Poets, Pickers, Preachers and Prophets

 

 

I grew up in a house filled with music.  Some of my earliest memories are watching, listening and singing with my Nanny at the piano.  She was a wonderful pianist, playing both by music and by ear.  She played all the old songs - Sioux City Sue, Mr. Sandman, Moon River, Last Date.  She did a killer imitation of Jo Ann Castle from the Lawrence Welk Show – we used to laugh over that one until we were in tears.  I found out much later that, as a teen, she was part of a local combo – Hard Tater and the Syncopators.  I wish I had known while she was still living.  I would love to have heard those stories!

My daddy sang in church and sometimes was asked to sing at events around town.  How Great Thou Art was his usual choice for church.  People still talk to me about his renditions of that song.   It was one of the early hymns I learned to play and, after my Nanny died when I was about 12, I sometimes accompanied him on the piano.  My piano playing is basic at best and my brief attempt at guitar never got past 3 chords and “Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man.”  I wish I had worked harder at both instruments.

Nanny played piano just about any time they needed someone to provide music around town.  Singers who did not have their own accompanists enlisted her help and she always played for the beauty contests.  They used to have entertainment during breaks in the competition and I remember singing myself once or twice.    I cannot imagine why anyone thought the audience wanted to hear a little girl with extremely rudimentary singing ability; the only thing I can think of is that Nanny wanted it and they were afraid if they didn’t agree, she wouldn’t play the piano for anybody else!  The two songs I remember singing were Treasure Island and Sioux City Sue.  Thankfully, there were very few tape recorders at that time so I never had to listen to my performance.  

It seemed inevitable that I married a musician.  Robert played and sang at local events from the time he was in junior high school.  Not long after we were married he formed a garage band, and I became a roadie.  (I was in charge of the tape recorder.)  Our parties usually turned into jam sessions and friends invited to our house knew to bring their guitars along.  I went to sleep many nights listening to him tinkering with his guitar and trying out new songs.  Every time I hear “This Old Guitar” now, I still want to cry. It was our theme song.  I am glad I had the chance to share just a little bit in the magic that happens when a musician takes the stage and shares that incredible reciprocal energy with an audience. 

Robert’s cousin, Howard Forrester, played fiddle with Grand Ole Opry star Roy Acuff and the entire Forrester clan paid frequent visits to their roots in Hickman County.  They and whoever tagged along with them spent “Sundays in the Country” jamming, laughing and eating vast quantities of food at the home of my in-laws.  Some of the tagalongs were pretty well known – Charlie Collins, Brother Oswald, Larry McNeely and a hammer dulcimer player named Kathy Barton, who was a fairly well-known folk singer. 

You could count on three things during these sessions.  Robert’s dad, Floyd, would say, “Howard, play Liberty” at least three times, Robert would play and sing John Prine’s classic “Paradise,” and Robert’s grandmother would ask him to do “Easy Loving.”  That request always seemed to me an odd choice for an 80-something year old lady, but Robert always obliged.  I smile every time I hear that song on the radio.

Even now, I can sing the lyrics to almost every oldie I hear, largely because of a game Robert and I used to play.  We would take turns picking a topic and singing every song we could think of that had anything to do with that topic.  Our home, like my childhood home, was filled with music.  Willie, Waylon, Kris, Kenny Rogers, John Prine, Crystal Gayle, Linda Ronstadt, John Denver, Don Williams – we practically wore out those records.  And even though Robert has been gone from this world for many years now, I still hang out with good friends who are musicians.  They bring me great joy.

Those old favorites, along with new discoveries, have saved my sanity during the last couple of years, when Covid raged and live music was shut down, along with most everything else.  Thankfully, we now have YouTube and Amazon music and a multitude of other ways of listening to music.  We don't have to travel to a record store; we can buy and download favorite songs online. Thanks to a bluetooth speaker, I can sit on my porch and listen to concerts every night.  Music is a precious gift to this world, and without it, I’m not sure we could bear life at all.  Musicians are preachers and prophets (in the words of Kristofferson) and the best of them tell more truth than the empty-headed pseudo-preachers who spread their versions of religion on the airwaves and television nowdays.  They still bring their guitars full of songs and stand on stage to pour out their hearts.  Some people lament the passing of “the old guard” of music.  But musicians never really die; they leave so many pieces of their hearts behind – pieces of their hearts to touch our hearts and make us laugh or cry and inspire us to make our own music, whether it includes a melody or even a sound.  God blessed us beyond measure when he created the possibility of music.  I suspect he knew we would need it.

 

If the Cows are Out, It Must be Sunday Morning

 

I don’t know where cows and other livestock keep their calendars.  But I know they must have them.  Because they always know when it’s Sunday morning and all farmers know what that means.  If the cows are out, it must be Sunday morning.

Horses also share the uncanny ability to know when it’s Sunday morning and you are on your way to church.  That’s when they escape, or get a leg hung in the fence, or stick their head through a gate, or find an object to slice open a leg, or birth a foal.   I once had to remove a horse’s front leg from a wire fence dressed in my hose, Sunday shoes and best dress and still managed to make it to church on time.  There is no sleeping in on Sunday when you have livestock.  You have to get up extra early to go on a round-up before going to church.  You can’t just skip church, because you have to ask forgiveness for all the things you have said while on the round-up.

Just last Sunday, I had a couple of escapees from my pasture, not before church, but during church.  My phone was silenced, so I didn’t see the message about it until later, but luckily the round-up had already happened by the time I got home. 

Much of my childhood was spent chasing livestock of some kind.  I remember one time my daddy had a little band of renegade pigs, who ran amuck all over the farm until they were old enough to become bacon and sausage.  No matter where you put them or how much fence repair you did, almost every day we would look out and there they would be – merrily rooting around somewhere they had no business.  He kept his young pigs down in a large holler, surrounded by a pretty steep hill .  Their favorite thing was to get almost to the gate at the head of the holler, then turn around and run straight up the hill between whoever was trying to drive them back.  I think they were possessed.

We had an accomplished jumping calf once.  He could jump out of any fence he found himself in.  One day, he jumped 5 or 6 fences in his attempt to escape.  It was a happy day when he was finally captured and taken to the sale barn.  It’s too bad there was no market for calves with jumping talent.  He could have been the first Olympic champion in calf jumping.

The most expert escape artists I have encountered, however, are my horses.  There are some differences between cow escapees and horse escapees.  Cows usually get out through a hole in the fence, and you would be surprised at how small a hole it takes for even a fairly large cow.  Horses prefer to tear the fence down or open the gate.  If a cow gets out, they will almost always find that spot and go back in, if chased in the general direction.  In fact, if it’s only a single cow or two, they will usually find the spot themselves and return, given enough time.  Horses will never find that spot and go back inside.  You have to catch the horse and lead it to a gate.  For this reason, I have all kinds of rope and halters hanging in various places around the house and yard and in every vehicle.  Several times in the past, I have been out chasing down horses and found myself with nothing to lead them with.  I’ve used a shoelace once or twice, discarded hay string (when you find a stray hay string on the farm, there is an unwritten rule that you loop it around the fence for just such an occasion) , and once, my bra.  Emergencies call for drastic measures.  And, as the saying goes, “anyone who lives near me is sooner or later going to see me in my pajamas chasing horses.”  Especially on Sunday mornings.

Horses can be all the way on the other side of a twenty-acre field and sense a gate chain has been left unfastened.  And they study gates extensively to figure out how to open them.  I spent several weeks yelling at everyone who went through my barn gate that they weren’t fastening the chain back correctly because the horses kept opening the gate every night or two.  It turned out the snap was so worn out that Bullet could use his lips to work it loose.  Who teaches them how these things work?  Once I watched him study an unfamiliar latch at a county fair for a couple of hours.  If I had left him alone any length of time, he would have had it open, no doubt.  He is the only horse I’ve ever had that can open gates that swing toward him instead of just pushing them open.  He can open a gate that doesn’t even swing by draping his head over the top and dragging it toward him until he can squeeze through.  At 28 years old, he has had a lot of time to learn how to open gates.  And he has taught all his tricks to his young red-headed friend, who goes by the unimaginative name of Red.  In addition to gate opening skills, Red has another talent.  He can apparently jump really high.  I say apparently because I’ve not seen him do it.  But many a morning he has appeared on the other side of a fence with no other visible means of escape. 

Someday I might win a million dollars in the lottery.  If I do, I know what I will do with it.  I will build escape proof fences and gates with really good latches.  I may need to make that two million dollars. 

High Maintenance

 

I used to wonder why my daddy seemed to go to the Co-op every day.  Now that I am responsible for keeping all the mechanical things running on this farm, I understand. A tractor, RTV, lawn mowers, weed eaters – one or more of them need something every day.  

Every Friday, I tend to ponder where the week has gone and wonder what I accomplished during the seven days since the last Friday.  Actually, I start my pondering along about Wednesday afternoon when I suddenly realize the week is half gone and what in the world have I been doing and listing in my head all the things I meant to get done this week.  Usually, these ponderings take place while sitting in the swing on my front porch, and I have to admit to myself that sitting in the swing on my front porch is what I’ve mostly been doing all week.   At least I’m not sitting in the house where I would have to ponder all the things in the house I’ve not done all week.

This particular week, I have to say, I have accomplished a few chores I’ve been neglecting.   The neglect is not entirely my fault.  A recalcitrant tractor, an aging lawn mower and an improperly stored spray apparatus are all at fault too.  I won’t even get into my issue with weed eaters.  Are there really people who can replace the string on weed eaters when they run out?  Or is replacing string on weed eaters just a myth?

Masses of rain, heavy dew and hot weather have led to great difficulty keeping up with mowing.  It’s too wet to mow early in the morning, too hot to mow midday and raining by late afternoon during the monsoon season that has covered Middle Tennessee this summer. But I bit the bullet and set out to take care of my yard early in the week.  It’s a slow process when you have to stop every round to clear soggy clumps of grass from the mower deck.  My friend Clay was working on the porch and every time he helped clear the clog, he would say, “It’s the wet grass,” and I would say, “It’s because that flap that covers the opening is not fixed right.”  After about 4 times, he rigged a fix for the flap and I finished the mowing.  Sometimes I am right.

I marked the yard off my list and turned to the bush hog.  I love to run the bush hog.   It’s a fairly mindless task, other than keeping an eye out for rocks and large limbs and making sure you don’t get smacked in the face by low hanging branches.  I do a lot of my writing on the tractor while chopping up grass and small bushes.  Surprisingly, the tractor started with just a moderate amount of persuasion and very little strong language, and I only got slapped in the head once from a cedar branch.  Nothing broke, nothing quit, I didn’t run over any strands of wire, and I didn’t run out of gas.  A red-letter day for mowing!  I sat on my porch the rest of the day and admired my newly manicured field. 

I got cocky.  Success with the mowing went to my head and I decided to do some spraying.  Thus the first trip to the co-op, for brush killer.  After filling the tank on the back of the RTV, I hooked the cables to the battery and flipped the switch.  Nothing happened.  I had to go sit on the porch the rest of the afternoon.  Later I called my go-to advisor for all things farm related and he diagnosed the pump as the likely problem.  “Take it apart,” he said, “and see if it might be frozen.  Especially if you haven’t used it lately.”  Day two of dealing with the sprayer brought success in taking it apart, determining that the pump worked without the toggle switch, thus indicating that the switch was the problem.  So, a new switch (trip two to the co-op) was installed and I was in business for just the price of $1.98 switch.  Or so I thought.  I drove down to the nearest patch of cockle burrs, turned on the switch and pressed the handle of the wand, at which time the spray came out of the handle instead of the nozzle.  Time to sit on the porch for a while to gear up for another trip to the co-op for a new spray wand.    

The next morning I was feeling pretty good about my accomplishments, mowing, bush hogging and spraying all in one week.  I had a meeting in town that day, so I got dressed and started out the door.  Clay’s plan was to finish mowing the back yard.  He met me in the front yard clutching a zip lock bag of parts from the mower.  “It was missing really bad and we noticed that the fuel filter and air filter were really dirty,” he explained apologetically. “So if you can go to the co-op on your way home, we need these parts.”  As I said in the beginning, I know now why my daddy used to go there every day.