Tonica Days #1–NightLights

August, 1957…

The thing I most remember about being five was that everything that was man-made was drab.

The barn had not been painted in twenty years, so the bits of red paint on its sides had faded to rust color. From my four-foot high vantage point, you could not see the occasional traffic on the dirt road running past the house, but a car’s approach was announced by a cloud of grey dust. Mother’s shift had once been cheery, but years of washing it with the borax needed to soften the well water had faded it until you had to strain to make out the flowers that covered it.

By mid-morning, the black-and-white television had lost my interest. Captain Kangaroo was over, and Commander 5 wouldn’t be on until noon. I sat, playing with my black and white kitten, Muffin, moving a stick through the grass until she chased it. I looked up into the blue, blue sky and watched the white contrails of a B-52 on watch move from one horizon to another.

Mother was hanging laundry out on the line, holding a wooden clothespin in her mouth while wrestling with the bedsheets. Occasionally, there was a breeze that would lift one up with a snap, its brown pin flying back into her basket, from which she retrieved it and started the process over again.

Lunchtime came. If I went slowly and looked carefully for cars, I was allowed to cross the road to my grandmother’s house across the way. Her house was off-white, too, but was surrounded by riotous colors.

My grandmother had had a fight with the Catholic Church about twenty years before, and had never returned to Confession or Mass. Denied Communion, she spent her Sundays on her knees in her flower gardens, tending to the creations of God in a gesture of respect that she hoped Christ and His Mother would understand. If one judged by the results of her labors, God was very pleased with her.

Today, she was waiting for a mole. She sat on a kitchen chair in the shade of a two-hundred year old burr oak with a pitchfolk by her side. She held her finger to her mouth and pointed to the end of the tunnel-mound which had stopped moving at my approach. I stood like a statue waiting for the next step afraid to even breathe deeply. Suddenly, fluidly, she struck at the end of the mound and with one motion, lifted the impaled mole into the air. It described an arc of ten feet or so, landing wounded at the feet of her orange tiger cat, who made short work of the pest.

She made little sandwiches for me, cutting the slices of bread into quarters. We returned to the yard, she in her beige straw hat, me in my off-white T-shirt and brown shorts. I was amazed that everything with color had a name. The flowers were lillies and petunias and african violets. The red insects (not bugs, as she constantly reminded me) were called ladybugs and wouldn’t bite if you wanted to pick one up. The insects with the shiny wings were beetles and I must kill them when I see them, since they ate flowers. The long green ones that prayed were Praying Mantises. They ate other insects that were pests, so they needed to be left alone to do their work.

The red birds were cardinals and had four different songs. In the little birdhouse was Jenny Wren, and when Grandma spoke or whistled to her, Jenny would reply with her 10-note song. Jenny was brown like the dust, and tiny. The robins had orange bellies and would occasionally pull a worm from the ground when Grandma wet the earth in a section of the garden.

The heat of the day settled in, and we drank lemonade in the shade. The cows, black and white Holsteins, grazed on the short grass outside the fence. Soon Mother would come for them, and it would be time to go home. For now, I watched, wide-eyed, as a yellow and black bumblebee moved from one flower to another, the sacs on its legs full to overflowing with pollen stolen from the garden.

My father returned from the fields where he had cultivated beans all day. You could just make out the faded blue of his shirt under the layers of dust. Supper was shades of brown and grey also–mashed potatoes and pork cooked so thoroughly as to have little flavor left in it. Mother put together a small bowl of vegetables–early squash and cucumbers from the garden. I waited until she looked the other way, then moved mine back into the bowl from my plate. She was obviously tired, since she didn’t bother to reprimand me this time.

Dusk fell and my father finished up milking the dozen cows by hand, dumping the milk into cans that sat in the cold trough of water that served a dual purpose. It was deep enough to keep the cans cool overnight while also providing water for the cows who slept near it.

I was not tired, so I sat after sundown on the stones of the cistern cover waiting for the lightning bugs to come out to play….

And, for the first time, became aware of what was happening as the light faded. There was no moon that evening to dilute the view from our back yard. One by one, lights appeared in the sky–not the few visible from a backyard in 2007–but thousands of them, for there were no yard lights, no outside lights at all on farms then to obscure the view.

There were sweeping expanses of glory, the summer Milky Way casting a diffuse glow within the night. Not only were the lights everywhere in the sky, but they were different colors! In the very south, there was a red lantern shining among other bright stars that were arrayed in arcs. Further up the sky, there were bright orange and yellow stars standing out. Everywhere I looked, there was glory, even down to the edge of the sky near Highway 51 a mile away, where I could see the orange running lights of semis heading to their destinations.

Time passed. Occasionally, I remembered to breathe, sometimes not, for I realized that this was what my Grandmother had been talking about when she spoke of the presence of God. I learned a secret that day, one that has served me well for the rest of my life.

There are always times when life fades into the drab, when it is apparent that the vanities of mankind are impermanent. At those times, I can look upward and realize that the sky above me is the same one that I saw that day, so long ago. The house is gone, my Grandmother, too–gone like my kitten, Muffin.

The burr oak looks the same as it did that day. The fields still have corn and beans in them, but no cows low at the thought of grain for supper, and the skies will be there long after I’m gone, too.

Tom