Flyover People Daily News

 

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

 

REMEMBERING THE DEAD

The cemetery was my playground.

While Dad mowed, my 6-year-old self blew fluff off of dandelions. I traced the engraving on stones, and I climbed into the arms of a cedar tree and watched ants scatter as I peeled its hairy bark.

Among his many jobs, my late father served for years as the sexton of the Pawnee Rock Township Cemetery. A windy hill, just north of the city limits, was where we kept the town’s departed.

This was the family business. Dad rode the mower while Mom and my brother Leon and I trimmed the buffalo grass near the stones with hand clippers. I worked in the cemetery each year until I left for college in 1977.

The names on the stones built a community, a community that had relocated from town and nearby farms to this place on the hill.

When I was a child, the carved names were merely names. But now, many of the newer stones represent people I once knew.

Under the shadow of cedars toward the cemetery’s north end lies Harry Lewis, a bachelor, retired from the U.S. Railway Postal Service. He kept to himself mostly, didn’t speak to kids, and he wore a city man’s hat.

One Halloween, my friends and I dared ourselves to trick-or-treat at Harry Lewis’ home, doubting he’d open his door, afraid that he would. Harry answered, then stepped away into the darkness of his house. He returned with foil-wrapped cylinders, peeled back the aluminum and handed us each a nickel.

My third grade teacher, Mildred Dunavan, rests on the east side of the cemetery. When I got my first car, a 1973 Plymouth Valiant, I named the car Mildred in her honor.

Aunt Julietha and Uncle Herman are on the west side, neighbors to U.S. Sen. George McGill, a 1930s Democrat, perhaps the most famous of the residents here.

Another grave nearby is Carole Mead, the mother of my friend Karla. Carole drove me to the Larned hospital the day I broke my arm during an eighth grade mishap. She always had a grin and a punch line. With Carole gone, the world is missing a bit of its orneriness.

Stones from the late 1800s, speckled white-yellow-green with lichens, huddle near the graveyard’s entrance on the south side. One of my great-great-grandfathers is buried here under a narrow, vertical stone with an inscription “Born in Russia.”

Memorial Day is the big day in the cemetery world. For weeks in advance, we spent long days perfecting the acreage, trimming tree limbs, cutting grass, hoping to add beauty and order to the emotion of remembrance.

Several days before the holiday, while we did the final touch-up work, the pebble-covered roads filled with Chevrolets and Fords and Buicks.

Visitors left bouquets of white and pink peonies in coffee cans, weighted with sand and water. Crosses made of red plastic carnations marked graves like exclamation points. Daisies in Hellman’s Mayonnaise jars held steady in the wind with wire cut from clothes hangers, one end bent over the lip of the glass, the other end speared into the soil.

A visitor might place his hand on top of a headstone, a pause before he turned toward his car. We would look away, ashamed to have intruded on a private moment.

By Memorial Day, the cemetery danced with life and color. Small American flags flapped over the graves of military veterans.

About a week later, we returned for the cleanup. We plucked the Folders cans, poured the sand and water, now thick and green, onto the roadway. We tossed the cans and browned peonies into the bed of Dad’s truck. Plastic flowers were moved close to the stones where they wouldn’t be caught by the mower.

Lives pass. Memorial Day comes and goes.

A story, a bond, a kindness: these things remain.

Originally Published May 2003.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, Kansans, life on the ground, small towns

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

‘DRAGGING WYATT EARP’

“Returning home is like that. The future gets left behind, a piano dumped on a stark prairie. Suddenly you’re left with nothing but your life and the past. You have returned. Full circle. Everything else is just a blur.”

Those are the words of Robert Rebein in the prologue of his new memoir, “Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City.” Rebein, who grew up in Dodge, is now an English professor in Indianapolis.

When an author writes “a piano dumped on a stark prairie” on the first page, I know I’m in for a great read. A few pages later Rebein describes the grain elevators in his hometown as “Big white pencils busily erasing the Old West of yore.”

Language and stories are two vital aspects of memoir. “Dragging Wyatt Earp” excels on both counts.

Rebein’s essays about growing up in Dodge City are simply the tales of everyday life. He connects well with the reader because he brings each scene to life with detail and description. He helps us recall experiences of our own.

In “House on Wheels,” the author describes his family life (he was the sixth of seven sons) and the evolution of their home which included one remodeling project after another. “And this, too, shall pass,” was his mother’s mantra.

The author tells of hanging out at his dad’s salvage yard during his early grade school years in the essay “In the Land of Crashed Cars and Junkyard Dogs.” He studied the characters employed there and observed a variety of temperaments. And he told of Challo, the body man, who found and completely restored a Schwinn bicycle for Rebein, so Rebein could fetch Challo’s lunch more quickly.

His father sold the salvage yard after a few years and returned to farming and ranching. When a blizzard kicked up one day, Rebein’s father showed up at his fifth grade classroom and took him out of school. “‘The cattle are out,’ the old man informed me as I climbed into the cab of his pickup.” In the parking lot of his grade school that day, Rebein’s father taught him how to drive the truck, a stick shift.

Rebein wrote, “The cattle were spread out across two counties, and getting them back to where they belonged was an arduous task involving much in the way of human and animal suffering.”

“My part was to guide a truck loaded with alfalfa between snow-filled ditches (hence the impromptu driving lesson), while my father and several of my brothers and cousins prodded the exhausted cattle from behind. It was terrible, grinding work.”

The author includes quite a bit of history of Dodge City and the region. He tells of the drunken cow town that Dodge City was once upon a time, and writes about Wyatt Earp, the town’s famous lawman. Rebein follows Coronado’s expedition, visits scenes of Cheyenne villages, learns how to ride a bronc, and spends a day as a feedlot cowboy.

With the title piece, Rebein reminds us of a familiar teenage activity – dragging Main. In Dodge City, however, it was Wyatt Earp Boulevard that was dragged.

“The epicenter of my teen years was the parking lot below Boot Hill Museum, a rectangle of concrete the size of a football field…” where high school kids leaned against cars and drank beer. A metal cage for empty cans was in the parking lot and “most weekends we possessed no higher ambition than to ‘fill the cage.’ This was the kind of thing that mattered to us, not Wyatt Earp, not history.”

He and his friends were killing time. Not killing time until midnight or until their next football game. “… we were leaving. And not just for a year or five years, but forever. Like the region’s cattle, wheat and corn, we’d been raised for export, and most of us had learned this fact about the time we learned that Santa Claus was a fiction.”

Rebein’s memoir gives us a chance to think about our own relationship with our own hometown, recall our own stories, our own dreams. The book helps us remember the things we treasured in our town, what we took away from that place, and what we left behind.

“Dragging Wyatt Earp” is published by Swallow Press in partnership with Ohio University Press. Robert Rebein teaches creative writing and directs the graduate program in English at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. For more information, visit www.robertrebein.com.

Robert Rebein

 

 

Cheryl columns, history, Kansans, other people's stuff, writing

 

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

MOTHERS AND DRESSES

The other day when I was shopping online, I accidentally ended up on a page full of dresses.

Alongside the dresses were ads showing mothers and daughters celebrating Mother’s Day together. Now I wouldn’t buy my mom a dress; she prefers books. However, my mind easily took the mom-dress connection and ran with it because so many of my early memories of clothing, especially dresses, include my mother and grandmother.

Grandma loved sewing for me. My school pictures from kindergarten to third grade all have me wearing dresses or jumpers with blouses that Grandma made. In my school photos from fourth grade and later, I was wearing store-bought blouses. I’m pretty sure my grandmother had given up on me by then, had considered me a lost cause in the dress department.

As a tomboy who climbed trees and rode bikes and played in the mud, I preferred pants, even at an early age. In fact, in kindergarten a male classmate asked me “Why do you dress like a boy?”

Well, any girl who has ever climbed on a jungle gym while wearing a dress knows the answer to that one. I learned early on that dresses limited my ability to do what I wanted to do. Pants are a lot easier on the legs than dresses when sliding down the metal slippery slide. And it’s hard to be lady-like in a dress while hanging from the monkey bar rungs. I was never able to get clear across the monkey bars, but I got plenty of blisters trying.

Pants were just more practical than dresses. They have pockets. You don’t have to be so careful about sitting positions. And with slacks, you don’t have to worry about strong gusts of wind. (“Dress up day” is what we call a windy day in Kansas.)

During the ‘60s, girls in Pawnee Rock grade school were allowed to wear pants. The fun ended, however, when we crossed the line into junior high where dresses were a requirement. I worried about that for years, but I lucked out – the dress code was relaxed before I got to seventh grade.

Wearing slacks to church, however, was never an option. And every spring, Mom made an Easter dress for me. Part of the annual ritual was to visit a fabric store, usually Grace’s Fabrics on the courthouse square in Great Bend. There, we’d turn the pages of the pattern catalogs together to choose a dress and then pick out the material. One of my favorite Easter dresses was a lime green A-line dress made of polyester knit with colorful appliquéd flowers tacked onto the dress’s vertical front seams.

Now my grandma, she was old-school when it came to apparel. She only wore dresses, ones she had sewn herself. Her one and only complaint about me was my fondness for pants. “You look so cute in dresses. I wish you’d wear them once in awhile,” she’d say when we visited her in Arkansas.

I wore a dress every Sunday. Wasn’t that enough?

By 1976, Grandma had moved to Kansas and was living in her childhood hometown of Kinsley. Somewhere along the line, Mom had talked Grandma into buying herself a pair of slacks. One day when we picked Grandma up to go shopping in Dodge City, Grandma wore her new pantsuit. As soon as we returned to her apartment, Grandma changed back into her dress. “Now I’m comfortable,” she said, her voice filled with relief.

Actually, I did wear dresses and skirts once in awhile. I wasn’t going to miss out on the mini-skirt rage in the late ‘60s. Mrs. Fry, our fourth grade teacher, held girls to the dress code: skirt hems could not be more than four inches above the knee. We liked to push the limit, and when there was question of length Mrs. Fry had us kneel on the classroom floor and she got out her ruler.

My mother doesn’t care what I wear and Grandma’s not around anymore to try to wrestle me into a dress, so if you see me out in the world these days, you’ll likely find me wearing jeans or slacks. I haven’t climbed a jungle gym since 2008 when I found one at the closed elementary school in Carlton, but if I come across another one, I want to be ready.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, life on the ground, nostalgia

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE

Every afternoon, Mary Louise Wilhite read to her second grade students at Pawnee Rock Grade School. Following our after-lunch recess, my classmates and I came in from the playground, windblown and energetic. But we settled down quickly when we sat at our desks; it was reading time.

Mrs. Wilhite pulled her chair out from behind her desk and placed it in the center of the classroom, to read to us from one of the nine books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. For 15 minutes, nothing was required of us except to be quiet and listen.

Day by day, Mrs. Wilhite led us through the childhood of Laura Ingalls Wilder. My classmates and I took in all of the adventures of Laura and Mary and Carrie, Ma and Pa and Jack the dog. We heard about storms and illnesses and daily pioneer life. As Mrs. Wilhite read, we pictured the log cabin and the girls doing their daily chores of helping Ma with the cooking and sewing.

After listening to our teacher read these books in 1967, I read them all myself at least once. Seven years later, in 1974, the “Little House on the Prairie” series began on TV and I had the chance to see Laura and Mary and Carrie grow up all over again.

Now, decades later, I can’t say that I remember the details of Laura’s stories, but I do remember being a wide-eyed listener in that second-grade classroom.

A few weeks ago, Dave and I were in southern Kansas near Sedan and we had some extra time for exploring, so we headed east to check out the historic location of the Ingalls home which is about 12 miles southwest of Independence, just off of U.S. 75.

In the 1960s, research began to determine the exact location of the Ingalls family cabin. Thanks to the presence of Charles Ingalls’ hand-dug well, the property was found. In 1977, a replica one-room log cabin was built on the site. It’s a tiny dwelling with a couple of windows, and standing inside it’s easy to see where the term “cabin fever” comes from. It’s very close quarters for a family of five including infant Carrie who was born in Kansas.

The story of the Ingalls family begins in “Little House in the Big Woods,” the book set in Wisconsin where Laura was born in 1867. In 1869, the Ingalls family moved to Kansas and we read about their times here in the third book, “Little House on the Prairie.” In her books, Laura makes herself and her siblings a few years older than they were in real life.

Because they had unknowingly homesteaded on Indian Territory in southeastern Kansas, the Ingalls family needed to move and they left the state in 1871. From Kansas, they relocated in Minnesota, then Iowa, and later in the Dakota Territories.

To add more layers of history to the replica cabin, the Sunnyside schoolhouse and the Wayside post office were moved onto the historic site. These two buildings were not in use until after the Ingalls family had left our state, but the structures offer visitors a better sense about the early days in Kansas.

An outhouse is on site and it is also not historic; I was pleased to find that the outhouse had running water and flushable toilets. Also on the property are a few farm animals, as well as the (now sealed) hand-dug well.

A two-story farmhouse serves as the gift shop. A clerk told me about Prairie Days which she described as a fun event with reenactors, games for kids, music, and craft and food vendors. Prairie Days is Saturday, June 8 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

It wasn’t until I stood in the gift shop and saw a shelf filled with the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that I remembered Mrs. Wilhite reading these books to us. Immediately, I saw myself back in that second-grade classroom, sitting at my desk, leaning into those stories of life on the Kansas prairie a long, long time ago.

The Little House on the Prairie Museum is a privately owned and not-for-profit site. Requested donations are $3 for adults and $1 for children. Special events are scheduled almost every weekend at the Little House on the Prairie Museum. For more information, visit www.littlehouseontheprairiemuseum.com.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, Kansans, life on the ground, nostalgia, other people's stuff, writing

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

 

ROAD TRIP TO SEDAN

Spring seemed to be stalled out somewhere, so Dave and I drove south one Saturday to see if we could locate the lost season and drag it north.

It was early April and even near the Oklahoma line, we didn’t find much in the way of green grass or flowering trees, but the sun was warm and the sky was blue.

From Emporia, we headed straight down K-99, cruising through Olpe, sliding past Madison. At the sundries store in Hamilton, we purchased a few snacks for the road.

In Howard, we noticed the Benson Doll Museum in a storefront on Main Street. Because one of our friends makes dolls, we thought we’d check out the museum so we could mention it to her if she hadn’t already visited.

Hundreds of dolls of all kinds were on display. They were the collection of Bertha Baumgartel, known as “the doll lady of Howard.” She collected and repaired dolls and made some herself. After Bertha died, her family donated the dolls to the Benson Museum and this storefront was renovated for that purpose.

Upstairs in the museum is an area for tea parties for children or adults. They’ve had birthday parties and showers there and they offer fancy dress hats that can be worn by party participants. The museum is open on Saturdays from 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., or by appointment.

Driving along K-99, the highway is lined with cropland and pastures. Spring is calving season and dozens of cow-calf pairs grazed in the fields. We saw lots of new life on the prairie.

As my eyes studied the huge pastures, my mind wandered to a recurring thought: Is there a square foot of prairie that has never been walked on by a human being?

Ranchers have been out on foot on their pastures, tending to cattle and building fences. Farm and ranch kids have surely explored the land in great detail. Over the past 200 years, there have been homesteaders as well as travelers passing through in wagons and on foot. This place we call Kansas was once occupied by Native Americans who lived on the land in a very physical way.

Still, my mind wants to think that spots remain on the planet, on our prairies, that have never felt the pressure of a human foot. I just like to think that sometime I might place a step where no foot has trod before.

When we got to Sedan (pop. 1,124), we looked for a place for lunch and settled in at Buck’s BBQ on the edge of town. It was an excellent decision. Dave and I both had the ribs – which were pretty darned good, as were the sweet potato fries. When the waitress offered dessert, Dave selected blackberry cobbler. I decided on the coconut cream pie and it was the best coconut pie I’ve ever had; it was not too sweet, it was just right.

One of things we had hoped to see in the Sedan area was Prairiehenge, the Stan Herd art installation of upright rocks in the middle of a field on the Red Buffalo Ranch. I expected to get access information at the Red Buffalo Gift Shop in Sedan, but the store was closed, and no answer on phone. Days later, I did speak with someone at the gift shop who said that Prairiehenge was no longer open to the public.

But we did get to see Butcher Falls on the Red Buffalo Ranch and it was easily accessible. Butcher Falls is a 5 to 6 foot-high waterfall complete with actual rushing water in a rock-walled stream. Falling water has a beautiful sound and is something we rarely hear in Kansas.

Heading back through Sedan, we found the Chautauqua County courthouse and I added a photograph of it to my courthouse collection. The courthouse is a big old building – three stories of brick and limestone.

From Sedan, we headed east toward Independence to see if we could find a little house on the prairie.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, small towns, traveling, vittles

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

‘SHADOW ON THE HILL’

On a sunny Saturday in May, 1925, Decoration Day, Florence Knoblock was found brutally murdered on the kitchen floor of her farmhouse near Burlington. Florence was married to John Knoblock and was the mother of a 4 year-old boy named Roger.

“For starters, there was no obvious motive,” Diana Staresinic-Deane told an audience at the LeRoy Public Library several weeks ago. “There was no sign of robbery, no known domestic disputes, no known grudges against them as far as anyone really knew.”

Diana Staresinic-Deane, of Ottawa, has just published a book about this crime called “Shadow on the Hill: the true story of a 1925 Kansas murder.”

“The Knoblock murder and the investigation and trials were front-page news almost every single day for a year – from May to May,” Diana said. “I have almost 800 pages of newspaper stories that came out of that murder and the investigation and trials.”

“The way I found this story was completely by accident,” Diana said. One day in 2007, while employed as a library assistant at the Emporia Public Library, she chased down some kids who were playing hide-and-seek in the stacks. Passing by the genealogy area, a green folder dropped itself from the stacks and landed at her feet. Inside the folder were 22 newspaper articles about the murder.

Diana started reading those articles and was intrigued by the story. She later searched for more newspaper accounts on microfilm, and eventually conducted interviews and studied court records.

Her primary and much-valued source of information was the newspaper articles that were written by John Redmond, editor of the Daily Republican in Burlington, and by William Lindsay “Bill” White in The Emporia Gazette. Those articles provided a play-by-play of the investigation and trials.

“It’s not just the story of Florence Knoblock,” Diana said. “It’s a snapshot of what was happening in Coffey County in 1925 and 1926.”

As I was reading this book, I was curious as to why Diana chose to write the story in novel form. She’s a writer friend and we correspond regularly, so I sent her a message.

Diana replied, “What appealed to me about the narrative nonfiction format (meaning, more like a novel and less like a textbook) was the fact that it let me create a timeline and express a lot of emotion, and this story is painfully full of emotion. I’m not sure I could have fully expressed how traumatized some of these people were in a more traditional nonfiction writing style.”

When John Knoblock discovered his wife dead, he called her family and he called law enforcement. Their phone was on a party line – and nothing spread information or gossip faster in those days than a party line. A crowd showed up, wandered through the house and the yard, and pretty much destroyed the crime scene. And before law enforcement had fully completed their investigation, the murder scene was cleaned up by the victim’s family, because they didn’t know any better.

The investigation certainly was not helped by the fact that the newly-elected sheriff had no law enforcement experience, and the elected coroner was not a doctor.

Every stranger became a suspect. An African-American construction worker was arrested for the crime, but there was no evidence against him and he was eventually released. The community lived in fear, thinking that a killer could be among them.

The man who was arrested and tried (twice) was John Knoblock, the husband, even though there was no hard evidence against him either. Florence’s family believed in his innocence and even put up some of the money toward his bond.

While reading the chapters set in the courtrooms, I pictured the scenes to be like those in “Perry Mason,” a black-and-white TV show from the ‘60s. On those shows, there was often gossipy and explosive testimony, usually accompanied by gasps from the audience.

The first trial against John Knoblock was held in Coffey County and resulted in a hung jury. A change of venue to Lyon County was granted in the second trial after they couldn’t find enough impartial jurors in Coffey County.

This is a fascinating and well-written book. Eighty-eight years have passed since the murder of Florence Knoblock, and this story will once again captivate readers.

“Shadow on the Hill” may be purchased at Town Crier Book Store in Emporia, and is also available in the e-book format from various online sources. For more information, visit http://dianastaresinicdeane.wordpress.com.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, history, Kansans, other people's stuff, writing

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

 

 

TIGER HUNTING

It’s not often that one reads about tiger hunting in Kansas, but there’s a new book out on the subject. The book is fiction, of course; tigers don’t roam the creek beds and pastures of Kansas – as far as we know anyway.

“Tiger Hunting” was a fun novel for me to read on several counts. First, it’s an enjoyable story that I couldn’t put down, a romp set in western Kansas. The second reason is because I loved the subtle sense of humor that comes through in the thoughts and words of the main character, Jeni.

And thirdly, the book was penned by my writing buddy, Tracy Million Simmons, and so I finally got to read one of the several novels that she’s been working on. Many of you know Tracy Simmons as the manager of the Emporia Farmers Market; she’s also a writer.

It’s not autobiographical, but the book is set in Tracy’s hometown of Dodge City. As a native, Tracy understands and knows the community and the region, and that connection to place comes through beautifully in her writing. I could feel the wind on my face in the restaurant parking lot and the bouncing of the truck as they rode through the pastures. And, I could picture the endless horizon when Jeni was riding her bike on the lonely country roads.

In the book, a 24-year-old college graduate, Jeni, who is not living up to her potential, leaves a goodbye note for her boyfriend and drives from Houston to her parents’ home with all of her belongings packed in her car, and all of her mistakes messing up her mind.

A few miles from home, Jeni drives upon an accident involving vehicles of a circus caravan. She sees a dead dolphin by the side of the road.

And it’s on the novel’s first page that I was grabbed as a reader. As Jeni drives past the accident scene, her eyes meet those of a man from the circus who was walking toward the animal. “His sorrow seemed to leap the space between us. I felt my throat close and I blinked away tears. I watched him in my rearview mirror as he knelt beside the dolphin. He patted her. His head dipped down and I imagined him curling up beside her on the ground with his sorrow.”

Tracy presents scenes that a reader could walk into and feel at home. For me it was easy to feel as if I were in Jeni’s mind as she interpreted her parents’ words and facial expressions. It seemed as if I were experiencing the complicated interactions that are a part of any family. I discovered that Tracy is really good at this, at communicating the expectations that a person feels from herself and from her family.

In that accident involving the circus that Jeni drove upon in Chapter 1, sea otters had to be chased down. A white tiger was also missing from its cage. And it’s that elusive and half-tame tiger that the circus people, a veterinarian, Jeni and her brother, and Jeni’s old junior high crush, Joe, go hunting for with tranquilizer guns. Oh yes, Orville, the circus’ orangutan, joined in on the search as well.

There’s a bit of craziness with the animals and the circus folks, mixed in with Jeni’s struggle to find direction in her life. The story is pulled along with an engaging energy and with touches of sly humor in Tracy’s writing, like these lines:

“The ape puckered his lips and gave Joe a kiss right on the smacker. Joe flinched, jumping backward and wiping his mouth with the tail of his t-shirt, revealing the fine definition of his abs to anyone who was looking. I couldn’t be sure who that might be, because I couldn’t seem to take my eyes off Joe.”

While the protagonist faces her past and begins to address her future, the novel also tells a story of fun and adventure on the High Plains of Kansas. And – if you’re ever out Dodge City way, keep your eyes open – you might just catch a glimpse of a white tiger on the loose.

“Tiger Hunting” is available in paperback at Town Crier in Emporia, and is available in e-book format at various online sources. For more information, visit Tracy’s website: www.tracymillionsimmons.com.

***

Cheryl columns, Kansans, life on the ground, other people's stuff, writing

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

 

WHERE THE LILACS BLOOM

Winter can be a bully; it’s been shoving spring aside for weeks now.

Spring break is always cold and wet so that was no big surprise, but during February and March we often get a week of dancing-in-the-sun warm days. Not so this year.

The forsythia usually explodes in a burst of yellow around St. Patrick’s Day, but on March 24 of this year, each of my forsythia’s poor little limbs were stacked with three inches of wet snow. We had snow blossoms, but there was not yet a lick of yellow on that shrub.

The dominant seasons, winter and summer, call the shots. If winter wants to own October or flirt with April, if summer tries to give us heat stroke, we have no say – we’re just passengers in the car, along for the ride.

With its sometimes violent tendencies, spring may not be Miss Congeniality, but we still like to have her around. Spring and autumn, our transition seasons, are usually brief. They have shortened lives, crowded out by the narcissistic winter and summer.

Our forsythia bush is now regaining its composure, and our lilac shows signs of budding. For me, lilacs are the scent of the season.

Blooming lilacs are an everything-is-going-to-be-all-right flower. Lilacs are like comfort food for the olfactory system.

After we moved into this house, one of the few things I chose specifically to plant was the lilac. I didn’t know it at the time, but I bought a shrub that blooms both in April and August. Double the fun!

Anyway, most things that are good or bad in our lives have some connection to childhood. The lilac carries good memories for me. In our back yard in Pawnee Rock, my parents had planted three lilac bushes – lavender, deep purple and white – next to each other. They were big, healthy bushes and it was a gorgeous sight when all three were in bloom.

April is the month for lilacs, but some were always still around to use on May Day. My brother and I, and later my friend Amy and I, made May baskets for our Pawnee Rock neighbors.

Back in those construction-paper days, we wove strips of green and yellow paper together to make cone-shaped baskets and then stapled on a paper handle. We filled the cones with lilacs and other flowers. The part Amy and I most enjoyed was making a stealthy delivery. We decided on the recipients and planned our attack. Ducking around windows, we  attached the basket to the door, tried not to giggle, rang the doorbell, and then dashed away.

Those lilac bushes in Pawnee Rock also made a great hideout. It’s where Amy and I would take our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for private picnics underneath the leafy branches.

On summer days when I was alone, I’d lay a beach towel on the damp dark earth between the shrubs and spend an afternoon reading a novel in my shady fort.

When I went off to college at the University of Kansas, I was delighted that my path to campus crossed a little street called Lilac Lane. The street was only about two blocks long and it was lined with lilacs. During blooming season, I walked to class, inhaling the fragrance in the morning, and again on the way home after working at my job in the library.

One day, I snapped off a few sprigs of the lilacs and put them in a drinking glass in my room. Sleeping rooms are tiny, and the fragrance became overpowering. I woke up at 3 in the morning, almost sick with the thick and noxious smell. I had to throw them out. It was too much of a good thing.

All through our lives, we carry moments from our childhood, good and bad. It’s fun to plant the good memories and nurture them whenever we can.

One of these days, winter will back off. April will bring the lilacs. And when I sit on my front porch or walk to my car, once again I’ll get to inhale those fragrant backyard memories.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

 

 

Cheryl columns, nature, nostalgia

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

KEIM BAKERY

When I hear of a Kansas place that I want to visit, sometimes that place sticks in my brain like a bookmark. And I can’t get rid of the bookmark until I make the trip.

Keim Bakery in Ottawa had been on my mind for months. A friend, Diana Staresinic-Deane, who moved from Emporia to Ottawa a year ago, has often posted photos of Keim’s decorated cookies and cupcakes on Facebook. It’s hard to outdo a locally-owned bakery for treats, so I’m always eager to try a place like that.

One January day, Dave and I were driving home from Kansas City and we pulled into Ottawa to track down this bakery, since we were in the neighborhood and all.

Keim Bakery is at 304 S. Main Street, across from the gorgeous Franklin County courthouse. Unfortunately, we arrived mid-afternoon on a Saturday just after the business had closed for the day.

On March 16, I attended a presentation in LeRoy by the same Diana Staresinic-Deane mentioned above.

Her talk at the LeRoy Public Library was about the 1925 brutal killing of a young mother, Florence Knoblock, in Coffey County. After extensive research on the case, Diana wrote “Shadow on the Hill: the true story of a 1925 Kansas murder.” Her novelized version of this real-life crime, the investigation and trials, will be released this spring. (I’ll write more about her book after it’s been published.)

I decided to make it a Diana-themed day. Well, you know where this is headed. After all, I was kind of, sort of, in the Ottawa area, well – about an hour away. Because Keim’s had been pestering my mind for months now, I decided to wander my way to the bakery.

It was well worth the trip. My server, Beth Keim, was one of the owners. Sometimes you feel like you hit the jackpot when you come across people who are warm and outgoing and who are just giddy about their lives or their work. Beth Keim was one of those folks.

Beth said they opened the business about two and a half years ago. At the time, her husband had recently retired from KCP&L, and this pharmacy building had come up for sale. They renovated the place and opened a restaurant. The long countertop and round stools from the pharmacy’s soda fountain were kept along with its mirrored wall and old cash register. Booth and table seating is available on the other side of the room.

In addition to working at the bakery with her husband, Beth teaches third grade in Ottawa. Two sons are also involved, one of them in the restaurant’s daily operation.

During our conversation, Beth learned that I was from Emporia so she shared the news that her business would be providing “Wizard of Oz” decorated cookies for the EVCO trade show that was held in Emporia on March. 20. “I’m so excited and so proud. Can you tell I’m excited?” she asked.

It was pretty obvious. But, I’d say she’s likely an enthusiastic person anyway. When someone loves what they do, that joy shines through.

Because St. Patrick’s Day was the next day, decorated leprechauns and shamrock sugar cookies filled the front display case. And there were rows of chocolate cupcakes with a black dirt-like topping and each one had a green frosting sprout sticking out of the cake. It looked like a tray of tiny starter plants. I asked Beth about them. “We made those because of the home and garden show here this weekend,” she said, adding that their goodies are often inspired by local events.

A second display case was filled with fruit pies: blueberry, apple, cherry, as well as cream pies and lemon meringue. There were brownies: peanut butter and black forest. Keim’s also sells flavored coffees, smoothies, and cinnamon rolls. Oh yes, and breakfast, lunch and dinner.

My grilled bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich and homemade fries were really good and I finished lunch with a leprechaun sugar cookie. If I lived in Ottawa, Keim’s would be a hangout place for me. And I’ll definitely stop by next time I’m in town.

Hours: Tues.-Fri. 9 a.m. – 7 p.m.; Saturday 7 a.m. – 2 p.m.; Sunday 10 a.m. – 2 p.m.; Monday – closed. For more information, search on Facebook for Keim Bakery, or call 785-242-6700.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, Kansans, small towns, traveling, vittles

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

AN UNDERLYING ORDER

“Lefty-loosey,” I thought to myself as I twisted a screw. Standing on a step-stool, I was removing the glass shades on a ceiling fan in order to clean them.

Each tulip shade was held in place by three tiny screws. Because of my position, several of them were out of my line of vision. One screw didn’t move easily either way, and with my hand curled around behind the shade I had to visualize which direction my hand was turning, clockwise or counterclockwise.

It was about ten years ago, while watching reruns of “The Drew Carey Show,” that I heard Carey utter the phrase “lefty-loosey, righty-tighty.” I don’t remember what he was attempting to loosen; maybe it was a light bulb, or perhaps a hose from a spigot.

Anyway, my first thought to his “lefty” phrase was “Wow, you mean there’s an order to this?” I had never before considered that there was a thought-out plan in the construction of threads, an organized conspiracy in the world of tightening and loosening.

My second thought was, “Good grief, I’m just finding this out?”

That there’s an order to threads makes sense, of course, but it just wasn’t something to which I had given any thought. For me, in practice, tightening screws and light bulbs was just trial and error. I had always simply turned light bulbs one way or the other until I obtained the desired results.

OK, I’m not mechanically inclined. And nobody had ever told me about this left-right thing. Some of the secrets of life you just happen to catch by chance.

And while that tiny bit of knowledge, “lefty loosey, righty tighty,” is incredibly helpful, it was just plain fun to learn that there is often a pattern, an underlying order to things. It’s comforting to realize that the world is not as random as it seems.

Another moment that gave my mind a happy dance was when I was in ninth grade at Pawnee Rock, taking driver’s ed. My classmates and I sat two-by-two at tables in the classroom, passing notes to one another while Mr. Bean taught. He mentioned the different kinds of highways, two-lanes, four-lanes, interstates, U.S. highways, state and county roads.

And then in that classroom came the moment where Mr. Bean brought my 14-year-old self to the realization that the world was less arbitrary than I had assumed.

He told us that east-west highways were given even numbers and that north-south roads had odd numbers.

That was a life-changing moment. Civilization, or at least some of it, had been carefully planned. Highway numbering was by design rather than chance.

Our own odd-numbered interstate, I-35, makes a pretty convincing argument around here that it’s an east-west road with its easterly track out of Emporia.

But the big picture shows that, as promised, I-35 travels north and south. Beginning in Laredo, Texas, the interstate chugs northbound until it makes an elbow turn at Emporia. In Kansas City, the road once again heads north to its end point in Duluth, Minn.

Even though there can be a method, a certainty, in the naming of roads, there are also exceptions. One day as a youngster I realized that in nearby Great Bend, many of its streets were named for U.S. Presidents, in order: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and so on.

Well, it made sense that they would not name a street for John Quincy Adams, because two Adams streets would be a problem. But the Great Bend street-namers were in such a hurry to get to Lincoln that Presidents Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan were simply omitted. On the way to Truman Street (with an Eisenhower Ave. thrown in on the side), several others were ignored as well. So, as a kid trying to memorize the order of presidents, I discovered that the streets of Great Bend were not the fabulous resource they had appeared to be.

Sometimes there is an order in the man-made world, patterns that you can believe in; sometimes we are misled. But I can’t tell you how much easier my life has been since I learned how to screw in a light bulb.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, life on the ground

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

Strawberry pie – Hays House

MOVING TOWARD SPRING

For months our sky had been holding its breath. Finally in late February the sky exhaled, and a huge cloud of white flakes fell to earth. We found ourselves in deep snow, which is just what we needed, but it put Kansas on hold for a few days.

Here in Emporia, we received two heavy snows, more than a foot of white stuff, in back-to-back storms. Since that’s the only snowfall we’ve had all season, I thought of it as “All Winter in a Week,” recalling the title of Ray Bradbury’s fabulous short story, “All Summer in a Day.”

Maybe it’s because snow storms have been rare lately, but I enjoyed shoveling the sidewalk and driveway. It’s a good and mighty workout. And it’s a way to get outside of the house when you can’t go anywhere else.

During the course of those two storms, except to shovel snow up and down the block, I didn’t leave the house much at all for about a week. But good things happened indoors. I got caught up on a year’s worth of bookkeeping, prepared tax information for the accountant, and cleaned off my desk. I put my shredder to good use. Those are tasks I always dread, but being trapped by the snow made them easier somehow.

After that week, I was ready to escape. It was time to get out on the road again, so I contacted a writer friend, Lou Ann Thomas, who lives in Pottawatomie County. She and I met in Council Grove the next day.

While driving north on the Americus Road, I noticed cattle with their heads to the ground, making a meal of the hay a farmer had rolled out carpet-style for them. The tromping around of the cattle had turned that part of the field from snow to mud.

Roads were clear and some of the snow had melted already, but white was still the word of the day. White pastures, white ditches, white sky. If you’re hungry for color like I am this time of year, Kansas in winter is not the place to find it. Since November, we’ve been living in a dusty, straw-colored world.

During the past few months, the Flint Hills have looked so…dry, as if the land’s life and energy had long since evaporated. It seemed as if we were waiting for our bowl of dust to arrive.

Usually we can depend on emerald fields of winter wheat for a splash of color on the cold landscape, but in this drought, the wheat has looked anemic, a sad yellow-green shade. So on an overcast day the only place to find a hit of color around here is to train your eyes on the highway’s yellow stripes. We find our joys where we can.

I met Lou Ann at the Hays House in Council Grove for the Sunday buffet with its delicious fried chicken, mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli, and salad greens. And, desperate for a taste of spring, I couldn’t resist the strawberry pie.

She and I talked for quite a while over mashed potatoes and pie. Our writing paths and topics are similar and we have a lot in common.

When we’re on the same wavelength with another person, especially when creative topics are being discussed, our own energy level rises. As we listen to the other one speak, creative thoughts expand. But the combined energy here is more than that; when we hear ourselves speak, when we express our thoughts and ideas out loud to another person, our own projects take on a new shape and significance. And so it’s incredibly helpful to have someone to bounce ideas off of in any creative endeavor.

There’s a process and growth with everything in our lives – with friendships, with writing, with the seasons. The world is fluid, in continual motion.

Season-wise, we’re moving through an interstice, that gap between winter and spring, between snow and mud, between neutral colors and pastels. Soon, spring will take hold, daffodils will bloom, and green will return to our beloved Flint Hills.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

 

Cheryl columns, seasons, small towns, vittles