July 8, 2022
It doesn’t seem real that I
am sitting in a hotel room in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. While it’s feasible that most anyone can get
in a vehicle and spend over ten hours on the road traveling from Virginia to Missouri,
it just hasn’t been a reality for us.
Farming is an occupation that doesn’t allow for long trips away from
home, at least not as a couple. But all the pieces of the puzzle came
together this year, and after seventeen years together as a couple, Mike said
“Let’s go see your dad” (as he has done many times before when we both knew it
was impossible). This time, I said “Ok,
let’s go” (as I contemplated how we could ever pull it off). Mike’s sister said
she would stay at our house and take care of things on the farm for us. There’s no one else I would have trusted enough
that I could drive away and not have overwhelming anxiety. Having all the cows dried off, meant that I
didn’t need anyone to cover milking for us.
And so, today we started our journey in Virginia, drove through
Tennessee, saw a piece of Kentucky, touched a small portion of Illinois, and crossed
over the border into Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Having grown up sixty miles south of St. Louis, this part of Missouri is
not home for me except for the fact that it’s where my parents live. I had not been further west than Knoxville, TN
in almost twenty years and as we traveled, I could do nothing but gaze out the
window at the landscape and watch as the scenery changed. Things come back to
you after you’ve been gone for so long and return. You remember.
It’s emotional. You wonder what
it will be like to finally step foot under your dad’s roof after so many years
of being absent.
We checked into our hotel
room and then went to grab a bite to eat.
This is only the second time in over two years that we have sat down at
a restaurant to eat. It feels foreign.
Then I began to listen to the voices around me and I realized after twenty
years of living in the south, I talk more slowly. Maybe more like a southerner than a Midwesterner?
Our server at Olive Garden talked so fast that I wanted to ask him to slow
down. “Maybe he’s not talking fast; perhaps
it’s just me hearing too slowly”, I think.
This makes me smile. Mike
mentions the server’s accent and my smile deepens. “He does have a midwestern
accent,” I say and think how funny it is that when I lived in Missouri as a
child raised by southern-born parents, children teased me for saying things
like “pocketbook”. Embarrassed as only a
child can be, I learned to say “purse” instead.
Later, as a student at a college in Florida, my southern roommates
remarked that I talked “like a Yankee” and my Northern born roommates said I
talked “like a Southerner”. I retorted
that I talk like myself. I still won’t
say pocketbook, even though it’s socially acceptable where I live. I’m ok with the fact that my “accent” still
confuses everyone. I still get the
comment “You’re not from around here, are you?”. I guess I’m a little bit of all the places I’ve
been in my life, and I’ve been to a lot of places.
Then there’s the Missouri heat.
I grew up in this kind of heat but I’m no longer accustomed to it. I’ve lived in “cool” places for most of my
adult life: Alaska, Montana, Colorado, and
even the Shenandoah Valley are not hot like the Midwest. Living now in the mountains of Southwest
Virginia, I am really spoiled by the pleasant summers. As we traveled further west on our trip, the
temperature teased the 100-degree mark, and the oppressive humidity almost took
my breath away when I stepped from the car.
I was grumpy standing in the heat searching for our key fob. Only an idiot loses the key fob inside the
car and stands around searching under seats and through bags in such insane
heat when they could be inside where it’s cool.
But there we stood, bags all over the parking lot like two country
bumpkins as we pulled things out and looked for the key. Indoors, I laughed at our ordeal. “I really should get out more,” I mused. After
the fob incident, I struggled to get the hotel room unlocked. It took me half a dozen tries. “Slow down and breathe, Tammy”, I thought. “Wave the magic card slowly in front of the
eye. It can’t be that hard.” Finally, we were inside our room. Needing to run back to the car for something,
I stepped out of the elevator when it reached the third floor because I wasn’t
paying attention. I looked sheepishly at
the people getting on and rejoined them in the elevator. “Yep,” I thought, “I
probably have dirt under my fingernails and a little manure on my shoes. I
wonder if everyone can look at me and tell that I never leave the farm?” I smiled again. I like who I am. At fifty-five, nothing else really
matters.
July 9, 2022
I have not always kept in
close contact with my parents. We have
stayed in touch, but I never called them weekly. At one point in my life, it would be many
months before I would touch base with them.
We’ve had times of strain due to the choice I made in my first
marriage. That relationship of sixteen
years hurt all my other relationships including my relationship with my
dad. Then, I spent all my time and
energy on my maternal grandparents as they lost their health and neared
death. They were my entire focus and although
my calls home were more frequent, I let my work, my worries, and my own issues
keep me from reaching out and working on my relationship with my dad and stepmom. After my grandmother’s death, I decided to
take the time I had spent on my daily call to her and use that time to reach
out to my parents. I began texting them
every day and calling them once a week on Sundays. When Mike suggested for the umpteenth time
that we take a trip “out west” as he calls it, I began to consider it
seriously. (Out west to someone who grew
up on the east coast means anything west of the east coast, I learned when I
married Mike. Out west to someone who
grew up in the Midwest means near the west coast.) And now we are here, and it seems so
unlikely. I’m processing a multitude of
emotions and somehow, I know this trip will be a time of healing for me. It also holds an element of finality. Sure, I might make it out here again soon and
be able to spend time with my dad. Although he’s in decent health for his age,
one never knows what the future holds for any of us, and farming doesn’t allow
one to just drop everything at any time and hit the road. My dad has aged so much. I see his mom in him, my Granny, as she aged. He’s using her cane this weekend as he
stumbles around with vertigo. A part of
my daddy died when my momma died, and I missed him so much as a child, but I
somehow eventually learned to live with the loss of that part of my dad as well. I needed him to be present for me and I
judged him for being unable to do that.
He did the best he could. I
realize that now. He was and is a good
dad. He loves me. He sacrificed his life for his children. I believe he still does. So many of the good qualities instilled in me
are because of him. I didn’t come by
them without a lot of pain, misunderstanding, wrong roads, and searching but I
did finally figure it out and that’s what counts. And I’m here and the past is the past and
today is all that matters. The unspoken doesn’t need to be spoken. It’s all ok.
We are ok.
I’ve been able to visit with
two younger siblings as well. How I
wished Jimmy (my brother that is 3.5 years younger than me) could have been
with us, but he has a lot going on right now and couldn’t have made the
trip. Shane was four, I think, when I
left home and Elizabeth was a little over a year old. I thought of them as “my babies” when I lived
at home, although I initially wasn’t so happy about their births. My workload increased when they were born. I
was in high school and wanted to do the high school things but was required to
take on some additional household responsibilities to make it easier for my
parents. I resented that until the
babies arrived and then I fell in love with them immediately. I’ve always been maternal and grabbed up
every baby I could hold. These two were
no different and we were connected through our dad. But so much time apart, with only a few
visits over the years, our relationship has been by phone, mail, and later
email and texts. Somehow, we have stayed
relatively close over the years despite so much distance. I love them so much and I am proud of the
adults they have become. We laugh a lot
when we are together, and they understand the way I think and how I talk. It’s like that with all three of my
siblings. I feel very fortunate.
There was a time when I
swore that I would write of every wrong I felt had befallen me in this
life. I thought that one day I would
write a dramatic story about loss, pain, misunderstanding, misplaced anger,
abuse, manipulation, and fear and that the story would cover almost thirty
years of my life and involve multiple people.
That story will never be written.
It no longer feels necessary to write.
I choose to move forward and none of that part of my past is important other
than it served to make me the person, I am today with both my strengths and my
weaknesses. The details are
inconsequential. I am happy and at peace
with who I am today, and I am so very thankful for the opportunities within my
grasp.
July 11, 2022
Yesterday was Sunday and
like every other Sunday for my parents, that means attending a Baptist
Church. If they were attending any other
Baptist Church other than the one where our friend Pete Ruble pastors, I would
not have visited over a weekend knowing that I would be asked to go to church
with them. Daddy’s vertigo kept him from
going but Mike and I went along with Momma Helen. She seemed so proud to introduce us to people
and she wanted us to see the Sunday School class where she teaches the
children. (They are not having Sunday
School over the summer months, but she wanted us to see the room.) Since this is not home to me, I did not know
most of the people but there were a few that I knew who have migrated from the
St. Louis area further south. It was
good to see familiar faces after so very, many years. The best part was the hugs I received from
Pete and Kathy, a sweet and loving couple who watched me grow up, who loved me despite
my struggles as a child, and who still welcome me with such acceptance and
love. Back at the house, we worked
together to get lunch on the table and then spent the afternoon visiting. The day went by so quickly and our time there
is now another memory to hold in my heart.
We traveled today from
Farmington, Missouri to Crawfordsville, Indiana. We did get off the interstate and take the
highway and a few backroads for a portion of the trip which made it a little
longer trip but allowed us to see some of the countryside. We traveled through the town of Chester, Illinois
with its bronze statues of Popeye characters, Elzie Segar, the cartoonist and
mastermind behind Popeye and his friends, modeled his characters after some of
the people he knew in this town along the banks of the Mississippi River. Mostly we passed fields of corn, soybeans,
and alfalfa and Mike never tires of seeing that kind of scenery. I was just happy to be off the interstate as
I detest interstate driving. Before
arriving at our destination, we were happy to come across a couple of Amish-owned
produce stands. The first was more of a
CoOp and they shipped veggies in and out so that not everything they had was
local. The second, a bit off the main
road, offered us the opportunity to visit two adorable Amish children. The first child that arrived at the stand and
began helping us was probably about six or seven years old. He answered our questions with humor and was
not intimidated by Mike’s gentle teasing.
I asked him questions about the produce and the mule that his brother
and sister were using to plow up the garden where the strawberries had
been. I noted that the animal
seemed especially tolerant of the children, especially since it was a
mule. The older brother rode on the plow
as the mule pulled it across the garden while the big sister guided the mule
and pulled him along by his harness. How
can one not enjoy the small window into a life that must be both simple and
complicated in existence? When a sister
joined the boy at the produce stand, she spoke to us in English but soon
switched to Pennsylvania Dutch to speak to her brother, fluently switching back
and forth between the two languages as needed.
I listened as I shopped, enjoying the sound of their voices. I bought a Cherokee purple heirloom tomato
and a jar of honey from their bees I saw flying around in great number, in and
out of the hives. Although I never
witnessed an adult, I heard their mother’s voice speaking to other children
from inside the house where I am sure she was also paying attention to what was
going on with her children that were out of doors. The children outdoors, although ranging in
age from around six to sixteen, were all doing the work of adults. I thought about how my parents entrusted so
much responsibility to my siblings and me as we were growing up and how little
responsibility and physical work parents entrust to children today. I honestly think we are failing most of our
children who walk around with electronic devices in their hands and certainly
wouldn’t be trusted to pull a plow or lead a mule or even go out to meet
strangers to sell honey and tomatoes.
We’ve rented a small cottage
for the night and although it is within sight of the owner’s home and shares a backyard
with the main house, it is quiet and peaceful.
There are chickens within proximity and the hostess told us to toss our
scraps over the fence to them. They came
running when they saw me with treats.
Makes me feel at home. Now if I
only had a cow to milk in the morning!