Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

When I was young I used to walk home from school, a mile away. Sometimes I would ride my bike there and back instead. My brothers and I were allowed to walk or ride to our friends' houses sometimes -- 1 1/2 to three miles from home. Now, when I think about the day we'll let our daughters out of our sight, I break into a cold sweat.

When I was young I would wander over to the dairy house on boring afternoons -- coincidentally, the house I now live in -- to "visit" the family who lived there. The father and sons would be outside working, and only the mother and her daughters-in-law would be home. They spoke little to no English, and I spoke no Portuguese. They were watching afternoon game shows and soap operas, and I'd sit with them politely and watch, too -- none of us understanding much. They'd have sudden bursts of rapid conversation in Portuguese, having nothing to do with me, and I'd smile at them. Then we'd all look at the television again in silence. Eventually I'd tire of everything and I'd stand up and thank them, then they would pat my blonde hair and pinch my pink cheeks and give me a Portuguese sweet bread roll, and I'd scurry out the door for another day. Now, when I imagine my daughters hanging out with adults I barely know, it seems ludicrous and dangerous.

When I was young I spent hours with my brothers playing in the hay barns, or down by the irrigation slough, or playing hide-and-seek around the dairy. Sometimes neighbor kids would join us, sometimes not. We'd check in with Mom occasionally, but never with cell phones. We knew not to go over the north fence, because it was marshy beyond the fence and a girl could easily get stuck in mud she couldn't get out of (it happened to me as an adult once). We knew not to cross the road without looking, or old Mr. Forrester might run us down in his speeding jalopy. We knew not to upset the milking cows, or make any cows run, and we were pretty careful within the boundaries we'd been given. But now, when I try to imagine my daughters having the run of the place where I once ran, I get very nervous.

When I was young I used to play on tall haystacks with my brothers and our friends. I remember making forts by hauling steel fence posts up to the tops of the stacks, arranging the hay into square igloos, laying the posts across like rafters, then stacking more bales on top. My hay fever left me wheezing and puffed up like a balloon, with red runny slits for eyes, and sneezing my head off, but it didn't stop me. Did my father know exactly what we were doing up there? No. Was it safe, rolling nearly 100-pound bales around and crawling into the hay igloos? Not particularly. Would I let my daughters do all of the dangerous things we kids did on the hay stacks? I'd like to think I'd say that I'd look the other way, but I doubt it. Last night I saw from a distance Chas and the girls up on the stack, feeding hay, as I walked home to start dinner. Smedley waved at me, her little body silhouetted against the chalky late afternoon sky. All I could think was how close to the edge Smedley looked at that moment, and what was Chas thinking?!

Have things really changed that much in 30 years? Or have we -- okay, I -- become so conditioned by frightening news stories that we (I) needlessly shelter our kids from the complexities, and therefore the exquisite texture, of life? I say I want to raise my girls as scruffy little farm girls, but the truth is, it's so hard to let go long enough to let them take the chances they need to take. True, they're only four and six, but how soon should a parent start to let go?

I'm having a very hard time with this part of parenting.

When I Was Young -- The Animals

My faith was so much stronger then
I believed in fellow men
And I was so much older then
When I was young
When I was young
When I was young
When I was young
When I was young

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I should probably clarify something -- my daughters aren't really named Smedley and Sparky.

When I first began blogging over a year and a half ago, my original blog, Foolery, was more about my kids than anything else, and using nicknames for them seemed to insulate them from the world. I don't post their pictures, either, for the same reason.

Several things the girls have said over their very few years have become legendary among some of our friends and family. They may want to crawl under rocks some day, so I have given them the gift of relative anonymity.

My brothers are referred to as Bocci and Mantel Man, for the same reason. They are often mortified by their big sister's silly, frivolous, and completely undignified behavior, so I'm protecting them from too much scrutiny.

And, breaking my own rules, here are recent pictures of my daughters, the scruffy farm girls of the Pushing Water Ranch.

This is Smedley, age 6.

And this is Sparky, age 4.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Terrible photography courtesy of Yours Truly. Hey, what do you want for four dollars?

Saturday and Sunday were crisp mornings, even with the gluey gray cloud cover. The girls and I were invited over to Grandma and Grandpa's for breakfast Saturday (poor Chas works weekend mornings and always misses Mom's breakfasts). So I hustled the girls out of their jammies, steered them away from their favorite party clothes, and finally badgered them into their play clothes.

While walking down the road I idly scanned the west horizon and was startled to see a hot air balloon. "Quick, girls -- over to Grandma's! We can see it so much better from the dining room!" This wasn't just a cheap ploy to get some coffee in a hurry -- the view from the breakfast table really was better. There were two balloons, gliding north just to our west.

Each summer about this time, when the weekend mornings are cool and the winds are light, we can expect to see a few balloons drifting up from Bayliss in the south. (One year when I was young there was some kind of balloon race with many, many balloons. We were delighted to see them go right over the ranch, but we watched in horror as a balloon downed in the field just northeast of us, missing a power substation by yards. The wind came up with violence just as the balloon neared the nest of high voltage wires, but the pilot managed to cheat death and all ended well.)

Over breakfast my dad explained to the kids the finer points of hot air travel, a lecture I had just given twenty minutes before, had he (or they) been listening. "What are you -- TWINS?" I'm sure they were thinking, noses wrinkled in childish annoyance.

Sunday I was awakened by Smedley extolling the finer points of something inane -- ha ha, she got me back -- at 6:30 a.m. "Gimme a while longer," I mumbled, and by now Sparky was awake, so the two happily galloped off to play Something Inane. But the phone ringing just before 8:00 sealed my fate, and I lumbered to the desk to answer the phone in my best "of course I've been awake and productive since dawn" voice, because I knew ahead of time that it was my mother. "There's another balloon -- come on over, if you want."

"GIRLS! Get your shoes on -- we're going over to Grandma's to see more balloons!" As I hollered this in the general direction of Inane Headquarters, I happened to look outside -- and there was a blue balloon, right there. Much closer than it would have been at Grandma's.

"Never mind! Just come outside!" I yelled. I was mostly dressed, but I did take the time for pants, which was a good plan, since you can only assume they have binoculars in those balloons. The balloon was moving away fairly quickly, but we had a good view. Sparky wanted to get closer, but both girls were barefoot, and the driveway is full of stickers, so we stayed on the sidewalk.

"I don't even care that I'm in my undies," Smedley confided. "If they look at me, they'll probably just notice my smile, anyway."

Just then I noticed a rainbow balloon, obviously put down on the ground, just beyond the ranch's western border. It rose up a few minutes later, but struggled against the rising air temperatures. It never caught up with its blue travel companion.

We watched for a little while longer, until the mosquitos and the promise of Kix drove us indoors. Even rare beauty has a shelf life.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Feeding beef cows is not rocket science. They graze all day on green pasture, and, depending on the time of year, you supplement their diet with hay. Alfalfa hay is the best, and a favorite of the cows.

Feeding hay is a pretty big job in the winter, when they need so much more food energy than only grass can provide. In the late spring they need almost no hay at all, and in fact prefer the tender green grass to hay. But in late summer as the grass toughens, the cows again start looking for hay.

When my parents go somewhere overnight, or for weeks at a time, we take care of their animals, the most important of these being the Limousins, their beautiful red beef cows. Dad's instructions are usually vague, with lots of wiggle room: "Feed them enough. If they don't clean it up by the next feeding, cut them way back." Then sometimes, like last weekend, Dad gets oddly specific: "Give the cows on the north side 27 flakes, and the south cows none. Unless, of course, the south cows are standing there, in which case, give them four flakes." Um, okay.

So last Saturday morning I was up on the stack tossing alfalfa hay flakes down into the concrete and iron manger below me. Done it a million times, nothing new, can almost do it in my sleep -- until. Until I looked down and saw that I had inadvertently dropped a piece of baling twine down into the manger. Darn. When this happens, it's important to retrieve it, because some cow could possibly eat the twine. Cows are not known for their brains or discriminating taste.

Back when I was a little kid, hay bales were secured with three wires, made of metal. Dropping one of THOSE into the manger was a crisis. I know it sounds crazy, but cows really did ingest the wires, and then you had a real problem. A cow with a wire in her belly was a cow in trouble. The wire, or any scrap metal that dumb cows might eat, lodges in the honeycombed walls of the reticulum, one of the cow's four stomach chambers. Inflammation results, and the cow fails to gain weight, or, if she's a milking cow, her milk production drops.

The wire solution was surprisingly elegant and simple: all heifers were given cow magnets before they entered the milking herd. No, not those colorful refrigerator decorations, but 4-inch stainless steel magnetic cylinders which the cows were forced to ingest as if they were big vitamin tablets.

The magnets were preventive medicine against stray wires in the cows' stomachs, because all metal simply adhered itself to the magnets and stayed put nicely.

But, since hay bales are now wrapped with twine instead of wire, there should be no danger, right?

Wrong.

That Saturday morning as I watched a stray twine slither into the manger below me, I was horrified (and annoyed, let's face it) to see a cow already eating the darned thing. Stupid cow. Time to go down and save her from herself.

The minefield that is the haystack includes such dangers as
-- sharp alfalfa stems
-- black widows
-- unnoticed gaps between bales into which your entire leg disappears
-- cut bales that collapse under your weight
-- wobbly bales that teeter under your feet
-- feral kittens (dangerous because you'll soon be feeding them and calling them Fluffy)
It is rare, but it is also possible for poorly-stacked bales to collapse under your weight; it happened to my middle brother once. He was standing on the corner of a stack when it gave way beneath him. Luckily for him he was inside a pole barn, and near an iron support post for the barn. He grabbed the post and hung on as the stack crumbled out from under him, and survived with sore muscles instead of a broken neck.

But my least favorite hay hazard is caused by feeding hay into the wind. You find yourself suddenly in a cloud of swirling alfalfa dust and flakes, blinking and sneezing and shaking out your t-shirt. Wearing a bra full of hay particles is about as miserable as it gets, but there are no advisories for such things, and no one writes cowboy songs about that.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 02:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It's funny what things make a huge impression on you at an early age, and how you carry those things forward as dreams, or cautionary tales, or even phobias.

In 1965, when I was a baby, my parents rented a small dairy in the Santa Rosa area, and moved in about a week before Christmas. Dad bought a new vacuum pump motor at a farm supply (the one that was in the barn looked to be on its last legs), and he and my grandfather began to install it bright and early Christmas Eve morning. My grandfather was a very handy guy, but somehow they got the thing running backwards, and knew it was time to call in an expert.

Did I mention that this was going on while Dad had the cows in the milk barn? Oh, I forgot. Six cows were in the milk parlor, happy to be munching grain as they waited to be milked.

So a local electrician came out to help. While checking the system, the expert did the unimaginable, and touched a live wire to metal. Dad and Papa were with him in the machinery room at the time, and not in the noisy milk parlor, so they didn't know immediately what had happened, but they found out soon enough: five of those cows, with their heads secured by the metal stanchions, were electrocuted.

Now, I wasn't old enough to remember the events, of course, but I've heard the story of those cows all my life, usually from Mom, who still gets agitated talking about it. As deaths go, this was a brutal way to die, as evidenced by the condition in which the cows were discovered. When you think about my parents' stage in life -- fledgling dairy farmers on a rented ranch, in a brand new town, and a new baby to feed -- it's hard to imagine a more devastating blow. It was a big loss.

But that's not really what I wanted to tell you about; I told you that downer story so I could tell you this:

Fast forward ten or eleven years to the ranch where we all live now, in Orland. We had a little camp trailer we'd use occasionally, and it was kept behind the house next to the pump house. My girlfriend Cheryl and I had talked my parents into letting us sleep in the trailer one summer night -- a treat for scruffy ten-year-olds.

It was nearly dark when Dad came out to hook up the outdoor extension cord from the trailer to the pump house, so that we could have light for our sleepover. Cheryl and I were giddy with the anticipation that only little girls can understand. Cheryl threw open the trailer door, grabbed the pull-yourself-up handle, put one bare foot on the iron step, and let out a howl I hope never to hear again in all my life. I was standing behind her, crowding her in my jumpy state, but frozen to the ground as I tried to understand the problem.

Now, I don't remember this, but Cheryl says I was yelling, "What?! What?! Snakes? Snakes! Spiders! What?!" as I conjectured the only things that would make ME yell that way. I grabbed onto Cheryl instinctively, though surely out of fear and not out of heroism, and immediately felt the surge of electricity coursing through both of us.

Whether Dad unplugged the extension cord at that moment, or I in my hysteria had knocked the howling Cheryl and myself to the ground, I'll never know. But we were suddenly free from the pain, gasping for breath, lying in a heap below the trailer steps, and shaking so hard that it hurt. Then the tears started.

I think we stayed up half the night in my room, crying and getting hysterical all over again. There was no question of sleeping in the trailer that night, or ever again, for that matter; I think it was sold not too long after that. I refused to touch it.

The shaking is what I remember most of all, because it was violent and involuntary. As frightened children with exquisitely developed senses of drama, Cheryl and I no doubt elevated our fear and discomfort to new heights. Dad rolled his eyes at my melodramatics. But then, Dad didn't know the effect that his story about the cows being electrocuted -- remember that story? -- had had on me. I was absolutely sure that Cheryl and I would have met the same fate had we not been very lucky that evening.

Well, I don't know squat about electricity, so for all I know the headaches that Cheryl and I suffered that night were as much damage as could have happened. But the larger truth came from my remembrance of the family mythology. My respect for all things electrical certainly dates back to that night, but the respect was crystallized as distrust by the story of the electrocuted cows. And the strangest part of all is that, ultimately, the events of that Christmas Eve morning didn't have much of a life-long impact on my father, I was stunned to learn recently, as I was gathering my facts. The horror definitely didn't hold him in thrall as it did me.

Cheryl still likes to yell, "Snakes! Spiders! Snakes!" every once in a while, to get my goat. I let her. After all, we're both still here to laugh about it.

(Edited 8/20/07 for a few goofball mistakes I made the first time around -- like thinking that I hadn't born yet, which I had. SHEESH)

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

From time to time I will post things I have previously written and posted on my other, less thematic blog, Foolery.

http://foolery.typepad.com/foolery/

The following post, "Berry-Picking," is from late June of this year. I miss most of each year's berry season due to heat, mosquitos, vacation, and sheer laziness. I'm already grumpy about missing this year's crop, and so I'm posting this here, a eulogy for my favorite fruit.

* * * * *

Tonight the girls and I headed out for a walk after dinner, since the south wind had come up and it had cooled down quite a bit. We didn't get far before we noticed that the blackberries are ripening! It's a couple of weeks earlier than I was expecting. We scooted back to the house for some containers, then back to the giant briar hedges which separate the east pasture from our neighbors to the north.

We call them blackberries, but they're really Himalayan blackberries (Rubus armeniacus). The hedges grow about 10-12 feet high, and it's anyone's guess how wide they've grown. The entire north hedge burned to the ground about 17 years ago, though you'd never know it now. Foxes, coyotes, and all kinds of birds and field creatures live within the brambles growing over the "creek" which is actually irrigation run-off. Himalayas are a horticultural plague which botanist Luther Burbank introduced to the west coast; kind of like the south's kudzu, only with the most delicious berries you've ever eaten. They are far sweeter than true blackberries, and about twice as large when they're at their peak in mid-July.

It's a long-standing family tradition to make homemade blackberry ice cream for Fourth of July. The tradition persists, whether or not the berries actually ripen in time. This year we're in like Flynn.

As we were picking from the neighbor's side of the thicket, up walked the neighbor with his two daughters. "Hi neighbor!" I said. "We're stealing your berries." He didn't look too concerned.

We picked a vat of berries, and with any luck I'll have enough to make a cobbler this weekend. If I can keep Sparky out of them, that is.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Every place has its problems, its annoyances. In urban areas there's often noise to deal with, or traffic, or maybe a neighbor's tree encroaching into your yard.

In the country we have flies. Where there are herd animals there will be flies.

The house we moved into in 1971 had white aluminum siding on it. From a distance the siding looked okay, I guess, but within a few feet the first thing people noticed was the black polka dots on the white paint. "What are those?" they'd ask.

"Fly specks."

"Oh. What are fly specks?"

"That'd be fly poop."

"Oh. Can't you wash them off?"

"Would you like to try?"

Fly specks covered our house, our patio furniture, our cars, and probably our pets, if we had looked hard enough. Removing fly specks is next to impossible, so after a while you just give up. Removing the flies was impossible, though Mom tried. She bought bags of wasp larvae (more bugs), which we kids "planted" in fresh cow manure all over the dairy. When they hatched, the theory went, the tiny black wasps would destroy the fly larvae, somehow, and without pesticides. Who knew that 1970s bumpkins could be ecofriendly? The only problem was that if it worked, nobody could tell.

When Chas and I were first dating he introduced me to his old roommate Evan, who asked where I was from. "Oh, Orland -- I know a dairy family in Orland," he said. "I went to a fly-be-que there once." Yes, well, eating outside after Easter is not advisable if you live on a dairy. But, as with hurricanes or tornadoes or earthquakes or network news, after a while you do get used to the clouds of flies. Some of us, like the father of my best friend Cheryl, become almost proud of our fly-endurance -- "I've eaten in worse flies," he claimed. I've filed that quote away among my favorites.

So many more bugs and pests to share with you! But they'll have to wait for another day, because I have flies to swat.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 01:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a perfect world, animals -- both domestic and wild -- would stay where we want them. In the real world, it rarely works that way.

I was reminded of this fact this morning as I scanned the paper, and read of a bear in Tahoe who had crossed the line into Human World way too far, and one too many times. Because the bear threatened a sheriff's deputy the bear had to be put down. (It could well be the same bear who keeps coming to my friend Margaret's Tahoe cabin door and breathing on the glass, and if so she won't have to worry about nose prints anymore.)

Good fences make good neighbors, they say, and it's probably true, especially when cows are behind those fences. When first we moved to the dairy that became our family home and compound (the Pushing Water Ranch, as I have named it), the 70 acres of barns and pasture were compartmentalized by barbed wire fences. Over time, wooden posts rot, wire sags, cows scratch, and soon there's a tempting stretch of fence just begging a curious cow to step across. In the middle of the night. For no apparent reason. "Cows out!" became an all-too frequent rallying cry, and there was no arguing -- time to pull on shoes (boots in the winter), bathrobes, whatever you got. Cows on the road won't wait until morning, and cows on the neighbor's lawn would be frowned upon, but BULL in with the neighbor's heifers is a real no-no. Trudge, trudge trudge, out to chase cows.

One rainy winter pre-dawn morning I was awakened by a loud "GLOWRPH!" which is a sound not easily reproduced in print. Instantly the outside patio light went on, and I staggered from my bed to the window to see my mother outside in her nightgown, in the rain, carrying a long pole. It took a minute for my junior high brain to understand that a cow had fallen into the pool, and Mom was herding it toward the steps with the pool brush. (The "GLOWRPH!" came from the cow, not from my mother, by the way.)

Time to go chase cows.

Dad was dressing and in his boots, and there was no way around this, so out into the rain we went to find and herd the cows. This was big news later that day at my school, let me tell you.

We've had many of these stories over the years: the opossum who fell into a trash can, the cow who fell into a septic tank, Dad's rabbits who staged a jailbreak so often that he finally just let them run free, the bantam rooster who kept falling in the pool and riding around on the floating pool sweep (he miscalculated once and that ended that) . . . animals just won't stay where you put them.

After a few successful years of dairying Dad had sturdy iron fences built to replace all but a very few of the ratty old barbed wire (that's pronounced "bob wahr") fences. Good management, good neighbor relations. Now, on the rare occasion that cows get out, it's usually because someone left the gate open, but you can't solve for stupidity.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Greetings! And welcome to the most recent evidence of my ongoing megalomania!

Here is my mission statement for Reasonably Educated Bumpkins, and a list of self-inflicted rules, which I reserve the right to change or ignore at any time, without warning. So there.

Bumpkins Mission Statement

It is my goal, objective, mission and plan to tell the truth about rural life in California's Great North Valley, from my past and through my present. I will express The Truth as I see it. To this end I will tell The Truth (except when I’m lying, in which case I will almost always tell you).

Bumpkins Rules

No, this is not a poorly-structured football cheer; this is my code of conduct, to which I will pay strict attention (except when I don’t, in which case I will almost always apologize).

1. First, do no harm.
2. No swearing. I reserve the right to say “D-word,” “butthead,” and “golly” on occasion. (If you think “golly” is a swear word, this is no place for you, as I tend to apply it liberally, with aplomb, and without a care as to whom I might offend. Sorry.)
3. Most of my family and friends will be referred to by their nicknames, to protect the innocent. If you are not innocent, I will refer to you by your full name, and post your address, phone number, and a map to your house.
4. No discussions of religion, politics, sex, race, philosophy, existentialism, camels, trashy television, or nose-picking. Except when I want to, in which case I will agree to be on my best behavior. Okay, that just cleared out most of you.
5. Please feel free to comment and take part in the discussions which I hope will arise from this endeavor. The more the merrier!
6. For the three of you still reading, the last (today) and most important rule: No split infinitives, dangling participles, or using of prepositions to end sentences with. But I reserve the right to be grammatically incorrect AT LEAST 50% of the time (my escape clause).

Risks of Reading Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

You can expect to hear an inordinate amount of useless stuff about Northern California, as filtered by Yours Truly and by my family. You will become more familiar with my home town of Orland, and the town in which I am rumored to work, which is Chico. You do risk learning something, though that risk is statistically insignificant. Be aware that because this blogger is a mother of little kids, and a denizen of Rural America, you, dear reader, risk hearing about various excretions and things that smell. I’m sorry, I don’t make this stuff up, I just call ‘em as I see ‘em (or nearly step in ‘em).

Perceived Benefits

Anyone bored enough to have gotten this far can finish this for me. Please, e-mail to me any benefits you expect to get from reading this blog; I can’t think of any.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)