More Than a Thorn

As I mulled writing about devil’s claw plants for this week’s column, my thoughts skittered across a dozen bunny trails. So, hang with me. Folks who grow up on the plains frequently repurpose seemingly unrelated items into functional uses. Stephen Ambrose noted this ability in his book Band of Brothers. He praised the ingenuity of American farm boys who welded metal to fronts and undercarriages of tanks and other military vehicles, permitting them to plow open centuries-old hedgerows. Their problem-solving saved lives and permitted the U.S. front to advance across Europe. Though nowhere as dramatic as Ambrose’s story, I’ve watched friends and relatives turn what seems unusable into functional objects.

Consider those nasty stickers that thrive at the edges of corn and milo fields. Once they dry, they split into two wicked hooks that attack intruding humans and beasts. Like Norman hedgerows, this natural armament prevents hunters and farmers from getting where they want to go easily. When one embeds itself in the calf, ankle, or foot of you, your hunting dog, or livestock, it’s difficult to imagine them as anything but excruciating torture.

This did not hold true for Grandmother’s creative friend. Southwest Kansas has as many of these evil thorns as we have in Northwest Kansas, so this woman transformed them into art. She’d wander borders of fields carefully collecting them. Somehow, I never thought to ask how often they tore holes in her flesh. She’d dry them further and shake out their seeds so they didn’t expand territory before she turned them into magical creatures.

Following the summer molt, this artisan explored near the artesian well and other springs where a large flock of Meade Lake peacocks quenched their thirst. The noisy, pretty males dropped iridescent tail feathers. Instead of collecting them in a pretty container, Grandma’s friend recognized their potential for combining with her collection of devil’s claws to create tiny replicas of exotic birds.

Somehow, this craftsperson stabilized each massive thorn so it stood on its own. Then she trimmed blue, turquoise, and green feather eyes to fit inside the now dry claws. Satisfied with their fit, she glued each one in place. I know she spent time on this because they survived each of us grandkids’ close and frequent inspection. I’m guessing more than one adult handled them as well. When she finished, she had folk art renditions of courtly birds who dance prettily with fanned tails.

I looked forward to visiting Grandma and Grandpa’s each year for many reasons, but one was to see the new little peacocks lined up on Lottie’s shelf. Granddad had already introduced the grands to his favorite birds and entertained them with his imitation of the males’ obnoxious call. This combination made it easy to fall under such a beautiful creature’s spell.

The carefully crafted peafowl imitations in Gram’s house changed my perspective about thorns. A local artist’s imagination and skill increased my appreciation for beleaguered farm boys’ ability to adapt equipment and win WW 2. Funny how something as simple as creating folk whimsies out of what most consider trash connects dots across time. Head down the hole, bunny. Don’t come out until next week!

Good for Body and Soul

As daylight wanes and nights grow longer, neighborhood kids return to classrooms. While much of these kiddoes’ work involves the three Rs combined with social studies, science, technology, art, and music, don’t forget all-important recess. Seeing little ones walking to school made me wonder if youngsters still love to jump rope as much as I did when I headed to school, pig-tails bouncing and dressed in plaid dirndls and black and white saddle oxfords. While I loved learning to read and figure math problems, I adored breaks where we took turns turning the rope for one another and jumping in time to catchy rhymes.

As a youngster, I never considered the history of my favorite playground activity, but after some research, I discovered it’s been around more than a while. That’s not surprising when you think ancestors had to deal with vines, fallen trees, big rocks, and deep ditches. The ability to leap high and far made a difference between eating and being eaten our DNA contributors.  I’m guessing this aptitude is programmed into bone and muscle, even if we haven’t consciously developed it.

Somewhere over centuries, folks learned to weave lengths of cord and then turned that object into skill training for boys. By the 1600s, painters captured scenes of children jumping rope on Europe’s cobblestone streets. Soon afterward, Dutch immigrants brought the game to America, where English settlers titled one activity Double Dutch. I bet that rings a bell with older readers.

Yes, those of us who attended elementary school from the 40s through 60s recall gathering a minimum of three participants—two to turn long ropes in opposite directions and one to jump into the spinning midst while also reciting a memorized verse. If you were lucky, friends spun those lanky cotton twists at a speed you could manage without hurting yourself.

Once you’d developed stamina and agility, the chants required the performance of tricks while simultaneously leaping over cement-slapping cordage. My favorites included, “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear turn around, Teddy Bear Teddy Bear touch the ground…” and “Not last night but the night before 24 robbers came knocking at my door. I asked them what they wanted, and this is what they said: Spanish Dancer do the splits, Spanish Dancer do the twist, Spanish Dancer turn around, Spanish Dancer touch the ground, Spanish Dancer go out back, Spanish Dancer please come back, Spanish Dancer read a book, Spanish Dancer 1, 2, 3, …” and continued till the jumper missed or got tired. Girls interested in romance could skip rope while counting the number of Cinderella’s fella’s kisses.

What good memories! We thought we were just playing while, in reality, we refined coordination and agility and practiced counting skills, verse memorization, and turn taking. It didn’t take new kids long to learn that they had to play nice if they wanted to be included.

I know modern youngsters participate in Jump for the Heart and other physical education class challenges. I hope my little grandchildren have the chance I had to join friends on the playground and take turns either spinning ropes or jumping in the middle of crazy egg beaters. It does them good physically and socially. 

Visiting Grandma’s Meant a Dalton Gang Hideout Adventure

Most families keep their black sheep a deep, dark secret. Following this unwritten code in the late 1880s and early 90s, Eva Whipple, sister of the notorious Daltons,  didn’t announce to fellow residents of Meade, Kansas that her brothers robbed banks for a living. However, a hidden tunnel between her house and nearby barn supports the theory her outlaw relations secretly visited her. Apparently, citizens of this little Southwest Kansas town on Highway 54 didn’t know about the connection with these infamous characters until the Whipples moved and the home’s new occupant discovered a hand dug, three-foot diameter secret passage, just big enough for grown men to crawl through. It conveniently linked  house and barn.

During the Works Progress Administration, an administrative entrepreneur-at-heart arranged to stabilize and expand this shaft, so paying tourists could walk where the Dalton Gang once crawled. It worked. My cousins, brother, I, and every other kid visiting Meade finagled a dime,  quarter, or dollar (depending on the decade) in order to tour the small Victorian era home with gingerbread trim, heavy drapes, and carved furniture. The best part came when visitors trailed their fingers over damp, dimly lighted stone walls through the improved tunnel to the old barn. Renovators had turned the floor above the ancient horse stalls into a museum showcasing pioneer era Meade. Sounds of awe and delight announced that kids had discovered the stuffed two-headed, newborn calf display.

 Even today, my relatives and I fondly recall good times on the south side of town. It was close enough to Grandma’s we could walk. She  directed us to behave ourselves or she’d hear about it. I’d visited often enough  to know this rural community kept no secrets after revealing the Dalton’s hidden passage. Keeping my hands to myself, I walked on the sidewalk where possible and didn’t smart mouth anyone along the way. I paid my fee and responded politely to a local, retired woman dressed in a long pioneer dress to set the mood.

Recently, I reviewed Meade, Kansas on Trip Advisor. Not surprisingly, Highway 54 travelers still visit The Dalton Gang Hideout. Most report excellent or very good ratings. It’s wonderful to know adults and children still find their way to that little house with a big yard. It’s fussy furnishings counterbalance that trip into the tunnel where every sense goes on alert.

Nostrils still quiver at earthy scents as shoulders brush rough, stone walls. Tall people must duck to complete their journey. Naturally, imaginations picture outlaws with bandanna covered faces and whinnying horses waiting to speed their escape at the end of the passage . 

If the Dalton brothers actually used this tunnel when it was merely three feet high and carved dirt, I suspect they worried more about a cave in than getting caught visiting their sis. Nowadays, a ticket to see that two headed calf lightens wallets considerably more than it did when I was a youngster. Today’s visitors shell out a whopping 5 bucks to navigate the tunnel and examine that oddly formed calf. I bet the Dalton boys wish they’d raked in that kind of loot.

Learning to Read a Vanishing Landscape

Archeological training teaches students to look for human-altered landscapes. This includes out of the ordinary coloration, unusual shapes or formations that don’t match surroundings, or obvious construction such as cliff dwellings. Southwest Colorado’s sagebrush plain schools the eye to distinguish differing hues of greenery indicating soil disturbances or recognize mounds with donut-like collapsed centers. In western Kansas, students of vanished cultures work harder to identify signs of earlier occupation. That said, historic and prehistoric signs tell stories for those who care to read them.

A trip over Hwy 9 between Highways 281 and 183 is a good place to look for historic construction slowing melting back to the earth. This two lane parallels the old Missouri Pacific Railroad that wound through Gaylord, Cedar, Claudell, Kirwin, Glade, Speed, Logan, Densmore, and Edmond. Each little town had a depot where farmers picked up deliveries or shipped grain, cattle, milk, and other produce. In most places, those distinctive rooflines have gone the way of horse and buggy. However, locals in Cedar and Kirwin preserved their whistle stops in bright yellow that provide interesting photo opportunities.

From the beginning of this route, observers note an undulating rise out of place from the surrounding prairie. If they recall their history accurately, they realize Jay Gould’s Mo Pac crossed here, stopping at each hamlet. Humans and beasts scraped surrounding soil to build the foundation supporting those clacking wheels. Folks with metal detectors and permission to go on private property occasionally find their detritus at sites where these workers rested and ate. Until the line folded, train cars carried grass- fattened cattle and sun-ripened grain to market.

With such thoughts in mind, curious wanderers might turn off the main highway to investigate Kirwin Refuge. Just before their detour, those visitors passed well-constructed ductwork carved into a high hill’s base. Such conduits carried run off from the rail bed crowning the rise. After they turn, a straightway descending from the crown and vanishing into the west compels attention. It seems it has no purpose. Now a mowed bed bordered by wild plums, this was a section of the old track.

Over time, farmers have plowed portions of earthen foundations until they blend into surrounding fields. Inattentive passersby won’t notice the on/ off again appearance of the old Mo Pac. Then a couple of miles past Speed, a bridge abutment rising from the middle of nowhere draws attention. This structure is so out of place. Without knowing this was a once a busy avenue of commerce, curious sightseers leave wondering.

I hope that mysterious man- made formations will interrupt the rises and flats between Highways 281 and 183 well into the future. Historians and photographers, amateur and professional, can spend happy hours traversing what began as a game and Indian trail, evolved to a stage road to Colorado goldfields, then became a leg of the Mo Pac route. For now, it’s a quiet byway broken by unnatural colors and unusual formations out of place on a native prairie. Here’s to the stories those disturbances tell.

Enjoying Somebody Else’s Garden

I know people who insist on creating original landscapes in their yards. They either begin with a clean palette and scrape their property down to bare earth or they buy homes in brand new subdivisions where all the dirt is recently backhoed and then leveled by earthmoving mega-machines. Once these individuals draw up their plans and plant accordingly, they have designer yards that draw the eye to appealing areas throughout their lot. This is one way to create beauty around a home. Another is to enjoy what previous occupants have planted and work around the property’s history.

Since I was a little girl, I’ve enjoyed investigating other people’s gardening talents. My great grandmother lived near Buckner Creek in Southwest Kansas where she cultivated irises, peonies, and black berry canes someone had tucked around her house before she moved in. As a toddler, I examined her bearded irises and thorny berry plants from a nose to petal point of view. Somehow, I understood these mature plants had lived in this place longer than Grandma had. I also got the idea that they connected her and me as well to whoever optimistically planted them in a land of little rain.

Because of those early experiences, I’ve always loved moving into homes with already established plantings. Lovely wild rose bushes with once a year yellow blooms, peonies, poppies, purple and bronze iris, naked ladies, and lilac borders graced our first bungalow built in the early 1900s. Their cycles of scented blossoms brightened that yard for decades and continue to do so two owners later.

We were only the second residents of our next home, but the couple who built that house transplanted iris tubers and lilac starts from their family’s original homestead into their new yard. In addition, they’d added rose bushes, purple phlox, and blue flax to enhance the native prairie flowers that surrounded them.

One of the attractions of our most recent real estate purchase was the pretty yard surrounding the house. That owner landscaped with new plantings to increase the curb of appeal of her property, but she also incorporated old-fashioned poppies, peonies, daisies, butter and eggs, day lilies, and violets that add a nostalgic touch to the yard. While I love the roses and shrubbery this gifted gardener chose to border the house, I most enjoy the plants she transferred from her farm and other people’s flowerbeds.

What I like best about plantings passed down from the generations who first turned these prairies into homes is that they connect us to real people who longed for reminders of where they came from. They were dead tired from just surviving, yet they made time to turn up flowerbeds around their homes. Even more telling, they shared precious water with rootstock or seeds they either ordered or carried from more settled regions of America and Europe.

Drive by any dying community or abandoned farmstead and you’ll see remnants of lilac borders, iris or peony beds, and poppies that now escape confinement. The humans who planted them are long gone. Equipment they left behind rusts in weedy yards that come to life each spring with improbable lavender, pink, and bright orange blooms that fleetingly tell stories of those who came before.

Just a Swingin’

Once upon a long time ago, children played on asphalt or gravel playgrounds filled with tall metal swing sets and finger pinching chains. Those thick links froze little hands November through February and roasted those same palms July through September.

Anyone afraid of heights elected to play foursquare, jacks, jump rope, or cling to red brick walls every recess rather than get in line for a chance to test the laws of gravity. Those swing sets inspired the careers of many an astronaut and future jet pilot as boys and girls escaping wood and metal desks raced to be the first to claim a wooden slat or canvas sling.

 Once on board, wannabe acrobats pushed off and began earnestly pumping jeaned or bare legs to launch themselves into the stratosphere. Little girls wore shorts under their dresses to prevent boys from seeing their underpants as they flew higher and higher. After a swinger achieved peak arc, you’d hear a shrill “Cowabunga” and see a frail body hurtling earthward before they assumed a last second untrained parachute landing fall position.

Wishful watchers stood beyond the contact zone, judging those gravity-defying acts with approving oohs and awes or derisive raspberries. Once that swing was empty, another brave soul got in position for an arms wide, leg-paddling leap toward the sun. Later in sophomore English, the myth about Daedalus defying his father to fly too close to that golden orb made perfect sense when I recalled my primary school playground adventures.

 Swinging high enough to bail and twirling around metal side poles until we were dizzy enough to fall down were the extents of our daring while teachers were on duty. Once school was over and adults left the premises, neighborhood kids gathered to challenge one another to creative and dangerous feats.

More than once, I found myself first pulling and pushing monkey-like until I reached the horizontal support pipe that connected both ends of the swing set. Upon reaching that goal, our rule was to straddle the casing, inch the entire distance across, and slide down the other side, fireman style. It was doubly daring since girls often wore dresses that caught in swing chains or on peeling aluminum paint. I still remember friction burns on the inside of my legs.

I was luckier than some of my friends because I never experienced a bone-breaking fall. A few hard landings unnerved me and chipped a front tooth, but I didn’t require a cast. More than one buddy left school holding an arm chest-close while sobbing in pain. A day or two later, that little daredevil returned,   brandishing bright white plaster that begged for autographs. Though I longed to have everyone crowd round me waiting to write names on my arm, I didn’t want to spend six to eight weeks standing against the wall watching others play.

It’s funny to look back on these adventures. Somehow, over the decades, I’ve lost every ounce of thrill seeker I ever possessed. In fact, standing on chair to dust a ceiling fan causes vertigo. Good thing modern playgrounds aren’t nearly as thrilling as they used to be. I’d hate to rescue grandkids from the top of an old-school swing set.

Growing Older Has Its Merits

Growing older has its merits. You’ve made enough mistakes that you are wiser and more thoughtful. You’re comfortable with yourself. You take others’ opinions and feelings into consideration, but you know what you believe and consider that when you make decisions. You’ve survived catastrophes and tragedies enough that you understand time and love soften pain. Despite physical infirmities and the fact that when you reference commercials, movie stars, and music of your youth, youngsters don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Getting a monthly AARP magazine is a blessing.

That said, gray hair and wrinkles have downsides. One is becoming the oldest generation. The recent deaths of favorite uncles remind me that my husband and I are joining the ranks of elders. That’s hard to take when I think about how much I relied on these individuals for guidance, clarity, humor, and acceptance when I faced challenges or when I needed to know something about my family’s heritage.

An uncle by marriage survived the bombing of Pearl Harbor and served in the Pacific throughout World War II. He came home to be husband, father, and career teacher. Despite battle traumas Uncle Jay certainly faced, my brother and I knew only a kindly man who loved his wife, daughter, and a silly little dachshund. He kept an immaculate yard to de-stress from his classroom. To this day, when I think of him, I see Jay with hose in hand spraying down his already clean patio, watering his trees, or helping the love of his life with household chores.

My dad’s second brother Bob also came to maturity serving in the Pacific. He, too, loved his yard and garden and spent hours growing beautiful roses and luscious vegetables. I recall sitting with him in his front yard watching flocks of mallards fly in to feast on corn he set out for them every day. We didn’t talk much, but the pleasure he felt at these simple activities was evident. He found his peace in nature.

My dad’s oldest brother Seedy was a rough and tumble guy who’d grown to adulthood during The Depression and early Kansas oil boom years. When I consider him, I think of hard hats and rig clothes. My aunt kept reminders of his luck on a kitchen shelf. He and a drilling crew survived a fiery blow out, and the carbonized eyeglasses and tin headgear reminded me that life is tenuous.

This gruff uncle entranced his nieces and nephews by putting his thumb to his lips and blowing on it to make the brim of his hat rise. As a little girl, I tried and tried to make the same thing happen with my little straw cowgirl hat with no luck. I’d missed the part where he leaned back against the wall to create leverage.

Uncle Seedy always found coins in my cousins’ and my ears. Every time we visited, he mined a bank full of quarters and dimes out of these orifices. My joy in this activity continued when I took my little girls to visit him. Not surprisingly, they shared the family trait of sprouting money in their little ears. My aunt later told me a great-uncle had performed this trick with my dad and his siblings. Uncle Seedy loved passing on the magic.

Losing these men means missing their presence and their sense of homegrown fun at family gatherings as well as their wisdom and stories. After they passed, I longed to hear their insights about events that occurred before my time. They enriched my understanding not only of my universe, but also that of my parents.

It’s hard to think about stepping into their shoes. I don’t feel worthy or knowledgeable enough to carry their torches. I still can’t make my hat brim rise when I blow on my thumb or find money in children’s ears. 

Along with the benefits of aging come burdens.