Despite a glowing space heater that hums near my chilly feet, I still hug my arms and rub my legs as I sit to write this story. The sub-zero temperatures this weekend have brutally reminded us all of our human frailty, of our dependence on stoves and furnaces, electricity and natural gas, on blankets and fleece and wool and warm water. I think it is not odd at all that I am preoccupied right now with a steaming cup of tea, with flannel bed sheets and crackling sycamore logs in our fireplace.
I have waited for a night just like tonight to write this tale, perhaps in the hope that it will warm my toes against the persistent draft that sneaks like a thief under a nearby door. The wind comes knifing across the fields around our place to rob our house of its warmth, to cool our floors and rattle our windows, and I resent the intrusion.
It warms me a little to remember a trip that my wife and I took this past summer. We headed to northern Indiana in the smothering heat of August, up old Indiana 31 to Shipshewana and Goshen and Nappanee and points nearby. We went to shop and to sleep late and to eat too much, a mini-vacation before we headed back to the daily grind of a school schedule. The temperatures that week ran in the low 90s, and while we expended the sweat and energy that seems to be the price to pay for moving around in a Hoosier summer, I think we’d agree that had it been even warmer, we’d gladly trade those dog days for the natural refrigeration we’re afflicted with now. It was so warm that even our car’s air conditioner could hardly keep ahead of the day’s oppressive mugginess, particularly when the sun shone through our windshield like a greenhouse pane above a bed of slightly moist petunias.
My wife and I are wanderers; we enjoy gadding about small-town shops and junk stores, looking for nothing in particular. We like to eat in Mom and Pop diners, take in sites of local interest, and search for bargains in antique markets and auctions, even five-and-dimes. We were in a shopper’s paradise in the few days we spent on the trip, but I now think it was the warmth of the days there that make me want to go back most of all.
It didn’t take much driving to escape the cloistered feel of strip malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions north of Indianapolis. Within a half-hour, we found ourselves looking at the endlessly flat fields and unwatered yards and wild black-eyed susans that grew in the uncut weeds amidst fence row corner posts. We got a more generous sampling of Indiana small towns after we left the outskirts of Noblesville and before we arrived in Kokomo, and even though we could have slurped on mega-sized soft drinks purchased at convenience stores and mini-marts all along the way, we passed through only small burgs and hamlets after that, turning east on Indiana Highway 6 long before we ever made it to South Bend.
Not far from Argos, I saw a crop duster dive-bombing a soybean field, the airplane’s yellow underbelly coming so close to the highway that I could clearly see the pilot in ball cap, dark sunglasses and tan shirt. Within a few miles, we saw massive wheeled irrigation lines as they crept their way through dark green cornfields and mashed down their own crisscrossed rows, flattening the very stalks they were mercifully delivering from thirst.
My wife didn’t see the brown and crunchy yards on either side of the ribbon-thin highway as we drove on toward Nappanee. Uncharacteristically, she had waited several hours to fall asleep in her passenger seat, for she is usually groggy and napping within 15 minutes of getting into any automobile that she is not driving. It’s as though she trusts my sense of direction — I own no GPS — and steady hand on the wheel because she feels no need to keep an eye on my driving. I think she deserves the rest, but kid her that she is not unlike a fussy baby who settles down the minute it hears and feels the lullaby of the road rolling away underneath.
Had she been awake, we would have shared the first glimpses of the massive Percheron draft horses as they grazed in closely cropped fields, and a pair of towering white round barns, and the sight of a scrawny Amish boy in straw hat and too-short britches pulling a much heavier sister in a wagon behind his bicycle.
She awoke by the time we hit even tinier Highway 15 and headed north again, then toward New Paris and what is real Amish territory. There we came to a place where it seemed everyone sold homemade furniture and where names like Zook and Yoder and Borkholder were painted on nearly every mailbox. But huge factories also dotted the otherwise calm landscape, reminders that the state in which I live is as much or more industrial than agricultural. Heavily loaded semi trucks stood in anachronistic contrast to the signs we saw that advertised even more of those bulldozer-sized work animals, as well as one for buggy repairs, and yet another for a local farrier.
As we headed into Goshen, then onto the east and north again toward Shipshewana — a place well-known for its huge flea market and weekly auctions — we again saw the incongruity of the modern and the antique mingled along the roads. A grotesquely colorful sign advertised “Crazy Joe’s Fireworks,” yet within a mile of the place we passed neat white farmhouses whose only concession to the modern age were carefully lettered placards that read “Honey For Sale.” We recalled that along the way, we also saw a harness shop, a chick hatchery, the “Sprig ’O Mint” golf course, and a field of blueberry bushes well past harvest.
That north wind is whistling a frigid tune now. In the back of my mind, I am etching mental reminders to leave my water taps dripping and my cabinet doors ajar. I have already thrown an extra blanket on our bed, dropped a little warm water off for the cats to use as an evening nightcap before retiring to their straw in the barn, and am hopeful that my truck’s battery survives the long, cold, bony fingers of that brutal overnight breeze.
But I can also recall being under the heat lamp of those days we spent near Shipshewana last summer. We didn’t know it then, but the warmth of those days may have been the best bargain we found.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. He’ll be reading from and signing his new book, “Sidelines: The Best of the Basketball Stories…” at 6:30 p.m. (CST) Thursday at the Paris Public Library. Mike’s Web page is at www.mikelunsford.com.
Mike Lunsford
Sidelines: Feeling cold? Here’s a story that just might warm your feet
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
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The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.
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THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.
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THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…
It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
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The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read
It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.
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The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes
Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.
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The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing
It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
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Wash. becomes 7th state to okay same-sex marriage
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The 'Celebrity Apprentice' Cast Meets Donald Trump
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Jacqueline Kennedy's personal papers released
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