For my 10th birthday, my parents gave me a red, battery-powered transistor radio. I was thrilled. In the mornings during the summer, I would position the radio in the middle of the garden, turn up the volume to full blast, and listen to Wichita disc jockeys while hoeing weeds and chasing grasshoppers. I relished the big city voices visiting our farm. There was no doubt, however, my father felt no comparable enthusiasm. He loved the quiet solitude of his daily chores, whether feeding the hogs or milking 5-15 cows twice a day, balanced on his one-legged milking stool.
Although I own no Holsteins or Guernseys, it appears I have become my father, seeking similar solitudes. The Alumni Garden may only be a few steps from First Avenue, but the garden walls and the vegetation and the fountain’s lyrical susurrations repel many potential invasions. It’s just me and my pairidaeza–to resurrect an ancient Persian word for “garden.” Gardening does require some attention to tasks at hand, but its patterns are like walking, the recurrent rhythms inviting the mind to relax and flow in multiple directions. This past summer, my garden ruminations frequently returned to recollections of my family’s old farm house and its kitchen. What follows is a fragile effort to bring some coherence to those memories.
Entering the kitchen from the porch, one encountered a small, dark room with a low ceiling and no windows. There had once been a large window to the west--next to a chipped porcelain sink--but during the 50 years I knew this kitchen, the window space was covered by an opaque, fiberglass panel. My Dad probably installed it to improve the insulation of a farm house built in 1870. He also built the wooden, floor-to-ceiling cupboards, providing the kitchen’s only serviceable counter top. Between this counter and the sink was space for a small refrigerator. In my childhood the refrigerator was a white Philco, eventually replaced in the 1960s by a brown Montgomery Ward. Only after my father’s death did I rediscover the old Philco residing in a corner of a livestock shed, its shelves a repository for his veterinary equipment and medical supplies.
Across the kitchen from the refrigerator was a gas stove, installed shortly after my parents moved onto the farm in the spring of 1946, nine months after I was born. Mom once told me that Dad proposed marriage shortly after he was drafted into the Army. She agreed to marry him and move to the farm after the war--on condition that he make three changes in the farm house, his home since birth. The proposed contract was for her future husband to replace his mother’s wood cooking stove with an electric or gas range, to replace the wood heating stove with electric or gas heat, and to install an indoor toilet. Eager to be married, my Dad agreed to the three conditions. On Halloween in 1942 they were married, shortly before Dad was shipped to a military installation in the Caribbean.
Since I was only nine months old when we moved to the farm, I don’t recall my grandmother’s wood-fired stove. My earliest memories are of a white gas range along the south kitchen wall. Not surprisingly, my Dad was slower fulfilling his other two promises. In 1959 he purchased a gas stove for heating the house. Until that time, we had a small, black, pot-belly wood stove that heated the kitchen and living room; the other two rooms in the house–the two bed rooms–were not heated. As for the indoor toilet, that arrived in time for my parents’ 30th wedding anniversary. I don’t know how often Mom reminded Dad of his promises, but no changes would have occurred without her instigation. He was never impressed with simplistic ideas of progress. I don’t recall ever seeing him use the indoor toilet. Even on the coldest nights, he continued to visit the “out house.”
The kitchen’s furniture consisted of a small dinner table and three chairs. Dad made the small oak table by nailing together two boards from a larger dining room table stored in the “attic.” All meals were eaten in the kitchen. We would swing out the kitchen table at a 30 degree angle from the south wall, I would sit with my back to the that wall, Dad would sit at the end of the table, and Mom would sit trapped within a small trapezoid--but with ready access to the stove, frig, and sink. When the meal was over, the table and the men’s chairs were returned to their original positions. Mom would wash the dishes and put everything away.
My mother was a town girl, and she hated the isolation of the farm. As a means of cheap therapy, she occasionally purchased plastic flowers to decorate the house. For many years there were fake purple violets over the sink and genetically unidentifiable flowers tacked next to the door leading into the living room. Other than my vivid paint-by-numbers vase of flowers prominently displayed in the living room, the kitchen had our only work of art–a small reproduction of a 17th century Dutch landscape featuring a windmill on a small hill. I now wonder if that picture was my grandmother’s vision of an ideal landscape.
For over fifty years, this kitchen would have been my grandmother’s home, from the day when she and her husband William moved on the farm in the 1890s until her son and his new family assumed possession in 1946. Although my father and his mother lived together through the Great Depression, he rarely spoke of her or of their relationship. He did once mention that she would begin each morning–winter or summer–by rekindling the fire in the kitchen stove, preparing a pot of coffee, and drinking the coffee throughout the day. By the end of the day, Dad told me, “It was very black and very strong.” I have tried to imagine what it was like preparing meals in this kitchen in July and August, a small kitchen in Kansas with virtually no ventilation.
A rare moment when I felt a hint of my grandmother’s culture came not in Kansas but when visiting England’s Lake District. The Cumbrian farm house where we were living had an AGA kitchen stove permanently on, 24 hours a day. My grandmother was English, her family from Herfordshire in west central England, not far from Cumbria. As I was using preparing an evening meal on the AGA, it dawned on me that this all-purpose cooking/heating/clothes drying appliance–perfect for a wet and cool climate--was probably similar to what my grandmother’s family would have used. Despite the long, hot, dry summers in Kansas, the old habits proved resilient.
My folks and I must have eaten over 15,000 meals together in that kitchen, but there are only a few I can distinctly remember. The most graphic occurred one summer at a noon meal. While eating lunch, Dad suddenly grabbed the leg of his overalls, calmly stood up, and walked outside. After returning to the table, he continued eating his meal, not saying a word. When Mom asked him why he had gone outside, he simply said, “A mouse ran up my leg.” He then explained how he caught the rodent inside his overalls, went onto the front porch, broke its neck, let it drop to the ground, and threw it away. I thought Dad’s portrait of the event quite amusing, but Mom was horrified, insisting Dad set more mouse traps around the kitchen baseboards. The old house was so porous it would have been impossible to keep the house mouse free–but Dad dutifully added more mouse traps to the ones already under the sink, in the cupboards, and behind the kitchen door.
The other memorable meal occurred in the winter of 1958 following Mom’s emergency appendectomy. For the first night she was in the hospital, I slept at a neighbors’ house. Upon returning home the next morning, I discovered that Dad had assumed a new role--chief cook. What surprised me was that he was quite skilled, producing a huge crock of delicious vegetable beef soup full of cabbage, a vegetable I had never previously eaten. Every night before we drove the 40 miles to the hospital, Dad would heat more of his soup. When Mom returned from the hospital, she immediately resumed her responsibilities as cook. I never saw my Dad cook another meal.
The kitchen was certainly my mother’s primary domain, but once she was finished cleaning up after supper, she would escape to the living room. There she would read the Wichita Beacon newspaper and a daily devotional in The Upper Room or--after we obtained our first GE set in 1955--watch TV. Meanwhile, Dad would sit at the kitchen table, reading his King James Bible. During the summer the Bible reading would occasionally be accompanied by listening to the Kansas City A’s baseball team on the small radio that sat on a shelf next to the Dutch landscape. Eventually he lost his patience with professional athletes, disdainful of their obsession with money. But he never lost his patience with the Bible.
With the exception of the Beacon and a few farm publications, Dad’s only reading was in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. He had an obsessive desire to understand the book and its complexities. This image of my father as a dedicated reader had a profound impact on my life, surely the primary inspiration for my own commitment to the magnetic power of the written word. But there was a profound difference in our habits. I am a restless reader, jumping from text to text, often reading from 5-10 books in a single day. Dad never had that restlessness. He knew one book was enough.
The last time I visited the farmstead, one could no longer drive to the site of the farm house, so I parked my vehicle on a gravel road, jumped over an old cattle guard, and walked across a flat plateau of buffalo grass. To the west I could see the edge of the Flint Hills and at the bottom of the hill a small valley divided by Rock Creek, a tributary of the Elk River. All of that landscape looked familiar, apparently eternal. But coming over the hillside where the farm house had once stood, I found myself completely lost. Not only was the house gone, everything was gone: barns, fences, the out house, the chicken house, the brooder house, the garden, livestock tanks, locust trees, pecan trees, peach trees, several rows of Osage orange trees, rose bushes, everything except for an ancient mulberry tree, the lone survivor on this rocky hill.
Searching through a mixture of little bluestem grass and anonymous weeds, I eventually found a few limestone blocks, which had once supported the roof of a storm cellar. Stepping south from the spot a lilac bush had once resided, next to the storm cellar’s entrance, I located where the kitchen had been. Slowly my eyes swept the field, finding it hard to believe I once could have stood in this location and looked at warped wooden cabinets and a Monkey Ward frig, my mother’s plastic flowers and a faded reproduction of a Dutch landscape. But, now, all I saw was a pasture of ghosts, waiting until I would turn and walk away, disappearing forever over the hillside.