(no subject)
more stories from the farm.
My brother swears up and down he's going to graduate high school and keep working at the factory where he puts in a few nights a week as his part-time high school job. I called home the other night to talk to my parents about my decision to forsake the whole journalism thing and go into education. I'm going to be a kindergarten teacher, and just saying that out loud makes me grin like I probably haven't grinned since, well, never. And that's how I know it's right. My brother thinks I'm making a huge mistake.
Ted is 17, and he is everything I have hated that I was, found that I couldn't escape, and accepted as my blessings rather than my burdens, since I left home. He is sardonic and humble and despises humanity but loves each person he meets. Ted and I have a bond that all our opposites can't quite defy. We have the same sick sense of humor, the same blue eyes, and we both wear the scars and the dust from a town where nobody really dreams.
There's money in factories, Ky, if you stick around awhile. You just punch a time card and go home, and you ain't even gotta pay for no damn college classes or shit like that.
I know a guy who has worked in candy for 23 years. Candy. Not even like the freezer or something hard. And he makes 18 bucks an hour! No school loans to pay back, either. Hell, I'd love to be a teacher, but I refuse to live on that kinda money. You gotta pay for your education on top of it, just ask your aunt Cindy how easy it is to pay school loans as a teacher.
I dunno Ky. Do what you want. I think you're makin' a mistake though.
I feel dirty when I sit in college classes and wax intelligent about my roots. It feels like lying to talk about that town, like assuming I am better for leaving and they are somehow worse for staying. It seems to go unspoken that if the only people in town with a college degree are the teachers, and if I'm going to be a teacher, that somehow that makes me better. There is something missing in that equation, though. Nowhere in that formula does a college degree mean better. And if I sit there and speculate on what it means to be from Melcher-Dallas, Iowa, and I say things that would make my parents and neighbors and teachers want to smack me and call me ungrateful, and I say those things in front of a bunch of suburban kids who are nodding blankly and thinking about how glad they are to live in a town that has a mall, then I must really be full of shit to everybody.
Oh, sis, you don't want to do high school, my mom says. Think about those big yucky boys in your class. You'd have to be controlling those kinds of creeps every day. Your aunt Keri told me to tell you that you're too little, said those high school kids would just run right over you.
Oh, it is a great job though. You get your summers and your weekends and holidays off, and you'll be able to bring me my little curly-headed grandbaby every Christmas! There will be one, too. Don't even think there won't. It's a great job.
I was born after five years of waiting. I was a tiny smooth pink girl with lots of hair, a dolly for my 23-year-old mother to rock and sing to and cry to and promise the world to. Ted, on the other hand, Ted was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. He was also born a gigantically fat baby, and as soon as he could walk he destroyed things with gale force. Somewhere along the line though, we crossed. I was the one who destroyed things. I tore people down. I demanded too much of everybody and offered nothing in return but the satisfaction of my being maintained. Ted became the one who asked nothing. The one who didn't ask because he didn't need, period. And then I ran like hell and tried to prove something, and he stayed behind and watched me try to prove it while he shook his head and coughed in the trail of dust my parents left as they scrambled after me.
"How's it feel to be the favorite now?" he asked me one night after a particularly vicious fight with our father.
"When was I ever the favorite?"
"When you left. You get to be poor abused overworked Kylie now. And I have to stay here in this hellhole and put up with him. Enjoy it Ky. You're the favorite."
And I guess maybe I am, in a lot of ways, if being the favorite means being the one they have to keep one eye on in their sleep. If it means being the one who keeps them from sleeping for fear that if they drift off, she'll fall apart. The one they can speak frankly to and say nothing. If that's what being the favorite means, well then, Ted, I guess I win.
The sun always seems its most golden and the sky its most blue at home on the farm. That was what I yearned for the msot during the horrid humid summer after freshman year I spent working in Minneapolis, where the sun is white and translucent high in the slate-colored sky, and I savored every second of it on the weekends I could get it.
The air feels thinner on the farm, the sun colors everything yellow and gold and rose. I am barefoot more often than not, or I am on the roaring Kawasaki four-wheeler tearing across the field and down the hill, past my grandparents' house in a trail of dust. I wrestle the dog to the ground, all 16 pounds of her, until her fluffy white hair is peppered with leaves and she is too tired to pay attention to me. The dust settles everywhere in the house during the summer with the windows open, even with the layer of gravel treatment they spray every April and October, it works it way into your lungs and makes you sneeze.
The farm is an oasis, with its lush grass greens and harvest golds in a world of browns and grays, but it is its own kind of trap. Nobody leaves. When I have been in the city for awhile, I can only see all the wasted potential. When I spend time on the farm I almost understand it.
One hundred seven years of Knust have called these hundreds of acres home. The first called it a livelihood, too, they rose and slept with the sun and ate long lunches on the tailgate of a truck and churned butter in the summer kitchen that now houses spiders as big as your hand. One hundred seven years of Knust living at the bottom of the same hill, waiting for the same rain and sun. Did they ever want to leave? Their wives did. My mother does. My grandmother does too.
The family farm is dead now, much to the chagrin and sorrow of the sons whose stars placed them in this time and not their fathers' or grandfathers'. Urban sprawl has exacted its own cost, paled the sun with smog and shrunk the American yard to a postage stamp of well-manicured radioactive grass, and commodity farming has polluted the water and drove down the price of pork to the satisfaction of the people who never have to think about where it comes from. This is called progress.
In my family, the price of this progress is rage. My father came of age as the family farm gave way, around the time the task of sowing and reaping these amber waves of grain became a futile one. The losses became so great that he chose to rent the land to a wealthier farmer than himself, with better and more equipment, rather than let his family try and fail to live on it--and he will never accept that this loss is beyond his control.
Farmers are by nature, or perhaps just by trade, stubborn, independent people, and my father is no exception. He grew up surrounded by farmers, played with a toy barn full of horses and cows, worked with his father to bring in the crops and then at the Co-op loading trucks with seed and feed, spent a few months in Des Moines at 20 and promptly decided it wasn't for him. He married at 21 and they lived in town for a year, which was just long enough for him to decide he couldn't do it anymore and to build a home just below the ridge where the field starts and the farm ends. He built this home with his wife, then 19, a small town girl to whom driving 10 minutes for a gallon of milk was inconceivable, and they raised two discontented children in that home, bitter with isolation and the indignity of being a "country kid."
He worked the land while shuffling from one factory to the next, calling in sick a few days a year to spend 16 hours in the field, until at the age of 40 his back grew too weary for the assembly line at a meat-packing plant and he took up truck driving instead. It proved too much of a headache, the hours wrong and the stress of 3 am runs of flammable fuel not worth the money, so he begrudgingly opted for a low-paying position maintaining forklifts for a convenience store company, and that is where he has stayed.
This is the way of it, now. There was a time when farming was a second job, then a time when it was a third job, and now it isn't really a job at all, just a noose, a saddle. The family farm has become obsolete in the way of the cotton gin, and a chapter of American history has slipped through our fingers without much notice. What we call progress is knocking our foundation down one brick at a time, and when it's too late to stop it will be the moment we notice.
My brother swears up and down he's going to graduate high school and keep working at the factory where he puts in a few nights a week as his part-time high school job. I called home the other night to talk to my parents about my decision to forsake the whole journalism thing and go into education. I'm going to be a kindergarten teacher, and just saying that out loud makes me grin like I probably haven't grinned since, well, never. And that's how I know it's right. My brother thinks I'm making a huge mistake.
Ted is 17, and he is everything I have hated that I was, found that I couldn't escape, and accepted as my blessings rather than my burdens, since I left home. He is sardonic and humble and despises humanity but loves each person he meets. Ted and I have a bond that all our opposites can't quite defy. We have the same sick sense of humor, the same blue eyes, and we both wear the scars and the dust from a town where nobody really dreams.
There's money in factories, Ky, if you stick around awhile. You just punch a time card and go home, and you ain't even gotta pay for no damn college classes or shit like that.
I know a guy who has worked in candy for 23 years. Candy. Not even like the freezer or something hard. And he makes 18 bucks an hour! No school loans to pay back, either. Hell, I'd love to be a teacher, but I refuse to live on that kinda money. You gotta pay for your education on top of it, just ask your aunt Cindy how easy it is to pay school loans as a teacher.
I dunno Ky. Do what you want. I think you're makin' a mistake though.
I feel dirty when I sit in college classes and wax intelligent about my roots. It feels like lying to talk about that town, like assuming I am better for leaving and they are somehow worse for staying. It seems to go unspoken that if the only people in town with a college degree are the teachers, and if I'm going to be a teacher, that somehow that makes me better. There is something missing in that equation, though. Nowhere in that formula does a college degree mean better. And if I sit there and speculate on what it means to be from Melcher-Dallas, Iowa, and I say things that would make my parents and neighbors and teachers want to smack me and call me ungrateful, and I say those things in front of a bunch of suburban kids who are nodding blankly and thinking about how glad they are to live in a town that has a mall, then I must really be full of shit to everybody.
Oh, sis, you don't want to do high school, my mom says. Think about those big yucky boys in your class. You'd have to be controlling those kinds of creeps every day. Your aunt Keri told me to tell you that you're too little, said those high school kids would just run right over you.
Oh, it is a great job though. You get your summers and your weekends and holidays off, and you'll be able to bring me my little curly-headed grandbaby every Christmas! There will be one, too. Don't even think there won't. It's a great job.
I was born after five years of waiting. I was a tiny smooth pink girl with lots of hair, a dolly for my 23-year-old mother to rock and sing to and cry to and promise the world to. Ted, on the other hand, Ted was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck. He was also born a gigantically fat baby, and as soon as he could walk he destroyed things with gale force. Somewhere along the line though, we crossed. I was the one who destroyed things. I tore people down. I demanded too much of everybody and offered nothing in return but the satisfaction of my being maintained. Ted became the one who asked nothing. The one who didn't ask because he didn't need, period. And then I ran like hell and tried to prove something, and he stayed behind and watched me try to prove it while he shook his head and coughed in the trail of dust my parents left as they scrambled after me.
"How's it feel to be the favorite now?" he asked me one night after a particularly vicious fight with our father.
"When was I ever the favorite?"
"When you left. You get to be poor abused overworked Kylie now. And I have to stay here in this hellhole and put up with him. Enjoy it Ky. You're the favorite."
And I guess maybe I am, in a lot of ways, if being the favorite means being the one they have to keep one eye on in their sleep. If it means being the one who keeps them from sleeping for fear that if they drift off, she'll fall apart. The one they can speak frankly to and say nothing. If that's what being the favorite means, well then, Ted, I guess I win.
The sun always seems its most golden and the sky its most blue at home on the farm. That was what I yearned for the msot during the horrid humid summer after freshman year I spent working in Minneapolis, where the sun is white and translucent high in the slate-colored sky, and I savored every second of it on the weekends I could get it.
The air feels thinner on the farm, the sun colors everything yellow and gold and rose. I am barefoot more often than not, or I am on the roaring Kawasaki four-wheeler tearing across the field and down the hill, past my grandparents' house in a trail of dust. I wrestle the dog to the ground, all 16 pounds of her, until her fluffy white hair is peppered with leaves and she is too tired to pay attention to me. The dust settles everywhere in the house during the summer with the windows open, even with the layer of gravel treatment they spray every April and October, it works it way into your lungs and makes you sneeze.
The farm is an oasis, with its lush grass greens and harvest golds in a world of browns and grays, but it is its own kind of trap. Nobody leaves. When I have been in the city for awhile, I can only see all the wasted potential. When I spend time on the farm I almost understand it.
One hundred seven years of Knust have called these hundreds of acres home. The first called it a livelihood, too, they rose and slept with the sun and ate long lunches on the tailgate of a truck and churned butter in the summer kitchen that now houses spiders as big as your hand. One hundred seven years of Knust living at the bottom of the same hill, waiting for the same rain and sun. Did they ever want to leave? Their wives did. My mother does. My grandmother does too.
The family farm is dead now, much to the chagrin and sorrow of the sons whose stars placed them in this time and not their fathers' or grandfathers'. Urban sprawl has exacted its own cost, paled the sun with smog and shrunk the American yard to a postage stamp of well-manicured radioactive grass, and commodity farming has polluted the water and drove down the price of pork to the satisfaction of the people who never have to think about where it comes from. This is called progress.
In my family, the price of this progress is rage. My father came of age as the family farm gave way, around the time the task of sowing and reaping these amber waves of grain became a futile one. The losses became so great that he chose to rent the land to a wealthier farmer than himself, with better and more equipment, rather than let his family try and fail to live on it--and he will never accept that this loss is beyond his control.
Farmers are by nature, or perhaps just by trade, stubborn, independent people, and my father is no exception. He grew up surrounded by farmers, played with a toy barn full of horses and cows, worked with his father to bring in the crops and then at the Co-op loading trucks with seed and feed, spent a few months in Des Moines at 20 and promptly decided it wasn't for him. He married at 21 and they lived in town for a year, which was just long enough for him to decide he couldn't do it anymore and to build a home just below the ridge where the field starts and the farm ends. He built this home with his wife, then 19, a small town girl to whom driving 10 minutes for a gallon of milk was inconceivable, and they raised two discontented children in that home, bitter with isolation and the indignity of being a "country kid."
He worked the land while shuffling from one factory to the next, calling in sick a few days a year to spend 16 hours in the field, until at the age of 40 his back grew too weary for the assembly line at a meat-packing plant and he took up truck driving instead. It proved too much of a headache, the hours wrong and the stress of 3 am runs of flammable fuel not worth the money, so he begrudgingly opted for a low-paying position maintaining forklifts for a convenience store company, and that is where he has stayed.
This is the way of it, now. There was a time when farming was a second job, then a time when it was a third job, and now it isn't really a job at all, just a noose, a saddle. The family farm has become obsolete in the way of the cotton gin, and a chapter of American history has slipped through our fingers without much notice. What we call progress is knocking our foundation down one brick at a time, and when it's too late to stop it will be the moment we notice.