At the Headwaters

The idea for this project came about with a couple goals in mind: a) for the challenge of rebuilding a boat, b) taking an amazing trip down the Mississippi River, a national treasure that is right out my back door and c) spending time with my father.  But there also have been positive experiences that I hadn’t anticipated, the biggest being the opportunity to spend time with my grandmother at the farm she lives on, where the boat is stored. 

Those are two distinct entities – the farm and my grandmother – but really there is no separating the two.  She’s lived on the spot since 1952, when she married my grandfather, who inherited the farm from his father, and he from his father as well.  My grandfather and grandmother are (or “was” in the case of my grandpa) amazing people that, in the German tradition of their ancestry, humbly worked their whole lives on the family farm, putting everything into it.   When I was younger I had no appreciation for what this meant, but I still grew up admiring and respecting them very much. 

My grandmother is 86 now, and lives alone on the 60 acres, managing the property.  She doesn’t have the cattle anymore; she stopped raising them when she was 81, but there’s still plenty to do — mowing, painting, cleaning gutters on fifteen foot ladders, shoveling sixty feet of sidewalk – and she does it mostly by herself using her 5’2”, 90 pound frame.

It’s not that no one tries to help her, it’s just that she won’t let anyone help.  Tenacious and determined are two of the nicer words that come to mind.  Some prefer stubborn and obstinate.  But I tend to agree with her:  she’s been doing in all her life, why stop now?  With that said, I greatly look forward to times when I get to help her with a project around the farm.  Not because she can’t do it, but because we get to spend time doing it together, learning from each other. 

The other day I was down in the barn working on the boat and I heard a couple blasts from up by the house.  It didn’t phase me for a second, and I didn’t even think about stopping to check it out.  I knew it was my grandmother blasting away with the shotgun at the ill-behaved red squirrel again.  When I went up for lunch later, she told me she’d missed completely.  Then she handed me the gun, an ancient .410, and asked me to help her unload it because she was having trouble.  I was one of those moments that I will cherish forever:  as I showed her the spring mechanism that she hadn’t engaged correctly, she chatted absentmindedly about the history of the gun, and I thought to myself, “how many grandsons get the opportunity to discuss with their grandmothers the finer points of shotguns over the smell of fresh gunpowder?”

The extension of her – the farm – is a family treasure.  Many of the existing buildings are on their original structures, including the original farmhouse, which was built in the 1870’s.  The place has changed since then, but not nearly as much as the lands around it:  I can remember as a child row after row of corn and soybeans on rolling hills that are now dotted with replica monstrosities of split-level houses with three car garages.

Walking among the outbuildings and in the fields on the farm, there is a certain solitude that makes it easy to appreciate the history of the place as well as understand what a true sanctuary it is today.  It was because of this solace of the place that my best friend in the world and I decided to get married here, among family and friends — in the field that my grandparents, great grandparents and great-great grandparents toiled their whole lives in for their families.  It was one of the greatest moments of my life.