Flyover People Daily News

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

Tom Parker (photo by Dave Leiker)

THE WAY WE WORKED

“I saw unspeakable things done to cattle, and I lived through things I didn’t know I would,” Tom Parker said with a smile as he told me about his year-long photography project.

Over the past year, Tom Parker immersed himself in his own community of Blue Rapids to create a photography exhibit called “The Way We Worked.” The project, in partnership with the Smithsonian, received principal funding from the Kansas Humanities Council. The Blue Rapids Historical Society and the Marshall County Arts Cooperative provided additional funding.

Sixteen communities across the state were partner sites for the Smithsonian project, many of them using historical photos to tell the story of Kansas workers. Parker, however, chose to capture the present-day worker in Blue Rapids.

Parker is a friend of ours and on a recent Saturday, Dave and I took the two-hour drive to view the display of 80 photographs at the Blue Rapids Museum. These 80 pictures are just a small portion of the project. Parker has also put together a book on CD which includes 560 photographs.

The photographs tell the story of Blue Rapids, but it could be any small Kansas town because the pictures of workers and volunteers in that community tell our stories too. The pictures show everyday people doing everyday jobs.

One photo caught the sparks of a welder at Titan Trailer Manufacturing; another showed a tornado drill in progress at Blue Valley Senior Living. There is a picture showing a bank employee using a machine to count coins that she emptied from a bunny-shaped piggy bank.

For one photo taken from the top of the elevator, Parker said he was standing on a plastic bucket and was leaning too far out the window. He hoped the bucket would hold and not send him plummeting 110 feet to the ground. He said, “My thought was ‘If you fall out of the window, keep the shutter going until you hit.’”

At the Prairie Valley Vet Clinic, Parker watched a vet prepare a large dog for surgery. “The room was very small,” he said. “In the photo it looks like I’m a long way away, but I was eight inches from it. The vet had the scalpel ready and then she stopped. And she asked me, ‘Are you squeamish?’”

He received permission from families to photograph funerals, telling them he’d only do as much as they were comfortable with. A particularly striking photo is of a casket being pulled from the hearse at a cemetery. One of the six pallbearers is a young woman wearing a black dress. “She just adds everything to that picture,” he said.

At the Blue Rapids Swimming Pool, kids are buying pickles from a gallon jar at the concession counter. “I learned the importance of pickles,” Parker said. “They are a huge thing at the swimming pool.”

In 2012, a new bridge was constructed over the Big Blue River and the old bridge was imploded. He photographed guys from Chicago Explosive Services preparing equipment for the blast. During the explosion he shot 81 frames in 10 seconds.

Parker photographed an employee on a step ladder, filling the pop dispenser with ice at the Route 77 Corner Store, and one of a school bus driver letting kids on the bus. Photos include those of farmers and pharmacists, sanitation workers, clergy, postal workers, a police officer with his radar gun. He photographed the construction process of the Ice Age monument in the town square (which is actually the town circle).

While viewing the photographs as a whole, a strong sense of a community came through. I realized how these people, how all of us, are just doing our own jobs. But the photos show that it’s also bigger than that; we are each a piece in the same puzzle, each of us has a role, a contribution for the good of all.

Tom Parker’s work, his contribution to Blue Rapids and to all of us, is his fantastic talent. His photographs are worth studying for the art, for the story, and for the historical record they provide.

This exhibit will be on display through March 16. The Blue Rapids Museum is open Saturdays, 9 a.m. – noon, and 1-4 p.m., or you can call 785-363-7228 for an appointment.

To purchase the CD of photographs, call the number above, or send an email to Tom Parker at velvetweed@gmail.com. The CD is $35.34 with tax and shipping.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl Art, columns, Kansans, life on the ground, other people's stuff, small towns

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

a phone like we had

YUKON-2

Pawnee Rock wasn’t anywhere near the Yukon. Nevertheless, YUkon-2 was our telephone prefix when I was a kid.

In the ‘50s and ‘60s, each telephone exchange began with two letters to make phone numbers easier to remember. We had the super-cool YUkon exchange and our neighboring town, Larned, used the word ATlas, as in AT-5.

Curious about Emporia’s old exchange, I located a 1961 phone directory at the public library. DIckens was Emporia’s prefix. (Incidentally, the front page of that ’61 phone book also had a seven-point list of instructions on how to use a dial telephone.)

Eventually though, DIckens and YUkon got shoved aside for the more grown-up 342 and 982.

The reason I started thinking about these old telephone exchanges was because of an article I ran across in the New York Times which helped tell the story of telephone evolution during my lifetime.

Written by Margalit Fox, the New York Times article began: “A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?”

In the Pawnee Rock telephone exchange, we only had to dial four digits for a local call. Every phone number in Pawnee Rock began with a 982-4, so we only had to remember the last three digits. And I can still recall the numbers of my friends Amy and Marilyn, as well as those of the post office and the dress shop where my mom once worked.

Direct dialing came to other locations before it hit Pawnee Rock in the ‘70s. Until then, every long distance call involved the operator. We had to give her both the number we were calling and our own number – which seems like it would open the door for lots of mischief, but apparently folks were honest about giving their own phone numbers. You could even ask the operator to call collect or charge it to a third number – at which point she’d dial the number and ask the party if it was OK to charge the call to them.

Anyway, the article focused on the accomplishments of John E. Karlin, a former Bell Labs employee who died on Jan. 28 at age 94. Karlin – a mathematical psychologist, electrical engineer (and professional violinist) – led Bell through the switchover to all-digit phone numbers as well as during the change from rotary dial to push button phones. Introduced in 1963, the Touch-Tone system celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

Apparently a lot of thought and psychology went into the decision of how to place the buttons so as to make the phone easy to use. Karlin’s team had to decide whether the new Touch-Tone buttons should be placed in a circle like the rotary dial, or in an arc, or in a rectangle. And should the buttons themselves be square or round? They decided to place the 1-2-3 at the top of the phone, rather than at the bottom like they are on a calculator.

During my childhood, we, like everyone else in the neighborhood, had the standard black desk phone with a rotary dial. The phone was basically indestructible. Made of Bakelite, I believe, it was tough and sturdy, and if needed for protection, you could certainly clobber someone with the receiver.

Back in the days before cordless phones, there was no wandering around the house talking on the phone. A telephone conversation was a stationary event; one could not cook supper or wash dishes while conversing, unless you had an extra long cord. There was nothing to do while on the phone but sit and be fully engaged in the dialogue. Well, doodling was always allowed.

Being stuck at a desk between the kitchen and the living room, as a teenager I had no privacy for my calls. My parents could listen; my brother could walk behind me and bop me on the head (for no good reason, I might add.)

Things have changed dramatically over the past 50 years. We have progressed to answering machines, cordless phones and smart phones with internet access. No longer chained to a desk, we can talk on the phone anytime and anywhere. We are free, free, free – unless you consider that many of us are now hopelessly chained to our phones.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, life on the ground, nostalgia

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

BACK TO THE ‘50S

A model home built in Prairie Village presented a new and exciting lifestyle option to Kansas City area residents in 1954. The number of people who toured the house that year, 64,000, was equivalent to the population of Johnson County at the time.

Dave and I recently visited this all-electric‘50s home which is now part of the Johnson County Museum in Shawnee. The house had long been on my list of places to see, so when Dave and I were in Bonner Springs to visit Moon Marble, we drove into the city.

The first thing we did, however, was to eat lunch. I’d heard good things about Oklahoma Joe’s Barbecue, located in a gas station at 47th and Mission in Kansas City, Kansas. We stood in a line stretching out the door, but it moved fairly quickly. Peering through the dining area divider, we couldn’t imagine there would be a place to sit when we got our food, but tables opened. And the barbecue was as good as promised.

Then we were off to the Johnson County Museum to explore the history of suburban living.

The 1950s was a booming decade for Johnson County – and for the entire country. A short film, which was part of the house tour, noted that Johnson County’s population doubled between 1940 and 1950 and that it doubled again during the next decade.

The film suggested that the ‘50s were “a time of promise and prosperity” in the United States. The country had been through World War I and II, the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl. But mid-century, things were looking up. Babies were booming. Suburbs grew.

Ranch-style architecture was the new must-have design and it was used for this model home. This one-story, wood-frame house has an open floor plan; the kitchen leads into the dining room which shares a roomy space with the living room. A large picture window behind the sofa lets in plenty of natural light.

The house was constructed in 1954 by Kansas City Power and Light to showcase an all-electric residence. It featured a heat pump which maintained climate control year-round. A switch in the bedroom activated a percolator in the kitchen, and the living room blinds were opened by a motorized curtain rod. An attached garage featured an electric garage-door opener.

In the kitchen, the modern housewife used an automatic dishwasher and electric range. A washer and dryer were contained within a single machine. A lazy-Susan shelf was a handy item in the refrigerator – and there was a foot lever to open the refrigerator door when your hands were full. Hey – that’s a great idea; I want one of those.

I was born at the end of the ’50 and this house seemed pretty familiar. Many of its features were similar to my childhood home. My dad built our own house around us. My first year was spent living in a basement residence while Dad added on the main floor.

My father embraced many of the modern features that we saw in this model home. Our house, too, had a wall of quality wood paneling and recessed lighting along the ceiling. Dad included a lot of built-in features in our home – cabinets and bookshelves.

Linoleum tile in the model home’s kitchen reminded me of that on our own living room floor. In a corner of this kitchen sat a rotary-dial telephone. We also had a built-in nook for a phone.

But, our house didn’t have a hidden television over a fake electric fireplace. In this model home, you could push a button and a painting of an ocean scene would slide away to reveal a television screen.

Walking into this house with its ‘50s style and décor was like stepping back into childhood, back to the days when the words “modern convenience” were used in countless ads aimed at housewives.

Maybe it was my own experiences from that era, but while touring the house, I could feel the excitement that must have been present in the ‘50s – that time of prosperity that was equipped with modern appliances and electrical doo-dads which must have seemed almost magical at the time. A new world was indeed at hand.

The Johnson County Museum is at 6305 Lackman Road in Shawnee. For more information, visit www.jocomuseum.org, or call 913-715-2550.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl buildings, cities, columns, nostalgia

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

 

MOON MARBLE
“Do you guys mind if I turn on the big rocket flame for a minute?” Bruce Breslow asked the group of about 20 gathered in his marble-making studio.

“Yes,” shouted the dozen or so Cub Scouts in the bleachers. With encouragement from Breslow they changed their chorus to the more appropriate response: “No.”

“I have a foot pedal. I step on it and it opens up the solenoid and adds more oxygen and propane,” Breslow explained as the flame intensified and a yellow flare lit up around the marble.

“I can only use the rocket flame so much,” he said. “If things get too hot, glass is dripping everywhere.”

On a Saturday morning at Moon Marble in Bonner Springs, shop owner Bruce Breslow was the man behind the flame. He held a blue marble on a wand, turning it, always turning it.

“I don’t know if you notice, but I keep this spinning all of the time,” Breslow said. “That’s how I keep this centered on the rod, and gravity does all of the work.”

He’s been making marbles for 16 years. Before that, Breslow made, repaired, and restored furniture in his shop.

One of the scouts asked about the wooden swords standing in a nearby box. “We’ve made those for the Renaissance Festival for 32 years,” Breslow said. “If anybody has a sword and shield like that, thank you.”

With scraps of wood from his woodworking business, he made toys and board games. For some of those board games, he needed marbles. The local dime store only had one color, so he ordered a bunch of marbles from a factory. And then he started making his own.

On the days Breslow does demonstrations, he’ll make 6-8 marbles in front of an audience, and then before he goes home he’ll make another 4-5 for inventory. His store also sells marbles made by other glass artists from around the country.

Plus they sell huge quantities of the machine-made marbles. Thousands of marbles in clear bins brighten the front room in the store. You can choose from iguana which has a green base with yellow swirls, or the triceratops, a green-yellow base with red and black streaks. The Neptune is a transparent blue base with opaque white swirls. The names of marbles are colorful themselves: swamp thing, Bengal tigers, soap bubbles, tiger sharks and bumblebees.

The store is fun for anyone who has ever been a kid. There are current-day and retro toys. If you’re looking for a Slinky, a gyroscope, Fiddle Sticks, a bendable Gumby or Pokey, or even Mr. Bill, you can find them here.

There were items in the store that took me back to my childhood, for example, an inflatable punching toy about 3-feet high that is weighted on the bottom and inflated on the top; you box it or punch it down and it springs back upright.

And Super Balls. I haven’t thought of the Super Ball since mine took a wrong bounce and disappeared when I about was 12. I had one of the early Super Balls in the ‘60s. It was about the size of a racquet ball. I’d bounce it on the sidewalk and it would fly as high as the full-grown elm trees in our yard.

Breslow walked around in front of his work stand to give the audience a close-up view of the marble-in-progress.

“If this falls off, do not pick it up and hand it to me,” he warned us. “It’s very hot.”

Then he tapped the marble off of the glass rod it was attached to, repaired that connecting spot, the marble’s “belly button,” then placed the marble into a nearby kiln, set at 960 degrees, a cool-down temperature, for overnight.

Breslow barely finished with one demonstration before he started the next one. As I looked at some of the antique toys in his studio, I heard him talking to a man who was there for the next show.

“I’m ready to get started,” Breslow told the man. “This never gets old.”

*Moon Marble is one of the Kansas Sampler Foundation’s 8 Wonders of Kansas Commerce and is located at 600 E. Front Street in Bonner Springs. For demonstration hours or to schedule a group tour, visit www.moonmarble.com or call 913-441-1432.

Copyright 2012 ~ Cheryl Unruh

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

Yo, I was on the radio this morning, celebrating Kansas Day.

Here’s a link: A Part of Kansas.

****

***

Cheryl columns, life on the ground, on the radio

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

 

UNDER THE KANSAS SKY

Blazing clouds in the southwest looked as if they were filled to the brim with Orange Crush. The twilight sky glowed like a neon sign in the wilderness.

I was sitting on my couch on a January evening until the light outside of the kitchen window grabbed my attention. When the sky screams in orange, you can’t help but respond. I stepped out onto the back porch to breathe in the color.

With trees and buildings in the way, I didn’t have a clear shot with a camera, but others did. Facebook immediately lit up with sunset photos. Kansans, east to west, marked the moment that the sun set the clouds on fire.

In Kansas, we wake each day underneath this one big sky. No matter where we live – in the city or country, in the rolling hills or on flat land – and despite any differences in our social and political views, we share the same heavens. Perhaps our common ground is the sky above us.

In honor of Kansas Day today, I’m paying tribute to my personal obsession: the sky. More than anything, what makes Kansas feel like home to me is our dome of reassuring blue.

Staring into the sky, we notice all the nuances of color – that the sapphire blue lightens toward the horizon, how it becomes more saturated as we look into outer space.

Sometimes clouds divide the sky into sections. In one area, the blue has a yellowish tinge, in another a grayish tone. Those blues clash, as if they don’t belong in the same sky.

Blue is a day-long monologue, and clouds are the commas that make us pause along the way. Cumulous, just passing through, add cadence to the atmosphere, a trail of thought set in meter and rhyme.

Clouds offer a quiet grace, billows of water droplets gliding on a river of air. They sail without engines, without sound. And unlike our vehicular movements on this chessboard of earth, clouds move freely in any direction, wherever the wind takes them.

One of my favorite encounters with clouds was during spring break, 1980. The March day was grimly overcast in Kansas and I was traveling alone from Kansas City to Austin to visit my brother. I had flown in small planes before, but this was my first commercial flight. Wide-eyed and gripping the arms of the seat, I prayed that if death came it would be quick and merciful.

The fear tapered after take-off and soon we entered a fairytale world of clouds.The plane buffeted as it hit each cloud puff, like the soft impact you feel when your boat intersects a wake.

With clouds inches from my face, just on the other side of the plane’s thick window, I could see nothing but wispy fragments, white on white. But the view got even better when the upward-angled plane finally broke through the cloud line. It was an entirely different day up there.

Rising above the clouds was pure metaphor. And now I know for sure, that despite the oppressive clouds of a vanilla sky, the blue holds steady, the sun always shines.

Gazing into our Kansas sky brings me peace. Azure blue is my security blanket, a color of comfort.

Some states have mountains which cut into air space. But the relative flatness of Kansas allows the sky that much more room to work. We have the fullest experience of atmosphere possible, 180 degrees of playful light.

Our blue sky is more familiar than family. It is perhaps the most common scene in our visual storage banks. Postcard blue is the color we’ve seen nearly every day of our lives. And the sun setting on the prairie is our kiss goodnight.

There’s no sky like our sky, no end to the day like a Kansas sunset. Maybe I’m holding onto an image which is nothing more than air, but that’s all I need to feel right at home.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, landscape, life on the ground, sky

Today is the 10 year anniversary of my column, Flyover People. It all began January 28, 2003.

And so it goes. Another 10 years? Sure, why not?

***

Cheryl columns

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

A CREATIVE LIFE

While cutting up a chicken last week, the knife got away from me and nicked my hand. As I searched for a bandage, I thought of a moment about 10 years ago with my late father.

In that scene with my dad, he and I sat on the stoop of the work shed in his backyard in Pawnee Rock. Using a pocket knife, he chipped bark from a tree limb, the first step in making one of his walking sticks.

Chips flew through the air and landed near our feet. After a lifetime of working with wood, Dad offered a bit of advice, “When you use a knife, never cut toward yourself – or you’ll be sorry you did.”

“Oh,” I said, pointing to a recent cut on his thumb, “Is that what happened there?”

“Yes,” he laughed, “that’s what happened there.”

When he retired as a rural mail carrier in the early ‘90s, Dad started making walking sticks. He didn’t have a market for them, or any desire to sell them, he just liked to make them. Downed tree limbs were free and plentiful. As a carpenter for more than 50 years, wood was ingrained in his life.

My dad had always been creative. He made beautiful furniture. And for years, he carried a camera and set out to photograph every courthouse and post office in Kansas. As a collector of junk, Dad used scraps of iron and wood to make sculptures for his yard and flower gardens.

Making things made him happy.

Most of us find this to be true. We like to create, to have something, a finished product, to show for our time and for our lives. We like to draw, write, build, bake, sew. It is satisfying to construct a cedar chest from a stack of lumber, or to start with squares of cloth and end up with a beautiful quilt.

After stripping the bark, Dad sanded and varnished his sticks. He used a set of die stamps to imprint humorous or inspirational quotes. On one cane, he attached 10-inch nails using eyehooks. Some had door knobs as handles. He signed many of them, often noting that they were made in Pawnee Rock. Each stick had its own story to tell.

Dad wouldn’t have called it art, but his work was a form of grassroots or outsider art. He wasn’t a trained artist, he just made stuff, including hundreds, yes, hundreds of walking sticks.

After he and his wife, Betty, moved to an apartment in Great Bend, Dad continued his hobby. His pickup truck became his workshop. He’d sit in the passenger seat, door open, feet on the ground, and he’d chip away at bark or sand sticks.

A few years later, aging caught up with him. He slowed down on the walking sticks and started a new project. He didn’t get out of the apartment on his own anymore to stock up on supplies, but in typical Dad fashion, he used what he had. He began to decorate the bills of baseball caps that were in his closet.

He glued coins and tiny plastic figures onto the caps: cowboys and Indians, squirrels and bears. One had a round ham bone with a bonus nickel inside. If you didn’t know my dad and his sense of humor, you’d think, “Well that’s just odd.” And in truth, it was odd, but hey, that was my dad.

In his last few years when we went out for lunch, Dad would grab one of his sticks and put on a hat, maybe the one with the ham bone. He was a walking grassroots art display.

My father and his peculiarities had often embarrassed me, especially as a teenager, but luckily, I outgrew those feelings. His eccentricities were a part of who he was. He was colorful and human. He hid emotions, but they were revealed by his art. I realize now that he was not concerned with the approval of others. He made things for the sheer joy of creating them.

I have dozens of his walking sticks, some crooked, some straight. One is from our backyard Kentucky coffee bean tree. Each stick tells its own story, but the underlying narrative is the story of my father, a man who created until the end.

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, Kansans, life on the ground

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

 

 

LOVING THE WIND

“How can you call yourself a Kansan if you don’t love the wind?” Dan Markowitz accused me when I ran into him at the Java Cat.

“Um,” I stammered. “Too much of a good thing?”

In a recent column, I wrote about tumbleweeds and western Kansas. While I didn’t really slam the wind, neither did I fully rejoice in its existence.

“The wind, Cheryl. What’s not to love?” he asked.

My friend Dan works at Poehler Antiques. He’s a smart, likeable guy. And he’s energetic – his main form of transportation is his bicycle, which he rides year-round.

Now, I don’t hate-hate the wind. In fact, I have occasionally appreciated the redemptive power of a mighty gust, one so strong that it can blow away sins. But when I don’t feel a particular need for deliverance, I’d prefer to opt out of any kind of breeze over, say, 15 mph.

The wind is such a part of our lives that it might be considered a state mascot. And yes, absolutely, the wind has benefits. For example, wheat needs to be dry before it is cut. So wheat-on-the-stalk is turned over to the Kansas wind for an afternoon of moisture removal.

Another good thing about the wind is that is annoys mosquitoes enough to keep them off of our skin. Ah, something to annoy the annoyer. Wind wins again.

Many Kansans do actually like the wind. Dan calls these people, including himself, “windophiles.” And, if he rides his bike in the January wind without complaint, his love for gusty Kansas air must be true. So I emailed him later, asking him to tell me what he thinks is so great about moving air.

He wrote what he called a “long-winded” response in praise of air currents. Growing up in Olpe in a house with no air conditioning, Dan recalled how the summer breeze cooled the bedroom he shared with his brother. He spoke of happy kite-flying days.

Dan wrote, “And I loved lying on my back and watching white puffy clouds roll across a bright sky, shielding me from the sun’s heat and creating shadows on the ground as they passed by. How do you think those amazing shape-changing clouds passed overhead? It was the wind, my friend, the wind!”

“By the time I was a teenager, my love for the wind was deeply ingrained,” he wrote. “Nothing felt better for a sweaty, dirty farm worker than a gust of fresh air on his face while baling hay in a low-lying meadow.”

Dan told about one recess at St. Joseph’s School in Olpe. “A great gust of March wind caught Sister Emma just right and ripped her veil, a long, dark, heavy contraption, right off of her head. The veil sailed across the playground, leaving Sister Emma standing there, bare down to her wimple. I stifled a laugh (it was never a good idea to laugh at anything that happened in front of a nun) and set out across the playground to retrieve the tumbling veil.

“I proudly walked the veil back to Sister Emma, who expressed her appreciation for my humble service with a chocolate chip cookie from the nuns’ special larder.”

Even this fan of the wind acknowledged its negative aspects. Dan wrote, “You asked how I like it if I’m biking into a stiff northerly breeze on a chilly January morning. The answer is, not much. You have a point. Nor do I like it in the summer when I’m riding south on Highway 99 directly into a strong hot breeze. On those days, it’s particularly bad just beyond Evergreen Cemetery, where the highway starts up the hill that forms the southern edge of the Cottonwood River Valley. For some reason, the wind whooshes over that hill and blasts everything in its way like a furnace. Literally, it’s taken my breath away there, leaving me unable to even curse as I huff and puff my way up to the crest of the hill, where it’s hardly better.”

Nevertheless, Dan says, “I think it’s unfair to judge the wind by its occasional bad conduct.”

I’m giving some serious thought to Dan’s perspective. Wind offers benefits – such as a continual supply of fresh air. And disliking the wind only increases our annoyance. So maybe it is time to appreciate and celebrate air velocity. Wind festival, anyone?

Copyright 2013 ~ Cheryl Unruh

Cheryl columns, Flyover Weather, Kansans, nature

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

 

WHAT REMAINS

When I noticed the downhill-sloping sidewalk in front of my grandparents’ former house, I remembered being 8-years-old, holding onto Grandpa’s hand, and skipping beside him on the way to the neighborhood grocery store.

We each have latent memories, things that we forget about until we return to the scene of that memory. In this particular case, the scene was Siloam Springs, Arkansas.

This past November, Dave and I met my mom in Northwest Arkansas and we drove around the Fayetteville and Siloam Springs area together, visiting spots familiar to Mom and me. My grandparents had been native Kansans, but during my childhood they lived in Arkansas.

After nearly four decades away, I expected that my grandparents’ old house might be in disrepair, or maybe gone, but it was in fine shape and even still painted blue-gray. A girl, about 11-years-old, raked leaves in the front yard. She told me that her family had just moved in.

While we were at this house in Siloam Springs, although we were only on the outside of it, I felt the presence of my grandparents so much here. And I wondered, how much of yourself stays behind when you leave a house? Not only did it feel as if my grandparents’ spirits were here, it seemed as if they were nudging me toward memories.

Memory is something of a correspondence course. What we remember from childhood is far away from us in time and often in place. Until we get that time machine fixed, we can’t return to a particular time, but sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can revisit places we once knew well.

It was thrilling for me to suddenly recall that scene of walking with Grandpa that block-and-a-half to the store for a quart of milk or maybe a bag of potatoes. A new/old memory. The store was closer than the long trek that it had seemed when I was a little hoodlum.

An ongoing sadness in my life is that I didn’t get to experience my maternal grandparents during my adult years. Grandpa died when I was 16 and Grandma passed away when I was 18.

I’m always searching, it seems, for these people who loved me, for the grandfather who laughed at my antics, who scooped me up and carried me around. I’m still looking for my grandmother who sewed dresses for me and sent hand-written letters.

So I keep trying to piece together the stories of their lives. I question my mom and other relatives about them. No matter what I learn, the picture is incomplete. And it always will be.

Driving around, I was surprised that so much of what I remembered from those trips to Arkansas in the ‘60s and ‘70s was still there, the grid of my childhood still intact.

It was fun to be able to show these places to Dave. And I felt fortunate to be able to visit them with my mom. With Mom beside me it felt like a treasure hunt, trying to find what was left of those long-ago settings.

Of the three places my grandparents had lived when I was growing up, this two-story house in Siloam Springs was my favorite. It was a spacious house, and with four bedrooms upstairs I had my own room when we visited.

When I caught sight of the small part of the house that jutted out on the south side, I remembered sitting on an oval rug in that room to watch Art Fleming on “Jeopardy” on an ancient (even then) black-and-white television set.

During that time, my uncle and aunt lived just up the alley. When they adopted four kids, my brother and I had instant cousins to play with. In my grandparents’ backyard in the evenings, the adults would sit in lawn chairs and talk while we kids turned cartwheels in the grass until the moon and stars lit the night.

Driving through the alley adjacent to their house, foliage lined the fence just as it once had, and I wondered if any of those plants were leftovers from my grandma’s flower garden.

When we return to a place of our youth, we look for what remains.

Memories somersaulted through my mind. Seeing that house again was a joy. Although my grandparents departed years ago, in a way they were still there.

Copyright 2012 ~ Cheryl Unruh

 

Cheryl columns, life on the ground, nostalgia, out of state, traveling

The Gazette doesn’t print on Christmas Day or New Year’s Day – and since those fell on Tuesdays this year, no Flyover People column. Flyover People will return this Tues., Jan. 8. Thanks for following along, my friends!

Cheryl columns