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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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.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Taking a road less traveled in this illogical life
If you can still recall reading the poetry of Robert Frost in your high school English class years ago, I imagine that you can conjure up a line or two from his “The Road Not Taken.”
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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.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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80-Year-Old Skydiver's Nightmare Jump
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