Tag: kansas farmland

The Dream Inside: Daily Post–Containers

Published on by Janet Sunderland4 Comments
Windows of Dreams
Windows of Dreams

While these windows don’t look like anything much, in reality they contain a dream. And not only a dream, but a dream of nearly forty years. Hard to imagine, isn’t it, that two windows and a red stepladder might hold so much.

Years ago, when I returned to college to complete an undergraduate degree, my life was in chaos; grief followed me; and I knew I was in trouble. While I have, as most will attest, a less than stellar memory, I clearly see myself walking across campus on a sidewalk bordered on the right by green, fresh grass and noticing a sign outside the low brick building on my left–Counseling Center. Abruptly turning in, I made an appointment. My counselor, Tim Lowenstein, taught me bio-feedback and self-guided visual meditation.

When I needed to go to a quiet and safe place, I’d visualize going to the farm, walking down the lane toward the road (Mom and Dad still lived on the farm so I couldn’t go to the house), turn left on the road towards the bridge over Mission Creek, climb over the fence to a wide grassy patch of pasture on the south side of the creek, and go to the cabin I’d built in my mind. I’d sit on the porch in a rocking chair to breathe and be at peace.

That went on for several years. I also talked to Dad from time to time about the farm’s future. When I worked on a BFA in metals, I’d talk about an artists’ retreat. How I’d build cabins at the perimeter, how his old heavy anvil would be useful again. I had to let go of that dream plan when I decided I’d never be more than an adequate visual artist and went back to acting. But I hadn’t forgotten the farm.

Mom and Dad moved to town; I moved everywhere else, including New York and Mexico, but the farm remained a place of peace and safety. After all, how loud can it be on a place six miles from the nearest paved road? By that time, I’d become a writer, but that made being on the farm even more attractive. I continued dreaming of a writer’s retreat.

My bookcase filled with Annie Dillard and William Least Heat Moon, Edward Abbey and Diane Glancy. Jane Brox wrote Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm and I underlined and underlined passages: “The heart of the New World had its own name: prairie. The long open center of the word conjures an endless, calm, undefined expanse…”

Dad died. Mother followed ten years later.

By then, I’d moved back to Kansas, my brother moved to Hawaii, and I took over managing the family farm, planted to tallgrass prairie, and with some of the outbuildings still intact although not the house. I’d helped Dad tear down to make way for a new double wide mobile home. But Dad saved the timbers of the old house and built a room onto the double wide, which we called The Little House, to accommodate kids when they came home. They’d sold the double wide when they moved into town, but the Little House still stood. Dead birds in the screens; pack rat nests in the basement; old jars of canned vegetables in the corner “cellar”; mold on the walls. I cleaned and tossed.

My husband and I bought an old camper and put it on the land. We’d go up when the weather permitted. Too hot and the air conditioner didn’t operate; too cold and the furnace couldn’t keep up, but we went. The folding panel of the camper shower cracked and leaked water onto the floor, but we went. We painted the inside walls of the Little House and turned it into a writing room. The antenna outside for television reception finally broke; we resorted to videos. The ceiling began to leak; we resorted to duct tape inside and vinyl coating on the aluminum roof; the mice and bugs got in; we resorted to moth balls, rat poison, and stinky air “freshener” when we left each time and swept up dead bugs and tossed dead mice when we returned. It was a process as they say, but the camper continued to decay.

It wasn’t until we were mid-way into the reconstruction of the Little House, adding a kitchen and bathroom, a new roof, new insulation and siding that closed cracks to critters, new front deck, and driving the two and a half-hour drive up, again, to take light fixtures and paint and to once more clean out the basement, when, on the two and a half-hour drive back that evening, I woke from a doze and realized a dream was coming true.

An artist’s retreat was about to be born.

This is land my grandpa’s father homesteaded in the 1800’s, the man who’d walked the long journey to St. Joe to buy supplies like salt and sugar and lug it back. Grandpa told stories of the Jesse James’ gang coming by one time his father was on a trek to St. Joe and how they’d asked for dinner, politely, and slept the night. This is where Grandpa traded with the Otoe Indian tribe–cattle for firewood–whose reservation was north of our place. This was where his wife died and where Grandpa died. This is where Dad grew up. This is where I grew up and couldn’t wait to get away. And then, it’s where I returned.

Dream your dreams, boys and girls. Because you know what? The more you dream, even with editing, they may just come true.

And the windows? I’ll put a desk in front of those windows and sit there and look. Here is the prairie. This is what dreams are made of.

Night comes to the prairie.

 

 

Living with Loss

Published on by Janet Sunderland13 Comments

Mom

Part One

A snowstorm swept across the window of my mother’s room in the Good Samaritan, a nice room and well tended. Mother had chosen the bed closest to the window so she could watch the storms and the wind and the trains that passed at the bottom of the gentle slope beyond the fence where a plowed field lay. Her father was a depot agent so watching trains made her happy. She’d returned from a two-week stay in the hospital and was curled into her blankets. I lay beside her and curled around her back. We watched the wind batter snow in gusts. I’d planted a miniature lilac bush outside her window earlier in the spring, but it was hidden in the icy squalls.

The Good Samaritan Nursing Home is in small-town Wymore, Nebraska and where my elders go to die. That’s blunt, but it’s the truth. I’d seen it transition from an old time two-story brick structure to a modern one-story residence with gardens. The old structure sagged in decay across the street. Two of my grandfathers died in the old building and my Grandmother Sunderland. Dad died in a hospital bed. Grandpa Sunderland, too. They’d never lived there. I grew up on a Kansas State Line farm some seventeen miles south. Wymore is where we shopped, went to church, and where Mom and Dad retired when they left the farm.  Mom volunteered at the new place after they moved. Several of her friends lived there or worked there. Then Dad died and Mom when to live with my sister north of Seattle. “I never hear the wind up here,” she’d complained more than once.

I live in Kansas City, Missouri some three hours of driving from Wymore. A year before she died, she came to visit and I drove us up to the Wymore church where all the people she knew went. Mom had macular degeneration so when we got out of the car in the church parking lot and walked across the gravel to the front doors, she took my arm and said, “If someone comes up and I can’t see who it is, tell me their name.”

“What if I don’t remember their name,” I said. “I haven’t been here in years!” She drew herself up to her full four-foot eleven and a half-inch height and looked at me as if I were six years old instead of reaching for elder-hood myself. “Just ask them to remind you of their name!”

Everyone was happy to see her and kids who’d grown up in the church stopped to measure their growing height against her tiny frame. Adults bent down to hug her.

That afternoon, driving back to Kansas City, Mom watched the rolling fields of blood-red milo, nearing harvest time. I heard her sigh. She turned from the window and said, “It’s time for me to move to the Good Sam.” And just that quickly, a two-week visit turned into forever.

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Part Two

I watched the snow in an endless cascade across the window as if it had been snowing forever. Mom fell asleep, puffing her little breath puffs from between her lips that told me she was calm. The hospital stay had taken a lot out of her. Out of all of us. I carefully removed my arm from around her and rolled onto my back.

Three weeks ago, when the nursing home staff nurse had called to tell me of another seizure, this one stronger than the usual small ones, this one leaving her unconscious, this one sending her in an ambulance to the emergency room at the Beatrice hospital, my whole body clenched. I’d tossed a few things in a bag, called my son down the street, and started driving. It would take me four hours to reach Beatrice. I saw nothing as I drove except the black asphalt of road: not the wide rolling fields or the wide sky, not the line of windmills I liked seeing, planted in a straight line leading to a small museum at the curve outside Hiawatha. I didn’t notice if it was cloudy or clear. I didn’t stop for the usual break in Seneca. I drove.

By the time I got to the emergency room, she’d moved to Intensive Care. I found her, elevated in a bed in a single room, unconscious, tubes in her nose to help her breathe, tubes in her arms, heart monitor glued to her chest. The room still except for blinking lights and beeping. A doctor, white coat, gentle hands, came in and guided me out of the room. I leaned against the wall. “How is she?” I asked.

“She’s had a bad seizure,” he said. “And she hasn’t regained consciousness. It’s probably time to call the family.” My knees gave way. I slid to the floor, hunched over my bent legs, head resting on my knees. I couldn’t stop the tears. My knees were wet.

The doctor brought a glass of water and waited as I regained some kind of something. Composure it wasn’t but I could stand up. I began calling. My brother first. He was the closest. He’d be here in a couple of hours, maybe three, he said. I called my sisters, two in Oregon, one north of Seattle, one in Hawaii. One by one, they arrived. Jack or I drove to the airport to meet them. Mother had drifted in and out of semi-consciousness from time to time but she still lived. Finally, we were all together again, gathered around her bed. Jeanne, the farthest away, was the last to arrive. She brought sacred ti leaves with her.

I wasn’t conscious of the staff reaction to this growing gathering. They came and went, checked machines, adjusted the flow or one tube or another, left us alone. Jeanne placed the ti leaves around Mother, circling her in a giant lei like a tiny jewel set in white sheets. We held hands. We sang. Our voices rose and fell, quiet harmony in a quiet room. We told her we understood. We said it was okay to go.

And then we held vigil. Waiting. No idea how much time passed. Mom’s hand twitched on the covers, opening and closing her fingers. Someone went to get carry-out and brought it back. Maybe she smelled the food, who knows, but we heard her clear her throat and her eyes opened.

We laughed about that later. How with all her kids home, she had to do something and that something was usually food. Little by little, she came back to us. In a couple of days, they moved her into a room with an extra bed so one of us could always be there. Usually, we were two or three. Jack had to go back to work, and Jeanne to Hawaii. Jolene stayed for a few days then went back to work. That left Julia and Judy and me. Mom got progressively stronger, still weak, but she could finally get rid of the bed pan. One morning, as she sat hunched on the portable pot they’d brought to her bedside, she looked up. “Am I having another baby?” We laughed. No, Ma. You’re not. “Well, good,” she said. And soon, Judy and Julia left.

Now she was back in her bed at The Good Sam. I felt her stir beside me. I heard her smack her lips, a sometimes sign of a Petit Mal seizure, but no, her mouth was dry. I got up and brought water.

I went around her bed to the window side and sat on the edge, facing her, to help her drink from the straw. She drank and pushed the straw out of her mouth. She sighed a sigh all the way to her toes, which wasn’t that far. But I saw her brow furrow as she recognized the room. “I’m still here?” Yeah. You’re still here.

I set the glass on the window sill and leaned over her, brushed my hand across her lovely white hair. What prompted my question, I don’t know, but unplanned, I asked, “Mom, are you ready to go?’

She smiled a half-smile. “Oh, my yes. They’ll be people to laugh at my jokes on the other side.” One of her frustrations at the nursing home was that so few of the other residents understood her wry humor. I stroked her head. I’d started crying again and my nose was running. Lifting my arm from her head, I swiped my sweatshirt arm below my nose.

She glanced up. “How old are you? Forty?” No. I’m almost sixty I reminded her. “And I never taught you not to wipe your nose on your sleeve?” I laughed. “Yeah, Ma. You did.” At least her kids understood her humor.

I had to go home. I’d been sleeping the last couple of nights at the little roadside strip motel, old enough that I remembered it from my childhood going to church years, and I needed clothes. My cousin had brought a couple of changes to the hospital for me, but even they were dirty. I told her I’d be back soon. She nodded. “I’ll be okay here,” she said.

I got behind the wheel of Dad’s old blue Pontiac. I’d had it for years since my brother gave it to me when I moved to Santa Fe. I’d renamed it Old Blue. After five years in New Mexico, it had moved me back to Kansas. Mom loved riding in it when she’d come to visit. She’d pat the dash. It was the car that moved her to The Good Sam. The car we took when we went shopping. She’d paid for a new paint job and it looked the same beautiful sky blue as it had always been. I drove, back onto Highway 36, back toward St. Joe and home. I was still crying.

As I started up the long rise to the blinking light at the Beattie corner, an old truck stopped at the sign on the right. The truck reminded me of my uncle’s Chevrolet Apache. I grinned. I sworn that if I ever bought a pickup, it would be an Apache.Twenty-five yards ahead, the truck pulled onto the highway. An old man’s head framed by the truck’s side window, a dog beyond him. The man was looking in the opposite direction. Not at me in a car hurtling toward him.

I slammed on the brakes, jerked the wheel hard left, some part of my car shuddered against his front fender. When the car stopped, I was in the far left ditch and the truck had spun corner to corner. Shattered glass lay across my lap. The passenger side window gone. Traffic at a standstill. In the distance, I heard a siren. I wondered if I’d blacked out for a bit, but I could stand after I pushed open the car door. I braced myself on the trunk and walked around the back, worried about the old man and the dog. I saw someone helping him out of the truck. Somehow, we’d all survived. Except for Old Blue, deeply scored on the passenger side. I was losing Mom and now I’d lost Dad’s car.

Police arrived; a tow truck; I still had my phone and called an aunt in Marysville. The police took me there. I seemed to be functioning if rattled. I sat on my aunt’s sofa and called the insurance company. My uncle took me to a local used car lot, Route 36. “I know the perfect car,” the dealer said. “A Chevy. We just got it in. Owned by an old lady. Not many miles.” It was dark blue. I signed papers. I had a New Blue. I drove to where the tow truck parked Dad’s car and cleaned out the glove box and the trunk and the papers scattered in the back seat. I patted the dash and said good-bye. By evening, I was headed home again. But I cried as I passed the Beattie corner.

What was I going to tell Mom?

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Where’s Home

Published on by Janet Sunderland4 Comments
Night comes to the prairie.
Night comes to the prairie.

When someone asks me where I’m from, my stock answer “Tell me a year and I’ll tell you where I was,” works pretty well. In this case, the prompt was very specific: describe the house you lived in when you were twelve. But if someone were to say where did you live when you were thirty, for example, I’d have to add thirty years to my birth year and then I’d know where I was. That’s why tell me a year is more effective. I know where I was each year. Otherwise, I have to add. I just added. At thirty, I was living in Germany in Army family quarters.

However, twelve? That’s easy. By the time I was twelve, I was only on my fifth residence. By thirty? I’d have to make a list. We moved to the farm when I was nine so by the age of twelve, I’d stayed in one place for three years and would be there for another five.

In those years, the house we lived in was built in the late 1800s by Grandfather’s father. The farm, a hundred and sixty acres of original Kansas homestead, had only one owner before Grandfather’s father and that for only three years. Probably a Carpetbagger (did Kansas have Carpetbaggers?) who claimed it during the land rush and sold it at a profit. We still have the farm and the original land grant deed.

The high plains were built for spectacular storms, wide stretches of grass which often became prairie fires, high winds, and a lot of sky. The first grandfather, however, found the only hill in northern Marshall County and built his house there. Tornadoes rolled to the south and down a draw (a gully) or around the north side of the hill. Never over the top. Tornadoes, for all their fierceness, are lazy. We could see ten miles in all four directions which is about how far it is to the horizon, and storm days, Dad would stand at the back fence and watch. I only remember being herded into the cellar twice. I hated the cellar. Shelves lined both walls and the door opened from the ground like at Dorothy’s farm in The Wizard of Oz. An awful place where being sent to the cellar to get….well, whatever: a jar of canned meat, beets, beans, or potatoes from the sack at the floor made me imagine rattlesnakes at every step and giant spiders hanging from the rafters. Neither of which I ever saw. Hated the place nonetheless.

The house: no don’t imagine 1870s antebellum columns or colonnades of trees on each side of the road. Imagine tar paper, thick, scratchy, and pebbled, in a brown-to-look-like-wood siding. And the staircase? No wide sweeping curve up from the foyer floor, rather an enclosed narrow and steep flight of stairs that grew up the kitchen wall and made a sharp left turn three-quarters up. You could imagine the occasional spider or mouse if you like, but that’s a little creepy. As were the stairs. Did I mention steep? At the bottom the door opened onto the kitchen and at the top, opened into two bedrooms, one on the left and one on the right. Grandpa slept on the right up two steps off the top landing. We girls slept on the left. I guess that’s how it happened although I’m not sure how we got four girls in one bedroom. We probably fought a lot. But I’ll stick to house. Which makes me wonder how our bedroom over the kitchen ceiling was lower than Grandpa’s bedroom over the living room. Maybe the house had settled.

My older sister went into high school, however, when I was thirteen, and Dad built a separate room for her off Grandpa’s room in what was the old attic. He put up wall board and painted it blue. The room had one window that looked out over the yard and the lane leading down to the road. It’s the room I graduated to. Perfect for a teenager. A sanctuary. No one could go in without permission–my sister started that and hung a blanket across the door for privacy. When she moved to the attic room, there were only three of us in the bedroom with the gas heater for cold winter morning. In that room, we had to lie on the floor and look out little windows that tipped up to find out who was driving up the lane.

Downstairs, a big kitchen, a living room, a south porch perfect for sleeping on hot summer nights, and an east porch that served as a mud room and a separator room (a separator separates cream from milk) and a place to store milk buckets after they were washed and eggs we’d gather each morning and evening. The east porch is where we cleaned eggs – a task I never cherished – and stored five-buckle galoshes for trips to a muddy farmyard.

I don’t remember when Dad added the bathroom on the north side of the house. It may have been a few years earlier when his mother was ill and couldn’t go outside to the outhouse. She died before Dad and Mom married so I didn’t know her. But the outhouse was still usable if you were desperate. By the time I was twelve, I guess we were six kids since Mom and Dad had birthed another girl, so with five girls and one boy, desperation time could come at any time. Grandpa often used the outhouse. Probably just for a little peace of mind.

The south porch was my favorite room–well, not so much in the winter since it wasn’t insulated and winter put frost on the bed–white with windows that stretched around three walls. Maybe not antebellum but close.

I wish I had a photo I could attach, but all the photos are stored in big albums at another sister’s house. So instead, I’m attaching a view from the window on the west side of the Little House. We tore down the old house when Dad bought a new double wide for mother after we all left home. She was tired of living in an old house. I’d moved back from Germany and helped with some of that. I remember pounding plaster off lathe in the upstairs bedroom where I once slept so we could take the house apart board by board and save what was salvageable. After they set up the double wide, he built on a 21’x24′ extension room attached to the west side of the mobile home so there’s be a place to put us all when the six kids and their kids descended for one reason or another. That’s the building that’s still standing and we call The Little House. He built it out of the salvaged timber after digging a full basement just in case for some reason a tornado decided to come over the hill, and in one corner he built a fruit cupboard.

That’s the cupboard I had to clean the pack rat nests from if you’ve read earlier posts. Or maybe that’s in the memoir I’m writing. Words are getting mixed up from one deal to another.

Anyway, this summer we’re building an addition on the addition. An eight foot extension with a composting toilet and a shower and a corner kitchen inside the little room. We’ll have a year round house. Not that we’ll live in it all the time, but it’s there.

You see, you can go home again. It just takes some work to get there.

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Writing 101 Day 4: Living with Loss

Published on by Janet Sunderland7 Comments

MomA snowstorm swept across the window of my mother’s room in the Good Samaritan, a nice room and well tended. Mother had chosen the bed closest to the window so she could watch the storms and the wind and the trains that passed at the bottom of the gentle slope beyond the fence where a plowed field lay. Her father was a depot agent so watching trains made her happy. She’d returned from a two-week stay in the hospital and was curled into her blankets. I lay beside her and curled around her back. We watched the wind batter snow in gusts. I’d planted a miniature lilac bush outside her window earlier in the spring, but it was hidden in the icy squalls.

The Good Samaritan Nursing Home is in small-town Wymore, Nebraska and where my elders go to die. That’s blunt, but it’s the truth. I’d seen it transition to an old time two-story brick structure to a modern one-story residence with gardens. The old structure sagged in decay across the street. My grandfathers died in the old building and my Grandmother Sunderland. Dad died in a hospital bed. Grandpa Sunderland, too. They’d never lived there. I grew up on a Kansas State Line farm some seventeen miles south. Wymore is where we shopped, went to church, and where Mom and Dad retired when they left the farm.  Mom volunteered at the new place after they moved to town. Several of her friends lived there or worked there. Then Dad died and Mom when to live with my sister north of Seattle. “I never hear the wind up here,” she’d complained more than once.

I live in Kansas City, Missouri some three hours of driving from Wymore. A year before she died, she came to visit and I drove us up to the Wymore church where all the people she knew went. Mom had macular degeneration so when we got out of the car in the church parking lot and walked across the gravel to the front doors, she took my arm and said, “If someone comes up and I can’t see who it is, tell me their name.”

“What if I don’t remember their name,” I said. “I haven’t been here in years!” She drew herself up to her full four-foot eleven and a half-inch height and looked at me as if I were six years old instead of reaching for elder-hood myself. “Just ask them to remind you of their name!”

Everyone was happy to see her and kids who’d grown up in the church stopped to measure their growing height against her tiny frame. Adults bent down to hug her.

That afternoon, driving back to Kansas City, Mom watched the rolling fields of blood red milo, nearing harvest time. I heard her sigh. She turned to me and said, “It’s time for me to move to the Good Sam.” And just that quickly, a two-week visit turned into forever.

(to be continued)

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