Another Day in the Country
Returning home
© Another Day in the Country
It’s been a quiet week in my hometown in spite of tornado warnings and storm watches.
My friends from other states call and say, “Are you all right? I’m hearing about flooding in Kansas on the news.”
And I tell them, “We’re fine. When it comes to a storm, a miss is as good as a mile.”
“Baba, what does that even mean?” my grandson asks.
“I think it means that life is a risk always, but it’s a risk worth taking. And when you’re OK, you should give thanks!”
I’m not sure that’s really the meaning of the axiom, but it works as an answer.
I’m sure difficult things have happened for all of us this week — some worse than others. But in Ramona, no one’s house has burned down. The wind has been fierce at times, but no tornado brushed our borders.
In my yard, no trees were blown down, but we did cut a tree down last week.
For quite some time, I’ve been feeling this funny spot in the guest bedroom floor — like it was tilting.
Things tilt with the seasons in lots of Kansas houses, so I haven’t paid close attention. The room isn’t used every week. It’s for guests, and it’s only when I’m getting ready for company that I start to notice flaws.
I might have told you about my mother ordering a “princess tree” from some mail order catalog 20 years ago.
She had shown me a picture of this beautiful blossom-covered tree and said, “Wouldn’t it be lovely in the yard, Pat?”
When it came, it looked more like a cucumber plant than a tree, but we nursed it through its first winter, and lo and behold, slowly but surely, it became a tree, then a bigger tree, then three branches of a tree.
In the midst of all our marveling and its expansion, its roots headed under the house, and we paid it no heed.
Even when there was a small hump at a spot in the floor, we paid no attention.
“It will go away,” I reasoned. “It’s just the ground settling or expanding, depending upon the season.”
But it didn’t go away, and it kept getting worse, little by little. That tree was like Hitler coming to power in Germany, the tree being the expansion of Nazism and my house being Germany.
While for years I’d worried about the tree’s survival, I now was worrying about the house. The tree had to come down.
LeeRoy came to our rescue. After a day’s hard work by the whole family, the tree is gone. I guess that qualifies as news from my hometown.
We had guests this past weekend, which also qualifies as news. A friend from high school was returning to Enterprise for a school reunion and came from Nebraska to stay overnight at my house — in the topsy-turvy room that the tree’s roots had been playing with.
I had to warn my guests that the shower door was a little wonky because tree roots had been trespassing under my house and not to fret that there was a gap in the trim.
For years, my favorite radio personality started a story-telling portion of his show with a sentence that I just started this column with: “It’s been a quiet week in my hometown.”
I would stop what I was doing, bend my ear closer to the radio, and wait in anticipation to hear what came next.
His stories were about people in a make-believe town in Minnesota, but they often sounded a lot like people I knew in whatever town I was living in at the time.
When you listened to stories about people in Lake Wobegon week after week, you soon felt that you knew them.
I had a real friend I knew from high school this past weekend. For me to have a childhood friend and her daughter as guests was quite a treat.
Not to sound crass, but at my age, friends in my peer group are rather sparse.
I went with her to the first meeting of the school reunion and had to laugh. When they got to people who had graduated from high school in the 1950s, they no longer went year by year. The 1950s were a category unto themselves.
She stayed for all the services. I escaped and headed back to Ramona, giving thanks that I still was able to drive through greening wheat fields, hear meadowlarks calling, pull into a garage at a house with a tilt in the guest bedroom floor and a wonky shower door, kick off my shoes, and spend the rest of the day in the country.