Back in the day, a group called The Lovin’ Spoonful recorded a tune called Summer in the City. I know all the words to the song, because summer is precious when you live where there is winter. The farther north you live in the Midwest, the more you appreciate summer.
In Southeast Iowa and Missouri there are four complete seasons every year. People there have fall and spring wardrobes, because there is enough time during the fall and the spring to actually wear them. In Northeast Iowa and Minnesota, we adjust by adding or removing a sweater on those days that feel either warmer or nippier in the afternoon than they were in the morning. The concept of heavy sweatshirts or sweaters worn with a pair of shorts demonstrates the schizophrenic temperature patterns unique to the Upper Midwest.
In the rural Midwest, things don’t get lazy in the summer. Unless one is a pre-schooler, the chances of grabbing a little kick-back time diminish rapidly, just before the switch to daylight savings time. By the time school lets out, country folk are in full swing. Things don’t let up for the 4-H-ers until after the county fair, and for some, not until after the state fair, an event which also heralds in another school year. We are talking about busy and happy summer memories. “Work” is a relative term, and productive work from the heart and soul explains a farmer’s smile.
Living in small rural communities gives townsfolk an enormous appreciation for all the smiley-work the farmers do. In fact, in 1909, the city of Calmar couldn’t contain itself, and they organized a day to honor the work of the local farmers, and the business people who worked overtime to keep them going. A few years ago, Calmar Farmers’ Days ran a momentary risk of disappearing, but a few Calmar residents recognized how important it was to continue this annual homage. Members of The Calmar Commercial Club breathed new life into the event, and it’s bigger than before. The danger of not celebrating 100 years of Farmers’ Days is behind them. Traditions like these are the glue in small towns. We don’t usually throw out our aging traditions; we re-glue and clamp them.
Summer is busy in town, too, but it’s a different kind of busy. Getting up early and being outdoors releases the soul from its winter hibernation. Cuddling up, which felt so homey and comforting a few months ago, is replaced with joining hands and running outside. Gardens take time, as do fix-up projects, volunteer work on festival committees and summer sports activities, and whatever else we see that needs a helping hand. A group of local artists recently offered a Fairy Home Tour to support PAW (People for Animal Welfare) develop an animal shelter in Winneshiek County. The artists were busy building homes for the diminutive home tour, the organizers getting the whole thing planned, and the supporters took time to be loyal patrons of small town efforts.
In our neighborhood, we look around at ways to share our outdoor freedom. At the fair I ran into one of my across-the-alley neighbors. “My wild flowers have gone, well, wild, this summer, and please come over and take whatever you want. There are plenty for all of us to enjoy.” The neighborhood picnic is coming up, and we’ll have a rare chance relax with familiar faces that usually only exchange a wave and a holler.
This summer has held one unexpected pleasure. It’s kind of a corny little evolution of events that developed mish-mashy, stemming from an unthinkable tragedy. In March, a beautiful 36-year-old wife and mother of four young children, Gloria Ormord, collapsed and died at home in the early morning hours. It was one of those community-stunning occurrences, a healing that takes years to accomplish, though it is never fully done. Both town and country have offered what can be offered. Replacing what has been lost isn’t possible.
I wanted to spend some time doing creative, fun things with Gloria’s daughters. They are lively and precious beyond words, and my empty nest needed some occupants. Coincidentally, another friend commented that she wished her daughter could spend some time with me, because she likes doing the things I do. My friend felt a bit out of water in my arena. Hmmmm. Her daughter is the same age as one of Gloria’s. This is beginning to sound like fun, my emotions told my brain. My brain said it was thinking the same thing.
Our first day resulted in all of us getting matching flip-flops with Tootsie Rolls® on them, and by the end of the day we were calling ourselves “The Tootsie Chicks”. We have grown in size some since that first day, adding a new full-time member and an extended Tootsie Family of six more. Hubba is our mascot – he’s such a good sport, and lets us do all sorts of humiliating Tootsie adornments of him in pink. Please don’t tell him I told you.
The Tootsie Chicks meet once a week. There are no rules. We figure if someone acts up too much, we just won’t pick her up the next time. So far, everyone’s been safe. We make crafts out of our Tootsie Rolls® wrappers, we try to do something nice for other people, and we even made a fairy house for the PAW fundraiser. It’s not all fun, you know. Sometimes it’s crazy fun!
The Lovin’ Spoonful’s song reprieves itself in my head again this year. The words don’t even hold true for rural summer lives, but I sing them anyway. Summer songs make us feel good, and when I get to the lines, “Come-on come-on and dance all night, Despite the heat it'll be alright”, I can delete my winter memories and paste in my summer ones. Summer in town, with the Tootsie Chicks.
Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns July 2006
Farmer's Tan
An entire segment of society exists who understand the term “farmer’s tan”. Everyone in the Midwest has a mental picture of a father, uncle, grandfather, or even a favorite guy at church (they don’t wear their seed corn caps on Sunday morning) leap into the frontal lobe, triggering the smile reflex.
Field work begins early in the spring and ends late in the fall. Farm animals need tending year ‘round, and pert’ near everyone keeps their livestock outside and/or in a barn, away from the house. Sorry to sound condescending, Midwesterners, but you know how city folk are. They don’t have a clear picture of farming, and often wonder about things, like do we keep pigs and chickens in our actual homes, even when they aren’t sick.
People who farm are going to get tan, there’s no getting around it. They get tan because they’re outside working, and they don’t even notice. I’m not sure if they put on sun screen, but I bet some of them do now that we know too much sun can either kill us or age us prematurely. Right. Just like some dairy farmers have started drinking skim milk.
You don’t wear shorts and sandals to farm. I’ve seen some of the guys wearing tank tops, but there are no metrosexuals in the country. Farm workers are very, very tan people – tan in places, that is. Their arms are tan from about mid-bicep down, including their hands if they aren’t fencing or baling hay. Their necks are gorgeous copper browns, as are their faces, up to the eyebrows. From there, the Pioneer or John Deere cap protects the farm worker’s head from too much sun, and their eyes from too much glare. Some of them will wear sunglasses – Oakleys – but most of them depend on the brims of their caps.
We’d visit our farming uncles when I was a girl. Uncle Harry never had a full tan on his face. He’d come in every noon for dinner and every evening for lunch (the turned-around names for the town versions of lunch and dinner), get washed up, and leave his hat in the mudroom. His big ol’ white forehead sat right there on top of his eyebrows, as his brown arms reached for the rolls and mashed potatoes. When we’d visit my Uncle Dean, it was the same thing. Uncle Dean sold Pioneer Seed Corn for many years, but he still bore half a pale face.
Farmer’s tans are a staple of rural culture, an understood event that draws no attention. City folk don’t see so many farmer’s tans, so they have a tendency to stop and stare, wondering why those people don’t take their off hats and even out their faces, or their shirts so they can brown up their shoulders and backs a little.
Those of us who live in town, and who believe we are prematurely aging in our fifties, are beginning to make choices. From the mid-1980’s, some of us have used tanning beds to achieve the all-over tan we found irresistible. Do that and you’ll pay, said the dermatologists. Assuming they meant someone else, we carefully timed ourselves as we were “laying a base” in early April. Burns, we heard from the fashion experts, were what caused cancer. Tans just caused premature aging. There, you dermatologists. Harpers did a lot of research to bring us this good news, so what do you know? Besides, who thinks about aging when you aren’t old?
Buddy Pat and I have advanced together through our life stages. Our daughters were born one week apart, and for the first seven years of their lives, that was the only week they weren’t together. Running things past Buddy Pat became second nature to me. We both have plenty of other friends we cherish dearly, but Buddy Pat and I always seemed positioned for the big stuff together. It’s one of those soul-sisterhoods, easy and not at all demanding.
I was talking to Buddy Pat on the phone the other day. We always start out having a regular conversation, exchanging information and catching up. She’s throwing her niece a bridal shower, and she told me her daughter Katie is spending another year teaching in Taiwan. It’s the usual stuff, and with our schedules we don’t get to talk on the phone that often. Without fail, though, one of us says something that cracks the other one up. We don’t mean to, but one of the hallmarks of our friendship is how dang funny we think we are. As I was signing off, I said, “I gotta go now. I’m going to go Fake Bake.”
“Fake Bake? Are you going to a tanning bed at this hour?”
“Naw, it’s a sunless thing,” and I filled her in about how I get this stuff from Kathy at the beauty shop. It’s a sunless tanning product that (get this) doesn’t rub off on your clothes when you sweat. Move over, sliced bread.
“Oh,” says Buddy Pat, “I just use the regular moisturizing lotions that have the sunless tanning stuff in them.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t it rub off on your clothes, like when your neck sweats?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just throw some on my arms and a little on my legs and don’t think about it again.”
“Okay, so what you’re telling me is that you give yourself a farmer’s tan on purpose with your Neutrogena™?”
Time marches on. Instead of being horrified at the prospect of only having tan arms and legs, we find the ease of maintaining that rather attractive. Stick with the farmers, friends. They are way ahead of the rest of us when it comes to self-esteem and common sense.
I think I will put a little bronzer on my forehead, though.
Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns 2006
Field work begins early in the spring and ends late in the fall. Farm animals need tending year ‘round, and pert’ near everyone keeps their livestock outside and/or in a barn, away from the house. Sorry to sound condescending, Midwesterners, but you know how city folk are. They don’t have a clear picture of farming, and often wonder about things, like do we keep pigs and chickens in our actual homes, even when they aren’t sick.
People who farm are going to get tan, there’s no getting around it. They get tan because they’re outside working, and they don’t even notice. I’m not sure if they put on sun screen, but I bet some of them do now that we know too much sun can either kill us or age us prematurely. Right. Just like some dairy farmers have started drinking skim milk.
You don’t wear shorts and sandals to farm. I’ve seen some of the guys wearing tank tops, but there are no metrosexuals in the country. Farm workers are very, very tan people – tan in places, that is. Their arms are tan from about mid-bicep down, including their hands if they aren’t fencing or baling hay. Their necks are gorgeous copper browns, as are their faces, up to the eyebrows. From there, the Pioneer or John Deere cap protects the farm worker’s head from too much sun, and their eyes from too much glare. Some of them will wear sunglasses – Oakleys – but most of them depend on the brims of their caps.
We’d visit our farming uncles when I was a girl. Uncle Harry never had a full tan on his face. He’d come in every noon for dinner and every evening for lunch (the turned-around names for the town versions of lunch and dinner), get washed up, and leave his hat in the mudroom. His big ol’ white forehead sat right there on top of his eyebrows, as his brown arms reached for the rolls and mashed potatoes. When we’d visit my Uncle Dean, it was the same thing. Uncle Dean sold Pioneer Seed Corn for many years, but he still bore half a pale face.
Farmer’s tans are a staple of rural culture, an understood event that draws no attention. City folk don’t see so many farmer’s tans, so they have a tendency to stop and stare, wondering why those people don’t take their off hats and even out their faces, or their shirts so they can brown up their shoulders and backs a little.
Those of us who live in town, and who believe we are prematurely aging in our fifties, are beginning to make choices. From the mid-1980’s, some of us have used tanning beds to achieve the all-over tan we found irresistible. Do that and you’ll pay, said the dermatologists. Assuming they meant someone else, we carefully timed ourselves as we were “laying a base” in early April. Burns, we heard from the fashion experts, were what caused cancer. Tans just caused premature aging. There, you dermatologists. Harpers did a lot of research to bring us this good news, so what do you know? Besides, who thinks about aging when you aren’t old?
Buddy Pat and I have advanced together through our life stages. Our daughters were born one week apart, and for the first seven years of their lives, that was the only week they weren’t together. Running things past Buddy Pat became second nature to me. We both have plenty of other friends we cherish dearly, but Buddy Pat and I always seemed positioned for the big stuff together. It’s one of those soul-sisterhoods, easy and not at all demanding.
I was talking to Buddy Pat on the phone the other day. We always start out having a regular conversation, exchanging information and catching up. She’s throwing her niece a bridal shower, and she told me her daughter Katie is spending another year teaching in Taiwan. It’s the usual stuff, and with our schedules we don’t get to talk on the phone that often. Without fail, though, one of us says something that cracks the other one up. We don’t mean to, but one of the hallmarks of our friendship is how dang funny we think we are. As I was signing off, I said, “I gotta go now. I’m going to go Fake Bake.”
“Fake Bake? Are you going to a tanning bed at this hour?”
“Naw, it’s a sunless thing,” and I filled her in about how I get this stuff from Kathy at the beauty shop. It’s a sunless tanning product that (get this) doesn’t rub off on your clothes when you sweat. Move over, sliced bread.
“Oh,” says Buddy Pat, “I just use the regular moisturizing lotions that have the sunless tanning stuff in them.”
“Yeah, but doesn’t it rub off on your clothes, like when your neck sweats?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just throw some on my arms and a little on my legs and don’t think about it again.”
“Okay, so what you’re telling me is that you give yourself a farmer’s tan on purpose with your Neutrogena™?”
Time marches on. Instead of being horrified at the prospect of only having tan arms and legs, we find the ease of maintaining that rather attractive. Stick with the farmers, friends. They are way ahead of the rest of us when it comes to self-esteem and common sense.
I think I will put a little bronzer on my forehead, though.
Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns 2006
Catching Up To Summer
It’s been a corker of a summer so far! Now that the Fourth of July is behind us, I find I have some major obligations out of the way. We had the Onerheim Family Reunion last weekend in Ottumwa, Iowa. The Barn gathered together his offspring and made us all sit quietly together in church. We ate loose meat sandwiches from the Canteen and looked at slides, just like the old days. One offsprung family couldn’t make it, and the hole they left around the table was felt. The next generation down, the grandchildren, only yielded one brave soul. His cousins owe him bigtime, and they should acknowledge his representation from the positions of their post-college careers.
The quilters are back at it in the church basement. It is a relaxed group, and we are comfortable enough this summer to come and go as we please. We have developed a way to get the key to the room back and forth to each other, and before long we’ll start working on putting together the donated quilt blocks into one of the most unique quilts ever to leave a church basement. There’s nothing ordinary about the way we’re going about this, and the final presentation will most likely stand our impressions of what a quilt looks like on its ear. At least I hope so.
I have a few written pieces in process, and I’ll add them here within the next few weeks. I’m on a roll with the Midwestern lifestyle, and I do manage to get some quilting time in every week. I’m not moving fast enough to suit me on my current major project, but I’m inching along and not letting any free moments evaporate. At the end of that is usually a quilt.
So, check back soon. I’ll still be here, quilting and watching, watching and quilting. I’ll tell you all about it.
Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns July 2006
The quilters are back at it in the church basement. It is a relaxed group, and we are comfortable enough this summer to come and go as we please. We have developed a way to get the key to the room back and forth to each other, and before long we’ll start working on putting together the donated quilt blocks into one of the most unique quilts ever to leave a church basement. There’s nothing ordinary about the way we’re going about this, and the final presentation will most likely stand our impressions of what a quilt looks like on its ear. At least I hope so.
I have a few written pieces in process, and I’ll add them here within the next few weeks. I’m on a roll with the Midwestern lifestyle, and I do manage to get some quilting time in every week. I’m not moving fast enough to suit me on my current major project, but I’m inching along and not letting any free moments evaporate. At the end of that is usually a quilt.
So, check back soon. I’ll still be here, quilting and watching, watching and quilting. I’ll tell you all about it.
Copyright © Kari E.O. Burns July 2006
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