Fall and Winter Catalog

Over the past few weeks, as children have been going back to school, traffic has gotten much worse. I  am recalculating my trips around town to avoid the traffic backup in those 15-mile-per-hour school zones, and this got me thinking about summers when I went to school.

During junior high to early high school, I would spend summers on my grandparents' farm in central Nebraska. Within a few days of school ending, I would ride with a family member or even a Continental Trailways bus, the 360 miles from Denver to their town in central Nebraska. On their farm were cows, pigs, and chickens. They raised corn and soybeans irrigated from an underground aquifer. Initially, my grandfather used irrigation tubes to transfer water from a ditch over the berm, into the rows of corn or soybeans. This was done in the morning and evening, when it did not rain. A few years later, the tubes were replaced by 12-inch aluminum pipe in 20-foot-long sections stretching for 1/2 a mile. The pipe had sliding three-inch plastic gates that could be opened or shut to irrigate the crop.

Some cousins were my age. On Saturdays, we would work on different chores around his parents' farm and then have the rest of the afternoon to do something fun. After watching Dwight Stones' high jump in the 1976 Olympics with the new Fosbury flop technique, we set up our own high jump pit with two small wood sticks as upright standards and a thin stick between the standards as a bar. We piled straw on which to land. The more we jumped, the higher we set the stick (bar), and the thinner the straw pile became each time we landed. Only a few bumps and bruises, for our lack of a suitable landing area.

A few years ago, there was a TV advertisement where farm kids put together a high jump pit into a pile of straw, but I say my cousin and I did it first.

Several aunts and uncles lived in the area and often came over to my grandparents' house with their families in the evening to hang out. My grandmother would have cookies, or cake, and iced tea for everyone.

It was a great time for someone my age to spend with your extended family and get a chance to work outside. June turned to July, and then August; the summer wore on. My grandmother subscribed to most of the catalogs, Sears, Montgomery Ward, and JCPenney. One day, in the mail came the first fall and winter catalog. It didn't mean that much to me, but soon after, I noticed more talk about me traveling back home to Denver to start school in early September. Soon after, arrangements were made to ride back to Denver with an aunt and uncle. 

In subsequent years, the arrival of those Fall and Winter catalogs signaled the limited time left before school started, and that fun on the farm would end for another year.

Those summers seem like a big part of my life now, like I had done it for many years; in reality, it was only about four years, from seventh to tenth grade. As high school went on, those summers on the farm were replaced by high school, cars, girls (much to the chagrin of my mother), and football.

I visited the farm for many years afterward, even taking my children there when they were young, to meet their great-grandparents. My grandmother died in 2008 and my grandfather in 2010. Within the past few months, the last part of their farm has been sold, thus ending 80 years of family ownership.     

This past weekend, I traveled again to central Nebraska, where my nephew, who grew up in Denver, married a girl from that same town.

So the connection continues.