Another Day in the Country
Becoming a landmark
© Another Day in the Country
On any day, as I drive towards home, I watch for landmarks that tell me I’m getting closer to where I began in Ramona.
There’s the typical cluster of trees and buildings around a white farmhouse that says “Rural America.”
There’s an old bridge outside of Marion with its cement arches, no longer on a widely used road, that’s a childhood memory.
There are meadowlarks singing on fence rows and a lone old silo still standing in a field outside of town.
It used to be old-style windmills were the most precious landmarks for me. But, they are mostly gone now, replaced with mysteriously quixotic high-rise wind farms marking the terrain.
Any restaurant run by Mennonites — whether it’s in Yoder or Durham or out on K-15, is a landmark to me of my days spent with Gramm in her kitchen.
Graveyards that dot country roads are landmarks citing family names and memories. The one on the outskirts of Ramona is where my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins are remembered.
Many of the landmarks are crumbling: The building that used to be Georgia Berger’s café, Betty’s old place, the little barbershop building, the old high school, Kink’s Garage.
We’re so glad the post office is still there, and the Lutheran church maintains on its corner.
There are landmark houses as I walk down the street in my mind. There’s Tony’s house, what used to be Cousin’s Corner, the Ramona house, Aunt Bertha’s house, Aunt Naomi’s house, Jakie’s house, Eric’s house, the Sondegards’ house — all in pretty good repair.
Uncle Hank and Aunt Gertie’s house is in such disrepair it’s hard to look at. So, I turn my head and remember instead when my cousins started to paint the house a particular shade of yellow one spring, and Aunt Gertie started to cry. We had to pour lots of white paint into those buckets to get the color right.
There are landmarks on the edges of Ramona in the countryside — the Wingards’ places, Warren and Paula’s old home, the old Brethren church, which now is painted purple and is someone’s home — still a landmark.
There’s A.V.’s purple martin houses at half mast, waiting another month or so before birds return.
The city building that used to be the school where Tony Meyer and lots of other kids from his era were educated 100 years ago is a genuine artifact. It once stood beside a country road, in the corner of someone’s pasture, and then it came to town one day, repurposed.
Even the railroad that cuts along the edge of town is a landmark with its “X Marks the Spot” sign and its fancy crossing guard.
I give thanks for that guard every time I meet it and, of course, sigh in exasperation when a train stands for hours, and I have to go around the long way to get home.
I play a game with myself called “Was it worth it?” and am so pleased when I finally drive into town, and the train is still there, sitting on the tracks, blocking entrance.
I am validated once again for not waiting. I am so proud of myself.
At night, I hold no grudges toward that train, wailing away. I just turn over and smile. Those of us who’ve stayed in Ramona, even for one night, remember the trains. They are a landmark.
Grandpa Ehrhardt’s barn and their farmhouse across from the cemetery is a landmark for those whose relatives held their spot in history within those boundaries of Scully property.
Grandma’s chicken dinners stopped being served in that house 75 years ago, but I still can smell them frying and imagine her mashed potatoes and gravy served with perfection salad.
“What?” says my sister, who, being 12 years younger, has no such memories. “You mean that orange Jello with carrots and pineapple?”
Yes.
Sleek black Angus cattle or red Hereford bulls lying down in the winter sunshine, contentedly chewing their cud, in a pasture where they’ve been well fed, are beautiful landmarks to me of the country.
An old bridge, built by the WPA, that allows us to cross the creek that cuts through Ramona where fireflies congregate on warm summer evenings to do their mating dance is another landmark.
There are people landmarks, too — some of them connected to buildings in town that have long been sold to someone else, and the new owners have yet to make names for themselves.
It has to be a good name to be remembered. There are hosts of move-ins who have come and gone, ruined things, torn up stuff, damaged us all with their insolence, their bad habits, their mean words. But they are soon forgotten. It’s a good habit to remember good things.
I don’t remember the names of kids who tried to chop down young trees we’d just planted in the park to take the place of an old-timer tree that was broken and needed to be removed. But I do remember the man who helped me plant them and the day I trimmed them back and willed them to live on.
I don’t remember the name of that guy who never fed his many horses past starvation in the winter years ago, but I remember who bought hay to feed them.
We all have our list of places and faces, the anchors in our time together. May you all become landmarks in your community, a testament to how we spend all our days in the country.