Sheep Shearing Time

On the wall in front of my desk this picture hangs along with others from sheep shearing. I enjoy looking at it; this is a job I remember doing. The man stomping down the fleeces is one of Mary's relatives and is the only one I've ever found of someone doing this. A couple years back I wrote this poem to remember:

Sheep Shearing Time

A man holding a clattering shears
straddles an upended ewe
and bends to strip away
the thick robe of wool
she wore through the cold.

Lambs separated from penned mothers
bleat, hungry, lonesome tunes.
Clouds of dust hang
above the milling flock
where a helper
enters to catch and drag
another animal to her shearing.

"Good sheep shearers can do
a hundred head a day,"
goes the dinner table talk,
and this flock of sixty
will be shorn by mid-afternoon.

The boy feels drawn to enter
this grown man's world
and wants to tie and throw fleeces
into the hanging wool sack
and climb in to pack the bundles
so that by the end of the day
the boots he wears,
soaked lanolin soft
from the wool's drenching oil,
bring him another step closer.

A Sign from the Times

When I saw this old delivery panel truck in a group of old wrecked vehicles I couldn't help but stop to take a picture. There was a time when we'd take its presence for granted as it drove around or sat parked in town. It faces the south so the letters have begun to fade considerably from its exposure to the sun. This is just one example of things no longer used but filled our days one time. I plan to take pictures of as many as I run across: windmills, hip-roofed barns, deserted store fronts, grain elevators, abandoned railroad tracks, horse-drawn machinery, etc. They mean little or nothing to the generation younger than I, but I still enjoy their reminders.

The Sheyenne River in Lisbon

Easter celebration for us was Saturday in Lisbon when we went to visit my mother in the Parkside Home. News reports had told us the river was high and this is the scene as we drove into town. The crest had not hit yet and was expected for yesterday, Easter Sunday. People put so much energy into protecting property these past few years putting up dikes and sandbags, then taking them down again after the threat passes. Perish this thought, but I heard someone ask, "What if Lake Agassiz is filling up again?" Devils Lake certainly has.

Easter, 2011

A few years ago Mary and her sister traveled to Rome with a pilgrimage group to tour religious sites in and around the city. I made one request: to bring me back a likeness of the Cross of San Damiano. Luckily, she located one in a gift shop in Assisi. I wanted one because the artist painted on it such a great wealth of symbolism surrounding the crucifixion of Christ, something that greatly interested me. A Google search for the cross will supply much more information than I intend to include here; it is well worth the time to search it out and study it. This icon hangs in a church in Assisi and dates back to 1100.

The Old "AR"

Snow keeps falling down, down. . . It's getting to be real old. I want to see some green, so I dug out this model "AR" John Deere, the first tractor I ever drove. This one's a bit more streamlined than my memory of an open grille and open fly wheel, but nevertheless it opens the window shade to let me watch that young boy in the hay field steering it to pull an old horse dump rake where Dad sat on its machinery seat and worked the foot trip lever. If I remember correctly we did it this way because the rope trip lever didn't work from the tractor seat so he rode the rake and dumped the hay with his foot. The John Deere's clutch control was hand lever, and I had all I could do to pull it and disengage it. Well, a situation developed. The rake had a long wooden pole, a throwback to its horse drawn days, and it broke. Dad hollered to stop and I pulled back hard. The fulcrum bolt at the bottom of the clutch lever assembly was rusted and worn and it snapped. Just like that, that lever had no leverage! Dad jumped off the rake and caught up to the runaway, grabbed the flopping lever, and pulled back. It disengaged and we got stopped. Little things like that firmly entrenched themselves in my mind, and I think back to it everyone once in awhile.

The date today, April 19th: A winter storm warning is in effect for the rest of the day and into the evening. Maybe I'll have to keep digging out model tractors for color; I have a "B" John Deere and an "H" Farmall.

Our Neighbor Boy

Here's our neighbor boy, Trey, (and I wish I knew how to spell his name) having fun both last night and this morning with the snow that lingers in our world. He likes forms as witnessed by the shape of the five gallon bucket he used to haul the snow. He is a twin; his brother, Cameron, has been laid up with a broken bone for a few weeks so he's not out here. His problem has become for me the chance to get back in the world of youngsters, his mother has asked me to pick the boys up after school to spare him the long walk home. It's been fun seeing the busy after-school scene with kids running all over the place. I've forgotten how gullible that age can be, sixth graders, when I told them a tall tale just after they got back from a recent trip to Florida. I asked them if they'd gotten to the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine, a place where I had drank of the water. I went on to say it worked, that I'm 100 years old. "Really!" was all I got out of them so I let it ride; the next day I found out their folks told them it was a joke. But you know, being 69 might qualify in their young minds as being almost like 100.

What's This?

Here we are on the morning of April 15, 2011! I've summerized the snowblower and will be darned if I start it up again. We shovelled a couple paths so we can walk to and from the car. I've been wanting to get out and take pictures with my new D-SLR, but all I get are these snow scenes. By the way, I took the opportunity to learn how to run the camera by signing up for a class at BSC which will start in a couple of weeks. It was such a popular class that when I called to get in the first go-round, I was told the class had already filled. What? I just got the catalog yesterday. We'll take your name since we're thinking about adding another class. The next day she called and said it was a go. The only requirement seems to be to take my camera with a fully charged battery. It sounds like we're going to "shoot."

Old Ways of Doing Things

I enjoy looking at these old pictures of the hometown. I believe one of these elevators is the one that was picked up and moved by truck to the Runck farm south of Casselton. I can remember seeing it jacked up on huge timbers and rolling down the street. When I was old enough to start helping with harvest I liked the job of driving tractor and trailer to town with a load of grain and driving over the scale, watching the hydraulic hoist lift the front end of the trailer so the grain could run out the endgate and into the grate-covered pit.

And I always liked going into the railroad depot where I heard the large Regulator clock on the wall ticking away. Freight used to come to us through this facility and occasionally we'd go there to pick something up. That building stands empty now but has been moved some feet away from the RR right-of-way to satisfy their requirement.

Pictures like this represent a period never impressed into my kids memories, but I remember those scenes well.

Water Witching

Today I ran across a reference to water witching and was reminded of this picture of Dad demonstrating to me how he could do it. He'd say go cut a willow switch or any green twig and I'll show you how. When he'd grab the ends of the "y" and hold them tightly he would walk slowly around until the twigs reacted. It was something to see how they would twist in his tightly clenched fists, so much so that he could hardly hang on. Then whenever I'd try - nothing. I did not have the gift. The book I read today told me why: according to one of the cited sources the ability can only be passed down from a father to a daughter or a mother to a son. It crosses genders in its path through the generations, therefore I could never inherit Dad's gift of witching. Some people don't believe in such things, but a lot of wells have been located prior to digging through this method. In another type a ring on a string held over a half-full glass of water would start hitting the edge of the glass when over a vein of water, and the number of times it hits the glass is the number of feet to dig down. Another style consists of holding two pieces of wire bent in a "L" shape and holding them in front of you; then when the wires crossed you were over the vein. Believe it or not!

RFD

Our mailbox, standing at the head of the driveway, beckoned us six days a week to empty the newspapers, magazines, cards, letters, bills, packages, and catalogs delivered by our rural route mailman. He would arrive each day about the same time in a cloud of gravel road dust, lean across his car seat to insert our mail of the day, and roar off again to the next box a half mile down the road. This one looks very much like the one I remember,only ours had several bullet holes from someone's target practice. Cream cans made common anchors for the boxes.

45 Years Ago

When I ran across this picture and did some quick math I discovered it was taken 45 years ago. There's a song by my favorite western music singer Ian Tyson that has a cowboy singing this line "Was it yesterday or was it fifty years ago." It was about some lost love, but the line applies to many situations, my hog picture included. That time sure has flown by! A couple years ago I wrote this poem and included it in my second chapbook:

Slat shadows from a snow fence
lay on the backs of my pigs -
120 of them. Their heads are down,
eating, always eating, so much I
had to keep hauling feed pellets
from Newton's Feed Store at X
number of dollars and watch that bill
tally up, but then I had to feed them
to grow so they could be sold as feeder
pigs since they were still weaners.
The brood sows, fifteen of them, came
from a hogman in Owego Township, sand
hill country, some call it Hillbilly Heaven.
He told me They're just full of pigs!,
and I could tell he told me no lie
just by looking at their bulging
middles. I never fed 'em, they run
in the woods and eat acorns,
ground's just covered with 'em.
How much? I ask. A hundred
dollars apiece, and I'll haul 'em
for ya. So the deed got done,
my lot soon filled with litters
of little pigs and grunting moms,
all hungry all the time. I gave
those sows, raised in the wild
as they were, no different
treatment than the hogman gave
them, and they proved their self-
reliance by farrowing an average
eight shoats per. Well, things
worked out well for me, I sold
them when they reached 35-40
pounds each and made a few bucks.
As for the hogman, he hung himself
from one of the acorn trees.

Road Patrol

This glorious morning, 4-4-11! The ever present herd of deer browsed below us again this morning, a flock of geese flew low over the top of them, a coyote skulked in the far corner of the field, and eagles are nesting nearby. The Heart River runs high and fast and a tinge of green starts to color the ground. Spring comes!

The roads and streets are rough and breaking up. It made me think of an activity we would often do on the farm: grade our gravel road with the township's road patrol. I snapped the above picture in Georgia. Dad always called it the road patrol, so when I saw this one I scanned the frame of the machine, and sure enough, the name "Road Patrol" was prominently etched into it.

Some time ago I wrote this poem and published it in one of my chapbooks.

The Road Patrol

The Greene Township road grader,
scaled small enough for horses
to pull, sat rusting in trees
until someone searched it out
and hooked a tractor to it.

Here's where I enter the scene:
driver, pulling straight-away
while Dad stood on rear platform
working blade angle and depth
to smooth the washboard bumps

that banged and chattered a car's
chassis so hard your teeth shook
and made you wish for a rain
to fall and soften the road bed
so that the little grader

blade could grab some bite and cut
the rough grade to a smooth shave.
The times cried, "Do-it-yourself
if you want to change your world.
No one will do it for you!"

Home Again

After spending the past week in Minneapolis, we returned yesterday evening and slept the night away in deep sleep. This morning when I looked out our patio door I spotted this sunrise worthy of a photo. The hill on which our house is situated makes for great viewing of the sunrise and I often admire the beautiful ones. Yesterday we left I-94 near Wendell, MN and cut across to Fairmont, ND. Along that route we noticed lots of old time barns and tall corn silos on the farmsteads. One glaring thing was missing though: fences. There were none. The barns and silos stand as monuments to an older time, something I miss when driving through the countryside. The whole of the Red River Valley is mostly devoid of fences, and it's not until we get back here that fences become commonplace again. More will probably be said about the old days at another time. The sunrise was beautiful !