Rural Routes, Blog Version

On June 30 I attended a funeral for a local farmer who died of cancer at the age of 72.

My parents lived about a mile from where he and his family lived, less if you cut across the field. There were six children in our family, four in theirs and the youngest three in our family were the same ages as the oldest three in theirs. My parents were a bit older, though. My mom had taught him in the one-room school where she worked before her marriage. He and his wife lived in a small house built across the road from his parents, a standard setup for farm families including ours. We lived across the road from my grandmother and my dad’s older, unmarried brother.

The year I turned 18, my uncle died. We did not want Amma to be alone, particularly at night, so the older of my two brothers began sleeping in her house. He would have been 12 at the time. He continued this routine until Amma moved to a care facility in 1980, eight years later.

Every school day one of us would phone across to Amma’s house to wake our brother.  But Amma was hard of hearing and our brother slept on the second floor. Getting an answer sometimes took a long time, especially on a Monday morning after the weekend.

In those days we still had party phone lines. Amma’s phone number  was 312 ring 5. Which meant that anyone sharing the same party line would have to listen to one long ring, two long rings and all the way to five. And if we were having a hard time getting our brother out of bed, that would be repeated many times. Our neighbours on the same line laughed about it.

When I was a teenager, I  babysat our neighbour’s children and now it seems strange to me that some of them already have grandchildren! How could it be possible that I  babysat for grandparents?

I am 58 years old and I have lived 52 of those years in this community. I recognized most of those attending the funeral – unlike my sister, who no longer lives in the community and so only sees some residents on an occasional basis. She commented on how much some people had changed, how much older everyone looked. And we joked, how is it that others age when we have not?

The theme of the service was the correlation between farming and life. How you have to plant the crop if you wish to reap a harvest and yet how all the work in the world will not protect you from a drought. How no dream can be realized unless you work for it, yet the end result is out of your hands. Hard work and faith go hand in hand.

My brother – the same  brother who kept their phone ringing endlessly all those years ago – was a pallbearer.

And suddenly, as I was sitting there, I felt both immobilized and held in place by the ties that bound everyone in that church together – blood, history, community, the land itself, the sowing and the reaping, the foibles and the follies, the memories. Old hurts. Old passions.  Stories our grandparents told. Stories we will tell. Chapters in our lives.