I have spent much of the past few days raking leaves and cleaning my yard. The yearly ritual burns my time like cordwood, but it’s not really work at all when I compare the clear blue skies and cool breezes of late October to the sweaty miseries of July and August workdays.
A friend of mine says I should just wait for all of the leaves to fall, then, in one massive Normandy invasion on my yard, be done with it all. But I would rather plug away at it little bits at a time, enjoying my green grass and its speckles of newly fallen gold maple leaves, rather than wait for the brown shifting carpets of the dead to swirl and blow into my open garage or crumble on my porch floor.
Fall signals the waning days of control over my yard. Soon, I’ll have less interest in spending time outdoors with snow shovel in hand or as I fist-fight dead car batteries and bitter winds and knee-deep drifts.
I want to soak in a little more outdoors for now, keep a few calluses on my hands, too. I’ll be sitting at my office window peering at the bird feeders soon enough, so for now, I don’t really care if I head indoors after the television news is over or supper is a little cool, or my back is a little sore. Besides, I like to watch the sun set, to gaze at the evening stars, and to see the wisps of my breath in the air, too.
Autumn raking teaches me persistence. For virtually every morning that follows an evening of loading my crummy old tarps with poplar leaves and pine needles and inky walnuts, I walk amid the ruins of another battle lost. The breeze and gravity persistently do their jobs over night, so after a day of teaching and chalk and notebook paper, I come home to slip on my boots and grungy blue jeans to work at my raking. I work alone and I enjoy the time by myself.
My generation, and the generations that have come after it, are not as persistent as those of our parents or grandparents. Technology and convenience stores and laziness have replaced that quality with impatience. I used to watch my grandmother and mother peel basket after basket of apples, the paring knives in their hands rarely slowing for a glimpse at their worn blades. I marveled that not once did I see them slip up and lop off a thumb or bleed into their work; it was almost a seventh sense for them. They snapped beans and cut corn and cranked tomatoes through a grinder for hours on end, the only entertainment between them being their own conversation. That seems too quaint, too old-fashioned, too time-consuming to most people now.
I remember spending time with my old pal, the artist Salty Seamon, and once, while I stood with him at the studio basement table on which he constructed his own picture frames, he casually mentioned that he had not only built the studio — his house, too — but that he had dug the studio basement himself, as well.
“I didn’t know you knew how to use heavy equipment,” I told him.
“I don’t,” he replied. “I know how to use a shovel, though. I used to come home from work and spend an hour or two filling my wheelbarrow,” Salty said. “Sometimes I’d come out after supper for another hour or so, too.”
I can’t remember now how long he said that it took him, but countless hours, and I imagine more than a few aching spines later, Salty had his basement dug. He then learned how to pour cement and lay concrete block. After that conversation, I think I admired that man’s perseverance nearly as much as his skill with a paintbrush.
In summers long ago, I used to work with my grandfather as he tried to earn a few extra dollars with his retired time. It was hard work for a 12-year-old boy, but he’d come down to our house by 7 a.m. or so, his black coffee and toast already gulped, to drag me out of bed to go with him to hoe strawberries at a neighborhood farm. I remember standing at the end of those roes in my Huck Finn get-up, shoelessly toeing at the sandy soil, as the newly planted strawberry plants — a year away from yielding fruit — stretched out in long straight rows toward the horizon. We’d hoe until lunch, eat out of our dented aluminum boxes in the shade of a few locust trees, then hoe some more, and we did it for 75 cents an hour.
My grandpa thought jobs like that would “make a man” out of me. At the time, I just thought they made me tired. He, on the other hand, was a hoeing machine, and if I couldn’t keep up, which inevitably I couldn’t, he’d just hoe himself a good distance away from me, a blur of his worn hoe blade and wrinkled skin in the far distance. But it was his lessons in hoeing that kept me going years later when I insisted on cutting a 100-foot sycamore tree into fireplace-length pieces, a mall and sledge and ax and sweat all the resources I had, and it took me from midsummer until the snow was flying to get the job done.
I hear of great tales of persistence: a man who has read the Encyclopedia Britannica, a woman who collected aluminum cans until she could pay for a community swimming pool, a tough old guy who tore a barn down a stick of wood at a time, took it to his new farm in numbered pieces, and put it all back together again. Just a few days ago, I read about a man who had completed a trip around the world in his own old car. Small strokes do indeed topple great oaks, as Benjamin Franklin reminds us.
Raking leaves isn’t like building one of Egypt’s great pyramids, nor is it like laying blocks in the Great Wall or digging the Panama Canal. It’s just me, with a rake, and a paint-spattered tarp, scraping the earth for its yield of leafy crumbs and twigs and pine cones, and I enjoy it, even after a day of work.
It re-teaches me that little battles count for something, whether it be digging a basement or hoeing strawberries. It teaches me that there is something satisfying to be learned from cleaning a yard and waiting for the stars to come out.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or through regular mail, c/o the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. His second book — “Sidelines: the Best of the Basketball Stories…” — will be released this month. Visit Mike’s Web page at www.mikelunsford.com.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: Proving persistence, one pull of the rake at a time
- Mike Lunsford
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A walk in the woods
I went for a walk in the woods one day last week after work. It was a warm and green afternoon, and a fresh blue breeze blew in from the west like a new spring friend.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘Dowsers’ provide hope more than science
My grandfather was a man of God. Many times I saw him, his right hand held high in the air at his Wednesday night “prayer meeting,” praising the Lord before weeping at the altar on his knees. And yet, he was a “dowser,” a “diviner,” a “witcher” who, as a favor, would grab a forked sassafras stick and find water for some poor unfortunate whose well had gone dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: As of today, it’s unofficially spring
Despite the calendar telling us not to rush things, I think it is all right to go ahead and say spring is here. The Ides of March has passed, Easter is coming soon, and I have already been out in my yard with a rake, getting my boots muddy. It looks like spring to me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Twain’s Sawyer helps us yearn for ‘wilderness of childhood’
My cousin, Roger, stopped in one day last summer for a glass of tea and a little conversation. Rog has lived an hour’s drive away for years and now, and besides summer reunions, I don’t see him nearly often enough. He’s a good man who has raised a good family, and he owns a healthy sense of appreciation for not only the life he has now, but also the lives we had years ago as kids.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Cheerful green of wheat fights winter blahs
There is a light drizzle of freezing rain tapping at the door of my cabin today. It is little more than a week before the words I am writing are due to appear on your breakfast table or work desk with your morning coffee and scrambled eggs. But I write when I can, and today, despite a full schedule of televised football games, and the stacks of ungraded papers in my briefcase, and a good book lying open on my nightstand, I am clacking away on a keyboard to the whir of a heater and the steady drip of my gutters.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On the simple joys of watching it snow ...
It began to snow about 20 minutes ago, as I write this, light, wind-driven flakes that fall silently into my woods as I watch from a window.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: On this day above all, ‘Peace on earth, good will to men’
More than a year after his wife’s death, the great American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Christmas Day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Remembering a Lefty Frizzell-kind of Christmas ...
My brother and sister and I sat around a Thanksgiving dinner table a month ago, shifting in our seats just enough to make our yet-to-be digested turkey sit a little more easily, and, as we often do when we get together, we reminisced about our childhoods for a while.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The wonders of wading in ‘The Iridescence of a Shallow Stream’
I have no idea how many times I have written a story that begins with the wistful phrase, “When I was a boy. ...”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Little man who came to dinner changes feel of household
My 7-year-old nephew, Carson, came to visit us last week. That in itself isn’t earth-shattering news, for he often drops by with one of his parents or the other, the last time dressed as a ghoul for Halloween. But for a couple like Joanie and me, whose youngest child is now nearly two decades past Carson’s age, having a little guy like him in the house, even for a few hours, takes a bit of adjusting.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Reflections: a bit of red glass and our daily thanksgivings
I sat in the half-light of my old desk lamp a few nights ago, a chilly wind blowing in from the northwest that made me appreciative of my long-sleeved shirt and purring heater.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Growing up — and ‘old’ — with many mouths to feed
At our family reunion last summer, I asked my brother if I could borrow a pair of photo albums he had put together. Over the past couple of years, I have committed quite a few of our family’s old yellowing snapshots to newly cropped and digitalized lives, and I wanted to do the same with some of the pictures John has collected for himself.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Violets in October – a pleasant surprise
I guess I don’t pay much attention to the weather forecasts these days because it surprised me a bit when our furnace kicked on a few nights ago.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A library is a good thing — even a little, homegrown one
I grew up with libraries, and I can’t imagine there ever being a time when I won’t want to wander one exploring it like some bookworm-Balboa, finding an author or title that I never really knew existed before. Creating those “Eureka” moments seems to be a dying interest now that so many of us download and digest books electronically without ever really considering that there just might be some hidden gem we’d have liked even more had we simply stumbled upon it on a shelf by accident. I think those moments of discovery are not unlike kicking up lost treasure a mile from where X marks the spot.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The ‘soothsayer’ who came to dinner
I’ve had a good time opening my mail these past few weeks. Sure, I still received the usual junk about lower credit card rates and satellite television packages, but the genuine letters made me smile; most were about a story I wrote in late August.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The agony of de‘feet’ has this writer on his heels
I don’t know if I can electrocute myself by using a computer and soaking my feet in a pan of warm water at the same time, but I am contemplating taking the risk. My feet, particularly the right foot, have staged a 10-digit rebellion over the past few months. After a half-century of commendable service, my pods are screaming to be taken in for repairs, a big inconvenience for a guy who works on his feet all day and whose “sole” form of serious exercise is putting one foot in front of another walking the local roadways.
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Mike Lunsford: Summer’s hidden beauty worth the wait
The great naturalist John Burroughs once said that nature teaches more than she preaches. I can’t recall a summer where that rings true more than this one, for that old sun of ours truly taught us a thing or two these past three months.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time to redefine the concept of ‘assisted living’
Although it has been nearly two months now, I can’t forget the few afternoon hours I spent on a hot June day this summer at a local “assisted living” facility in town. I had been asked to speak to a group of men there about Father’s Day, but for most part, the wonderful old guys who came to listen certainly made my day more memorable than I did theirs.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Observations on smooth stones and blue-green water…
It was raining when I began to write this. Although no one could rightfully call what we got this afternoon a “downpour,” it was nice to have my windows open to hear the steady drops of a passing shower tapping on my dry-as-dust deck and hard-as-concrete yard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: This summer has us recalling the heat of ’36
It was “only” 99 degrees one afternoon last week when I decided to work on a backyard deck. With a jack and a drill and a little more sweat than I wanted to invest in the project, I went about the business of leveling its sags and dips a bit. The sun pounded down on my head and shoulders like a thug’s blackjack, but as I packed my tools and drank a glass of cool water under a big maple tree a few hours later, I couldn’t help but think about how lucky I’ve been these past few dusty and drought-stricken weeks. I have worked under this summer’s heat lamp for only a few hours at a time, but God help the roofers and utility linesmen and firemen, and so many others, who are out in it day after long hot day.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: We had no better friend than Andy Taylor
The world is a sadder place now that Andy Griffith has died, but at least we still have Andy Taylor.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Wading deeper into the subject of Blue Herons
Like a relative who has worn out his welcome, the hot, parched weather of this young summer has already overstayed its visit with us, so my wife and I have found ourselves walking our road later in the evenings to keep our feet cool and our backs dry.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Thanking two dads whose gifts have never stopped coming…
It is nearly a week until Father’s Day, but I have had my dad, and my father-in-law — a second dad to me — on my mind today. I wrote about both men just a few weeks ago, but I have set my mind to write about them again anyway. I don’t want this story to be sad; they both loved to laugh and wouldn’t want that. No, I just wanted to tell them hello, and to thank them again for what they still do for me.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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Mayor: Person Killed in San Antonio Flooding
Suspect in Killing of Officer Found Dead in Cell
Raw: Texas Deputy Shot by Colo. Suspect Honored
Major Detours Following Wash. Bridge Collapse
Raw: Apple 1 Computer Sells for More Than $650k
Raw: French Soldier Stabbed in Throat Near Paris
Raw: Train Derails After Overpass Collapse
American Held in Grisly Czech Murders
High Wire Spectacle Thrills Crowd in Austria
Raw: Jersey Shore Reopens for Summer
Today in History May 25
Raw: Rescues From San Antonio Flooding
Raw: Gay Rights Activists March in Ukraine
Raw Video: Washington State Bridge Collapse
Bus Fire Kills 16 Children, Teacher in Pakistan
UK-bound Pakistan Plane Diverted, 2 Men Arrested
Officials: Tsarnaev Friend Linked to Slaying
Hagel Urges Cadets to End Scourge of Sex Assault
New Wheelchair Lift Promises More Access
Massive Flooding in San Antonio Area; Rescue Efforts Underway
Hope For The Boy Who Can't Smile
Young protestor goes viral on Youtube
Toronto Mayor says he's not a crack head
Maine island offers lighthouse getaway
Should We Prepare for Quakes?
Lynn Kindergarten Class Rescues Ducklings
Congressional gold medal awarded to civil rights heroes
Charles Ramsey visits Kentucky
Unique Display Greets Guests At Revel Casino
Cape Cod Train Service Worries Residents
BASE jumper rides snowmobile off cliff to honor dead friend
Bridge Collapse Survivor: 'Rough Day'
SHOCKING: School Guard Throws Girl Down Stairs
Star Wars X-Wing Star Fighter Made of Legos
Actress Amanda Bynes Arrested in New York
Singer Psy Has An Imposter
