On the hall wall
by the bathroom hangs an original oil painting by a neighborhood friend of my
mother’s family. Dr. Carl Quosig picked up the skill of a paint brush after he
put down his skill with a scalpel.
I remember meeting
him once in his attic room turned into a studio. His house was as weathered as
his face and the welcoming warmth of its interior matched the cheerful gleam in
his eyes. Fascinated by his many canvases, my mom and I were treated to a range
of subjects from landscaping, flowers, city streets, and several depictions of
monks in various stages of inebriation. My mom chose the one of the monk passed
out in the wine cellar with the monastery’s cleric looking disapprovingly down
a very pointed nose. Dr. Quosig gifted us with the one that is now hanging in
my home.
The 8 X 11 canvas
shows a once muddy road, now drying under a late summer sun and disappearing
through a stand of trees whose leaves are gloriously orange and yellow and red.
In the distance, gray mountains stand beneath mounds of white clouds looking as
if recently whipped into stiffness and waiting to top a fruit cobbler.
This carefully
crafted scene housed in a frame my mother refinished in cherry maple stain
appears to me as if I’m looking out a window. For all the years it hung in my
parents’ home and then in mine, I have studied every detail. As a youngster, I
wondered what it would be like to live at the end of this road. On every trip I
took with parents, mostly when we were ordered by the Marine Corps to a
different military base or one of our rare vacations, I would look for the
earthy driveway into the trees, thinking I would recognize the scene and
perhaps talk my parents into turning around and investigating the end of that road.
My dream continued as an adult, traveling with either husband or by myself. I
wanted to know who lived there, what kind of house, and were there horses and
cows?
About the same
time I began imagining the end of the road, my parents and I visited the family
farm in the southwest corner of Colorado. Uncle Lee and Aunt Lois, with their
two sons and their families, farmed the land. Uncle Lee had the brightest blue
eyes and admitted he could count cows on a hillside, miles away, but could no
longer read newspaper print. His sun-dried skin was etched with spidery
wrinkles, his wispy white hair held in place under his lop-sided straw hat
which had seen rain and sun and sleet and snow. Aunt Lois’s face crackled with
every emotion, worry lines from tending children and animals, angry lines when
I let the pigs out by carelessness, laugh lines that came out like sunshine
after a storm. Even mad, her eyes were merry.
In my memory,
today, I learned so much in the week we were there because once you set foot on
the land, you were part of the activities. Yours were another pair of hands to
stir the gravy or soup, dig and wash the potatoes, peel the fruit, iron the
sheets, feed the pigs, or find the eggs.
Whereas, I was
left to my own devices and homework when I lived as an only child with my
parents, at the farm, I was part of something. A team of some kind with a
common goal of survival is the only way I can describe it. With my mom
and dad so involved with each other, I was more the observer of life, like an
appendage.
At the farm, we
cooked constantly with foods picked from the garden, fruits canned in blue and
clear jars from the previous fall, meat brought up from the freezer that had
been one of those pigs or a cow or a steer or a chicken who’d stopped laying. I
learned about the cycle of life, the dying and the living, and about outhouses.
So now I had a
picture of what life could be like at the end of my well-traveled country road
through the multi colored trees.
I’d like to say I
found my dream. In a way, I did. The unpaved road to our home in Laytonville
didn’t lead to a farm house, but my late husband and I did build the
eight-sided hogan ourselves. We didn’t have farm animals but we did have a dog
for a time and watched the ravens and wild turkeys pick at whatever food we
left out, heard the pileated woodpeckers and sassy squirrels, relocated
rattlesnakes, and tried to keep the garbage cans safe from the bears.
In my mind, I
believe I tried to sustain what I remembered of that team work effort so all
who lived or visited there could feel part of something bigger than themselves.
I suppose I did
find my ‘end of the country road’. Interesting though, the memories of the farm
in Colorado are more distinct now than those of the 27 years on our land. What
clings most from the early childhood experience is the idea of the
togetherness, the purposefulness of our lives, the relationships initiated and
forged. It’s that commonality I miss and am continually looking to create in my
current one bedroom bungalow which stands past a two-car long driveway, behind
a garage, and at the end of a cement walk which travels under the shadow of a
fruit-filled plum tree; my own version of a country road.
