Of two lives and buffalo grass

Most of my dead relatives go to the Walnut Grove Cemetery, where a double lot goes for $20 - a heck of a good deal before Roy Gardner took up his space there. He lived around the corner from Walnut Grove and took care of it like a garden after he retired from farming.

My dad hated to see Roy go. Five generations of my father's family are spending eternity in Walnut Grove, and dad liked the way Roy kept the buffalo grass trimmed away from the marble headstones and watered the peonies and the scrubby cedar trees. He also hated to see Roy go because they'd known each other just about as long as two people can know each other.

Both of them grew up on family homesteads about a mile apart, and they both went to the same one-room schoolhouse. Both men farmed for a living and they both raised their own families in the small, wood-frame houses where they were born.

At first, the differences between men like Roy and my dad, and the rest of the world were incipient. The two friends lived a kind of life familiar to farm families since the turn of the century. They raised chickens, commiserated over the price of corn, bought ponies for the kids and kept the freezer full of beef.

Over the years, though, just about everyone else they knew either built new houses or moved to town. The old farmhouses on our road disappeared one by one, except for my dad's and Roy's.

My dad painted one side of his house and tarred the leaky chimney every year. Roy fixed up part of his barn as an apartment. My dad turned our chicken house into a playhouse for us kids. They both had picket fences and outhouses longer than anyone else in the neighborhood. My dad continued to use our outhouse years after the indoor bathroom was added, until one night when a tornado came and blew it to the end of our property line.

It became apparent that my father was eccentric, in a very economical sense of the word, in that he did not avail himself to the wonderful world of extended credit. There came a time in the '70s when everyone bought huge tracts of farmland and the necessary equipment to work it. Neighbors drove stereo-equipped, air-conditioned eight-row combines, and chuckled at my dad's two-row corn picker, bolted to the front of his John Deere tractor with an umbrella on it instead of a cab.

Roy and my dad were a lot alike. Neither of them could see any reason to buy something new if the old something still worked. They both seemed pretty content with simple things. The two of them could look out at the rest of the world and clearly see that everyone else was eccentric and they were just ahead of their time. When Roy died, dad was left alone with their secret, so he hated to see Roy go, and fretting about the grass at Walnut Grove was his way of saying as much.

The older you get with someone you know, the more you can talk without saying anything. When that person's gone, there's no one else who remembers what you remember. The longer you live, the fewer people you have to talk to without saying anything. You have to start making due with people who may or may not know what you're talking about. It's either that, or take up your $20 lot at Walnut Grove and let somebody else worry about the grass growing around your headstone.

Monday, December 14, 1998

Copyright 2010 by Deborah McAdams. All Rights Reserved. For Reprint Rights, click here.