The Great Plains and Small Town Hearts

Over a decade ago, I lucked into a National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar titled  The Great Plains: Texas to Saskatchewan.  For five weeks, Tom Isern  led 19 other teachers and I to read and analyze literary and historical texts, discuss conclusions, and visit iconic sites to better understand what it means to live on the plains.

One identifying characteristic of this land is its vast horizon paired with  few vertical disturbances like trees or skyscrapers.   That distinction made it into plenty of diaries and journals as pioneers left locales where coves and hollows or great groves of trees cupped around them, making them feel secure as a babe in its mother’s arms. When my mom worked at the Meade County Courthouse back in the 60s, she discovered records of early immigrants institutionalized when they were unable to cope with the open t space and frequent wind.

Fellow seminarians from other regions shared that the immensity of our vistas disquieted them as well.  That reminded me of a Japanese exchange student I took on a visit to Oklahoma City.  She exclaimed over and over , “Why don’t you build cities in this land?  Why don’t people live here? You should use this space.”

For those of us accustomed to so much sky and so few upright interferences, outsiders’ viewpoints challenge us to think about where we live and what it means to be a plains person.  Recently, I’ve traveled the more isolated highways of western Kansas, stopping to explore almost-ghost towns like Densmore, Ogallah, and Edson that were once thriving communities.

 I love isolated miles of asphalt stretching infinitely over hills and valleys.  I smile  to think how these trails must confuse anyone who thinks all of Kansas is flat.  High spots abound that permit  travelers to see across counties.  Imagine Indians and other early explorers standing on these ascents to view scores of buffalo, deer, elk, turkey, and antelope.  In all directions, they saw a rich land that could feed many.

Seeing  crumbling remains of once well-built churches, multi-story brick or stone schools, plaster and lathe homes that housed growing families, and the always peaceful hilltop cemeteries reminds me that hopeful hearts once acted on the thought that this is an abundant land. These little hamlets about every 15 to 20 miles across the prairie remind us of Jeffersonian Democracy in action.  Here families worked the soil, tended their businesses, worshipped their God, and educated their children into a better life.

As folks gravitated away from these self-sufficient little villages to cities, they lost something.  These small towns tied to the land, these schools that required all students to participate in declamations, plays, music, and sports; these churches that took care of not only spirits but also physical needs of residents created well-rounded citizens who dealt together with whatever difficulties arose. 

In forested regions, close-growing trees hold one another upright when the wind blows, and in mountainous landscapes one rock supports another. Nature offers no protection in the  open plains, so humans must sustain one another.  Neighbors become one another’s rock, cove, hollow, and grove.

When I think back to that seminar and this place I call home, I acknowledge that lifestyles  change.  We can’t all live in self-sufficient villages, but we can celebrate open space that reminds us this is a rich land that feeds many and a place that teaches us to look out for one another.

Trophy Dust Bunnies

Athletes compete to make the play-offs.  If effort and luck shine on coaches, managers, players, owners, and fans, two franchises make it to games such as the Superbowl, World Series, Stanley Cup or other legendary competitions.  Olympians dedicate four years to earn those few seconds or minutes they have to claim gold. Hunters spend seasons seeking the biggest buck, bull elk, caribou or other record setting trophy to decorate the family room.  After a week of packing a house we lived in for 16 years, I have decided homemakers need their own prize.

Athletes and hunters have to meet criteria to claim victory.  Sports competitions require speed, strength,  and skill.  Game stalkers’ strive to meet or exceed state, Pope and Young, or Boone and Crockett records.  To have their competitions taken seriously, housekeepers need to establish a list of golden qualities to identify champion dust bunnies.

After the last two weeks, I may be perfectly qualified to establish those norms.  We have sorted, packed, and cleaned a house we lived in for 16 years.  When I say lived in, I mean that.  This was no model home where people took shoes off at the door, pets stayed outside, or folks ate  only at the table.  Grit made its way to odd corners, pet hair is part of the vacuum bag collection, and a handy bottle of Resolve took care of spills.

Despite my statement this was not a model home, I dusted, vacuumed, and mopped once or twice a week.  I thought I was a stellar housekeeper until we started moving items that hadn’t exactly taken root but hadn’t seen a new locale for a long time.  If there had been a season on dust bunnies, and I had had a shotgun, I would have golden trophies to dust.

After the initial embarrassment of realizing I wasn’t the homemaker I thought I was, I took an analytical approach.  These were dandy fuzz collections and deserved respect for their length and circumference.  I suspect dark corners under heavy cabinets lend themselves to breeding a super species of these critters, as that is where I found the best examples.  

Looking at the constituent parts of these monsters, I see that drafts found a way into household caverns to roll that first speck of dirt or hair into another and another and another until the collected mass needed a name. Looking at these artistically, the mixture of elements enhanced their integrity.

After seeing each trophy’s individuality, it was hard to attack them with the vacuum cleaner.  I knew once they were sucked into the inner workings of that machine, they’d lose their uniqueness and turn into either a giant glob of dust, hair, and fiber or they’d separate into individual components during their journey from the beater brushes to the collection bag. 

Okay, so this is a lot tongue in cheek, but I did find some dandy dust bunnies that deserved recognition for size and form.  What I do know is that real housekeeper Olympics would award prizes for the contestant  who found the fewest and smallest of these creatures.  Folks who grow humongous dust based creations would receive scorn rather than accolades.  

My goal in my new home is to model myself after the Amish Cook who thoroughly empties and cleans her home twice a year.  That ought to keep fuzzballs at bay and me busy enough I can’t make up stories about trophy dust bunnies.

Swagger and Blink

If junior high dances are anything like they used to be, on the way inside, you walk past noisy boys jostling one another for dominancy.  You hear snippets of saucy trash talk, see manly posturing with exaggerated shoulders and aggressive chins, as well as smell a mixture of colognes designed to tantalize the fairer sex awaiting that evening’s Prince Charming.  When a particularly desirable young woman arrives, those waiting Romeos amp their preening and posing until they catch her attention.

Once inside the door, one notices young ladies dressed to catch the eye of the toughs shoving one another around outside, listens to decidedly feminine voices discussing outfits, hair, make-up, and the charms of their dream boat, and inhales a second barrage of scents selected to enchant male objects-of- affection.

Once the music begins, dominant lads stride across the room to tag the girl of their dreams for a dance.  Every now and then, competition gets in the way, and a stare-down begins first as the two assert their authority.  If that doesn’t work, a hefty shoulder shove gets the message across that the lady is taken.  Some wannabe sweethearts just don’t get it, and a fight ensues.  Whenever I observe these adolescent activities, it reminds me of the annual deer equivalent of this junior high social function.

 Not long ago, we spent the evening at Cedar Bluff where we watched the white tail version of this rite of passage. A group of does arranged themselves on a green field below our picnic area and began to nibble daintily.  I wondered how long  it would take before a buck arrived, and sure enough one followed the females only minutes after they appeared.  He was not particularly big, so I expected what came next. 

A much larger male strode onto the scene.  He didn’t amble; he strutted. He was every bit the cocky adolescent male strutting his stuff to show off for the girls.   It was clear he saw the ladies as his and the other buck as an intruder.

Beginning the challenge, the two locked eyes. For several minutes, they stared and feinted forward and back.  When that didn’t cause the other to budge, there was some head tossing enhanced with pawing of dust.  I guess that’s the deer equivalent of a little sand in the eyes.

For a moment, I thought the little guy was going to give in and leave.  The big deer thought so too, but it was a ruse.  The challenger was playing with Mr. Macho.  After his little deceit, he charged his opponent.  

Tensions escalated considerably.  You’d have thought the human observers were cheering on a favorite football team with all the jumping up and down and hollering going on.  Fans evenly divided their support for the bucks, so emotions heightened on the hilltop as the battle raged.

The warring deer clashed antlers and thunked shoulders, snorting and grunting through the ordeal.  Ironically, the fought over four-legged maidens, kept eating. They’d glance up every now and then at a particularly loud assault or at a cheer from the audience, but, in general, they didn’t pay much attention to their Lotharios. 

 

Eventually, the larger creature dispersed his challenger, who wandered into the brush to hide his shame.  Several of the hilltop cheering section groaned as their favorite left the battlefield under the flag of defeat.  Despite the winner’s exertions, he didn’t seek a prize that evening.  He contented himself with joining the gals for dinner. 

I was left mulling the similarities between humans and deer and how entertaining it is to watch either species’ courtship rituals.

Dust Storms and Tumbleweeds

Growing up, I heard story after story about the Dust Bowl from my parents and grandparents.   Dad described his mother shoveling rather than sweeping post-storm drifts.  Grandma told how she placed wet sheets over her children’s beds to protect their lungs as they slept.  She’d launder the linens the next day because they got so dirty.

My mother’s family lived in Southwest Kansas and shared similar taleswhen family gathered. What made these epics unique was that I grew up in Southern California among fertile citrus orchards and strawberry fields.  The concept of dust darkening the sun was outlandish to a little girl who played outside year round.

When we moved to Oklahoma in 1972, I listened to more first person accounts of the Dirty Thirties, but the tales seemed movie or a book-like to me.  Even though I had seen dramatic photos in history books, I couldn’t imagine that air could hold more dirt than breathable oxygen.

As a college junior in Weatherford, Oklahoma, I literally got my first taste of a dust storm.  As my relatives had described, daylight disappeared.  Aeolian soil, probably from Nebraska, found its way through every crack and crevice in my ancient dorm room.  Mucus I coughed up in response to this invasion was muddy, which explained why my taste buds screamed, “What are you doing, eating the garden?” 

Just as in the stories my relatives relayed, the day turned so dark I had to flick on the overhead light to see.  I also had to skip the trek to the  cafeteria for supper.  My tongue thanked me as it had plenty of foreign matter to process. I hadn’t sampled that much dirt since I was three.

Over the years, I’ve seen dust storms enough that those old tales ring true, true, true.  Recently, I drove twice in one day between Ellis and Logan during  marathon winds.  In the morning as I traveled toward my destination, air-borne  loam muted the horizon line.  A normally sharp view took on fuzzy edges, but I could clearly see distant elevators. 

By the time I finished my chores and began my return, I couldn’t see from one section line to another.  Wind speed had increased considerably, stirring air into the color of milky coffee.  What had been bluster earlier was now a gale that pressed weeds in the ditches flat to the ground.  

Hordes of tumble weeds large and small raced east.  It was like watching a movie or news report about throngs of people breaking out of a prison and running helter skelter to get away, only these were herbaceous orbs of all sizes rolling at top speed across the prairie.  I didn’t clock them, but if I’d had one of those radar guns, I suspect some sleeker plants cruised by at 55 miles per hour.

Thankfully, they were plants and not people or animals  that dashed in front of my grill.  I know I whacked at least 200 unmoored Russian thistles on that journey.  At times, it seemed as if 2000 prairie critters sped my way.  If I had been able to see more than a couple hundred feet, I may have had to stop driving  to count the masses passing before my astonished eyes.  The tumbleweeds that day compared in number  to the millions of migrating buffalo that once stopped trains crossing these grasslands for up to three days.

I no longer have trouble understanding family Dust Bowl accounts. In fact, after that nasty Saturday storm, I have a saga of my own to pass on to my granddaughter.  As a Kansas kid, she isn’t going to have the trouble her grandma did picturing a landscape erased by blowing dirt.

Life Cycles: Auction Buyer to Seller

All my married life, I have loved attending local auctions.  Part of the charm of those gatherings is seeing friends and neighbors and catching up with one another’s busy lives or listening to the auctioneer’s clever patter.  Another reason these events draw me  is the chance to see history and sometimes buy a little chunk of someone else’s story.  Unfortunately, there comes a time when those little pieces of other’s lives add up to enough stuff to clutter my closets to overflowing.  Before anything bursts, I need to take action.

For several years, dusting day each week has generated thoughts about getting rid of stuff.  There comes a point that all the extra polishing or the lack of space to display pretties makes them seem like a burden instead of a blessing.  The charm that made me raise my hand until the auctioneer hollered sold has vanished.

 One of my girlfriends, a role model for collectors like me, goes through her shelves, cupboards, and closets a couple of times a year and makes a thrift store run each time.  As a die-hard accumulator, it was hard to believe someone would choose to get rid of everything they didn’t use regularly. The one time this woman told me to search her cupboards for a specific object, there was no search.  I opened the door and put my hand directly on the sought-after item. Seeing her extraordinarily tidy and organized storage space was an epiphany.  Some people can find what they are looking for immediately.

After that experience, I decided to work harder at creating order out of my loot.  That meant I went through “stuff” every couple of years to either sell or give away objects I no longer wanted.  Despite these efforts, more came in than went out, and storage areas bulged.  If I needed to find something, I had to empty a shelf or closet get at the box where I stashed my prize.  So much for changing my life.

I finally got to the point that enough was enough.  I quit attending auctions and garage sales so I wouldn’t be tempted.  That doesn’t mean I don’t love to read a great auction bill, garage sale listing,  or see someone else’s terrific find.  However, I don’t want to find a place for more bargains.

Over the last two years, I began going through closets, drawers, and boxes.  Sometimes holding a pretty  reminded me why I so desperately wanted to buy it, but most of the time, I hold it and realize the time has come for it to find a new admirer.  That led me to contact a former student who along with his brother runs an auction company. 

For the past two weeks, I have sorted, analyzed, and packed away 35 years of goodies.  Boy, do I have eclectic  taste.  I bought pretty Depression era boudoir lamps and hand-forged branding irons.  I discovered Monterrey Western Ware dishes alongside a lovely pitcher and glass set turning purple with age.  I found kitchen gadgets my great-grandma could have used and a giant wooden lobster trap. The oddities are endless.  

Despite the fact I have dozens of boxes packed with booty to sell, I couldn’t let go of my armadillos, my  dinosaur tooth and coprolite,  or my giant seashells.  Some objects still make my heart sing when I hold them or admire them in the curio cabinet.

Once the sale takes place, my shelves will sport empty spaces.  Maybe it will be time to attend an auction and remember what it feels like to be a buyer.