Like Mother, Like Son

            Mary E. Wilkins’ “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” is a highly amusing tale of one long-suffering farmwife gaining a well-earned victory over a husband who had grown far too accustomed to focusing solely on his own goals while treating her like a doormat. Wilkins does not devote much of the page space to the children of this couple, but the words she does spend on them—particularly on the son, Sammy, add a considerable measure of depth to the story. Sammy is the barometer of the power balance in the household and a forecast of the effects of the examples parents set for their children.

            The fourth and final member of the family to appear in the story, Sammy introduces himself much like his father: very like Adoniram in looks, set on his own tasks (no matter how insignificant they are), keen to attempt an “ignore it until it goes away” strategy on the females of the household, and stubbornly monosyllabic when this strategy fails. His mother and sister are confused and upset by the ground-breaking of the new barn, yet he is more interested in combing his hair and tying his shoes than in telling them the information he’s known for three months. He “didn’t think ‘twould do no good” to tell them Adoniram’s plans, either because he knows his father wouldn’t have “nothin’ to say” if they raised objections, or because he has grown to believe that their objections simply don’t matter (102). His father’s example has taught him well: the plight of woman is not worth considering, particularly when it is inconvenient to the ambitions of man. If nothing changes, he will surely grow up to imitate his father’s behavior as well as his appearance and become the kind of man who takes the women around him for granted.

            Fortunately for Sammy’s future wife and daughters, his mother is not the doormat his father believes her to be. As her scheme to claim the new barn for the promised house she’s been dreaming of for four decades unfolds, Sammy’s silences change from obstinate and dismissive to respectful, and he begins to see himself not as superior to his older sister, but as an equal. Wilkins conveys this transformation with subtle, but very effective language: “Nanny and Sammy stared at each other;” “Nanny and Sammy watched;” “Nanny and Sammy followed their mother’s instructions without a murmur; indeed, they were overawed” (107). Wilkins repeatedly pairs the siblings’ names (notably, Sammy’s name is always second) and unites them in their actions. Nanny has always been respectful of and a willing helper to her mother, and syntactically attaching Sammy to her in this way elevates him to the same status. He is becoming a better, more considerate son.

            As Adoniram’s return from his trip draws Sarah’s barn-to-home conversion project to its climax, Sammy’s behavior continues to improve. After several more “Nanny and Sammy” moments, Wilkins gives us an even greater demonstration of Sammy’s transformed character: “Nanny kept behind her mother, but Sammy stepped suddenly forward, and stood in front of her” (109). The new conjunction separating the names of the brother and sister is crucial. Sammy has now surpassed his sister, and is willing to defend his mother from his father should things turn unpleasant when he enters the room. By quietly and cunningly taking what she wanted for the first time in Sammy’s life, Sarah shattered all of her son’s notions of how marriages are supposed to work. She earns his respect and allegiance far beyond anything he’d ever felt towards his father.

            Without Sammy’s subtle transformation over the course of a handful of sentences scattered through the story, “The Revolt of ‘Mother’” might not have been much more than merely amusing. Sammy’s character suggests something of greater value. A boy may look, talk, and act like his father, but one bold action from his mother could be all it takes to completely change the trajectory of his life. Sarah’s revolt defeated Adoniram, but what Sammy has learned from them could spare him from a marriage defined by battles of wills. It isn’t just Sarah’s living situation and her marriage with Adoniram’s that will improve as a result of her actions. Sarah’s triumph is one that will last generations.

The Wolves of Russia

Last week, I read Willa Cather's My Ántonia for the first time. It was an interesting experience, because I found it very easy to read even though the pacing was slow. (I have a short attention span, so that doesn't usually happen.) The language of the book is beautiful, whether the subject matter in any given chapter is miserable or happy, which I think is the biggest factor in its enjoyability from cover to cover. It certainly isn't the narrator who makes it enjoyable. I'm not a huge fan of first person in general, and when it is used, I like for the narrator to actually have an active role in the story, but Jim Burden is incredibly passive and almost useless most of the time, however impressive (if biased) his powers of observation. He's a good storyteller (and a little bit too proud of that). He doesn't merely tell the story of his experiences surrounding Ántonia; he recounts the stories the other characters told him. These stories range from charming, like Ántonia's father's stories about Bohemia, to grisly, like the man who committed suicide by wheat thresher right in front of Ántonia.

One story, however, stands apart from the others as serious nightmare fuel: Russian Peter's confession about the reason he and Pavel left Russia. They were in a wedding party, happily traveling through the woods from the church ceremony to the banquet on a snowy winter's night, when they were set upon by hundreds of wolves. Peter and Pavel were in the lead sledge with the bride and groom, and after hearing and seeing the wolves overtake each sledge behind them one by one, their own horses beginning to lose strength. The village at last in sight, they threw the bride and groom out of their own sledge in order to ease their horses' burden and give themselves a better chance of survival. I had to sit there for a few minutes after I got to the end of Russian Peter's story to process my horror. Not to mention my disgust. Whatever happened to chivalry, to women and children first? I'm sure the bride wasn't weighing down the horses nearly as much as Peter and Pavel! Ugh.

But it gets better. I started Googling to see if there were/are really enough wolves in Russia for something like that to be plausible, and I stumbled across this little gem in the archives of the New York Times. Guess what, guys? Russian Peter's tale is based on a TRUE STORY that happened in Russia in 1911 (seven years before My Ántonia was published). Enjoy.

Edit: I have been invited to write about this discovery for the Cather Newsletter.

At the Farmer's Market

            Today, I caught the bus down to Willow Park and the Cache Valley Gardener’s Market. After hearing good things about it for so long, I finally made the trip. At first, when I got off the bus, I was very confused. There’s a clothing exchange market at the north end of the fairgrounds, and I initially thought that was the Gardener’s Market. It seemed odd that there weren’t any booths with produce inside the pavilion, but maybe I’d missed them because I arrived towards the end of market time. However, I’ve been to Willow Park before, and I knew that the fairgrounds were something different. So I left the pavilion and all the used-smelling clothes behind and wandered south.

            I passed a bunch of people preparing for what seemed to be an ultimate Frisbee tournament, a couple of family reunions, and the fairgrounds stables before I finally reached Willow Park itself. I could see white tent covers in the distance, and I knew that this time, I’d found the market. Still expecting it to be mainly produce stands, I was delighted to find such a wide variety of things being sold in the booths. It was like being back at the Renaissance Festival, minus the costumes and the jousting. There was a booth full of delicate wire jewelry. I spent so much time admiring it that I felt guilty when I walked on without buying any. There were a few food stands, and I quickly got in line for fresh-squeezed peach limeade, which was delicious. Next, my eye was caught by a booth where a man was selling a selection of rather beautiful rolling pins and breadboards. I bought a rolling pin. I already have one, but it’s only 10”—which those of you with cooking experience may recognize as being too short to roll almost anything with. This one is gorgeous and longer than my tiny rolling pin and its handles combined.

            I walked on. There was a booth selling magnets made from bottle caps and pictures of fandom things, so I bought a set of Avatar: The Last Airbender magnets. They are awesome. I will not be asking my flatmates’ permission before I put them on the fridge.

            Then, of course, the produce. There were about seven or eight booths selling fruits and vegetables grown in Cache Valley. Many of them sported signs that boasted multi-generational family farms. I walked back and forth along these booths as nonchalantly as I could before I was able to single out the one that had what I was looking for (raspberries and tomatoes) and one of those multi-generational signs. Once I found the right booth, I waited until it didn’t look like there would be any customers for at least a minute or two, then stepped forward.

            “So how long has your family been doing this?” I asked the smiling, forty-something lady standing on the other side of the produce. She looked like she’d be easier to talk to than any of the overalls-wearing old men sitting nearby (as much as those men reminded me of my grandpa).

            “We’ve been coming to the farmer’s market for the last eight years,” she said. “But the farm itself—we’ve been on it for four generations.”

            “Oh, wow,” I said. “How many acres do you have?”

            “Eighty,” she said. “But we only grow produce on about fifteen. We do hay on the rest of it.”

            “I have an uncle in Idaho who grows alfalfa,” I said, nodding.

            “We used to only do hay and alfalfa, but the boys wanted to try produce.”

            I asked her what the growing season is like, and mentioned that my grandpa used to be water marshal when he had his farm in Morgan. He hated all the drama. She laughed and agreed that water is kind of a tricky issue up here in Utah. She told me how they plant lettuce, cilantro, and some herbs early in the season, because those plants can handle the cold. Then they do strawberries, potatoes, beans, peppers, tomatoes, and summer squash in the first half of summer, and finally corn and pumpkins in the second half of summer. Having only ever worked on a half-acre garden when I was growing up, I didn’t realize that you could extend your harvest by staggering your planting. Instead of planting all of one crop at once, you do some one week, some the next, some the next, and so on for about five weeks.

            “This all sounds like pretty hard work,” I observed after she told me all this about their farm.

            “Oh, yeah,” she said, her eyes widening. “Farming is probably some of the hardest work, and it isn’t for a lot of pay, but the boys love it, so it’s worth it.”

            As I headed back to the bus stop, careful not to let my rolling pin smash the raspberries and tomatoes, I wondered what it must feel like to put in months and months of backbreaking work, and then to have all those baskets and bushels of plump, ripe fruits and vegetables of every color to show for it. I’ve made things before, and I’ve stood back to admire my work, but it’s been at least ten years now since I helped anything grow.

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I'm the daughter of a farm boy and a small town girl. I grew up on a four-acre piece of land in Texas with two little brothers, and I spent my childhood picking dewberries, climbing the post oaks, exploring the creek bed, and riding horses. This blog is where I'll be exploring my farm roots through a mixture of memoir, literary analysis, and cultural analysis (with perhaps the odd recipe or two).

My mom's maternal grandparents had a dry farm in Trenton, and her dad was raised by his grandparents, who were farmers. My mom grew up in Logan, but they had enough property for a few fruit trees, sixty beehives, and a huge garden. My dad grew up on a farm in West Bountiful, where they grew asparagus, corn (field and grain), tomatoes, wheat, potatoes, barley, and hay, and they raised cows, hogs, and hens. Dad's dad was a hardworking farmer until literally the day before he died, and he and Grandma both grew up on farms. When I was a year old, Dad got a job in College Station, Texas, and we lived there until I was seventeen.

I was kind of a tomboy when I was a kid--I suppose that's what happens when you have two younger brothers, no sisters, and no neighborhood girls to play with. I would lead my brothers on our adventures in the backyard and pasture. We never succeeded in persuading Dad to make us an actual treehouse, but that didn't stop us from equipping every good climbing tree on the property with the trappings of a tree fort. We slung buckets attached to ropes over the branches, so that food and gear could be hoisted up to whichever of us was keeping watch from the treetops. We'd dig in the creek bed like pirates looking for treasure. We also had ground forts between the fig trees. The low branches with their huge leaves made the perfect cover, and luckily no fire ants ever built mounds there.

Every May, the dewberries would grow all along the fencelines of our property. Dewberries are like the best kept secret of our part of Texas (and wherever else they grow, I'm sure). Nobody with neatly groomed fencelines would ever discover them, and certainly nobody with a suburban lawn. They were left to the country neighborhoods like ours, with untamed grazing pastures sparsely fenced with barbed wire. Over time, the vines coil and loop their way up fenceposts and sprawl out along the wire. The tiny, spiny thorns are more wicked than any metal barbs, but it's worth scraping up your hands to get the berries waiting amongst them. After we finished stripping the berries from our own fencelines, we'd drive out in search of other fencelines where nobody had noticed the berries growing, and we'd pick those too. We usually had enough to make a few dewberry pies, add berries to our cereal, make dewberry ice cream for the church ice cream socials, and then still have enough to freeze a few gallon-sized bags.

For about ten years, my dad would plow the northwestern portion of the pasture (the part you had to drive past when you were entering the subdivision) for a garden, and we would grow corn, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbage, and I think I remember doing potatoes one year. When me and my brother Ben were young enough to be tricked into thinking that work was fun (this was before Josh was old enough to help), the whole family would work on the garden together, and we loved eating corn on the cob at the end of the summer. But as I got older, I got more and more irrationally terrified of bees and wasps (despite having never been stung), so I'd start weeding, but as soon as a bee or wasp wafted over, I would sprint back to the house in panic. Eventually, Ben and I were so resistant to working on the garden and Dad was so busy with his actual job that he gave up on it and fenced it off as extra pasture for the horses.

We got our first horse when I was about seven. He was a gorgeous mustang, and Dad named him Wiley (because he's wild) on my suggestion. A few years later, after we'd boarded a couple of other horses for a while, I wanted a horse of my own, and Dad found a gorgeous paint mare for sale. But instead of buying it, he made me work for it. Together, we mowed the lawn of the mare's owners for two years. At the end of the two years, I had Scoot (the mare) and Dad had Skip (her half-brother, a paint gelding). We trained them and rode them until I was seventeen, when we moved to the suburbs in Utah and couldn't keep them on our property anymore.

We also raised Barbados sheep (which look a lot like goats). These sheep are extremely cute for the first few months of their lives, but because they don't grow wool, they just end up looking kind of fat and lumpy as adults. Much less cute. We got two pregnant ewes, and when they gave birth, we made the mistake of playing with the new lambs too soon, so one of the ewes abandoned one of her lambs. I named him Little Buddy and bottle fed him until he was old enough to graze. He would bleat loud enough for me to hear him inside the house every morning. The plan with these sheep was to eventually slaughter and eat them, but that plan failed. Three of the lambs (including Little Buddy) died because they overate and there was some kind of toxicity thing with the bacteria in the grass, and then a neighbor's dog got into their pen and killed one of the ewes. In the end, we only slaughtered one, and let the last one run around with the horses until she thought she was a horse too.