIS ONE'S FOR UNCLE LAWRENCE

RIDING TOWARDS THE PRESENT

DALTON, MINNESOTA

 

 

Posted in COMMUNITY, favorite things, minnesota life | 11 Comments

PRAIRIE WONDER

Posted on September 8, 2011 by snowbirdredux

Grandma Marie's first dwelling in Comstock, Minnesota

 

Whenever I thought about my great-and-grandparents arriving for the first time in this far northern province, I must admit that through my California filters, I remained a bit fuzzy as to the actual and factual scene.  Brief vacations over the years led either to flat and populous Fargo, or pretty impressive Twin Cities, or corn, soybeans and fields as far as the eye could see.   And usually in the summer. The winter I only dreamed about, and it most certainly didn’t appear to resemble a snowy, sparkly  wonderland in a picture perfect New England village.  That was reserved evidently  for the likes of  Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney under plush fur wraps,   jingling through the snow.

Instead I imagined bleakness, cold, and hardships beyond measure.  I’d heard the tales and read the accounts of how they arrived at the Red River Valley in the Agassiz Plain and how they knew they had found gold in the fertile ground and so they put down stakes and began.  And in most cases, they succeeded brilliantly.  In time.

But I read my Laura Ingalls Wilder with due diligence, and felt smug in 10th grade when we were assigned “Giants in the Earth”, knowing it was my familial story too, a few generations removed.  On my desk today,  along with the I Ching, I Married Adventure, A Book of Angels, and Anderson’s Fairy Tales, I keep a copy of “The Challenge of the Prairie” by Hiram Drache, simply because some of my relatives and their travails made the cut.  It has an introduction by William L. Guy (a former N.D. governor) who aptly describes – “…strong women who would endure the months of loneliness; who would battle searing prairie fires; who would watch for children or husbands coming home through the white gloom of a three-day blizzard; who would nurse sick children, work in their gardens, make the clothing, cook the meals, and make a home in a single-walled shack, a log cabin, or a sod hut.”   In other words, just how good could the darn soil be?

What, beyond the fertile soil, could have induced them to stay and persevere if it all was so truly harsh and hard, bleak and flat and fiercesome as my childish inner postcards imagined it to be?  Even then I sensed that we all crave solace in nature.    I know that at the first sign of any inner trepidation, I flee to my meditation aerie to sit and just stare at the old mighty Ash outside, and feel better.

Yet a lifetime of living on the Pacific Ocean and midst redwood forests, rolling oak savannas and a quick days drive to high mountains, left me somewhat unprepared for the immensity of earth and sky in this land of my forebears and ever since we transplanted ourselves back into this edge of the Agassiz Plain, I have begun to realize that my childish notions and picture postcards were all in back  and white, and didn’t begin to account for what they must have seen in living color.

The reality of  this piece of the greater North isn’t any part and parcel of my childhood notions of gloomy, desolate, and depressing. And I’m glad to report that Grandma Marie and Greatgrandma Elin  might have nursed the children and  scrubed with stove rags and   gazed anxiously into a gathering blizzard, but there was more than enough on the prairies to soothe the soul all the while.

Here must be what they saw!

Prairie - early September

Prairie Wetland, Fergus Falls, Mn

On the trail

"NEW" BARN!

Monarch Butterfly - pre flight to California Cental Coast

Next stop - Molera State Park, Big Sur, Ca

POLLINATOR

MAXIMILLIAN'S SUNFLOWER - helianthus maximiliani

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE SKY!

Education Center, Prairie Wetlands, Fergus Falls, MN. - U.S. Fish and Widlife

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in COMMUNITY, Family, favorite things, Immigration, introspection, minnesota life, Wild Life | Leave a comment

ENGAGED

Posted on August 30, 2011 by snowbirdredux

 

What happened to our youth?  The promises.  The dreams.  The expectations.  We’re beginning to do that thing that “old” people do.  Wondering how indeed the time fled by, feeling not all that different within, but a whole lot of different without.  And I must admit, that at just this point of reckoning, what some might call the “twilight time”, I do indeed find myself wondering now and then just what it was I might have become, given different circumstances, different twists and turns of fate.  Didn’t Marlon Brando (maybe in the movie “On the Waterfront”) lament that he “could have been a contender”,  and do I relate?  Well, yes and no.  Yes, John Leonard (of the N.Y. Times book review, etc.) and I were co-editors of our Woodow Wilson High School “Loudspeaker” newspaper and he went on to a brilliant, much lauded career– and I had two children before I was twenty.  But No, would I have negated all that that entailed?  No way.

I see our number one grandson, Sean, just now in his last phase at Sonoma State University in California, and envision his endless possibilities at the same time I am remembering his baby sweetness. And number two, Sam, who we recently celebrated off to his first college year, and marvel at what he has become.  Their dreams and promises have just begun and we can only hope they come up rosy.

My cousin Curt’s grandson, Gage, is right now at that very threshold.   And what could be more symbolic of the rite of passage into adulthood, into dreams of the future, into everything that represents freedom and the new and open road, than the dream and theme of The Boy and His Car!

T.M. got his first car, a 1934 black 4-door Ford,  when he was 16, courtesy of the Burger Broiler in Lakewood., California and thanks to their stacks of dirty dishes.  Gage, at 17 and a junior at Barnesville High School in Minnesota, just became the owner of a 2003 white Buick Le Sabre, courtesy of acres and acres of newly mown grass.  He wisely passed on the Mitsubishi Eclipse which would have meant  a lot more lawns in insurance money down the line, and opted for the  “older guy look”.  Good choice, Gage.

In fact, the car looks primo. T.M. and Curt gave it an A plus, and for Gage, the best bet is the sound system, which is definitely primo and which he admits handles a “little metal”.  But mainly it is his intro to the next big stage of life.  And when he says that his goal is to pursue an education in psychotherapy so that he can help others deal with emotional problems without resorting to drugs, I can’t help but want to cheer him on.  We’ve been fortunate to have Sean and Sam in our lives, and watched their first steps into the bigger world, and now seeing Gage,  appreciating his thoughtfulness,  I just want to celebrate his chances and his choices and the open road ahead.  You Go Gage!

 

 

 

 

Posted in Family, favorite things, introspection | 2 Comments

GROUP HONK

Posted on August 25, 2011 by snowbirdredux

That’s what my friend Susan’s husband calls it.  And Matt was also the one to intervene into any future embarrassment so that I would correctly refer to the Canada Geese and not the Canadian Geese.  Thank you Matt.  What’s a California girl to know?

When we first arrived in Minnesota, to live across the street from the Otter Tail River, it was early June and the flocks had already made their long trek from the south.  They beat us here and were already hatching little fluffy chicks who they then began to parade across the street and into the green spring grass.  In fact, driving into town soon became a Make Way for Goslings experience.  I always thought of Mom, the kindergarten teacher, whose favorite book to read to her charge-lings was Make Way for Ducklings.  She would have loved it.

Unlike many municipalities and golf courses, T.M. loves the geese.  I’m not sure what old memory they evoke for him, but he professes a particular fondness for their immediate presence in our lives.  But we are the snowbirdsredux who chose to return, if only to my roots, and chose to stay.  They, on the other hand, will come and go, come and go – branta canadensis migrare.

In the early summer they woke us up at dawn, and their cacophonous “ahonk’s” (gander) and “hink’s ” (goose)  sometimes made me think I was back on Castenada with  the wild turkeys squawking their way across our lower field. They’re honking all the time these days, and the sound is less a “Get-up, here I am, it’s dawn!” declaration,  and more of a frenetic  “get packing, hurry up, DID YOU HEAR ME!”   They have a few weeks to go until the  final departure date, but some early birds are not even waiting for the first frost to compel them into the skies and we see their take-off V’s throughout the day as they honk their way south onto the Mississippi flyway.  The V is a powerful and thrilling sight.  And the formation has a purpose beyond the esthetic beauty, as it seems that the “drafting effect” allows the flock to benefit (just like a cyclist in a race) from the currents created by their movement in the air. They CAN travel 1500 miles a day! And that means that it isn’t just Dad in the lead, for they have to take turns at the more exhausting driver’s seat.

Yet here on the Otter Tail,  many of the geese are still busily working out the logistics, thus the Group Honk as they evidently count noses and assign car seats and maybe argue over the inclusion of some distant unmarried uncle.   For they do, indeed, mate for life, travel in relative family groupings, and will  return together in the spring to the old familial  stomping grounds.  I can relate to that.

T.M. is sad and says he’s going to miss them, but we are planted and redux, and they are wild and migrare.  I’m hoping that Cousin Dennis who is  down in Texas, will see them V-ing by on their way to, maybe, the Yucatan Penninsula.  And although we missed the opening act this year, I suspect that the first early returns next spring will have us outside hollering out a great and welcoming GROUP HONK.

Posted in Birds, favorite things, minnesota life, MOVING, Wild Life | 2 Comments