Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

(Photo stolen from these guys)

This is Annie Bidwell, or, if you'd like to be formal about it, Annie Kennedy Bidwell. Around Northern California she is most famous for the following things:

~ Generously donating about ten square miles of land to the city of Chico, for a municipal park (now known, of course, as Bidwell Park)
~ Knowing a lot of influential people of her day, including three U.S. presidents, John Muir, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony
~ Being a teetotaler, and casting a long, alcohol-free shadow upon the land she donated to her town (much to the chagrin of some golfers at Bidwell Golf Course)
~ Having a really big pink house

(Photo stolen from these guys)

But there's one story about Annie Bidwell that you don't know. It's a tiny story, admittedly; most of my family have forgotten it. But I remember it, because the first time I heard the story, it made Annie Bidwell a real person to me. My own tiny link to history.

My grandfather, Frank LaGrone, was born in 1903. When he was about seven, he and his little sister Stella were on the lawn of Annie Bidwell's mansion, for some reason. They had probably been playing in Big Chico Creek, or over at Children's Park (just across the creek from the mansion, and also a Bidwell endowment). They peeked into the carriage house to see the dusty and forlorn horse-drawn carriages, decaying in the dark after the advent of the automobile.

And as they were investigating the carriage house, Annie Bidwell herself appeared. What did the great lady do? Shoo away the tiny trespassers? Scold them for snooping?

She gave them cookies.

Annie Kennedy Bidwell (1838 - 1918)

Henry Frank LaGrone (1903 - 1990)

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is a member of my dad's cat collection. (It used to be my mom's cat collection, but Dad felt she was neglecting them by feeding them only twice a day.) This is Pinkie.

He's window shopping with his neighbors, the bird collection: zebra finches, parakeets, and red rumped parakeets, or some name like that. The bird collection is continuously fed.

As far back as I can remember my dad has raised birds. There were always chickens, but not necessarily the kind you think of when you think of a farm or dairy (big layers like Plymouth Rocks, White Leghorns and Rhode Island Reds); Dad preferred the fancy bantam chickens.

(Photo stolen from this site)

He also raised white doves and fancy pigeons, the above-mentioned finches and parakeets, as well as love birds and cockateels. Dad has always planned and built all of his chicken coops and aviaries himself, which he has at least painted to match the house, or I think Mom would kill him.

I recently sat down with my dad, armed with a note pad and pen to get the fine details of one of his childhood stories. As often happens with Dad, the story began in English and ended in Swahili, so to speak; we covered a lot of ground and the rabbit trails were many and far-flung. But I learned something I thought was significant, and I'd like to share it with you.

When Dad was 14 his family moved to Hawaii for two years for my grandfather's government job. Since this is the larger story I'm working on I'll save that for another day; the move home is what caught my ear as Dad related his story. They had to move to Oahu (1948) and back (1950) by ship since commercial air travel was in its infancy, and remote Hawaii may as well have been the North Pole in those days. The government paid for everything, including moving their furniture. The only hang-up of their plans was the ship's policy about not transporting live fish in fish tanks, so 16-year-old David, my future dad, made arrangements with someone on a cargo ship to transport his new pet fish home to San Francisco, where David would go to pick them up later.

But David was able to take his parakeets onto the Lurline for the voyage home to Berkeley, in their cage, in the family's quarters.

I thought about that for a minute. "You had parakeets back then, Dad?" I asked him.

"Yeah," he answered. "I bought them for a quarter apiece in Honolulu, and raised them while we lived there."

"Had you ever seen parakeets before you moved to Hawaii?" I asked.

"Well . . . I guess not," Dad answered, a little impatient with this line of questioning, since we were really supposed to be talking about traveling on the cruise ship Lurline.

"And how about the tropical fish? Did people have tropical fish in Berkeley in those days?"

"No, I'd never seen a salt water tank before. This isn't important --"

"So you were probably the only person in your neighborhood to have tropical birds and fish. I would imagine your friends must have been fascinated by them. How did you keep them once you got them home?"

"Well, we had had a Victory Garden during the war, just like everyone else, and that included chickens. The chicken coop was empty, of course, when we moved back to Berkeley, so my dad helped me convert it to an aviary for the parakeets. I kept the fish tank on an old metal patio table in the corner of my bedroom. I must have gotten some kind of heater for it."

"Did you meet anyone else who raised tropical fish or birds?"

"Well, there was a guy in Alameda that the pet store people told me about. I used to go out to see him, and I bought some more birds from him. I started raising the birds and selling them to a high-end pet store in San Francisco. Every time I had birds to sell, my dad would take a cage of them on his lap for the bus ride into San Francisco where he worked, then at lunch he'd take them to the pet store and sell them for me. I got four dollars for each bird. I made $500 the first year, which was a good month's salary in those days, and $200 the second year. It started my college fund. But people don't want to know about this stuff!"

Maybe they don't, but maybe they do. In any case, I now have a better understanding of the origins of the menagerie that was always present in some combination, throughout my childhood and up to the present. I'm just thrilled to death that there were no snakes in Hawaii.

No finches, parakeets, or cats were harmed for this post.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Put aside what you may think you know about California weather; if you live in the California's Great Central Valley, including where I live in the northern part, you know that late fall through winter is Fog Season.

This is how I imagine London fog:

(Photo stolen from Homemade on Flickr)

This is the romantic version of fog, in a Bronte sisters sort of world:

(Photo stolen from vp_bsu on Flickr)

This is what fog looks like around here, and we call it tule (TOO-lee) fog:

(Photo stolen from Tony Dunn Photography -- a very talented local photographer who is SO worth checking out)

Honestly, though, when the tule fog is at its worst, it looks more like this:

and few people are apt to get their cameras out on such days, since it's pretty much pointless. Out in the country there are no streetlights, few houses to guide you as you creep down the dark roads, and even fewer passing cars. And there could be animals on the road -- dogs, cats, skunks, possums, heaven forbid cows. Satellite imagery shows you what we're dealing with, and it's no fun to drive in, especially on the freeways down near Fresno:

(Image stolen from these guys)

But I'm here to talk about splat fog. What? You say you've never heard of splat fog? Well, that's because my best friend Cheryl and I named it. It looks a little like this:

(Photo stolen from these guys)

. . . or this:

(Photo stolen from VillaRhapsody on Flickr)

. . . and it rides the earth's surface at about eye level. Cheryl and I call it splat fog.

When we were newly-legal drivers, Cheryl (who lived a couple of miles north of me) gave me a ride home one winter evening. As we turned down my road (known to those of us who live there as ground zero for fog) we could see bands of fog hanging above the road ahead of us. As we drove through it, the fog seemed to splat on the windshield, then slide unctuously up and over the roof of the car. It was like driving under a thick wool blanket, and we grimaced each time a band of the stuff "hit" the window, so solid did it look. We were giggling like kindergarteners, until we got halfway down the road and the splat fog mysteriously ended. "One more time!" one of us hollered, and Cheryl threw the car into reverse and backed up the road to do it again. We did it several more times, actually, backing up each time. I have no idea why backing up was the thing to do -- it was a very long way in reverse with only back-up lights to guide her -- but when you're 16 anything is possible, and all things are sensible.

While I have seen splat fog many times since that time, it's never been as spectacular as it was that night, and I have never again experienced it quite that way. I guess that's part of the magic of youth, and of charging through the world with your best friend.

(Photo stolen from Sarathine on Flickr)

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 04:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Had a little drama yesterday that ended in tears. Not mine (this time), although I did consider it. Maybe I'll cry later (probably).

Headed over to feed Mom and Dad's cats, fish and cows Saturday morning before breakfast. On a working cattle ranch, "before breakfast" would be two hours before the sun comes up, but on The Pushing Water Ranch that's about 8:30. The girls and I were all bundled up, they in unmatched bright pink and green socks and such, I in my hideous old tweed coat and ridiculous warm hat and muffler. Yes, I said muffler. I know this isn't Antarctica but I am a weenie and I get COLD.

As we walked down the road toward the hay barn I saw a cow out on the road. Crud. A little black steer sneaked into Dad's east pasture several months ago, a fugitive from some other rancho, and he has figured out how to get in and out of the pasture at will, to eat the tender new green grass just outside the confines of his pasture fence. Dad's on vacation and he'll deal with it when he gets back, but in the meantime -- at least until the steer's true owners get off their hineys and come get him -- the little guy has a sweet deal, and his little game hasn't been a problem.

(It wasn't this little guy, but the culprit looks just like him.)

Until this morning. Apparently he brought some friends to the banquet this morning, and one of them, a large white-faced Hereford cow, was lumbering down the middle of the road toward the girls and me as we headed off to feed hay. I calmly pushed her back toward the weak spot in the fence through which I knew she'd made her breakout. As I did so, however, I noticed a few other cows way down the fenceline, grazing outside the fence -- FIVE others, to be exact. And just at that moment an old Ford Bronco came barreling up the road and pulled over. A woman I've never seen before jumped out of her car and almost sprinted toward me. She was lean and sinewy, and she bore the weather-lined face of a capable rancher type; probably a horse woman, I decided.

"THOSE YOUR COWS?" she hollered.

"Sort of," I waffled.

"WELL, YOU'RE GONNA NEED TO GET THEM BACK IN THE PASTURE, OR THEY'LL GET OUT ON THE MAIN ROAD, AND THEN THAT'LL BE BAD. LAW SUIT OR SOMETHIN'." These sentences came at me like machine gun fire. I'm thinking, Cows're out, lady -- it isn't an international incident. But okay, she's being helpful, and she thinks I'm totally new here. I mentally inventoried my appearance: silly hat and matching muffler, hideous coat, sweat pants, white tennis shoes. Two little girls with me dressed in pink, orange and purple. Yup, she thinks I'm new here.

"YA GOT A HUSBAND?" Whoa. What exactly does THAT mean?

"Uh, yeah . . . he'll be home about 2:30. But these aren't our cows; they're my dad's, and he's on vacation --"

"WELL, YOU SHOULD TELL THAT GUY TO GET HIS HORSE AND ROUND THEM UP. NO WAY YOU'RE GONNA GET THEM IN WITHOUT A HORSE." That guy? My husband? Or did she mean my dad -- the one who's not here -- and did she think he has a horse? I could have spent a long time giggling to myself over the visual image of either my husband or my father trying to herd cattle on a horse, but there was no time. This woman had probably been up since 4:00 drinking black coffee and fuming, and she was in a huge hurry, apparently.

"Yeah, I'll have to do that," I answered without irony. As nice and helpful as she truly was I just wanted her to go away, because I really didn't feel like explaining to her how grown people who raised cattle could actually do so without the company of horses. Or why I wasn't freaked out that the cows were out. I guess I'm a bit too Type B, or philosophical, or maybe I just have my head in the sand, but years of practical experience with cows getting out has taught me that they usually don't stray far from the herd. They want a taste of freedom, but more than that they want green grass. And they'll need water after they have their grass, so they usually stick pretty close to the water troughs.

So after a few more manic pronouncements this good samaritan jumped into her vehicle and drove on up the road. I decided to go feed the cows while I figured out my next move, so back we went in the direction of the hay barn.

As I walked I saw the Bronco screech to a halt way up the road by our neighbor Brian's house. Hmmmmm, I wonder what she's doing now? I thought. Maybe warning Brian that his lawn looks a little dry? From a quarter mile away I saw the woman jump out of her vehicle and BOLT into Brian's field and out of range of my sight. Weird. But I had cows to feed, so I turned down the driveway toward the hay barn.

Halfway down the driveway I heard a car approaching, and I turned to see the Bronco backing down the road -- backing a quarter mile? Really? -- so with a heavy heart I trudged back out to the road to see what else this crazed woman had identified as a potential threat to society. She launched herself from the car.

"YOUR NEIGHBOR UP THERE IS ON HIS HORSE, AND I TOLD HIM YOU'VE GOT COWS OUT. HE'S COMING DOWN TO HELP YOU."

"Oh, thank you! That was nice -- thanks for doing that!" I shouted.

"NO PROBLEM!" the woman yelled, and lunged for her vehicle and drove away. Wow. What would she be like on steroids? I wondered.

Sure enough, in a couple of minutes my neighbor Brian came down the road riding his horse. His girlfriend followed in her SUV. Brian rounded up the cows, and the three of us easily pushed them through the gate. We then took a look at the sagging fence section that the sneaky steer had used as his private exit. We shored it up in a half-as -- er, um, we jerry-rigged it with some old boards and tree limbs.

We walked back to the road where my daughters were supposed to be waiting for us; they weren't there. When Brian had pushed the cows toward us (his girlfriend and I waited near the gate to turn the cows in -- close enough to be able to head them off should they bolt, but far enough back to give the cows some breathing room and make them think it was their idea to go through the gate), my girls had actually started screaming as they saw cows running toward them. The cows were far enough away that the girls could potentially have confused them with stampeding dachshunds. "Really?" I said to myself as my daughters, the country girls, screamed at cows who were no threat to them whatsoever. "Is that how you think you act around cows?" So I had made my kids walk up the road to stand well out of the way of the murderous cows, and then the grown-ups set to work putting the escapees back in their pasture. But when we cow herders returned to the road, my daughters weren't there.

I stood in the road for a few minutes talking with my neighbors; Smedley and Sparky came sidling up. They were carrying their biggest stuffed animals, and Smedley had been crying. "What's the matter, honey?" I asked as Smedley burst into tears and approached me to be hugged. Turns out she was sure that something had happened to me when I didn't come back right away, because she couldn't see me. She took her four-year-old sister and unlocked Grandma's house, went in and fed the fish and the cats. Wow, responsibility through her tears -- I'm impressed. Then the girls ran home to our house and packed a couple of favorite stuffed animals, since Smedley was sure they were now orphans and would have to move away.

Upon hearing the word "orphans," Brian threw his head back and laughed. I, however, didn't even blink. I'm used to the drama.

"Honey," I reminded Smedley, "Did you think that Daddy wasn't coming back, too? He's just at work, you know." But Smedley must have had an answer for that, because after fetching the stuffed animals she had dragged Sparky over to another neighbor lady's house to tell her the sad tale. When the neighbor offered to call Daddy at work, Smedley must have felt her drama slipping out of her grasp, and opted instead to "go out looking for Mama." Sparky remained unfazed by the whole spectacle. She happily ran around with her teddy bear while Smedley planned their lives as wards of the state, probably homeless.

Our lives are a perfect hybrid of "Green Acres" and "The Edge of Night." Note to self: teach girls not to scream around cows (or dogs or horses or . . .)

She looks guilty, doesn't she?

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 10:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

(With much appreciation to my brother Mantel Man for his editing skills, and for his encyclopaedic memory. Thanksthz!)

Read any children's book that mentions rural living and you will learn that a man who has a cow, a goat, a pig, a horse, and a handful of assorted fowl, is a farmer. This oversimplified definition ought to stay in childhood, but, unfortunately, it sticks, and follows people into adulthood. "Oh, you and Chas are farmers!" people say, upon learning that we live in the country, on a ranch, with (until last week) no access to broadband. This couldn't be farther from the truth.

(Photo stolen from these guys)

Farmers grow things; Chas and I do not. Oh, I have teased a geranium into submission on my kitchen windowsill, and I have created the first tropical bonsai plant known to man -- and those are just my successes. You should see the hardy plants I have killed! And Chas is no better. Looking out my window in the twilight one morning recently, I noticed that the lawn is largely dead. Sigh. Nope, definitely not farmers.

Even my "animal husbandry" father was not necessarily a farmer. He did farm for several years in the 70s, and I think he did a good job. By farming he achieved a somewhat vertically-integrated dairy operation, and if you thought a 24/7, 365-day-a-year dairy was an involved pursuit, try adding farming on top of that -- living at the mercy of weather and time on a grand scale.

When a farmer has hay down (hay that's been cut and is lying in neat little rows to dry before it's pressed into bales and bound with twine), black clouds on the horizon are scarier than the Boogeyman. Hay that gets rained on mildews or molds, and if there is too much moisture it can't be baled, or the forces of heat, moisture and pressure inside the bale will combine, combust, and burn your barn down.

(Photo stolen from Michellepio124 on Flickr)

If you've ever wanted to feel the grandeur of Nature, to be inspired by Her power, don't go to Yosemite -- just cut your hay and leave it down to dry until a summer thunderstorm threatens. THAT'S Nature's unassailable power -- and that's a farmer's real fear.

Vignettes of Dad's farming period play in my mind, in the grainy golden Kodachrome colors common to both 1970s photography and to hot summer evenings. Dad rented some acreage a few miles to the east of us; 200 acres, which, in a burst of ingenuity, we dubbed "The 200." Dad would grow corn from summer into fall, and alfalfa or oats from our mild winter through spring.

My brothers and I had two connections to the farming operation. First, when it was time to plant the corn seed, Dad would take two of us to The 200 to help him mark out the field.

Mom had bought several packs of white paper lunch sacks, and these were our responsibility out in the field. We'd walk with Dad along the long edge of the fields, following the irrigation ditch that delivered the water down the rows, and carrying the white lunch bags. We'd fill the bags with large dry dirt clods, both to weigh the bags down and to make them stand upright, and then we'd set each one on the spot Dad had indicated. The bags, white against the turned dark soil, could be seen all the way across the field; they provided visual markers to the guy who would, a few days hence, drive a tractor across the field pulling a special plow. Tractor Guy would drive straight from each white bag at one end of the field to its counterpart at the other end, and the plow would create a long berm of piled dirt. The parallel berms would be spaced at regular intervals across the field to match the spacing of openings (the "checks") in the irrigation ditch. So, we kids weren't just stuffing dirt clods into lunch bags; we were creating order. AND stuffing dirt clods into lunch bags. It was hot, dusty work, and, being the little weasels we were, we mostly hated it. Well, I did anyway.

(Photo stolen from silent encore on Flickr)

The second connection my brothers and I had to The 200 and all of its charms was silage. If this word is unfamiliar, let me explain. Silage is like a big chopped green salad which is aged and fermented and then fed to cows, who like it more than I like ice cream, and that's saying something. Dad mostly made corn silage. The corn was mowed down and sucked into a powerful machine (called a "chopper," probably by the same clever person who dreamed up the name "The 200") which chopped the stalks into a fairly fine mulch. This mulch was blown into the back of a specially-designed silage truck. When the truck was full, the chopper would cut power, and the truck would drive off, back to the dairy to dump its load at the silage pit. And that's where my brothers and I would come in: we'd ride with the silage trucks, at least once a day, until all the corn was chopped. We'd stand beside the road, the truck would stop for us, we'd climb into the cab (usually one kid per truck), and ride to the field for the slow and tedious filling of the truck. Then we'd ride back to the dairy, watch the truck dump its load at the silage pit, and that was that. Thrilling, right? Well, it was -- to scruffy farm kids like us. We couldn't wait for silage season.

(Photos stolen from thejesse on Flickr)

Some day I may tell you about packing the silage with huge tractors, to press as much air as possible from the pile so that the fermentation didn't become a conflagration.

Nahhhhh, I won't.

(Photos stolen from thejesse on Flickr)

I will tell you, however, about how we teased my baby brother Bocci for years after the farming years had come and gone: 6-year-old Bocci would eagerly climb aboard the silage truck, and within about three miles every time Bocci was sound asleep in the cab. Drooling. Bocci was so famous for napping that once one of the hard-bitten truck drivers actually brought a camera with him to capture the moment. He had to climb up onto the cab of his White Freightliner to get the shot, but he got it, and somewhere in Mom's cedar chest is a picture of Bocci drooling all over his striped little boy shirt.

Lovingly preserved in 1970s grainy golden late afternoon Kodachrome, of course.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 01:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

(Photo stolen from this guy)

One of the great joys in life is introducing your children to everybody you've ever known, especially if you are related to them. "This is your first cousin twice removed -- no, wait, THREE TIMES removed. What was I thinking?" Nuggets of information like that have pretty much NO impact on kids, while the phrase "glows in the dark" can set them all adither.

Twice in the last week I have had the pleasure of informing my glow-in-the-dark daughters that they were related to pretty much every person in the room. The first time was at a family baby shower for the newest member of our extended family, baby Caydance, and every person in the room was family. "Really? Everybody?" asked Smedley.

"Yup," I said, then launched into an explanation of related "by marriage," and watched her eyeballs glaze over. "Uh, never mind," I relented, "You're related to everybody in the room."

Saturday marked the second family get-together in a week. My cousin Mike lives two miles away, and he and his wife Chris hosted a pheasant hunt at their ranch this weekend. Once upon a time it all happened at our house, on our ranch, but over the years our indigenous pheasant population thinned out and made the hunt somewhat bleak. With no birds to bag, a pheasant hunt became just an excuse to get a bunch of guys and labradors together, running around, drinking beer and having the time of their lives. Well, I'm not sure that the labradors drank any beer (but I'm not sure they didn't).

Not that these hunters aren't serious, mind you, or that they don't know their way around a gun, because they are, and they do. The men from that half of my family are born with an inclination to bring home the proverbial bacon, to hunt for food the way our ancestors used to. The beer is kind of a side benefit.

The branch of my family from which my genes surely originated would be the Wuss Strain, we of the less virile group -- the Clan of the Grocery Store. Hunting just doesn't happen among my dad's people, other than one long ago, very unfortunate turkey hunt, which shall remain unmentioned. My brothers were both drawn to the romance of the hunt, but it didn't really stick. I'm afraid we are Safeway people, to the core.

That doesn't stop me from enjoying a good pheasant hunt, however. A good pheasant hunt always includes lots of chips and salsa, homemade cookies, barrel-smoked meats, beer and wine. Any birds actually meeting their demise in the spectacle are cleaned and plucked and put on ice, while we all sit down to a dinner of smoked beef. Family members engage in the oral tradition of storytelling (which is pretty much Creative B.S.ing). This can last for hours.

This weekend the weather was picture postcard perfect -- warm and dry, with strong sunshine and no wind. The hunters were not hugely successful, but no one cared. The conversation was good, the mood high . . . great company, tasty vittles -- really, how could anything improve on the day?

Well, I suppose the pheasants could have glowed in the dark . . .

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had a very scary dream last night. Wind-whipped flames were shooting sideways at my house, sure to catch it ablaze any second. We were forced to evacuate, and everyone around me worried only about ordering Korean barbeque take-out.

Seriously. I have stupid dreams. But this time, at least, the scars uncovered, I can trace the source of the dream -- the seeds of the fear that manifests itself as an incredibly stupid nightmovie: the current southern California firestorm that rages out of control, with no end in sight.

The house my little family and I now live in actually was threatened by fire about 17 years ago, long before we were even a family. 17 years ago . . . 1990, or thereabouts. I was single and waitressing for a living at the time -- one of my Bad Waitress phases -- and I was very familiar with the volunteer fire department. Several of their ranks came into our restaurant every afternoon for coffee and tea and camaraderie, often with various members of law enforcement. They paid their check with coins, usually, and often those were bounced at me, contemptuously. Sometimes I had to pick up the nickels and pennies off the floor, and forget about a tip! Was I really THAT bad as a waitress? I don't think so. Well, maybe . . . In any case, they seemed to dislike me, for whatever reason. I took it in silence, truly mystified.

The day I really needed those firefighters came in the midsummer heat. The berry bushes lining the northern edge of the property caught on fire and burned. The conditions were very similar to those of the southlands this week: very hot (over 100 degrees), very dry, and with a strong, hot north wind to fan the flames. The man who accidentally started the fire was trying to do everything right. He had a burn permit and a water tank on a trailer. He was burning weeds, I guess, on the other side of the berry hedge, and it got out of his control. He must not have known that the lush green berry vines burn like a torch, especially when blasted with north wind.

When the two volunteer fire departments from Orland and Capay responded they had quite a battle on their hands. My boyfriend (at the time) and I ended up helping, though I can't believe they let us anywhere near, wearing shorts and tank tops and (probably) flip-flops as we were. I remember holding a garden hose -- one that must have been linked to seven other garden hoses to reach out into the pasture -- and spraying the smoking remains of the berry hedge, guarding against flare-ups.

The fire blew out all the north windows in one of the mobile homes on the property, and melted some of the belongings inside, but somehow didn't actually burn the home. The flames jumped the road and burned west, licking the edge of the old calf barn in this photo. Right on the other side of that barn is the house we live in now.

Somehow this firetrap didn't burn, so the house was saved as a result. Two things happened to save that house, and probably every other building on the property, which would have gone down like dominos: one, the firefighters were fantastic, as usual. Two, the wind switched. Suddenly the blaze was pushed from the southeast, and it roared northwest across the wheat field that was due to be cut the next day; crop a total loss. This is the field (from this spring).

The fire didn't stop there. It jumped the road and burned down the barn owned by the same unlucky neighbor who owned the wheat. The barn housed his car collection -- I don't think the cars were in mint condition, or anything, but still . . . how much can one guy take? Four different insured parties and insurance companies, a year and a half later, and my parents, at least, were compensated for damages. I don't know about all of the others.

Back at the restaurant . . . my first afternoon shift after our fire I was ready for the coffee guys. The usual group straggled in, ordered, sipped, talked, and asked for their check. "Not today," I said. "The least I can do after you put out our fire is to buy your coffee. Thank you," I said. After all of the crap I'd taken from their group, this was not easy to do, really, but I truly was grateful for their heroics.

They looked at me. One or two said thank you. The ornery one who gave me the most trouble, the alpha dog of the group, gave me a long, hard look. Then they left, and that was that.

No one ever threw coins at me again.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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)

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)