Thank you key drive

For saving me on days like this....yesterday the crop insurance auditors (and the Farm Side deadline); today the last high school concert, a bittersweet milestone on the map of family life. This is a tribute to my late mother-in-law, which I don't think I ever actually published. I believe that I wrote it in 2002. She and I had our differences as any two cooks in one kitchen and women on one farm will do. However, I loved her and found out just exactly how deeply when she passed a way. Living here in her house a day never goes by that I don't think of her. I hope I somehow measure up to what she would have wanted...so here's to Peggy, one of the greatest women I ever met...

She was born in the town of Stark in the year fifteen. At first she was so tiny that her daddy, Frank, carried her around the house on a pillow for weeks. Her family wondered if she’d make it at all.

What an illusion that frailness was. She started helping Frank on his farm on Fiery Hill as soon as she could toddle. Milking cows by hand and doing fieldwork were as natural to her as breathing. When I met her she could still push her head into a big Holstein’s flank and make the milk fly with her small but purposeful hands. On Saturdays in spring she had to lead the big buckskin, Dan, pulling the cultivator up and down the rows of corn.

Later she told me how hard it had been to trust the horse not to squash her. She was fearful that his big black hoofs would stomp down on her bare feet and crush them into the hot dust of the cornfield or that he would drag the cultivator through the tender new corn. Still the work had to be done no matter how scary it was. She loved to ride him though, steering him with the driving bridle.

Dan was one of Frank’s fine workhorses, probably more a carriage type animal than a big, heavy horse like you see charging around the show ring today. He was so slow and deliberate in his tread that he never tipped over a stalk of the precious corn. He never did step on her either. She talked about him seventy years later as if he were still waiting out in the barn.

She started school in a one-room schoolhouse, when the teacher came to board at her home when she was three. We have a picture of her, bundled in a thick black coat, much shorter than the other students, but smiling hugely. She always loved to learn. Her education spanned eight decades and encompassed everything from gardening to a knowledge of politics as broad and deep as any scholar of the art. (There are those of us who learned to do our homework before we got into a political discussion with her. It was the only way to avoid walking away muttering and wondering what hit you.)

Frank was a renowned horseman in that area. His teams were called upon when no one else’s horses could get loads of ice or lumber up Fiery Hill. Whereas other farmers had to couple two or three pairs together, Frank could get the job done with one pair of his horses. We have a picture of him driving his yoke of oxen and, so in step are they, that it appears that there is only one ox, the off animal’s legs being totally hidden behind those of the nigh one.

Sadly, Frank was the one who was frail in reality and he died when she was twelve. As often happened in those days, the family was split and she was separated from her mother and sisters. She was sent to live with an old friend of the family who needed extra care, then later found a home with a woman who owned a diner in Booneville. She loved that restaurant and remembered the people who worked with her there very fondly. Roy, the irascible cook dominated the kitchen like a king and kept the girls on a run. She gave him his comeuppance one day when he bent over to check something in the oven as she pared potatoes nearby. She reached out with the razor sharp paring knife and nicked every stitch in the back seam of his trousers. He laughed and gave her hell.

There were some famous patrons among the simple farmers and loggers at the diner. Walter Edmonds, author of Drums Along the Mohawk and Rome Haul, was a regular summer customer. She said that he loved the strawberry shortcake and often stopped in for some during the season.

The loggers came in hungry for fine food after months in logging camp. Hobos were never turned away without a hot meal and a sandwich for the road. There was even a special, substantial dinner that was laid out for any itinerant who called at the back door, with lots of hearty bread and potatoes and gravy to stick to the ribs.

The good cooking she learned at the Brown Derby never left her. She could turn out apple pies with crust as moist and light as the early morning fog at the beginning of a perfect July day. She taught my girls and Alan to cook too. It’s scary. Liz is fifteen and teaches me new recipes. They even inherited her special ability to never use one dish when two would do. When they finish in my kitchen I start looking for the tornado.

She married a local dairy farmer in forty-three and later had two sons. They set to farming with a determination few today could imagine. They raised strawberries and pigs to pay the mortgage. Then they bought a second farm next door. When milking machines came in, her husband milked his string with the new invention while she milked twelve cows by hand-twice a day. Even when her hair was snow white and her steps had slowed enough that toddling grandchildren could keep up with her, she could still send streams of milk drumming onto the floor when she hand-stripped a cow.

At eighty-three, she was still milking cows. Even when she slipped on a grape dropped by an errant grandson and broke her arm; she went to the barn and washed cows with the good one.

She wouldn’t stay in the house in any weather. Snow, ice, it didn’t matter. It was a good thing that the old dog, Beethoven, would let her use his fur to pull herself back up when she fell, because there was no getting her to quit.

Last September, just eighteen months after her husband passed away at ninety, she had a massive heart attack. Nine months later, she died on my birthday, July 4th. It’s pretty empty in the old farm kitchen now. There is nobody to tell me how to grow cannas or cook ham or stuff zucchini. I miss her more than she could ever know.