THE SONIC BOOMER
This morning I got to thinking of all the things that progress has cost us. It’s not that I mind progress (usually), it’s just that sometimes things are gone before we know it — replaced by easier, faster, more modern things. Then, one day, we look up and wonder, “Where did that go?”
When I was a kid, we went to “the farm” every summer. “The farm,” located near the tiny town of Alpha in Upper Michigan, was where my mother had grown up, together with her eight siblings, her mama and her tata (Polish for papa). My father would help out around the place, even though my uncles teased him mercilessly about being a “city slicker” who was barely able to hoist a bale of hay onto the truck without help.
My mother would hang out with grandma, chattering happily in Polish. The chattering was musical in a way, because I didn’t understand the words, but it was also concerning to hear, “Blah-blah-blah-Debbie-blah-blah-blahski.” Huh? What?
My brother Jim and I loved the farm. Unlike our home in the city, the farm boasted acres and acres of land upon which we were free to roam with one caution — “Stay away from the well!” The well, unlike pastoral drawings in which a circular brick structure is topped with an adorable shingled roof and an accompanying wooden bucket on a rod, was a hole in the ground with a piece of plywood slid over it. One false move, and you fell to the center of the earth. We gave it a wide berth — about an acre in circumference — and were spared.
Instead, we spent our days picking raspberries, strawberries and hazelnuts; climbing the apple trees; tossing hay at each other up in the barn’s hayloft; and chasing the chickens.
We also gave a wide berth to the bull (easily distinguished from the cows by the brass ring in his nose) and watched when grandpa did the milking, something my mother used to do before walking a mile through snowdrifts to school. (My dad thought a hay bale was heavy until he loaded 12 cans full of milk onto the delivery truck.)
One of our favorite things to do was to hang around in the shed where grandpa kept his tractor. The smell of old grease and oil, together with the sound of clanking metal tools, still brings me back to that place.
The farm is still there. After grandpa died and grandma moved “to town” (population: 124), Uncle Walter took it over. He did some farming, but mostly he filled the house with junk.
It was a shame, because grandpa and his neighbors had built the house by hand back in the 1920s. It had three bedrooms — one for the boys, one for the girls and one for the parents. My mother’s three sisters slept in a double bed, and mom slept across the bottom with their feet. The littlest sister, a baby, had a cradle in the parents’ room.
I’ve gone back to visit, and everything is so much smaller than I remember! The house is small. The apple trees are small. The chicken coop is small. I ventured onto the property and poked my nose into the tractor shed. I breathed deeply.
Ahhhhh. Some things never change.
