"Her Most Perfect Day Ever" is central to Curlew:Home, my memoir of growing up on an Iowa farm during the grey Republican 1950s. Though I haven't named them here, though they begin in this telling to stand in for Everyman and Anywoman and there story is the story of many middlewestern farm families, these are my parents, Philip and Oma Montag, and this is their story. The essay appeared originally in The Journal of Unconventional History, where I needed to append a foreword averring that the story is as true and factual as humanly possible; apparently the creative nonfiction bordered on too creative, even for Unconventional Historians. For those interested in my memoir, Curlew:Home can be ordered from Tom Montag, PO Box 8, Fairwater, WI 53931 for $15.95 + $2 s&h.
Maybe they didn't talk about
the lonesomeness in those early years. About the day the young farmer would be planting corn in the near field. His wife would be so lonesome for him, she would want an excuse to go out and visit with him. They would have had bean soup for lunch. She'd think: I'll take him a bean sandwich and talk with him while he eats it. Bean sandwich! the farmer would exclaim. Whoever heard of a bean sandwich! Well, the wife would say, in my family we have bean sandwiches all the time. We have bean soup for dinner and then a bean sandwich for supper. The young farmer would go ahead and eat his and the couple could talk.
Driving home from Tom Maury's farm, the oat seeder rattling in the trunk, maybe they didn't talk about the morning the young farmer and the hired hand headed off to work the other two hundred acres over near West Bend. The young wife still had chicken chores to do, but they didn't have to be done right away so she went back to bed. Along comes a knocking at the door and there's a young fellow who says he's selling magazines to work his way through college. I don't have any money for magazines, the wife would tell him, but I sure get bored out here. Tell you what, she says, you help me to do the chicken chores, and I'll play cards with you. So that's what she did. The young wife and that magazine salesman did up the chicken chores, then they went to playing cards all morning. Along about half past eleven, the wife told that young salesman that her husband and the hired man would be coming home for dinner at noon and he'd have to get moving along. It wasn't until years later she wondered what nosy neighbors might have thought about her entertaining a young fellow all morning while my husband was away. She was still that innocent.
To be continued....
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