Twenty-One Stories

I often dream of the Midwest, though I haven’t lived in it for two thirds of my life. I remember the townies and the farmers whose outlook was more rural than urban. I recall many details of a small town that was exceptionally neat, shady, and proud. In the spring the lawns were green, the roses bloomed, and the railroad that ran through town had straight bright rails that hummed as the train approached. St. Peter’s church bells rang every hour, welcoming me back again. It was a self-contained little town that served many neighboring townships. When I was a child, there were three or four restaurants, bars, WASP and Catholic churches, banks, barbers, grocery stores, a Ford dealer, a drug store, a hardware store, an appliance store, stores that sell feed, grain, and farm equipment, an antique shop, a poolroom, two laundromats, three doctors, dentists, plumbers, vets, funeral homes, and two sets of stoplights. There were many clubs: VFW, 4-H, PTA, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Rainbows, Masons, Moose Lodge, Elks, Optimists, Women’s Book Club, the Sunshine Society, American Legion, Bridge Club, Chamber of Commerce, and probably many more I didn’t know about. My mother, siblings, and I belonged to none of them. Most of the dwellings were fairly spacious farm houses in the customary white, with wide wraparound porches and tall narrow windows, though there were—and still are--many of the grander kind—fretted, scalloped, turreted, and decorated with clapboards set at angles or on end, with stained-glass windows at the stair landings and lots of wrought iron full of fancy curls. Generations of families are buried in the enormous, beautiful cemetery outside of town, including my own. Some of the big, drafty houses are dying, as are the folks who inhabit them. The elderly folks are slowly losing their senses—deafness, blindness, forgetfulness, mumbling, an insecure gait, an uncontrollable trembling has overcome them. Large families might take over these houses, undertaking makeshift repairs with materials that other people have thrown away; paint halfway around their house, then quit. They might own an ugly, loud, cantankerous dog and underfeed a pair of cats to keep the rodents down. They will collect piles of possibly useful junk in the backyard, which could easily sit untouched for years, and weeds will take over the property. Just outside the town is the country, where growling tractors tear the earth. Dust roils up behind them. Drivers steer by looking at the tracks they’ve cut behind them. Each farm smells different, depending on what the barns are used for. The best farm smells like good quality hay and freshly-turned, rich, moist soil. If the barn is used to milk cows, it will have the smell of disinfectant and the smell of cows, feed, and a bit of manure. The worst farm smells like rotten eggs and decay. The sky in the winter is heavy and close, and it is a rare day, a day to talk about to the neighbors, when the sky lifts and allows the sun to peek through. Many days go by without a glimpse of the sun. The sides of the buildings, the roofs, the limbs of trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings—everything is gray. It warms up just enough to snow, and then, again, it is gray. Because we knew nothing different, the Wisconsin climate didn’t seem unnatural. Snow endured for months, well into spring, hard-crusted, dirty, and unforgiving. The freeze-free season ranges only about eighty days per year. In those eighty days of non-freezing temperatures, it rains. So basically, we had nine months of cold and three months of mosquitos. During the winter, it wasn’t safe to be outside. After the long, cold winters, and in spite of the humidity, we couldn’t wait for summer, when time stretched thick and slow. Summer nights in Wisconsin have an eerie quality. We would usually be outside when the evening rains came, and they came most days just before dusk. Most parents would call their kids in, to protect them from the thunder and lightning, but nobody called us in. Instead, we splashed at the warm water in the gutters and raised our faces to the sky as the rain poured down in torrents. When the rain stopped as abruptly as it began, swarms of mosquitos attacked us, followed by trucks that blasted their obnoxious smoke and odor as they made their way through the small town. The air was heavy; blue halos quietly surrounded houses in this bedroom community that was barely on the Wisconsin state map.