We Are Slogging On

Yesterday just before noon our Mexican friend, Nuco pulled in driving his new truck. For a number of years he worked for J. doing both carpentry and mechanical work. Like many men he was lured by the wages for working in the oil fields and has spent the last several years working in Sheridan, WY which is about 3 hours away.  [Every place in Wyoming is about 3 hours from everywhere else.]

He doesn't always return to Lander on his week off and it had been several months since we had seen him. We were concerned that with the haste to be off house hunting we wouldn't see him.

Just about the time that we remark his long absence he arrives.

He seemed not at all astonished to learn we had sold the house and were venturing off on a retirement caper.

He immediately insisted that we get in the truck and he would drive us to town to eat at the Mexican restaurant El Sol.

Kind man that he is, he spent the afternoon after lunch helping J. to move tools and equipment out of the garage and down to the old barn where it will have to remain until we come back from our house search.

While the men labored outside I continued to empty closets and kitchen cupboards, filling box after box.

Today, daughter G. had a dental appointment so was off work.  She appeared and began directing the sorting and cleaning of the kitchen, telling me, of course, that I have "too much stuff."  Grandson D. is off school early on Wednesdays so he was also recruited to help.

G. has taken my plants to her house to care for while we are away.  D. and J. hauled out boxes, removed all but a few sticks of furniture into the van.  G. found a home with one of her work mates for the sewing cabinet I don't want to move.

The excess of clothing, shoes, oddments, canned goods and such have been laboriously stashed in the cabin where we and the cats are climbing over them.

The cats!  A stray cat wandered onto the porch at 4 A.M. and several of our resident vigilantes went into siren mode---singing cat war songs up and down the scale.  J. lept from bed, his big flashlight already in hand and shone it out the door onto the big tiger tom who was now sitting in the drive. 

I stayed out in the living area, trying to calm the cats while J. went back to bed.  Finally, convinced that the felines were "over" the intrusion, I crept back to bed.  I had just gotten warm and sleepy when the outcry came again with even more of the cat tribe adding their voices.

Resignedly, I got up, put on the coffee.

It has been a long day!

I got all the kitchen cabinetry wiped down inside and out--a big job.  Now merely [!] to sort the odds and ends, clean the floors and we'll be ready for the closing early on Friday morning.

I have to pack a suitcase, make sure I have reading material sufficient for the journey.

I must remember to read the electric meters, have the phone cancelled.

I think I must keep my "eye on the prize."

I have a post or two scheduled to share later.

I expect to suffer bloggers' withdrawal.

Family Singing

Dan with his guitar; Mary with "Emily," her double-bass.
Dave, J. and Dan making "country music."
J. with his mother's restored vintage autoharp.

Mary, Sharon, J., Dan, Dave on a summer evening.

Kathy, Mary, J., Sharon, Dave.

I grew up as part of a family that has been making music for generations. My maternal grandmother, an accomplished pianist, played "dinner music" at the summer hotels in her youth, sometimes joined by her brother on fiddle, her cousin on banjo. Later she played in a corner of the darkened "town hall" while the reels of a "silent movie" jerked and sparkled through a drama of intrigue and narrow escapes. She provided music for church services, as did her sister, and later, carrying on the tradition, her daughter and her sister's daughters sat at piano or organ on a Sunday morning while choir and congregation raised their voices in hymns of the faith. I have likewise played piano [less often--and less skillfully-- an organ] for my own church and area congregations who found themselves temporarily without a musician.

We lived in several rooms of my grandfather's farmhouse until I was 5. I have memories of relatives coming to visit on Sunday afternoons. When a meal was finished and talk had run down, everyone drifted to the parlor where my mother took her seat before the old piano. Popular tunes from "sheet music" were tried out, followed by old familiars from The Golden Book of Songs. As the sun slanted golden shadows through the parlour's west windows, the group turned to hymns, for which they needed no printed notes or words. Faces shone, the effortless harmonies soared robustly, each voice in perfect pitch.

My Mother taught me to sing before I could read words, years before she began to unfold the mystery of the black shapes which filled the lines and spaces of a musical staff. I can't recall at what point I could look at the "notes" and hear their sound in my mind before it was struck on the keyboard. She taught music in the public schools for many years, was still taking a few private pupils for piano lessons as she entered her 80's. The last time I was with her, at the nursing home where she spent much of her last two years, we played 4-handed piano in the social room. Mother's eyesight and her memory had failed, but we played the hymns and old songs with scarecly a false note.

We had no piano for a number of years after J. and I married. We put records on the 33 rpm turntable and sang with Tennesse Ernie Ford [hymns and gospel songs] or Johnny Cash and the Carter family. We copied words onto paper and sang again with the recordings until we were confident enough to sing for others at church. We sang often when our children were growing up, especially on long winter evenings. We had a succession of old upright pianos--some better than others.

We have found folks to sing with in Wyoming. About every six weeks our friend Dave drives 2 1/2 hours from the town where he and his wife Kathy live, loading his big van with tools, air compressor, high-intesity lamps, so that he can set up in the front of the quilt shop to service and repair sewing machines. He brings his guitar and on the evening that he eats supper with us, we look forward to an hour or so of singing.

This week we had two such occaisions: Tuesday evening at our house and Wednesday evening at Mary's home. Sometimes Kathy can leave her work long enough to make the trip with Dave, adding her strong warm voice and the throb of guitar or mandolin. We sing until someone reluctantly reminds us that we all have to get up for work in the morning.

When we went to Vermont late in August for my Dad's funeral, we took an afternoon away from sadness and tasks to be done, a time to meet with my cousins "across the lake" in New York. We had never made music as a group, but we sang the old hymns that our grandparents and great grandparents sang together; three women who sing harmony seemingly plucked from nowhere, the notes heard in our heads, two of our husbands, a guitar. Sadly, we realized belatedly that no one thought to take pictures. We were too absorbed in singing--just as the generations of our family had always done.

This comment on family singing is from the Farm Diary notes of Henry Beston which end each chapter in "Northern Farm; A Chronicle of Maine."

"How pleasant to spend some time with a singing family! During my own lifetime, one of the most dismal social changes of our world has been the disappearance of singing as part of human life and the work that has to be done. People used to sing, now you scarcely hear anyone even whistle. The world is poorer for the loss. There is nothing like music for giving one a sense of solidarity, and it lightens both labor and the heart."

Smoke from the Mountains

Column of smoke rising from a brush fire

The smoke is spreading



A rose that the deer missed!





Lemon bars for our shop lunch

We quilt shop girls agreed to have lunch together this noon, salads and cold drinks to be delivered. I decided to make lemon bars as a dessert treat. Busy with baking I didn't get outside to peg sheets and towels on the clothesline until after 10. I was immediately struck with the scent of burning sagebrush and discovered the plume of smoke rising in the foothills.

The heat of summer has been tardy this year, but it has arrived this week bringing with it a searing dryness. Most evenings lightning zips across the sky and thunder growls in the distance, but little rain falls. What little moisture comes quickly evaporates in shimmering heat. Western forest fires are a yearly disaster, whether caused by lightning strikes in dead timber or by human carelessness.

During the summer of 2000 my husband and son were building a large log home at a billionaire's hobby ranch near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. I was hired to overhaul and tend the flower gardens around the main lodge. Once a week I loaded groceries and two dogs into whatever truck was available and drove over South Pass or Togwottee Pass to spend several days gardening and tidying up messes of neglected housekeeping the men had created. It was a summer of intense heat and many fires. Fires in Wyoming, in Idaho, in California. A dirty yellowish smudge hung over the mountains by day; every evening the sun set in a smear of soiled clouds. The fire's breath blew in when we opened windows for the cooling night breezes; towels and clothing hung outside collected the charred odor; working outdoors our eyes stung, throats rasped. "That's from the big one in Idaho," we said.

Fire moved into the folds of the mountains behind the ranch, the orange glow visible on the night horizon. One day the men began to seriously consider the possibility of the fire cresting the ridges a few miles away and sweeping down the valley where the ranch spread its hundreds of acres. They worked on through a sultry afternoon, alert to the direction of the wind and the shifting smoke. Feathery ash and bits of charred pine floated into the work site. Down the hill half a mile away, I continued clipping carragana and trimming back potentilla that had gone sprawling into the paths during several years of neglect.

I became gradually aware of a strangely heavy silence. No birds were calling, the "chislers" were in their burrows, their cheeky chatter stilled. I stood, clippers dangling from my hand, inhaling wood smoke, turned to see a doe a few yards away, caught like a statue in the uneasy hush of an unnatural dusk.

The wind shifted, the fire raced through miles of high mountain forest before it was contained, burnt out. Wild animals perished in its rush and roar, firefighters worked until overcome by smoke and exhaustion.

I know of two fires, maybe three, in our area today. The one I spotted this morning may be the one at Willow Creek. [My sense of direction, never great, hasn't found its bearings here.] Another was up in the Sinks Canyon.

We invited an older lady we all love to have lunch with us at the shop. She came in a bit late, shaken and distraught. She and her husband, both retired, have a home in Sinks Canyon. The fire there, she told us, was considered the work of an arsonist. She could see the leaping flames from their home, as fire equipment was rushed in. "What would we take?" she asked. "If we have to leave, what could I quickly pack to take with us?" As we finished our lunch the fire sirens blared again. My co-workers, living here so many years, can distinguish the city fire and rescue vehicles from those of the rural fire department. The local radio station interrupts programing to give the location of each fire and ask that motorists avoid that area. We all cringe as the trucks charge along the main street, horns and sirens shatteringly imperative, blowing traffic aside. Later in the afternoon the bulletin came over the air: the fire in Sinks Canyon was under control but not out. If the wind doesn't come up.........!

We hugged our friend as she left, assured her that if she needed help we would do what we could. I have interrupted this writing several times to stand on my front porch in the dark, scanning the wavering line where the foothills blend into the night sky. We are so close to the mountains, so enfolded by the foothills that the mountain peaks are not visible. Already, in the intensity of summer heat, twilight falls earlier, the air cools. I don't smell the pungent aura of burning sage. The air seems clean. Perhaps a shower dropped soothing moisture somewhere above us.

We dare not be lulled. It is the season of burning, when grimy smoke rolls down from the mountains and the restless winds turn the flames where they will.