To Red Cloud and back

September has been a mix of different things including a recent trip West. 

It wasn’t bigtime West as one thinks of the magnificence of mountain peaks or the sublime shimmer of turning aspens along steep canyons but that’s not the point. 

Our rambles put us across the Missouri River and for me that’s where the West in attitude and inclination begins.

The trip was fun and relaxing with many sights seen and things done. It started out as a chance to visit a few places we’ve wanted to see for a long time.This included (my choice) Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Red Cloud is the girlhood home of Willa Cather, the author who through books like My Antonia helped me to appreciate the prairies and Great Plains. 

Before I found Cather my conception of the Great Plains, and Nebraska in particular, was not favorable. You usually can’t fathom what you don’t experience, and this was an area I didn’t know firsthand.

The vast region which slopes to the Rockies held no romance for me, and therefore no interest, until Cather’s words transferred its color and reality from the turned pages to my mind. 

Once latching on to the idea of prairie as beautiful in its way the prairie with its native grasses, history and culture has become a subject of growing and continuing interest to me.

Willa Cather came to Nebraska at nine from the verdant state of Virginia. Transplanted at an impressionable age she was to find and mine in Nebraska all the material she would need for her writings. 

Many of her novels are set, or set in part, in this marginally populated region which many years later, and not so very flatteringly, came to be called “flyover country.”  

Her descriptions of the land, hospitable and challenging by nature and by the season, with its bounty of planted orchards and field crops, and winters of wind and hunkering down on widely scattered farms amid creeks and arroyos, cracked open this part of the world to me. 

It was as if I physically annexed these millions of acres of the middle West to my own Midwest perspective.  

Farewell  I 35 and 80 70, this time we aren’t going to use you, we said. And we mostly stuck to our word, resisting the convenience of the interstate systems which expedite travel time. 

Instead, we studied maps for state or county roads that linked the small towns. The routes were sometimes winding and sometimes slow but they put us smack dab in the countryside and this suited us perfectly this time.

We especially enjoyed the designated scenic byways. Iowa's Highway 44 is named the Western Skies Scenic Byway. It’s a name to thrill to. 

The name is evocative of the big skies we came for and the long horizons that are a nightly show as the sunset spreads its flame for all to see.

As we pointed the car toward Nebraska it came to me why my folks went West every fall. They went in September after the summer place was shut at Labor Day and the family, from all our different places, had made our summer visits.

They went West when grasses start to get that burnished color and leaves are starting to turn. 

Their long driving vacations in the mild Western air under cloudless skies would have been a tonic to them, facing (like all Minnesotans) the long winter ahead.

They could get the sun-stoked West deep into them before settling in back at home and waiting for flurries to announce the next season.

Travel educates is the conclusion we come to every time.On the return we visited Kansas City with its fountains, plaza district, art galleries, and so many other places to take time for, that another trip specific to Kansas City is in order.

Northern Missouri is the country of Jesse James, Calamity Jane and horse-drawn buggies (among local farms are those who practice simpler ways.) Southern Iowa is the birthplace of labor activist John L. Lewis.

Red Cloud, Nebraska, the original impetus for the trip, proved to be the means of finding many other places and personalities, past and present. 

Sights and names pique interest and lead to self-directed learning. City is good, and the places one lives, but there are times when to be out in open spaces fills us with the whole sense of being alive.

Fall here proceeded apace in our absence. The deck was half buried in fallen yellow leaves. The leaves were soggy, indicating a shower had passed through rather recently. 

Trip completed, it’s always good to be home as I step out to sweep off leaf debris.

Ro Giencke – September 30, 2014

September carves a memory

Everything quickly shifts with the new school year. 

The neighborhood quiets in the absence of kids who are gone for a good portion of the day.

It’s not that their presence especially registers in the summer. 

Gone are the times when the young are seen and heard in outside play that can go on all day. 

So it’s not an abrupt change in activity that one notes. But somehow, nevertheless, with September a pronounced stillness settles over the tree-lined streets and rows of homes up and down the block.

My sister and I were commenting on this. I mentioned the older students who are at the curb each morning for their bus.

We usually don’t have the drapes open that early, but sometimes we do, and then there are glimpses of them as they step quickly in a marvel of timing that shaves it incredibly close. 

Teens perfect that timing, as we recall how it was with our kids as they met their bus.

She and I keep an interest in the young ones around us. They’re maybe not front and center in our attention at this juncture in our lives but they’re much more than background in our lives. 

They’re part of the important fabric of our surroundings. They shape our wider community.

We may not know all their names or instantly recognize them as neighbors if we were to meet in the store. But we’re aware of their young healthy forms as they walk past our houses. 

We mentally wish them well in their studies and elsewhere as the road of life moves them along.

“Probably our neighbors had the same interest in us when we walked to school,” I throw out to my sister. She likes that idea. She says yes, that’s probably so.

At grade school age we weren’t cognizant of those neighbors whose places we went by as we trudged along, a little family group, with an exact number of minutes to get  to the street corner so the school patrol would let us cross before the school bell rang.

There weren’t neighbor children to walk to school with. We were the school kids these neighbors saw day after day, always the same group, shuffling along if we had an early start, or hurrying our pace if late out the door.

They possibly noted us out their windows or from their gardens and knew the time by the consistency with which we came past.

She and I laughed when one of us brought up the name of an elderly bachelor neighbor and suggested he might have been among those who watched us go by.

He was a character and somewhat of a mystery but we accepted him from the few facts known of him. 

We didn’t know his age or if he was retired or if he had ever held a job. Kids generally accept what is, and don’t particularly wonder about what isn’t filled in.

That comes later when we have time to think about past acquaintances. 

We take them apart in their aspects as we have them in mind. Sometimes, and often, we see them differently afterwards and with greater respect. This comes from having experienced, in the meantime, a great deal of life.

This neighbor was nearest to us on our west. His home, a big white family residence shaded by venerable oaks, stood imposingly on a rise of land between our property and the elementary school.

The south slope of his hill, along which we filed past, because that’s where the sidewalk was, was banked with sumacs whose bright red cones will always be the picture of September to me.

He was apt to be outside in fair weather which is why we saw him frequently in the pleasant fall days or again in the mild weather of spring. He was almost always with a pipe, holding it or smoking it.

He lived with his two sisters who were also unmarried. He might have been in his 60s. The sisters were several years older. 

One can imagine that quite often he found the fresh air healthy for him. It provided a place of separation from domestic life inside. It was possibly the only place he was able to smoke his pipe.

They were Irish, and proud of it, and very musical. The mother, long deceased, had been organist at the Catholic church.

The oldest sister, lustrous white hair scraped back and secured in a bun low at the back of her head, was tall and had a commanding personality. 

She taught piano in the home. She was the extrovert, the one who liked to visit.

The younger sister, soft and round, gray hair wound in a braid on top of her head,  with sometimes a shawl over her sweater, nodded agreeably as her major contribution to the conversation.

She was a smiling, kindly, gentle presence as she kept her hands busy with crocheting or other handwork.

These scenes with the sisters are of the future when we got to know them better and went to see them on occasion. In grade school it was the bachelor brother we saw, and often heard, as he played on his xylophone. 

The xylophone was set up on a lower terrace of their yard. It was a short distance from their house. It faced our place. What he played traveled clearly to our yard.  

He had a pet Chihuahua which was his dear companion. Unfortunately for our ears the dog barked a lot. 

We heard considerable barking from that direction when we played outside after school. The barking and the music always let us know our neighbor and his dog were out.

It was our first acquaintance with a Chihuahua. We didn’t think much of this breed of dog. It exhibited nervous energy along with its constant yipping.

Not many families had pets in our part of town. Dogs that were pets tended to be pretty mellow or were hunting dogs trained for fall pheasant or duck hunting. 

A little dog all ambitious with noise to make was a novelty to us.  

Along with his music and his Chihuahua (whose name my sister remembers and tells me of when I forget - so handy to have another’s memory working for you!) this neighbor had one other interest that we knew of, and in later years our family was the recipient of the output of his pleasurable pastime.

He had a hobby of woodcarving. His carvings of birds and animals were whimsical and intimate. They were folk art but we didn’t know the term then.

He must have spent hours carving these various figures. He carved farm animals and more exotic creatures like giraffes with long thin wood necks. 

It’s easy to see him taking satisfying puffs of his pipe as he worked. Almost surely his dog was companionably at his side.

Prompted by the visit with my sister I ponder the long progression of students back to school each year to a new round of academics and playground friendships.

I consider the adults who, for as long as there have been students going to school, have observed and encouraged them from a distance or near at hand.

In the neighborhood hush of a new school year we listen with our ears and hearts. A new crop of scholars heeds the summons of the familiar peals of the school bell. 

Ro Giencke - September 18, 2014

Goodbye summer

Reading magazines on the deck yesterday after supper smacked of wonderful indulgence.

Mild sunlight filtered through the high green branches to dapple the pages I turned with leisurely interest. 

It was like stolen time to be outside in the last of the day’s warmth at the end of the season.

The reading session was particularly appreciated because that’s it for deck time for awhile.

A chilly jab of northern air is headed our way. Signs of the season are everywhere. (Even three wooly bears seen today with their black and brown stripes are part of the signs.)

One way or the other these signals of the season are there to be interpreted and heeded. We’re moving into fall.

With reluctance backed by common sense I’m ditching the summer shorts until next year. 

Even more than the leaves starting to turn, in a few bold splashes here and there, wrap-up of summer is defined by me by the packing away of shorts.

It’s goodbye summer. Balmier stretches may return, bringing more lukewarm weather in the days to come, but this first chilly outbreak is reality knocking on the door. 

It tells us there’s now no turning back, even with a few reprieves granted us.

Fifty degree temperatures intensified by 30 mph winds will make midweek a taste of mid-October. As much as I like pumpkin time it’s a jolt to move so quickly to the further end of fall’s spectrum.

Wanting to hold on to summer, or at least to slow it down, was no doubt behind an impulse purchase made today on a trip that ostensibly started out to return some library books.

Yellow flip flops at Old Navy had summer written all over them. They made a snazzy pair in their sales bin where they shared discounted prices with other footwear which hadn’t made it out of the store during beachwear season.

In the gloom of skies expectant with rain the pop of yellow tantalized me. The flip flops couldn’t be passed up.

My only thought was to take them home with me, put them on then and there and dance with them in the little patch of summer they create wherever they step.

Descend into the chilly zone tomorrow if we must, on my feet are sandals the color of a field of sunflowers. I can now embrace eternal summer with the insouciance supplied by my bargain footwear.

With the forecast for cooler temperatures my closet has been briefly inspected. Sweaters that have had their seasonal rest are being reviewed for the wearing they soon will get.

Summer is in my blood which makes my conscience twinge at the delight which awaits in reuniting with my sweaters.

Luxury may be described in terms of diamonds and stretch limos. For me chunky knits and oversize cotton cardigans have the same luxurious effect.

Clothes closets aren’t the only areas inside the home being opened for seasonal review. Bedding here in the Midwest is rotated as well. 

Breathable bed linens and light summer spreads are stowed to be replaced by warmer layering including blankets. 

This seasonal succession of bedding items culminates in the comforters which make bedrooms veritable scenes of hibernation. We snuggle deep into the quilted coziness when the thermometer nosedives, as it predictably will before long. 

All of this is gratifying in a Martha Stewart way (or like that other methodical, efficient, industrious and organized Martha, sister of Mary in the New Testament.)

There is consummate satisfaction in effectively managing one’s home according to the season. 

With the summer ship pulling out of port, as ice crystals form over polar regions, the changeover in our house to indoor time has begun.

Ro Giencke – September 9, 2014

 

 

Summer on a stick (record-breaking 2014 Minnesota State Fair)

We almost got to the Minnesota State Fair this year but as it turns out we weren't really needed. 

Without our help 2014 goes into the books with a new State Fair attendance record set. Thank you to the 1.8 million visitors (and then some) and the gorgeous August weather for making this record possible.

The Minnesota State Fair, our final summer hurrah before school begins and fall arrives, really did itself big this year.

Our State Fair is one of the standout state fairs in the country. It has some of the highest attendance numbers even without the count that we put in this year. 

I won't discount Texas, and certainly not Iowa, and a handful of other states who also know how to throw a State Fair party. We're all states that esteem our State Fairs and each with its particular foods and flair.

The Minnesota State Fair retains its draw even as its expands and modernizes. I think this is in part because it manages to keep its down home feel. 

The twelve days it runs are full of events that stay the same with changes introduced that keep the State Fair evolving.

It's a place for food on a stick (it's the stuff that legends are made of) and many other kinds of food and dining venues. You can fare well at our Minnesota State Fair.

Many visitors make a beeline for the Miracle of Birth birthing barn. Farm animals are born and we get to watch. 

It brings us in touch with our rural heritage which is only a couple generations removed (or even less) for plenty of us.

We can see the horses, chickens and bunnies which have their bucolic appeal in the midst of so much Fair clangor.

We can sit in on the judging of farm animals carefully raised for showing at the fair by dedicated youngsters who tend them and come with them to the fair.

We can buy tickets for Grandstand performances, try our luck on the Midway and do the rides. We can check out the homemade jellies and carrot cake and marvel at the array of bars, a Minnesota baking tradition.

One can assess the local art scene (the art exhibit hall is a stop I always make), sample Minnesota wines and get a health check or meander through the global market, not to be missed.

We can chat with our politicians (the ones we vote for and the others ones, those for whom we don't.) 

Each candidate who visits the State Fair (an important place for them to be seen) likely views each of us as a possible vote and a golden opportunity come November.

We voters can discuss directly with the candidates our issues or concerns. Politics at the State Fair is a proving ground for democracy at its truest and most grassroots level. 

We can buy some useful or clever item from the commerce building (or elsewhere) that we don't know how we ever lived without before its marvels were demonstrated to us. 

The State Fair is a chance to revisit favorite places from all the times before. It's a small city to explore. Wear athletic shoes and be prepared to hike a few miles. 

Another helpful tip: locate the patches of shade (they're scattered across the grounds) and all air-conditioned buildings. Someday you'll appreciate you did your homework.

In 90 degree heat (last year six days were in the 90s at the State Fair, and we were there sweltering on the hottest of those days) you'll want to know how to escape the sun.

Local TV stations broadcast their nightly news programs live from locations around the State Fair. Show up at news time and you might be on TV as as part of the TV audience.

A bench to sit on feels wonderful by late afternoon when the news programs begin. Be in the front rows if you can. They're closer to the food samples that will be passed out sometime in the program courtesy of the many different food venders. 

The local stations do a fabulous job of promoting the fair (as do the local papers, in a concerted effort to present to the metro community the State Fair adventures that await.)

There are on-site interviews and interesting facts shared about the fair. This detailed and varied coverage lets everyone attend, even those in front of our TVs as it was for us this year. 

When I'm at the Minnesota State Fair I always think of old family friends of ours. They didn't miss a year, not even when it got difficult for them to walk and to be on their feet for any period of time.

They loved the State Fair. They put up with the heat and inconveniences because they looked forward to it with the eagerness that never stales. 

They wouldn't have missed the Minnesota State Fair for the world. They loved it because it was their tradition. 

Do anything once and enjoy it, then do it again and you have the start of a tradition, no matter what it is.

Tradition aligns you in a way that feels right and proper. It sets you straight with your world to have some tradition that matters to you. It says something to you that may be only a whisper to others or heard not at all.

For roughly a third of Minnesota the State Fair we embrace is not a whisper and it surely doesn't go unheard.

It's a robust call-out to find ourselves and find each other each year as summer slides into September and another school year begins. Students are in the classrooms the very next day after the final day, which is always Labor Day. 

Seeing the Minnesota State Fair come to an end makes the last bite of our desserts on a stick taste both sweet and bittersweet.

Ro Giencke - September 3, 2014

Eventful Decorah

Summer is generally so beautiful in Minnesota it’s hard to leave even to take a vacation.

We bestirred ourselves this year and actually left the state for a couple days. 

Now as we come to the end of August we pat ourselves on the backs for doing so.

Two days gone guarantees a small trip. It was a perfect length of time and we played it leisurely. We dipped just below the state line to visit Decorah, Iowa.

We’ve driven past Decorah heading north many times. We’re coming from St. Louis or other points south and we don’t stop. 

We’re closing in on the Minnesota border with its promise of home in a few more hours. We keep promising we'll come back some day and see the town properly.

We knew Decorah to be interesting. It’s been covered in Midwest Living which scouts out the cool spots. 

Luther College, a private liberal arts college located there, is one of the reasons Decorah has been attracting interest.

With a beautiful campus, and an academic program to be proud of, it's the strong music tradition and excellence of its many music groups that come to mind when I think of the school. 

A musically talented young woman we know chose this school as a match for her gift of a voice and this is how we came to hear of Luther College.  

Then there’s the small matter of Decorah’s Norwegian heritage. The city is proud of its Nordic connections via its early population of Scandinavian immigrants from which it developed and grew.

You start out to see one thing, as we did with Decorah, and the nature of travel is that extras are generously thrown in. 

These bonuses can be as special or as appreciated as what you set out to enjoy. 

One such place turned out to be a gem of a discovery. This was Spring Grove, Minnesota. 

From the map it lay just off our route. Spring Grove struck me as a refreshing name. I suggested we detour the few miles to check it out.

A sign at the entrance to town informs that Spring Grove is the first Norwegian settlement in Minnesota.

It's a pretty little town set in green hills. The original families could have believed they were back in Norway with the verdant hills and steep valleys. All that was missing to make it Norway were the fjords.

The quarter Norwegian in me was happy to touch base with this original setting of Norwegian relocation to Minnesota.

Norwegians from the Old Country dispersed through the state in the years that followed the settlement of Spring Grove.

Leaving all behind, it took brave hearts. Those who settled Spring Grove, then a wilderness, and who preceded the rest of their countrymen, were role models for the rest.

Burr Oak is an Iowa hop and skip over the Minnesota border. It’s sits barely off Hwy 52. Burr Oak was another serendipitous find. As a Laura Ingalls Wilder fan it was like finding a lost chapter of her life.

Laura Ingalls and her family lived in Burr Oak about a year when she was a small girl. 

The Ingalls family moved from Minnesota when friends from their former home in Walnut Grove bought a hotel and then asked Laura’s father to manage it.

I don’t believe the Iowa year is chronicled in The Little House in the Woods series, which is why coming upon Burr Oak was a surprise. (We must have missed the signs other trips.)

There are some facts known about her time here. I found them at an online link. Laura and her friend Alice roamed the pretty hillside above town, and Laura’s little sister Grace was born here. 

The new baby was after the loss of nine-month-old Freddie, who died before their move to Burr Oak. Laura attended school in Burr Oak adding to the education begun back in Walnut Grove. 

Burr Oak is attractive as you picture Midwestern hamlets towns to be. 

Masters Hotel, now the site of Laura Ingalls Wilder Park and Museum, and where Pa in 1876 took the position as manager, has a white painted exterior and is pristine with orange daylilies growing alongside.

Our Iowa getaway was unplanned even to motel arrangements – perhaps not the smartest thinking during busy vacation season.

We came into Decorah the day after Nordic Fest 2014. We missed all the activities associated with the annual event.

Bad timing to miss Nordic Fest you say. Fifty-fifty bad luck, or equally good luck, is more like it.

Yes, we missed the event and it’d have been a blast (a reason to return next year). 

However, without motel reservations made, if we arrived while Nordic Fest was going on, we probably wouldn’t have scored a room.

Coming when we did, we had an available room and a room at Country Inn and Suites that faces a quiet hill. The place serves cookies, warming Al's heart. 

Country Inn and Suites is located on the Trout Run Trail (the trail is practically right out the door). 

Trout Run Trail is part of a trail system Decorah has developed and recently extended. The trail, we were told, is an 11 mile loop, and learned that eagles nest where hikers can view them.

With the weather sunny and pleasant – actually a tad cool for this time of year - we made the most of the time by using it outdoors on the trails.  

Along with the trails we enjoyed Dunning’s Springs. It occupies a shady glen, has a neat overhead walkway, is worth a camera shot or two and comes with some history besides. 

Later we found a little prairie park with wildflowers. Rocks are placed strategically. I parked myself while Al photographed flowers and butterflies and enjoyed the mild warmth on me from the lowering sun.

The big hill next to our motel was bright with firefly light when dusk turned to night. Hundreds of miniature lights wove luminous trails in a ever changing pattern against the hill as it disappeared into deep shadow.

The firefly show was quite magical, as was the vacation in its brief entirety. It was a pleasant chance to drive not too far, and to enjoy something quite nearby.  

Ro Giencke – August 28, 2014

 

Loud is the new silent

Noise is with us wherever we are. 

There’s no avoiding it. As a presence it travels with us and is there before we arrive.

Stop for gas and you almost don’t want to get out to pump it. 

Music at gas stations is often very loud. It blasts you as you fill your tank. 

Conversations at restaurants must compete with the music being played. Words get swallowed up by the impossible decibel levels allowed by some restaurants. 

We and other couples we know have walked out of restaurants because they’re too loud. 

We don’t elect to spend our dinners shouting at our servers to be heard. From experience (trust me on this) the noise prevents any actual visiting from taking place.

A number of us are scratching our heads at indoor malls. We wonder if we wandered into a disco by accident. 

The hard-hitting volume to the music reaches the farthest corridors. The high decibels might work in a nightclub. It seems overdone for the shopper crowd.  

Don’t get me (or a bunch of us) started on the hand dryers installed in many public restrooms and at Interstate rest stops.

Multiple hand dryers with several in use at once are like an echo chamber of horrors. 

They're so hurtfully loud that tots have been seen to cry when they come on. It startles them. Sensitive ears among them are particularly shaken. 

It doesn’t seem right that little kids, still somewhat protected from the assault of noise, should have to stand under these loud dryers every time they use a public washroom.

Leaf blowers are the bane of residential areas. Their disquieting din drills into the neighborhood quiet. 

They grind away, from one yard to the next, blowing a few leaves off the driveways. Their stink and unwelcome volume of noise drifts through opened windows.

On our table the meal may be on but when leaf blowers are whining nearby it strikes me that what we're being served is polluted air.

It makes me wonder if anyone brooms away leaves anymore. A broom is exercise, is low cost (and low maintenance), gets the same results as a leaf blower and doesn’t foul the air or break your eardrums. 

If you can’t use a broom for leaf removal from your sidewalk or driveway will someone please invent a silencer for residential leaf blowers. I plead!   

Constant extraneous noise, whether from music or equipment used every day, can't be good thing. 

This certainly is true in regard to our young. With a lifetime of hearing ahead of them, universal loud noise is doing some of its greatest harm to this generation.

Young people work and study to loud noise for hours at a time. They listen to it at decibels that make my ears ache. 

Many teens are accustomed to music being loud. They’re talking as loud as their grandparents to compensate. 

They sound like my grandpa who had to ask us to repeat what we said. He was deaf at an early age (not from loud music). It isn't fun to lose you hearing he'd tell them.

My generation took it on the ears too. We had our rock concerts. We were not without our own addiction to loud music.

We’re paying the price years later in wholesale hearing loss. But our ears took breaks in between. It wasn’t a continuous thing except for the rock stars.

Those in positions that decide the decibel in places we shop, eat out and go to relax can’t be unaware of the "too loud too long" effect on humans. 

Loud steady noise impacts employees and the rest of us. What it may do in the long term we can only imagine now.

Reduced exposure to noise, and a responsible decision on the part of businesses to sensibly monitor decibels where people congregate, are sound steps towards protecting our hearing as individuals and as a society.

Each of us must decide how willing we are to put our hearing on the line. 

Some of us are pushing back against excessive decibels. Our method is simple and works. We measure decibels onsite with a smartphone app.

When we think a place is too loud, and the noise potentially injurious to the health of our ears, we employ the app. It has helped us decide a few times whether we stay or move on.

It seems fair that businesses which interface with the public advise us up front about the decibel levels they keep. 

Decibel information can be posted on their front doors. It’d be like the signs that ban guns on the premises or the No Smoking notices we see everywhere.

This information would also be handy on web sites. We can check to see if (besides Tuesday specials and weekend hours) we want to go at all. The music (as posted by decibels) may be too loud for our tastes.

Loud has worked its way into almost everything. It’s taken for granted. It’s maybe time to see how some of this can change. It’s time to reflect on how sound has grown.

We’ve come a long way from the sound experience of my generation. If you were country raised or from a small town (both boxes checked for me) this applies all the more.

When I grew up, as a summer country resident, and in town from September through May, sounds were in the background more than they are now.

The wail of fire trucks, ambulances or police cars was pretty much absent. I wasn't able to differentiate one siren from another when we did hear them. All caught our attention as sirens are meant to do.

Our town did have a couple means of keeping the community informed through the use of public sirens. 

There was a noon whistle (whistle, not siren, as I recall) and a 9:30 pm curfew siren. The noonday whistle meant lunchtime. Curfew at night called kids still outside in from the dark.

When it comes to remembering sounds I wonder if it’s possible we’re not as emotionally attached to childhood sounds as to associations that come with other of our senses.

Cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven, for instance, remind us of the good aromas from the kitchens of our youth. It takes just one whiff to be transported back to five and eight and ten years of age.

Specific smells evoke the past. They can make us nostalgic. Smell, an agent of connection, makes us appreciate its influence on us. Smell taps something deep inside. Smell has a raft of associations.

Sounds heard as we grow up are perhaps stored on a memory disc apart from the rest. Or maybe sounds are so integral to the events that it takes some work to find them and sort them out.

Outdoor sounds, not indoor sounds, are what I remember. Except for school, and winter’s indoor hours, outdoors is where we spent our time.

It’s great exercise to meditate on sounds remembered from long ago. The sounds we wind up recalling can be as healing and connecting as smell associations or old photos we look at that put us back into the scene.

The process of recalling sounds started out slow when I tried it. One or two remembered sounds floated upward easily. They in turn delivered others. 

It’s as if each nudges the one next to it and says Hey, you’re part of this too.

The haunting cry of loons is at the top of remembered sounds. Elusive and shy of humans as they were then, we were proud that we had a family of loons (the Minnesota state bird) nesting on our lake.

Birds and waterfowl, gathering in flocks in the late summer, and treating our area as a layover on their seasonal migration, come to mind.

I can hear the twitters among the birds, heavy by count on the telephone lines by the river, with its morning fog as the days cooled, and the sharper calls of migratory Canadian geese.

Frogs croaking in the spring, the lazy drone of honeybees in our garden and the chorus of cicadas in the backyard add to the repertoire of sounds.

Summer rain created a range of sounds. There were the gentle ploop-ploop sounds of raindrops on water if it began to sprinkle when we swam or were in the boat. 

Summer rains were sometimes not much more than medium drizzle and if we got caught out in it we didn't mind getting a bit wet. 

There was the tattoo of steady rain on the porch roof and the barrage of rain against the window panes in the fury of a thunderstorm.

The sizzle of summertime rain on superheated highway is especially recalled. A tarry smell arose in vapors of steam from the hot wet asphalt. This smell was a distinctive smell of summer then.

These were our barefoot days. Our feet knew intimately the burning heat of sun-baked pavement. Quick steps across the hot road, the pads of our feet like on fire, is another sound of summer that drifts to me. 

A rural neighbor had a dock for a float plane. The float plane was for occasional fishing trips up north.

We didn't have a nearby airport and weren’t under a direct flight path (although we occasionally saw jet contrails high in the sky). The float plane made us feel modern. Air space was otherwise the realm of birds.

In the country we had minimal car traffic. A small number of cars and farm equipment passed by on any given day.

A car going by made for some interest. We knew the neighbors’ cars. My brothers could tell who was going by without looking. They could tell by the sound of the engine or the speed at which the car was driven.

When we thought about it we wondered where the farm neighbors might be going. There weren’t many places to go to then - to some other neighbor’s or into town.

Cars we couldn’t identify were the tourists, and at the end of the season most of them were gone.

The sounds of nature were all around but were often muted. You had to have an alert ear and be observant.

The soft thud of an apple off the apple tree in August or September could go unnoticed as you walked by. It takes being on watch. 

This gets you to notice things to wonder about. It’s a gift that develops when you spend time in nature.

The rumble of farm pickups and tractors over the wood planked bridge near our country home is a sound my ears readily pick up again. 

As kids we swam in the river under the bridge. The bump-bump-bumpity-bump of farm equipment crossing over was exciting.

It was like two different worlds going on, which of course is exactly what it was. 

The farmers (often farm kids were driving the tractors – teenage boys with sun-bleached hair and strong with well-worked summer muscles) were probably unaware of us.

From under the bridge we were hidden from them, and were far removed from the reality of their working day.

I still hear (as memory brings it to me) the sounds of our farm neighbor calling his herd of cows to the barn in the late summer evenings. 

Getting his dairy herd into shelter was a nightly ritual shared with us through the sound of his voice carried across the river.

It gave a sense of ineffable peace. It was like nothing could ever change. You could believe his voice would go on everlastingly into the summer dusk.

The barking of farm dogs running out to chase our car (and other cars) and the snapping noises some made as they went for the tires comes to me. 

This memory lies further down in the pack. It didn’t emerge immediately. But it has shown up and makes me smile as thought is given to it.  

A few dogs in our rural neighborhood were inveterate car chasers. 

Some did it for the love of it. Others were quite mean-spirited. We knew those places and were glad we were safely inside the car whenever we rode that particular stretch of road.

It was the era before boom boxes. Music outdoors was mostly limited to transistor radios. Transistor owners used earplugs to keep the sounds contained.

Because of the general quiet surrounding us the sounds I recall are of nature or they’re communal in nature. 

The sounds are the sounds of our lives. We were at play, at peace with each other and outside in the fresh good air.

We never dreamed life would be so much louder than it was then. The sounds of our youth become a marker by which we measure change.

Ro Giencke – August 23, 2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fall in line

The big fall fashion editions of magazines are starting to come out. 

We have first looks at colors and silhouettes we’ll see, and some of us will wear, in the season ahead.

While January is reckoned the start of the New Year those of us with any interest in styles and trends pounce on August and September as our new year (sans capital letters). 

These transition months kick off the new look inaugurated by autumn-winter collections shown on fashion runways around the world.

Not that we’re tired of summer wear. Not by a long shot. Summer wear means summer. 

Dressing lightly is my kind of style for as long as summer chooses to hang around. I suspect this thinking prevails pretty much across the board.

Most of us, nevertheless, are refreshed by a new palette of colors and new textures. It’s within us, I believe, to be renewed by change, like a coat of paint on the wall, which makes for instant transformation.

Even should we live in a climate without four seasons (certainly not the case here in the Midwest) there is in many of us a tendency to choose what we put on by the time of year we're in. 

While a seasonless wardrobe is the ideal – staples to wear at any time – the practice of rotating pieces in our closet has an amazingly comfortable right feel to it.

The fall line, presented on glossy magazine pages, at online retail venues and perhaps most tempting of all, via racks of newly shipped merchandise in the stores, makes this an interesting time for your closet.

This season meshes with back to school shopping. Sales and promos bring in students and their families as they restock for the school year ahead.

In the stores you marvel at tweaks in style in the fall collections. 

Embellishment (or lack of it) change in proportion, wider hemlines, and other details, abruptly make last year’s almost identical pieces appear oh so last season. How do they do that you wonder! 

Then there are trends that are imaginative forays into new territory. These clothes may catch on. They may not. They do cause you to stop and consider.

Mostly I consider how far removed we become in time from trends that seem aimed for quick trajectory. 

Trends for the most part are reduced to fads in my increasing loyalty to the tried and true. It makes it easier to pass by items not needed but are cute / on sale / or which shout Buy me. 

My sister and I, non-fashionistas from the beginning, nevertheless enjoy the fashion hype that comes with the fall lineup.

On our last visit she gave me a clothes catalog she was done with. We swap catalogs and jewelry, just as we swap clothing from time to time.

The catalog comes from England. It has luscious pieces. It offers beautiful soft cashmere sweaters with prices comparable to the cost of an air ticket to London.

Maybe if we teamed up and ordered a sweater and split the time of wearing it between us we could afford a catalog purchase. 

That is, if we could agree on a color. It makes the transaction dubious as we’re drawn to different hues.

From the fall magazines, and catalogs like the one my sister shared with me, we get an idea of key looks of the new season.

Investing some time this way you develop the ability to discern where the winds of fashion change are occurring. 

You note if a blouse is tucked in or left out, whether it’s loose billowy pants this year or if leggings are still in charge.

The details are like a set of directions. You can follow or refer to them or disregard them entirely. Fashion, ultimately, is what you make of it.

What these fashion sources particularly help with is suggesting how pieces from our closets can be worn to be made to look current.

Unlike young shoppers, and those in the prime of their careers, many of us past those stages buy less for our closets now. 

Our closets are established through generally careful purchases and many years of making advantageous buys. 

We’ve weeded and refined our closets, adding to them as some piece, with its perfect color or functional value, is put on the hanger next to the rest.

A closet is ongoing maintenance. Without effective management, however, it can take on a life of its own. 

As with anything it can grow out of bounds (think weedy garden). A neglected closet is robbed of its true worth, furthermore robbing you.

One way to maximize your closet is to utilize each piece for all its worth. In other words, wear what you have and make it work even better for you.

To do this you pull together what you already have. You clinch a look with an accessory like a scarf or an interesting brooch, as a friend does with panache, making brooches her signature look.

You let the way you dress, or a dominant color you wear, be your style. This is, I think, what classic dressing means.

Half your life you don’t want to be considered a classic dresser. At least that’s how it was for me. 

Classic sounded boring. I took it to mean Chanel, conservative hemlines and discreet hound's tooth checks. Nothing was farther from me than that.

Classic dressing suits me now and I like it. It’s just how you interpret what classic is. 

Classic for me is casual and I’m fine with that. When you ace what you wear it’s because it fits who you are. That’s classic defined in the real.

When my sister and I are together next there’s a Pottery Barn catalog for her. She’ll enjoy it. 

Neither of us can totally change out our homes or our closets. (Nor would we want to.) But a fresh look can greatly revive us. It can be done quite easily and without great expenditure of time or money. 

It takes something as simple as one item introduced, or switching an item around. It's a genius system if you think about it. And your home and closet will thank you. 

Ro Giencke – August 13, 2014