Blest Be the Tie that Binds

Anything can happen. We all know this. We can be driving peacefully down a highway and suddenly there’s a skunk in the road.

So when my half-sister called the other evening as I was rolling chicken in breadcrumbs, my first reaction was to guard myself — because this sister rarely calls and then usually about something gone awry. Perhaps my step-mother was ill, but if so, why did my sister sound so cheery?

“Is everything all right?” I asked.

“Oh yes, we’re fine.”

Some people get right to the point, to our great relief. But this sister does not. And so, I put my iPhone on “speaker” and laid it on the counter. I put the breaded chicken into the oven, trimmed brussel sprouts, and sautéed onions and peppers — all while she led me to the family storage pod in Northern California, sorted through furniture, disposed of heirlooms, and carted off memorabilia.

“And guess what? You won’t believe what we found! Boxes of, guess what!?”

“What?” I was, by now, sweeping the floor. Dinner guests would be knocking at our door in ten minutes.

“Dad’s ties! Three boxes of them! Isn’t that wonderful!? Do you want some of them?”

Ah ah! Finally to the point. Dad’s ties. Dad’s ties from, ostensibly, 1938 to 1984, from when he began working until he retired. Forty-two years of ties, worn everyday except Saturday. Boxes of vintage ties: hand printed silk ties from the forties, thin geometrics from the fifties, wide paisleys and plaids from the sixties, disco ties from the seventies, flowers and reps from the eighties.

Suddenly his ties scrolled in my head: one with a tropical scene of flamingoes on azure, one with ducks flying across a rust background, and one with tiny horseshoes aligned diagonally on black. I remembered black ties with tiny red dots and blue ties with thin silver stripes.

Before I was ten, I knew how to tie a Half-Windsor. When dressing for work, Daddy would hang a tie on a door knob. I would tie it; then he would inspect it and slip it around his neck under his crisply starched white collar. If he ever redid the knot, I never knew it.

As far back as I can remember, I gave ties to Dad for Father’s Day until I was a mother. I may have chosen the tropical flamingoes when I was six-years-old. The cowboy motif would have been from the 1950’s when he bought me a sorrel mare to ride. In the 1960’s I would have chosen somber geometrics befitting his respectful status as a businessman and church leader. By the 1970’s my children helped choose ties for the men in our family, but it was a hectic time: gifts were haphazard.

Dad retired, boxed up his ties, and moved from city life to ranch life. After that, he usually wore plaid shirts and denim. For years we sent him plaid shirts until we realized he had more than he could reasonably wear.

And then he died.

Sixteen years younger than I, my half-sister lives another life, 2,270 miles away. We grew up in separate families, cemented by our father’s genes and his dominating presence. He still shows up in the most unexpected ways to command our attention.

“Do you want some of the ties? ” She asked.

I was thinking. What would I do with them?

“You could wear them. I wore one of his ties after he died. It was like having him near.”

Still thinking.

“You should have them. You could make a quilt or textile art piece.”

Still thinking.

“This is such a great discovery. You know, I don’t even have a sample of his handwriting.”

I thought, I do. He wrote letters to my children. “Yes, send me some ties. I’d like them. I really would. Thank you.”

Blessed Be the Tie that Binds –words by John Fawcett, 1782

Blessed be the tie that binds

Our hearts in Christian love;

The fellowship of kindred minds

Is like that to that above.

Before our Father’s throne

We pour our ardent prayers;

Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one

Our comforts and our cares.

We share each other’s woes,

Our mutual burdens bear;

And often for each other flows

The sympathizing tear.

When we asunder part,

It gives us inward pain;

But we shall still be joined in heart,

And hope to meet again.

This glorious hope revives

Our courage by the way;

While each in expectation lives,

And longs to see the day.

From sorrow, toil and pain,

And sin, we shall be free,

And perfect love and friendship reign

Through all eternity.

Somewhere over the Rainbow

Auntie Em: Help us out today and find yourself a place where you won’t get into any trouble!
Dorothy: A place where there isn’t any trouble. Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain…
[begins to sing “Over the Rainbow”]
–from The Wizard of Oz

When my daughter and her husband leave with us their children — a grandson age nine and a grand-daughter age six — they entrust us with precious treasure. I feel keenly responsible, a feeling that is visceral and adrenal. I’m happy, but also alert.

These two children play like frolicking puppies, teasing, chasing, and squealing. Well behaved, they usually respond to gentle reminders because they love to please. They are clever and confident children.

And they love ice cream.

After their piano lessons one evening as I was driving them home, I decided to stop at Kroger for milk, fruit, and ice cream.

“We’ll get the ice cream last,” I said. “We can only get one kind, so you’ll have to agree on a flavor.”

“Chocolate!” They sang out.

Imagine a nine and six year old in front of the ice cream section in Kroger. An eager duet, they read aloud the flavors. Rocky Road, Dutch Chocolate, Neapolitan, Chocolate Chip, Mint Chip, Cookies and Cream, Cherries Jubilee…

The grandson first suggested Mint Chip. “Yuck!” said his sister. Then she rejected Rocky Road, “Nuts! You hate nuts!” She grabbed Neapolitan because it was pink and striped with chocolate.

“Not that one. Let’s get Cookies and Cream.”

And so we proceeded to the Self-check out where I began scanning items.

“Oma, she’s gone!” said my grand-son.

“What? Gone!?”

“She went back to get more ice cream.” He looked horrified.

I would need to leave the items on the scanner and go after her. As I turned, my grandson took off ahead of me. He’s in cross country. I’m not. Now I had two grand-children out of sight.

By the time, I rounded the corner of the freezer section, they were coming toward me, she with three cartons of ice cream in her arms, and he with a disgusted look on his face.

“She won’t put them back,” he said.

We returned the extra ice cream. I scolded her for running off, which also meant I had to remind her of safe behavior. My mind flashed to child snatchers lurking in grocery stores at eight o’clock at night just waiting for a curly headed, pink cheeked six-year-old distracted by shelves and shelves of yummy ice cream.

A confident creature, she looked innocently at me and said, “What else can I do?” as in, I came back, what else do you want?

“I want you to stick to me even when we get home! I’ll tell you when you can go. Is that clear?”

On the way home, I could hear her soft sniffles in the back seat of the car.

Grand-parenting is all deja vu.

Suddenly I was six years old in Macy’s in San Francisco shopping with my mother. The department store had elevators and five or six floors. I became distracted by all the bling in the jewelry section. One minute my mother was there, the next she wasn’t. At first, I wasn’t afraid. She had to be nearby. I would find her. The more I looked, the more lost I became, until hot tears ran down my cheeks.

A sales lady knelt down and asked me my name. I knew not to talk to strangers. Terrified now, I sobbed uncontrollably. In the office, where she led me, people tried to console me and learn my name, or my mother’s name. They finally gave up and announced over the store intercom, “Would the mother of a lost child please come to the office.”

A few minutes later, two mothers showed up.

I too lost a daughter once–in Disney World for half a day. She went out one door of a restroom, I the other. After hours of frantic searching, I finally found her sitting at a bus stop. “You take the bus, so I knew you would find me.” She was seven years old. I had never known such terror and relief was possible.

Let’s not discuss, please, my hiking adventure in the Rockies at age 68, when I veered from a main trail, lost my bearings at 11,000 feet, and had to be guided out by a rescue squad before dark set in and bears ate me.

All things considered, I decided the other night I might need a little check-up regarding my own whereabouts. “Herb, do I sometimes wander off?”

“All the time, Love, all the time. You’ll be right here beside me, and I won’t have a clue where you’ve gone.”

Blizzard Lore

A blizzard hovered for two days over the plains. It arrived on Thursday February 21, 2013, in West Omaha at Englewood Drive exactly twelve minutes later than the ETA reported on the weather channel. The airport shut down. Schools and universities closed. Employees stayed home. The family slept in.

One by one the family awoke and looked out onto a white landscape. The dried hydrangea blooms had turned into drooping balls of frozen cotton. The spruce trees looked like ice wizards. Fence posts rose like sentinels from two foot drifts.

Outside it was five degrees; inside 68. They lit the gas fireplace and made pancakes. They wrapped up in afghans and declared a pajama morning. The teenagers’ fingers flew through text messages and online games. The dad hooked into teleconferences and caught up with his email. The mom designed an iPad training session for teachers.

The dogs forged through the snow cover first, the puppy, dressed in a sweater, leaping like a rabbit, and the black lab plowing her way to the fence border. Soon the neighborhood came alive with snow blowers. Before evening the snow plows had cleared the streets.

The water supply didn’t freeze. The pantry remained stocked. The closets contained multiple layers of wool and polartec. A line of furry snow boots stood by the back door; a pile of mittens waited in a basket.

In the infamous blizzard of 1888, sometimes called the Schoolhouse Blizzard, temperatures plummeted forty degrees after an unseasonably warm January 11th. Arctic air swooshed down into the northern plains from Canada. On January 12th many children were either trapped in schools without heat or perished as they struggled against the wind and blinding snow to reach their homes. 238 children died.

Although I grew up in the San Francisco bay area in the 1940’s and 50’s in a temperate zone, I knew about blizzard lore. My dad liked to retell the story of the blizzard of 1888 in Nebraska, told to him by his mother, most likely to keep him from hunting in dangerous weather. In the 1880’s two ancestral families had homesteaded west of Nebraska City. When the blizzard struck, they settled in to wait out the storm. The men tied a rope between the house and the barn, so they could safely tend to their livestock. When their provisions grew low, the men, who were brothers, set out into the storm on their horses for Nebraska City. The women begged them not to go. I imagined silent children watching their mothers tending the fire and listening for the husbands’ return. After the storm abated, the wives discovered the two brothers frozen between the house and the barn. The provisions were in the barn with the horses.

My father grew up on a tenant farm in southeastern Nebraska. One harsh winter during the Great Depression, he and his brother struck out across frigid fields to hunt for rabbits and squirrels to supplement home canned tomatoes, the only food remaining that January. When the sky turned dark and the wind whisked across the empty fields, my grandmother must have felt blizzard lore course through her veins.

My husband was born into the Great Depression on a farm in the Flint Hills of Kansas where weather ruled life’s rhythms. Winter could be arduous. He slept with his brothers in an unheated room. When food ran low, they ate steamed wheat and gravy. Water froze in the kitchen bucket. In winter the boys dressed beside a stove in the kitchen.

In Kentucky when snow fell, my children would beg to go sledding. I remember one winter night when, after papering stairway walls, we went sledding with friends until midnight. Laughter and brightly colored parkas sparkled in the icy air. Our noses tingled, and snow caked our mittens . Afterwards we warmed ourselves by a wood fire and drank hot chocolate. It was 1981, nearly one hundred years from the blizzards of 1888.

We are now five generations distant from the Schoolhouse Blizzard. Weather scientists track storms to the minute. We are not precariously housed. Most of us live within a short drive to groceries. We can work online. Our most dramatic event is a household teasing about which cookies to bake, oatmeal raisin or chocolate chip.

This morning the mom of this Omaha family noticed that her bread pans were lying outside next to an unfinished snow fort. In the night the family puppy had discovered a bag of chocolate candy hidden under an afghan. Pieces of gold foil littered the rug. A sock here, a towel over there, jackets on the floor, magazines askew — the scene is definitely relaxed.

Last night we went sledding in the moonlight. I clung to my grandson as we careened down a steep sled run and over a mogul. The dogs chased us. At the bottom of the hill, my daughter laughed, “Mom, you okay?!” The Big Dipper sparkled in the clear sky above. It was thrilling.

Fact is, we are only inconvenienced when the airport closes, and relieved if we cannot go to work or to school.

References:

The Children’s Blizzard by David Laskin

HarperCollins, Oct 13, 2009 – History – 336 pages
Thousands of impoverished Northern European immigrants were promised that the prairie offered “land, freedom, and hope.” The disastrous blizzard of 1888 revealed that their free homestead was not a paradise but a hard, unforgiving place governed by natural forces they neither understood nor controlled, and America’s heartland would never be the same.

The Blizzard Voices by Ted Kooser, Tom Pohrt (illustrator)

Bison Books, September 1, 2006 – poetry – 64 pages
This book is a collection of poems recording the devastation unleashed on the Great Plains by the blizzard of January 12, 1888. The Blizzard Voices is based on the actual reminiscences of the survivors as recorded in documents from the time and written reminiscences from years later. Here are the haunting voices of the men and women who were teaching school, working the land, and tending the house when the storm arrived and changed their lives forever.

Eighteen eighty-eight, a Thursday,
the twelfth of January:
It had been warm all morning,
with a soft, southerly breeze,
melting the snowdrifts back
from the roads. There were bobwhite
and prairie chickens out
pecking for grit in the wheel-ruts.
0n lines between shacks and soddies,
women were airing their bedding–
bright quilts that flapped and billowed,
ticks sodden as thunderheads.
In the schoolyards, children
were rolling the wet, gray snow
into men, into fortresses,
laughing and splashing about,
in their shirtsleeves. Their teachers
stood in the doorways and watched.

Odd weather for January;
a low line of clouds in the north;
too warm, too easy. And the air
filled with electricity;
an iron poker held up
close to a stovepipe would spark,
and a comb drawn through the hair
would crackle. One woman said
she’d had to use a stick of wood
to open her oven door.

Excerpted from Ted Kooser’s The Blizzard Voices

Over the River and Through the Woods

Crab Orchard, Nebraska, today is a village of 38 people. A paved road branches off from Highway 50, passes through the village, and continues eventually to the Johnson County courthouse, churches, and stores in Tecumseh, Nebraska. A bridge crosses the north fork of the Little Nemaha River which drains into the Nemaha River and finally into the Missouri River. Along both sides of the road through Crab Orchard are tilted buildings with broken windows, weedy empty lots, a few bungalows, some house trailers, and the outlines of foundations bereft of once proud structures. The most substantial buildings today are the old Richardson gas station, the U.S. Post Office, and a two-story bungalow on a hill overlooking the post office.

At one time Crab Orchard had five churches, the first school in Johnson County, and a rail line. One of those churches was the Methodist Church where in the thirties my grandmother taught Sunday School, where my parents met as teenagers, and where many of my mother’s relatives were baptized and married. Demolished in 1987, the Methodist church was the last church to stand in Crab Orchard.

In the 1950’s this same road through Crab Orchard was gravel. I remember a general store, a hardware and farm supply store, an ice cream shop, a bank, two gas stations, the post office, two churches, a number of well kept bungalows, and an abandoned two-story brick high school.

“Do you know where you are going?” my husband asked last summer as I drove through Crab Orchard on my way past what was once my grandparents’ farm.

“Absolutely!”

From San Francisco, cross the Oakland Bay Bridge, drive through Donner Pass in the Sierras — listen to Dad’s tales of the starving Donner party — skirt Reno and cross the dry desert to Winnemucca, Nevada — stay overnight at a motel with a swimming pool — cross the Salt Lake desert — question Dad about Mormons and polygamy — climb into the Rockies, stop at Steamboat Springs for hamburgers and cokes, wind through the Snowy Range near Medicine Bow — quiz Dad about the Oregon Trail — drop to the plains — read Burma Shave signs — cruise along rail lines through Rawlings, cross into Nebraska, veer southeast toward Beatrice along gravel roads with the setting sun at your back, cross the Nemaha River, poke along through four blocks of Crab Orchard, turn south at the rutted dirt road to Lewiston, pass three sections, and turn into the long lane to the white farm house with the screened-in front porch when you see the red barn, the mowed yard, the red tractor shed, the work shed, and the chicken house.

My mother, Helen Jeffery Collins, grew up near Crab Orchard on a farm with her one brother and three sisters. Mom always said she never wanted to live on a farm again –ever! We lived south of San Francisco with every convenience: a phone on a private line, running water from hot and cold spigots, showers, flush toilets, electricity, and forced air heat. We walked to a neighborhood school with a classroom for every elementary grade level, a library, an auditorium, and a cafeteria.

Despite my mother’s aversion to farm life, she waited eagerly for letters from her Nebraska family. Summer’s joy was complete when Mom and Dad would pack us into the car for a vacation at the farm. Singing and laughing with uncharacteristic liberty, my mother, a reflective and reticent woman, visibly glowed as we drew near Crab Orchard.

Today an oil painting of the farm hangs in my study, a reminder of many escapades and explorations. My brother Gary once lured my brother Burt and me to the top of the windmill where, frozen with fear, we yelled in vain to be rescued. Against all rules, we repeatedly chased sows into a cedar grove until Grandpa discovered us and herded us into the house for a lecture about irritated sows and vulnerable piglets. Hidden among cedar and oak trees lay abandoned, rusty farm equipment, where we invented wild adventures with happy endings.

Our arrival inspired Sunday family picnics on the front lawn and softball games. I learned to milk a cow, pluck chickens, and haul water. My brothers and I searched for litters of kittens in the hay loft and played hide and seek in fields of tall corn. If properly bribed, we would gather eggs from feisty hens. Once we even attended the nearby one room school house with our cousins.

Running water was primitive. A cistern stored water for cooking and bathing. In the kitchen on the counter, a dipper hung on the edge of an enamel bucket. Everyone drank from the common dipper. When the level in the bucket was low, my grandmother would send me to fetch more water from the well in the front yard.

Honeysuckle sweetened the air. Blue morning glories hung on the fence. The windmill’s rusty squeaks mixed with clucking chickens and bawling calves. I’d raise and lower the pump handle, feel its pressure, and listen for the rhythmic rush of rising water until — swoosh — cool water filled the bucket half-way, a proper child’s portion of a bucket’s burden.

Grandma’s kitchen smelled of fresh bread, cherry pies, fried chicken, and corn pudding. Grandpa’s pungent work shed smelled of hot coals, heated iron, grease, and horse manure. The night air buzzed with insects and tree frogs while we slept on cots on the screened front porch, a summer farm’s version of air conditioning.

It was a sweet and wondrous place for city kids and a terrible responsibility for the adults — this farm, homesteaded in the 1890’s and virtually abandoned to nature today, the barn still standing as sturdy as ever but all else dissolving slowly into dust.

Yes, I can drive to the farm, from anywhere, from San Francisco, from Omaha, or from Bowling Green where I live today in modern comfort. But I wouldn’t want to stop at the old Jeffery farm along the Lewiston to Crab road, not today — because the place vibrates in memory. It’s not possible to purchase back what once was.