We set a record for this fine, sunny day, 65 at 3:30 p.m., while Jacksonville, Florida, had a mere 63. That's what we call shirt-sleeve weather: I changed from hot sweatshirt during late-morning errands to a short-sleeved pullover and opened windows before going off to mail a gift to my newest third cousin--we use ordinal numbers rather than degree--Raney Krause born at home the way I was, albeit not her parents' intention; to stop finally and buy some bread, Kalamara olive and tomato basil, at a French emigre's place in Dundee hard hit by the childish superpatriot tantrum that wouldn't even allow French fries (he wants to become an American citizen ultimately, for heaven's sake); and to re-visit one of Joslyn Art Museum's best shows, "Renaissance to Rococo: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art," this time to check out details I hadn't noticed before when I read placards and took in the whole paintings. This time I saw details: the nine other paintings with dogs besides the one with five I had noted; the very sturdy hoe Jesus has inexplicably in his right hand I'd missed under the cumulonimbus mammatus sky I hadn't missed--the kind we fear as ominous eggcrate wind-storm clouds--in Orsi's Noli me tangere; the clumsy wooden saddle in the lower left corner of Cardi's Adoration of the Shepherds; the many variations of angels, those creatures stolen, along with the Devil, the Magi, and several aspects of the cult of Mithra--virgin birth, 12 disciples, etc.--by Christianity from the Zoroastrians (Zoroaster/Zarathustra, better known by Richard Strauss' Thus Spake Zarathustra theme for Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey). Curiously many of those angels had halos much like the one on our Christmas-treetop angel, invisible glass with incandescent rim, halos the end result of the auras mediums still claim to see emanating around people or ghosts. I studied the plants the way I did hiking, palm trees wildly different from very stylized like Bob Ross' to some kind of punk haystack haircut, but I looked especially hard at the painted illusions of fabrics like the richly embroidered brocades, the satin sheens, the wondrous velour quality of Joseph's and Mary's clothes in four pastels in one favorite, Halle's The Holy Family with its robust red-headed Christchild. Still the most startling illusion was the checkers rolling off their board out of the bottom of the painting in Traversi's A Quarrel over a Board Game. My longtime favorite painted illusions remain glass and gems, the little daubs of white, gray, sometimes colors that resolve, as you back away, into realistically glistening goblets and goldfish bowls and the omnipresent baroque pearl earrings and necklaces--baroque means "irregularly shaped [pearl]." Of course, I know the joke of Magritte's This Is Not a Pipe painting portraying a pipe, bluntly mocking people who demand realism in art, for naturally it isn't a pipe but a painting of one on a flat surface. The illusion. Which is what art's usually about.
I'd been thinking about illusion anyway, having tuned into an unusual documentary this morning on the Sundance channel with its independent/foreign films. A 2003 French film, Investigations into the Invisible World, is a straightforward documentary of Icelanders discussing seeing elves, gnomes, fairies, trolls, ghosts, water monsters from years like 1970 and 1993, usually standing in front of the relevant sites: a policeman talking about a rock his friendly gnome lived in; a medium describing the ghostly inhabitants of a haunted hotel, their spectral surroundings, and what they were saying at the very moment the camera showed nothing but her, with closed eyes, in several rooms; several schoolchildren describing a water monster, followed by a bulletin board of their so-inspired drawings; a tourist map drawn for locating sites of fairies and gnomes, described by a national tourism official; a Druid priest castigating Christians for oversimplifying the world of gods and performing a marriage in the Norse names of Friga (hence our Friday) and Thor (hence our Thursday). Thor, "Thunder," used lightning as a weapon; Santa's reindeer, Donner and Blitzen, are literally Thunder and Lightning. Further, if you've not known about Druids, some still having their celebrations at Stonehenge, you can watch Heath Ledger's first TV serial, Roar, occasionally rerun on the SciFi Channel--preceding his popular Ten Things I Hate About You--in which he's the young chief, Conor, of a Celtic tribe combatting the Romans in early Britain, the Druids their spiritual guides. I knew about the sensational Icelandic biotech DNA studies, the most comprehensive anywhere, from that nation's meticulous medical records now mapped out genetically, so I was actually most interested in the identifying names under each witness, all daughters and sons, Margarita Jonsdottir, Selma Eriksdottir, Thomas Emilsson, Matthew Guntersson.
As a child I virtually memorized Hans Christian Anderson's and the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales and knew the Old Testament back-to-front from a thick comic-book version, and ever since mythology has been one of my major interests up through Robert Graves and Joseph Campbell and graduate study in the area. Unlike a cousin who ignorantly pooh-poohed mythology, knowing nothing about it, I believe in its scholarship bolstered by historical records and archaeology, such as the National Geographic's coverage of an ancient Black Sea flood now thought to have inspired the several Near East flood stories, of which Noah's Ark was a latecomer (all efforts to find his unlikely ark on Ararat failing, which ark wouldn't even hold pairs of all the mammals, certainly not insect duos, given the 8,000-9,000 ant species alone). Like Campbell, a born-and-bred Roman Catholic who strode away from his religion as he learned more and more about world religions and their multiform mythologies, I haven't much interest in rigidly institutionalized religion of the closed-mind variety except as I need to protect myself against its rabid followers who refuse to let nonbelievers alone, which remark hints how I reacted to this strange Icelandic world like a pocket from ancient civilization, a living museum of mythology. I react similarly to my sisters, for we have an informational-intelligence wall between us more like the Rocky Mountains, craggy stone, often impenetrable, beautiful but highly dangerous in various ways, as opposed to my Grand Canyon Generation Gap of different moral values, cultural tastes, and child-rearing notions. My sisters undoubtedly consider it informational-overkill bullying, as exasperating to them as they sometimes are to me, not so much a wall as an annoying pothole to drive around or over. (I had toyed with using the Pacific but find the ocean boringly flat, besides which I doubt I could even manage my self-taught backstroke with my fake knee.) I've been up and down the Rockies, including over the deceptively simple South Pass our pioneers used for crossing, as well as being traumatized by Wolf Creek Pass.
Which is to say, I view many of my sisters' beliefs as superstitious ignorance, such as asking a psychic for love advice or believing Ghost, with Patrick Swayze as one and Whoopi Goldberg as his medium, is valid beyond merely an entertaining story. I snort, they snarl. It is personal history, naturally, that's really walled us apart here. I started reading at 3 and have never stopped, happiest as books pile up around me, usually with two to four going at once, in teaching years having about 5,000 (most of those since given away, books far too difficult to move around), along with 17 magazines and seven book clubs when I taught in Illinois. I lived for several years on those rarefied reservations I disdain today called college campuses, hoping I taught my 15,000 students and learning from I-couldn't-guess-how-many themes or essay examinations or informative term papers. I have 30 hours of A toward a Ph.D. that includes a mythology class which gave me a lasting interest in twins. Neither of my sisters has a college degree, though some education beyond high school; both are highly trusted professionals far superior in their areas than I could be, gregariously popular, leading very full lives, loving and much loved. One doesn't even take a newspaper, declaring herself too busy to read, at one time listening to audio books but now usually a TV victim. The other does read newspapers, not many books; she also works crossword puzzles. So this Rocky Mountain wall of disparity looms between us, formed by our own colliding tectonic plates of personal background. I feel toward the illusions of the "ignorantly superstitious" as I do toward magicians' illusions, which gave me my title. And isn't it engrossing to watch the TV documentaries explaining how magicians perform their illusionary tricks of disappearing tigers and women sawn in half? Reminds me that I bought a book of magic tricks at a Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey sideshow back when bigtop tent units traveled even to places like Norfolk in the 1940s, but I lacked the chemicals or special devices or dexterity to do many of them.
However, let me see if I can, with words, float up a vision of farms for you. I have an ulterior reason, which you'll have to wait for. The Bloomfield farm first, the one I'm most familiar with. Scraggly tall trees, ash and cottonwood, lined the mail route on the south side--then State 84 to Bloomfield from Center's main intersection--and the county road on the west running north to other farms. These were not the triple rows of the government-sponsored shelterbelts with certain varieties, like the line of silvery grey Russian olives nearest to roads, just single rows. From the graveled mail route and the mail box--we relished getting the mail for Grandma--the dirt lane took about a block north to reach the large bare yard centered on the windmill we clambered up and its livestock water tank we "swam" in, later a new chicken house by it for the boxes of baby chicks Grandma got by mail. Stupid infants easily frightened into panic-crowd suffocation from piling up in corners but Eastertime cute. I guess. (I've always considered chickens symbols of supreme stupidity more than cowardice, albeit amused by a story Mom told, with sound effects, of staggering chickens drunk on fermented apples at the Old Brick House.) Along the west side of the lane was the apple orchard including plenty of the tart green apples Mom liked and Grandma made many American-symbol pies from. I think Grandma also had a couple of peach trees. (I was reminded of that orchard when I visited Old Jules' apple orchards south of Gordon made famous by his daughter, Mari Sandoz, buried nearby, one of our three notable Nebraskan women authors, along with Willa Cather and Bess Streeter Aldrich.) Also on the west at the north end of the orchard was the two-story white wood-frame house with porch making it an L in a square/rectangle of trees, those tree squares/rectangles still the way to spot no-longer-existing farm places. Two front doors led to either the large living room on the south or the dining room on the north, with a small kitchen west of the dining room and its tiny, lower enclosed back porch, a kind of mud room, and the back door. The stairwell was at the northwest dining room corner, its landing turn with, then, my favorite picture of Mom at 3 in a Prince Valiant hairdo, straight bottom with bangs--like Louise Brooks' bob--and a big hair ribbon in a large oval ornate tin frame. (I have that too.) Three bedrooms upstairs included the largest, my grandparents', at the south end, usually forbidden for play, the two smaller ones connected by closets so that we could circle around chasing one another just like me and Santa in the Center church, crawling over the clothes baskets under the hanging clothes: hallway-bedroom-bedroom-hallway.
I can even furnish the rooms. In the southwest corner of the living room sat the heavy old upright piano with its battered keys, next, some extra chair(s), then Grandma's curved-front desk in the northwest corner. The dark blue velvet sofa lined the southeast corner, then the door to the porch, then Grandpa's wooden rocker (?) with its smoking stand, from which today I watch my TV. The dark blue velvet chair matching the sofa was between the piano and the sofa, a magazine stand at its side. A coffee table fronted the sofa. The oil stove stood in the north center on its fireproof metal-asbestos mat. There must've been a smaller one in the dining room, because in cold weather the living room stove wasn't started unless someone was going to be in there and the kitchen range wouldn't have heated the dining room that well. The buffet on the east dining room wall was by the main entrance door, the door facing south onto the porch (because of the house's L-shape, the porch subtracting residential space). The all-important dining table lined parallel to the north wall with assorted chairs around it. The small, narrow kitchen with its central aisle had the big corncob-kindling range on the east wall, the sink and counter on the west, overhead cabinets. Upstairs my grandparents' room had a "new" Arte-Moderne/Art-Deco-hangover bed and dresser of wooden streamlined veneer and my great grandparents' small dresser, with marble inset top between two small, long raised drawers below a mirror set in a heavy frame with crenelated (think castle wall) top, two symmetrical little shelves above some birdseye-veneer decoration, the three regular dresser drawers below veneered in thick birdseye maple with tear-drop pulls. The other bedrooms had in contrast plain bedroom furniture, beds and dressers, though I discovered later that the two bureaus I have, one low and wide, the other high and narrower, have golden-oak-veneer fronts for the wavy-curved drawers, revealed when, after many paint disguises over the years, Mom stripped them down to the original wood to varnish them, ruining the wide one's top by too much sanding. I'm sure Uncle L. or cousins D. and M., who often stayed with my grandparents over the summers, can make "any necessary additions/deletions/corrections," as we said in court.
Back of the house were black walnuts. The other trees were mostly ash--box elder--I think. A rubber-tire swing on a rope hung from one of those in the front, the only sidewalk from porch to gate, the "lawn" grass and weeds, mowed but unlike the pampered, neatly mown bluegrass my father forever fussed over in town. The outhouse was at the northwest corner out the small back porch off the kitchen. It seems stepping-stone slabs flush with the dirt led to the privy and the garden. The house and clothesline and large garden north of it were fenced off by galvanized large wire mesh (2" x 4" rectangles). Dogs came out of the gate barking, the most memorable one a mongrel version of a dachshund we called Low Wheel Base.
North of that house-garden area, by the opening in the trees for the back way out to the county road, was a metal grain silo, for oats mainly, fun to jump into when low and Grandpa wasn't around. Beyond it were storage sheds on one side of a roofed passage, the other side a hog shed and corn crib. I learned about natural birth in Grandpa's hog houses, awed by the baby pigs plopping out of the sows. The tractor and/or truck could be parked in the central passage. East of the farm house up the gentle, bare slope of the low hill were the red chicken coops (above the aforementioned storm/canning cellar dug into the hillside) where my cousins and I vied to collect the eggs, preferably gathering them from the nesting rows while the hens were elsewhere because I could never work up the nerve to reach under sitting hens who rudely pecked anyone rudely reaching under them. These chickens provided not only a breakfast staple, boiled eggs for potato salad and other dishes, fried picnic lunches, but also extra money for Grandma, storing their eggs in slatted wooden box crates to take to town to sell along with the milk and cream separated on the front porch. I have to digress to tell about my visit last year to ex-teacher friends living in St. Louis. When I walked into one room, I exclaimed, "What the hell are you doing with a separator, Ron!?" A St. Louis city kid like his wife, he said, "You're the first one who's ever recognized what it was." He'd bought it at an auction and shined it all up. We loved cranking Grandma's, besides which Up West it could mean we'd make fresh ice cream.
Back to the tour. North of the chicken houses, at the northeast corner of the large yard, was the big red barn, where the cattle for milking and the horse were. Grandpa always had horses, teams of them in early photos that he and Dad used for plowing and harvesting, a single one called Peggy Ann at Bloomfield I didn't like because she kicked me once. The cattle rarely--besides their milk/cream--and mostly the hogs were for butchering, meat for the table, some to be canned by Grandma, some to be frozen in the locker plants in town, the only artificial freezers then. (My brother-in-law, once trained as a butcher, still helps his farming brothers when they butcher, getting meat the same way.) I could never get the hang of milking, whereas Mama could squirt milk from the teat into my face. I did like the little three-legged milking stools Grandpa used. And overhead was the hay mow, a fine play space. The pasture ran from the barn east, over the low hills where we played Doctor beyond adult eyes; the fields were north for corn and grain.
Let me skip to their first Knox County farm, which I knew only by sight when I was small and have avoided mentioning till here. I'm wondering if Uncle L. was born here. Still known as the Old Brick House, painted a few times by Mom in her later years because its ultimate fate broke her heart but not her memory, about which cousin Linda has written a poem, it was a big two-story brick house at the end of a long lane lined on both sides by eastern red cedars, now to be seen only in photos. On the west side of the road facing east, it had a large front porch, a garden and clothesline northeast and chicken house south of the house, and other buildings I can't tell you, but I know it's where Mom spent most of her growing-up years--she was born on the Niobrara River north of Mariaville Up West--where she lived while she was in school. (When in Bloomfield High School, a cheerleader who gave an arrowhead collection to the school I never saw and so never forgave her for, during the school year she boarded in town as many rural youths did, going home weekends.) The Old Brick House is where Dad lay in bed upstairs for months after a packing-house injury in Omaha when a drillhammer fell on him off a scaffold injuring his spinal cord; the doctor would come out regularly to puncture the swollen spinal cord, the fluid geysering to the ceiling. Dad claimed the injury made his hearing so acute that he could hear a fly crossing the ceiling, and Mom and Grandma swore it was true. It was also when he made a prescient drawing of a future auto, which I have. It's where Dad and Mom were living, of course, when, as mentioned, one October day too windy to pick corn, they, with Grandpa's youngest brother, Uncle Joe, and Ella Larson, drove to Yankton to marry in the courthouse (now razed), the wedding breakfast a loaf of bread and a ring of bologna bought to eat on the way back home, as Mom always laughed about. She was 18, just out of high school; he was 27, the hired man. His family farm was farther west, which he had had to leave at 13 when his mother died, quitting school at the eighth grade to hire out and so survive.
That Old Brick House had a crack from a lightning strike down one side which later owners used as an excuse to have it condemned and torn down. If you drive from Center two miles south to the "new" pavement to Bloomfield, go six miles east where there's a picnic bench at the end of a shelterbelt on the north side of the road, turn south for about a mile and a half, you will see the site on the west but nothing else. Everything is gone, not even any trees left.
That, I was horrified to discover, is what happened to the Bloomfield farm. Nothing is left, no trees, no buildings, nothing but a bare, flattened grain field sweeping from the road north. If you didn't remember how to get there, you'd miss it entirely. I was helped by having it imprinted, my inner magnetic version of the sensory feat of a migrating bird or salmon able to find its way back to the home nesting grounds. Fisk's hill just to the west, a short steep one for the road, helped. That's where I was picked up by an old man in a Model A who recognized me trudging the gravel's edge with my little cardboard suitcase and took me on back to town, dropping me off at Dad's station. I was somewhere like 5 or 6, starting my way back to Center without telling my grandparents, when I was supposed to stay over because Mom was going to be gone a few days (?), but I couldn't stand the farm or being away from home any longer than one weepy night. As you've anticipated, I was roundly rebuked, ears scalded, about getting into a car with somebody I didn't know--they knew him, but I didn't, which was the point--sneaking off, categorized with lying, stealing, murdering; disobeying Mom, hurting Grandma's feelings, much else, I'm sure. I wish today, as Mom did with the Brick House, the Bloomfield farm I fled from still stood. A whole scrapbook has disappeared for me, as it has for hundreds of others with family-farm memories. But, if I've done my sleight of mind well enough here, maybe you can see it anyway.
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