Adulthood Crash Course

Nov13

I parked in front of Stratford’s Allington & Van Ryzen Red Owl store and sat for a moment before getting out of the car. The damp, overcast sky made the day feel like it was much later in fall, and not just a chilly end of August afternoon. Clutching my purse, I slowly walked up the steps to enter the small-town general store. My mission that afternoon was to shop for and buy a pair of khaki pants.

At seventeen years of age, the only preparation for adulthood that I had made was to learn how to drive a car and get my license. Many of the activities that most teenagers experience were not checked off in my life. I had never cooked a meal, thought about what I wanted to do after graduating from high school, entered a store by myself to buy clothing, experimented with makeup, or gone on a date. I was far behind the social development of other kids my age.

Perhaps the reason I was so far behind had to do with my being the youngest of a large family, living in the country on a farm, being an introverted person. I felt afraid of adulthood and thought it was too far a stretch for me. 

Pausing for a moment after entering the store, I glanced around appreciatively. To my right was the grocery side of the store. Although it was small with about four short aisles, there was a refrigerated counter along the back wall with a butcher there, cutting and packaging meat. The check-out register was next to the entrance. I smiled, remembering the times I visited the store with Mom and my sister’s boyfriend was working at the cash register. He liked to joke and tease people, and it felt like he was a big brother even before he really was.

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Garden Report Card

Nov6
Who’s their Mama and Papa?

I waded through enthusiastically growing plants, checking on their progress. The amount that plants manage to grow in 30 to 40 days after the seeds and nursery babies are put into the ground never fails to impress me. Beautiful, large leaves umbrellaed over the zucchini and melons, tomato plants, once skinny and delicate looking now looked like happy, healthy, large balls of green leaves and yellow blossoms. Even the slow-to-start carrots showed up bushy and vigorous.

There were few, if any, weeds around the plants and none in the walkway since it was still so early in the summer. When my eyes spotted a row of stubbles instead of green bean plants, I came to a stop and glanced around. Along the empty row I spotted rabbit pellets. “Those darn rabbits!” I huffed angerly. “There’s so much for them to eat outside of the garden this time of the year, why do they have to come in here to eat?”

My garden building was over twenty years old. The structure was showing its age: wooden boards were rotted; a plastic panel was missing from one end, and the plastic skin that covered the whole building was full of holes. Until it was repaired, there was no way I could block the rabbits and deer from entering the garden to graze. There were several places where the hooves of a deer had punctured holes in the plastic mulch sheets. Where the rabbits munched on low-growing plants, deer nibble on taller vegetables. The peas and sunflowers didn’t survive their midnight snacks, either.

At the end of July, a work crew came to replace rotting wood support boards on the hoop building garden and swapped its leaking plastic covering with fresh material. Before they did the work, I weeded the walkway. After they left, I went to work spreading woodchips on the perimeter of the garden. The rabbits continued to visit, but since the peas, beans and sunflowers were gone, they limited themselves to just eating lower leaves.

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Moon Rock Bread

Oct30
It wasn’t pretty to start with, but Arnie’s photo makes it look worse than it was.

Like the good, brand-new wife that I was, I made Arnie, my young husband, a scrambled egg and fried bratwurst breakfast. This was my one day off from working as a nursing assistant for the week, so I planned to crawl back into bed for a couple more hours of sleep the minute I kissed Arnie good-bye.

After he left for his job at the Praschak Machine Company, the house felt too quiet, so on my way back to bed, I stopped in the living room to turn on the stereo. 

A few hours later when I crawled out from under the covers, the sun was much higher in the sky. I felt guilty for spending so much of my day off in bed, but I rationalized, “I needed the extra sleep because I’m in my second trimester of pregnancy.” From the living room I could hear, “The Age of Aquarius” by the 5th Dimensions playing on the stereo. They were singing, “When the moon is in the 7th house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars…” It made me think of how, though hard to imagine, just a little over a year ago astronauts had landed on the moon.

While eating buttered toast, I wondered what to make for supper. My inexperienced kitchen skills limited me to what I could make. My husband’s brand of pickiness also limited me. He’d once told me, “I’m not a picky eater. Just make me meat and potatoes and I’ll be happy.”

It never occurred to Arnie that he really was a picky eater. He hated most vegetables, wouldn’t eat casseroles, and he considered it fancy cooking when I added a can of mushrooms to fried venison steak. Many years passed before my husband eventually learned to eat and enjoy more than meat and potatoes.

I felt pleased with myself after settling on making boiled potatoes, heating a can of sauerkraut, and using leftover bratwurst for supper. Then, a daring thought came to me. It would be nice to make a loaf of rye bread!

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Fired Up for Fire

Oct23

I was excited and couldn’t stop moving around. My mother, trying hard to button my coat, exclaimed with exasperation, “Hold still!” From where I stood in the farmhouse entryway, I could see through the back door window to a snow covered back yard that I wanted to play in. Turning my head slightly to the right, I could see a pan of freshly baked cookies on the top of the stove. The smell of them made me want one so badly that my mouth watered. Tying a scarf tightly under my chin, Mom exclaimed, “There! Done! Now you can go outside with the big kids.”

One of my brothers asked, “Can we take cookies with us?” Mom got the pan and held it out to us. We each scooped up a warm, sweet treat before turning to leave the house.

Although I wanted to play in the fluffy, white, fresh snow, I dutifully followed my brothers and sisters to the backside of our farmyard. The boys put down bags of household garbage on a small pile of wood scraps and dried weeds. Striking a match, my brother set the kitchen garbage on fire.

The bright orange flame revealed what was in the bag as it burned. I watched it devour a bloody paper that the butcher had wrapped around the stew bone Mom was using to make soup. It delicately licked at a brown apple core, then turned it black before finishing it off. The fire warmed my face as I got closer to see what the flames would do to an empty soda-cracker box. My eldest brother snapped, “Back away from the fire, Kathy. You’re too close to it!”

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The Chaperone

Oct16

I wrung out the dish cloth and laid it on the counter and left the kitchen to look out the living room window to check on my children. I still felt I needed to periodically check on them even though they weren’t little anymore. 14-year-old Niki and 10-year-old Tammie were old enough to take care of themselves while I did housework.

The first few times my daughters played in our backyard when they were younger, I never got anything done in the house because I was constantly peeking out of the windows to make sure they were safe. My friends didn’t seem to feel the need to constantly chaperone their children as I did. Was I an overly anxious mother? My way of thinking was that if one of them got hurt, it wouldn’t be because they were unsupervised.  

The phone rang. It was my mother. She had gone shopping and wanted to tell me about what she’d bought. I sneezed. She commented, “I hope you aren’t coming down with a cold.”

From the window, I spotted my two girls playing badminton on the back lawn. Feeling silly, I paused before asking, “Mom?” 

On the other end of the telephone line, my 86-year-old mother responded, “Yes?”

I repeated, “Mom, when does a mother stop worrying so much about her children?”

My mother answered with a slow, impish drawl, “Umm…. I don’t know!”

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A Famous Relative

Oct9

Excited to attend the fair, my two daughters, Niki, Tammie and their neighborhood friend Dee-Dee, raced ahead of me through the parking lot toward the entry gate. I stopped to make sure my car was locked and was amazed that even this far from the midway, I could hear the screams of people enjoying the carnival rides. A gentle, easterly breeze carried the smell of deep-fried foods to us, but also the smell of animals that were entered at the fair. The unique combination of smells didn’t bother me because through the years I’d grown used to them.  

Of all the Marshfield fairground buildings, the first one and easiest to see from a distance is the huge red one that has a sign on it announcing that it is, “the world’s largest round barn.”  Tammie, my younger daughter, proudly informed her friend Dee-Dee, “My great uncle and his brothers built that round barn!” I smiled to hear my daughter repeating what I tell my children each year when attending the fair.

Knowing that my uncle, Henry Felhofer, and his brothers built this local landmark has always made me feel proud to be related to them. What they achieved was remarkable for so many reasons. The Felhofer brothers bid to the Central Wisconsin Holstein Breeders Association for the job was lower than any of the other bids because the brothers planned to do without using scaffolding.

Although the Felhofer brothers were thoroughly experienced in the building trade, this was the only round barn they ever built. They began to work on Thanksgiving Day, in 1915. Working through a bitterly cold winter, they cut the fingers off their gloves to keep warm and yet be able to handle the nails. Since the building had a round roof, the brothers were not sure how many shingles to order. They made an educated guess which turned out to be spot-on! They had only a handful of shingles left when they were done working. The 150-foot wide, 70-foot-tall barn was completed in the spring of 1916 and used for the fair that summer and ever since.

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Cat’s Eye Club

Oct2

I climbed the worn and weathered wooden stairs to the ancient shed’s second floor. Three of my neighborhood cousins who were the closest to my age followed. Bright morning sunshine peeked in between the building’s aged wall boards. We sat down on out-of-date equipment, the sort that accumulates in long-time family-run farm sheds.

Gray shadows inside the shed hid the bright colors of the summer shorts and tops our mothers had sewn for us, while the bright shafts of sunlight highlighted narrow strips of blazing color. Filled with a poorly thought-out kid-club fantasy, I suggested, “Let’s start a club. We could call it…” After stopping to think for a moment, I said, “The Cat’s Eye Club! This is such a cool shed. We could hold our meetings here.”

Barb, a year older than me, nodded and agreed, “That sounds like fun.”

Alice, a year younger than me, brushed dust off her leg, commenting, “Mom doesn’t like having us play in this shed.”

Donna, who was the same age as me, asked, “What would we do as a club?”

She had me there. I couldn’t think of a single activity for Cat’s Eye Club members to do. It didn’t matter. Our meeting place, the dangerously interesting shed, was torn down later that summer.  

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Watch Me Dance

Sep25

The smaller grandchildren tumbled about on the living room floor like happy little puppies, while the eldest girl tried to organize the bedlam. Anne kept repeating, “Let’s put on a dance for Grandma!” I smiled. The younger children were lost when Anne wasn’t home to direct their play.

 A golden ray of late afternoon sunshine found its way into the room through a slight opening in the drapes. The wayward shaft of light was like a spotlight on each towheaded child as they obediently trooped out of the room through the light to put on dress-up clothes.

Before the children were dressed and ready to put on a floor show, their mother and youngest sibling returned from town. I got up and walked into the dining room to talk to my daughter. When the children came back downstairs from their visit to my dress-up box, they were wearing prom dresses, scarves, petticoats, and lacy kerchiefs pinned in their hair. Anne begged over and over, “Mom, Grandma, come into the living room and watch us dance!”

We all returned to the living room, and Anne lined her siblings up. I took a picture of the performers. When she said, “Ok” they all began to twirl, jump and leap. If enthusiasm indicates a superior performance, my daughter Niki and I were watching the world’s best dancers.

“Watch me dance” was a demand I heard Anne make often when she was a small girl. It didn’t seem to matter if her siblings danced with her or not. In her mind, she seemed to feel she was on a stage, and that her leaps and twirls were flawlessly choreographed movements.

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A Luthier’s Gig

Sep18

A shaft of late afternoon sun peeked into the building’s smoky interior. The bartender stood, polishing drink glasses and watching the band setting up for their gig on the far end of the room between drawing fresh drafts of beer for customers. One of the musicians on the stage was my nephew, John.

John is a luthier. I like telling people this, but very few people know what a luthier is. One of the people I told was silent for a while before inquiring, “Do you mean, he is a Lutheran?”

I kindly explained, “A luthier is a maker of stringed instruments, which requires a lot of artistic skill. John has made and sold several huge upright bass instruments since he completed his training in Red Wing, Minnesota. When my nephew talks about building them, the wood he uses, the carvings in the wood, you can hear his passion for the job. He works for hours in his workshop to make an instrument produce beautiful music.”

Five lone drinkers dotted the long, polished bar. They were sitting slumped on tall stools, hitched to what I figured were most likely their favorite, and frequently used spots. A few steps from the bar, clusters of tables and chairs ran almost the entire length of the room. Due to the early hour of the evening, not all the places to sit were occupied.

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Sweet Relief

Sep11

Spotting a shaded bench in the garden, Tammie hurried over to it and quickly sat down before anyone else had the same idea. Slipping off one of her shoes, I noticed a spot on her foot where her shoe had rubbed the skin raw. She sighed with resignation, “Here we go again! The shoes I’m wearing today are rubbing and making my feet hurt, and I didn’t pack any band aids.”

This was our first full day in Seattle, Washington. The day before, my sister Agnes, daughter Tammie and I had done a lot of walking in the airports. Today, we were touring the Chihuly blown glass display and garden next to the Space Needle Center.

After thoroughly searching through her purse, Agnes handed a band aid to Tammie, proudly announcing, “I knew I had one in there somewhere!”

I sat down next to Tammie to apply the band aid for her. Slipping her shoe on again, she stood up, saying with relief, “Now it feels much better! We’re going to stop at a pharmacy to buy a box of band aids before returning to our bungalow for the night.” 

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