Mom's Elm

Pop planted the American Elm tree in the front meadow, next to the curved edge of the corn field, so he could see it as he sat in the front porch swing. He planted it as a memorial to Mom who loved trees as much as he did. He planted it because he remembered when the street where he learned to walk in Wilmington DE and the central campus of the University of Delaware, where he went to college, were lined with the magnificent arches of the trees overhead. 

Pop loved trees. Due to his good husbandry of the farm’s 50 acres of woods, the whole farm had been designated an American Tree Farm. We had spent many hours in our childhood planting unusual trees as Pop experimented with different varieties.

Pop also loved a good view. He often planted trees strategically to block out ugly buildings on neighboring farms. A Deodor cedar almost hid the pretentious columns added when the Frock family put a second story on their house. An English Walnut hid the doublewide Jimmy Yale’s farmhand had moved in on the edge of his farm.

But Mom’s Elm was his favorite tree on the farm. Pop was one of the original members of the American Elm Society that supported research to see if a cure for the devastation of Dutch Elm disease that wiped out the trees in the 1950s and ‘60s could be found. He was proud that he was keeping one alive.

The Elm he planted for Mom was a beauty, a rare healthy American Elm that loved its featured spot in the middle of the best view on our 170-acre Maryland dairy farm. It grew tall and spread its strong limbs 40-feet wide. The heifers found shade under its dark green canopy, robins and wrens raised their young high inside. One 4th of July, a cow had her calf under the tree’s protective cover.

Pop learned all he could about how to keep the tree safe from the dreaded fungal disease. He mowed the grass underneath, and carefully trimmed the bottom branches so they wouldn’t touch the ground or the grass. He cleaned fallen branches out from under and eventually put a fence up around it so the cows wouldn’t make the ground too hard by their weight and constant stamping away flies. 

The tree grew into its role as a sacred place. It quietly became the focal point, the first thing we looked for as we came to visit Pop from our new home in North Carolina. We loved seeing it gently change to orange-yellow in the fall, and its skeleton black and white curve on the winter horizon. Each spring we looked for the first sign of leaves to make sure it was still healthy. We sat in the porch swing with Pop and admired it.

Pop died last June at 94. Two years earlier he had successfully sold the developmental rights to the state of Maryland so the farm would always remain open space. He had willed his body to be used for science. My sister and I agreed that we would return to spread his ashes under the Elm this Fall.

We sold the farm to the neighboring Amish family. Two of their daughters had married brothers from another Amish family. We were pleased and we thought Pop would be happy with their plan to turn the farm back into the working dairy farm it was when we were growing up. Pop had talked often with David, the Amish father, about the importance of the trees in preventing soil erosion, providing shade and protection for wildlife. We’d told David about the sacred properties of the Elm as we signed the deeds of sale. 

But this week, on the first anniversary of Pop’s passing, we learned from friends who have driven by the farm, that the Elm is no longer standing. Few of the old and unusual trees are. The Amish have cut them down, piled them up and burned them. Apparently, their six-mule teams cannot as easily maneuver around big old trees in the middle of fields as modern tractors can. Big old trees, even sacred ones, are not practical when the field needs tilling in straight rows.

We will have to find another place for Pop’s ashes. We hope Pop and Mom are sitting somewhere on a different porch swing looking at other trees. We hope they know how sorry we are.

Retiring

I cleaned out my UNC office yesterday. A bittersweet moment. It didn't hit me until we were all done and I walked back to get my Carolina blue umbrella in the otherwise empty office.

35 years and now I've taken my hand out of the water. James, my husband, in a sort of supportive way has said not to worry about being replaced, because, of course I will be replaced. He said retirement is like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water -- you should notice how quickly the place where your hand was fills back in.

I'm not so worried about that -- I've seen how quickly my colleagues who retired or died were forgotten, their offices filled with someone else's books and busy-ness. I've vowed not to be like my retired colleagues who opine on our faculty listserv, as if they were still a part of the day-to-day work of the School.

As I emptied my file cabinets of all those folders from past classes and copies of journal articles that are all now online I felt relief that I don't have to think up the next project or stay current on the literature, that I don't need to write another syllabus for this semester's class.

I have helped train a couple of generations of young scholars who will do good research, much of it better than anything I ever did. Most are good teachers, too, cause they like young people and they embrace the world of 24-7 media access and social media. I'm still in the dark ages, loving the visual eye candy of women's magazines, humming 60s songs, and still not sure about the allure of Facebook and tweets. Time for me to go home so I can read the print edition of the New York Times with my tea in the morning.

Some of it was harder to toss -- all those qualitative interviews that we never fully analyzed, the drawer full of tape recordings of adolescents in their bedrooms -- the stuff that should have resulted in a book that I never wrote. Actually I couldn't bear to throw all that away so I packed it up to send to  my former doctoral student who did the work with me, got her dissertation out of it, and now has tenure. She said she wanted it, but she's in the middle of a fight to adopt her second child -- she's never going to look at it again. At least it will be hers to discard -- probably when she cleans out her office 25 years from now.

I'm going to send some of the bound dissertations to their writers, other former doctoral students, most of whom wrote wonderful notes of thanks in the front. I hope they think my returning their dissertation is a good thing rather than a sign that I don't care anymore, even though that may be the truth.

Now I know why a former colleague who shared my office for a couple of years after retiring from a long career at the National Institute of Mental Health, eventually declined any offer I made to include him in research projects. He said, "I've been on the front lines for 30 years, it's time for others to do it now."

I'll miss getting to know new students, getting to help them think about their futures. I was happy to be the "nicest person on the planet" in the school as my good friend and colleague Cathy Packer put it in her introduction before my last lecture. I'm glad I stayed long enough to not care about the politics, to just be helpful and for students and junior faculty rather than thinking only of my own career. I'm glad to be going while folks still like me and think they'll miss me, even though it won't take long until they don't.

Home again

We’re back at 451. Second morning. Judi is upstairs opening boxes, feeling a bit lost this morning, not yet into a routine. Yesterday she was still on the treadmill, ferociously unpacking, sorting clothes, making the upstairs bedroom and study hers. Today it’s not as clear what she should be doing. She kind of wandered around the kitchen, asking if it would be all right if she leaves her water glass on the counter, muttering, “I’m not drinking enough water.”

Yesterday was my hard day. I felt as if I were suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. I went through the motions of sorting my sock drawers in search of the warmer ones, but mostly I just wanted to get back in bed. “What just happened?” It’s been so intense for so long, to be back where everything is familiar and calm and the deadline of the sale doesn’t loom, I’m at a loss, too.

When we arrived about 8:30 the night before, James and Lily proudly showed us room to room all the work they’ve done to integrate the two other households into this one. The house is now more eclectic, with furniture and things from all the periods of the last 150 years, and much fuller than I’ve come to like. We’ll have to do another culling, I suppose, but we’ll have to do it now or we’ll all get used to it this way. I don’t want the house to lose its beauty, to become like Pop’s house -- an oddity, a kind of house freak show.

At least we didn’t bring a hornet’s nest to hang from the ceiling! But it seems as if we’ve brought everything else and James has diligently, generously found a place for them -- Judi’s ornate antique hall tree is in the front hall, the Mission desk is between the two sofas in the living room, the colored glass and floral cake plate have taken the place of the brown plates on the open shelves in the kitchen. 15 boxes of papers and photos await our sorting, stacked in the garage. James even bought a new freezer so Judi could bring the frozen venison from last year’s Klarwin deer.

James and Lily had arranged Judi’s suite upstairs so it was ready for her, so she felt welcomed into our home, with her pictures on the walls, the clothes she had left here already tucked in the cubicles in her closet. Over the desk they set up for me in the kitchen hang two photographs and two water colors of the farm and the 1958 C.W. Brown Lime Spreading calendar with “ratbate” written in pencil and circled on Sat, Dec. 6, and five sets of New Year’s resolutions on the back.



The burden of the farm will begin to dissipate and we will remember the beauty, the delight of growing up there, the warm feelings. The last few weeks have stimulated my interest in our family’s history. I want to preserve the time to learn more about that. Judi, in looking for the key to her safe this morning, dug in the crate of old coins and I saw for the the first time the twin gold watches that must have been given to our great aunts, Alma and Elizabeth. Alma’s was worn from use, Lizzie’s looked as if it were brand new with her initials elaborately carved on the back and the long gold chain still intact. I want to know more about Lizzie. We know Alma was a schoolteacher and lived in Judi’s house, married to Walter Kirk. But I don’t know what happened to her sister, Lizzie. I’m hoping I’ll learn more from the box marked “old letters and farm deeds.”


The closing went well. All that work over the past five months since Pop died culminated in a three-hour intense meeting of the lawyers, the two Amish couples, and Judi. They sat at Judi’s kitchen table and pored over the endless pile of papers the title lawyer had brought for them to sign. David S. marveled at the number of pens on the table.

Amos and his wife Katy did their paperwork first. She put her bonnet and he put his straw hat on the table next to Judi’s microwave. One of their sons, Inis, is married to the Stolzfus’s daughter, Lavina. Another brother will be marrying another of David’s daughters in early December. Inis and his older brother had come this morning so Inis’ brother, who is farming their father’s farm, could look over what his family is buying and offer his advice. I shook hands with both sons -- handsome young men with big smiles and firm handshakes who looked me straight in the eye. They went off to look at Pop’s side of the farm while their parents were signing.

David and his wife, Malinda, speaking to each other in Pennsylvania Dutch, went straight upstairs to see what Judi had left, and to make some copies on Judi’s printer. They were happy Judi was leaving the printer and Carl’s old desk. They want the desk to be the teacher’s desk in the new school house David has helped build. We aren’t sure how they’ll be able to use the printer in the future without electricity.

We all shook hands at the end, but the Amish couples politely refused to have any pictures taken of them. I drove Malinda home to fix her children lunch while the others walked quickly down the lane with their lunches in a plastic cooler. They planned to spend a couple more hours looking more closely at what they had just purchased.

Malinda gave me two jars of apple sauce and a jar of her canned peaches to thank Lily for the toy horses and cows Lily had left for the children. Malinda and David said to please thank Lily because “that little boy, Benial, won’t stop playing with them. He is trying to milk the cow and is bringing water to the horse. Yesterday, we couldn’t get him to come to supper.”


Judi and I had been up since five packing the car, loading the cooler with the contents of her freezer. We’d walked over just as the sun was coming up to turn the heater on in Pop’s house because the weather forecast called for freezing rain and snow. Getting out of there just in time. We took a picture of the “Beware of Bull” sign and the collection of tetherall parts in the basement. I’m afraid no one will know what they are and they’ll just be sent to metal recycling.

Charlie drove in on his motorcycle just as we were finishing up signing some papers Judi’s lawyer and financial adviser had brought about the estate. Judi and I both hugged him goodbye and waved out both sides of Pop’s car as we drove off to make a bank deposit and drop off the cable box in Rising Sun on our way to the Interstate.

Not sad then, mostly relieved, that everything we’d been working toward had been accomplished. Check, check, check, on the to-do list.


We finally lost it about two hours later as the stress, lack of sleep and hunger set in. We stopped at an Applebee’s to get something to eat. My salad was taking too long, so Judi offered me some of her food. As Judi pushed her little bowl of chili across the table at me so I’d stop spilling bits, I yelled, “Stop it, stop it!” cause I thought she was forcing me to eat more. She went quiet and then started to cry.

I was thrown back to our childhood when Judi, feeling misunderstood, would press her finger so hard on the page that the tip would go white from lack of blood, and I would get mad cause she was acting like I was stupid.


We were five years old, sitting in the restaurant, faced with an unknown future, together again in a way we haven’t been for more than 40 years. It took us an hour or so back on the road to get back to the present, reassuring each other that at least we know now how to talk through such moments.

We stopped again for food and the caffeine of a soft drink so we could stay awake. When we finally arrived we were thrilled to see in our headlights the Klarwin dinner bell already perched on a pedestal next to the driveway at 451 Lakeshore Lane.

We are hopeful this will work.

Dear B

En route -
April 18, 1948
9:35 p.m.
Now in Philly

Dear B -

A long time since I wrote to you
In verses, with a rhyme or two,
But since the man said what he did
'bout talents which should not be hid,
I'd better write while time is ripe
So when I can't I will not gripe
And find my time for doing such
Is all but gone and lost its clutch.

A thank you note this one should be,
For being so doggoned nice to me -
A thank you for the walks and talks,
And coping with me and my balks.
I'll miss you, dear - that's what you said,
And talk like that goes to my head.
I'll miss you too, in many ways,
And for three weeks will count the days.

I'll do my work, and get my sleep,
And carefully avoid thoughts deep.
I'm sorry that you seem to think
My pep is gone - I'm on the brink
Of nervousness, complete collapse -
But you are wrong I think, perhaps,
I need a rest, a change of scene,
But with our goal I'll be serene,
All will be well, I have no doubt,
And all we hope for will turn out.
________

We're out of filthy Philly now,
and farther from the land of cow.
Do let me know how it goes with you
The many things you plan to do.
Huh?

Love,

Fretting Florence

The sweetest greeting card

This was sent by Florence Delano to Clarence Brown in 1947. She was 30 at the time. Can you imagine a world where goodness like this ruled the day? (You may have to set aside frustration with gender-typing for a moment.) Isn't this just the sweetest thing in the universe? It makes me so happy to see this happy love.





This is the inside of the card.



268

From Florence (1947)

May 1947 ... an excerpt from page 5 of a wonderful letter from Florence after one of her first visits to the farm
....................................

referring again to your letter: and the parts of the activity, etc., i remember. jessie says i should have tried to drive the tractor, and and guess i should apologize for my stubbornness, if that's what it was. there is much i want to learn about farming, and it probably wouldn't hurt me to be able to do that ... i hope you were not disgusted with me because i refused so flatly. perhaps i should have feigned interest, though the truth would come out later and that would be more difficult ... frankness is one of my questionable qualities. i should watch myself in using it, i suppose ...

your instructions to "open with care" are unnecessary, for i open all your letters with care. you enclose so many interesting things i fully expect some day to find a live toad in one of the envelopes - but don't let me put ideas into your head.

the Comstock publishing company sen me literature about "Land for the Family" and a farm management manual, the latter for a dollar. do i want one? now that you have told me that you can provide pamphlets on subjects such as farm ponds, i don't leap before i ask. can you please tell me WHY the man has a bottle of mile in the middle of the vegetables? poetic license, i presume ...

enuf! you have work to do and i am keeping you from it.



240

Florence

236