memory lane

Last week-end we went to Iowa which we do a couple times a year to reaffirm we are city folks through and through. Well, actually we go to visit an elderly cousin of my Dad's who is now in a nursing home. When we were kids, our family went every summer and stayed a week on the farm he owned. My sisters and I loved going. It started with the 6 hour journey. We would get up super early and drive an hour and stop for breakfast at some small no-name diner. Then we'd drive some more making pit stops at little roadside rest areas. Around 3pm we'd check into a motel for the night. (did you go back to check if you read correctly that our destination was 6 hours away? - our family would have made great pioneers since we covered about as much mileage a day as they did long ago in covered wagons) We always stayed in a motel - a mom and pop type of course - that had a pool. Not one of us could swim a stroke but we would never stay in a place without one. We'd check in and then dash into our bathing suits and happily bob around in the pool like the happy little cork family till dinnertime.

On the second day we'd arrive at the farm. The four of us girls would run around like the place would disappear from under our noses if we didn't try to experience everything in the first hour there. We'd pump water from the well, we fed chickens who were not interested and ran from the dried corn we flung at them. We patted the smelly pigs in their pens and always wanted to help bring the cows in from the pasture at the end of the day along with the interchangeable collie always named Duke. During the week we'd go fishing in the farm pond and screamed if we caught anything - a mixture of excitement and city girl fear of snaring a living creature on a hook. John, our farmer cousin, let me drive the tractor once and I promptly got one of the big wheels stuck in a ditch. It took hours and a neighboring farm's tractor to pull it out. One of the most vivid memories I have is of my great aunt killing chickens in the yard by grabbing ones, whose misfortune was to be nearby, and chop off their heads with an ax. My sisters and I sat on the fence watching and would cheer as the decapitated bird would flap around a bit before falling over. I can't imagine what a psychiatrist would have to say about that.

It was sad to see John this week-end with his walker but his welcoming smile is just as big as when we were kids. We shared old stories and laughed a lot. The farm is sold now but we walked around it anyway. The big vegetable garden is gone, no farm animals anymore and the house is falling down around itself, but it was all still so familiar....one of those memories that linger with a hint of it all happening just a moment before instead of 50 years earlier.