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Home of Michael Perry – Author, Humorist, Singer/Songwriter, Amateur Pig Farmer

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Archive for June, 2009

Cool and Gray in June

Early morning easy listening: Bloodletting, by Concrete Blonde.  I like the name songs: “Caroline” and “Joey“.

Later, for balance, some Dallas Wayne.

Which might make me dig out this guy (he once got me into big trouble while live on the air at a radio station, a story that requires some time lapse before the retelling) (he wasn’t actually there at the time).

Turned the pigs into some new territory late last night.  They wouldn’t cross the old electric fence line.  But this morning they had overcome their fear and the new patch looked like it had been attacked by organic bulldozers which in fact it had.  Back when I was off on book tour, the neighbor plowed us a patch and my wife scatter-sowed rape and rye.  The patch is thick green and luscious now and those pigs love that rape.  So do the ducks.  They hit it with their beaks all a-clatter.

Nobbern Drive

Drove up to New Auburn with the kids yesterday, to a get-together on one of the lakes.  Right through town, out Highway M, “Jabowski’s” corner, Highway 40, into the lakeshore area where you meet a lot of Minnesota and Illinois plates heading home Sunday afternoon.  So lush there, it’s that thick green time of year, and man, it was saudade like sixty.  One memory after another.  The joy of being in a pocket of country that is like a pocket of my heart, mixed with the longing to spin the odometer backward 30 years just so I could have one more childhood afternoon, see the place when it was mostly farms few and far between and everyone was some sort of grownup hero character.  And yet I love the place in the present as well, tattered trailers, new driveways, the abandoned or repurposed buildings, signs of wear, old overgrown patches, changed, sure, but a living, evolving picture growing layer on layer over the place it always was.

I always feel vaguely embarrassed discussing saudade.  There are all the questions of what happens when reminiscence and sentimentality mingle.  Harmless enough now and then, the occasional lazy dog-paddle through it all is peaceful enough, but in the end one attempts to be firm with oneself and return to the shores of the present, where there is work to be done (more to the point: diapers to be changed).  It is also impossible, when drifting along this way, to think of the blind privilege these memories represent.  In a word: freedom.

My favorite view of the day: Halfway through  Jabowski’s corner, looking north out across the big swamp, the tamarack tips more blue than green in the haze, the great primordial breadth of it giving you just a hint of what this place was before anybody two-footed showed up.

What the Toddler is Digging

For over a week now, neither bedtime nor nap time commences until the two-year old gets her fix of Where the Wild Things Are.  “Why Things!” she says, drawing it from the giant pile of alternatives.  It’s been a revelation to read the book again, this time through a parent’s eyes (the book was published the year before I was born).  A masterpiece of simple story based in reality (kid sent to bed for back-talk, basically) that eases so naturally into fantasy and back.  Far from being upset, the tot on my lap is fascinated by the monsters, and loves to narrate Max’s state of mind based on his changing expressions.  During the wild rumpus, we bounce and rock the book so Max and the monsters can march and boogie and swing from the trees.

All those beetle brows, glowering eyes and fangy-fangs, and then she curls up with her duck and blankie and closes her eyes and drifts peacefully off, sailing back over a year, and in and out of weeks, and through a day, and into the night of her very own room…

What’s the Thread Count on that Tarp?

Some time ago when metrosexuals were all the rage I did a story that never got published.  The premise involved a magazine having me fly pretty much straight from 10 days of northern Wisconsin deer hunting – windburned, stubbled, and with dried deer blood under my nails – to an extremely high-tone New York City hotel, where I then spent two or three days being scrubbed, trimmed, and toned.  I did it all – manicure (two, actually — the deer blood, y’know), pedicure, straight razor shave with warm shaving cream, several different facials, an $80 dollar haircut (nice enough fellow, lots of rapid snipping, but when it was over I gotta say you couldn’t tell it from the ol’ DIY electric clippers buzz cut), eyebrow “shaping” (think of being attacked in the eyebrow region by a rabid woodpecker — lots of tears, but when it was over, for the first time in my life I had two eyebrows) (lasted for about a week).

Anyways.  I am off track.  Point is, as part of the story the magazine had me stay at a hotel that was over the top tony.  That experience was a whole ‘nother story for some other time.  I bring it up for this post only to ask, do you think a place with “Frederic Fekkai signature bath amenities” and “Frette linens” and “Fully Equipped Deluxe Poggen Pohl Kitchens in every Suite“ (I got the Fekkai and the Frette, but sadly did not stay in a suite, so no Poggen Pohl) ever reckoned a sheet from one of their bedside notepads would make a trip to Farm & Fleet?

Notepad from the Alex Hotel

Catalpa Snow

Big thunderstorm yesterday morning, came up fast on the heels of a sunny dawn, undulating torrents of rain, lightning that struck with a snap, and locomotive thunder.  The two-year-old stood at the glass sliding door and watched happily for a while but then furrowed her brow and said, “I wanna see da ‘tunder!”

Drove to town in the aftermath, the deep green, the shiny steaming streets, a heavy white skirt of fallen blossoms banked around the boles of the catalpa trees like a carpet of soggy popcorn.  Maybe it was just the light, or the post-storm atmosphere, but I didn’t realize how many catalpa trees grow around these parts.  We had one in our back yard on the home farm and it seemed so exotic next to the brush and white pines.  Those elephant-ear leaves, the seed pod beans long as a garter snake, and the blossoms far too intricately tattooed and fragrant to be growing off a Chippewa County tree.  I heard once that the farmers planted them because they made good fence posts.

Pigs and Ticks

OK, it’s 25 minutes after midnight, just finished the dishes, laundry still a rumpled dump on the living room floor.  I’m Mister-Mommin’ it.  Wife taking a richly-deserved few days at a yoga retreat with her mom after I spent 2.5 months zipping around the country as she held the fort/farm/family.  I am getting hit upside the head with exactly what she’s been doing for us while I’ve been toddling around making farmer snort jokes.  But of course the truth is it’s delightful to be home with the kids again.  Two recent favorite moments:

  • Nine-year old decides to refresh the pig wallow while barefooted and wearing her swimsuit.  Crawls right in there, over the pig panels, over the electric fence, toes smack in the mud.  The pigs cavort and snort, grunt and gambol comically.  The show is so delightful the two-year old and I pull up a lawn chair and for ten minutes just sit and watch.  Who needs the Dish?
  • When you come from these parts there are some things you learn young.  I am trying to give the two-year-old the quick once-over after her evening pre-bedtime bath when she pushes me away and says, “Daddy, I wanna do tick check!”

OK.  Early breakfast before summer school class in town, laundry will remain rumpled.  A peek into both bedrooms, then to my own.

Truck Before and After

Every now and then (just happened again today) someone who has just finished reading Truck: A Love Story requests that I post Before and After photos of my ’51 ‘Binder (that is to say, my 1951 International Harvester L-120 Model, 3/4-ton, long bed pickup truck).  We never did an official shoot but if you click on the photos below you’ll get the idea:

Hot Smoking Grass

One hesitates to devolve to discussion of the weather, but it’s gone jungly here, temps bumping the 90s and air like wet feathers.  Speaking of which, we are making sure the ducks and chickens have plenty of water and shade, and the daily ritual of hosing down the pigs and watching them flop in the wallow has begun.  Good fun.

Christened the new mower (push style, no self-propelled, must not weaken the next generation) yesterday by changing the oil (after the third tank of new gas, dump the iron filings).  Wasn’t sure how much of the oil can to dump in there, so kept checking the dip stick.  Was mowing right along (one of the reasons I disdain self-propelled mowers is that you must mow at the speed dictated by the machine [and thus the government, since they've now officially throttled the things for our safety] [it was a revelation to me when the lawn mower salesman said mower blades are no longer allowed to exceed a certain RPM...this is the kind of gummint "protection" that sends a guy to the garage to rummage around for his Don't Tread on Me flag] [I have a certain brother-in-law, who -- given five minutes, a pair of pliers, and based on the brief exchange we shared over popcorn last Sunday evening -- can do a little number that will jack that mower back up to helicopter speed] and when I mow I want to get it over with, not stroll along behind a machine proceeding at a pace calculated in some Washington D.C. cubicle) (as my brother Jed said the other night at the same popcorn feast, “Mowin’ the lawn is a timed event.”)…

OK, gotta start over because I lost control of all those ( ) and [ ]‘s.

So I’m mowing away at race-walk pace and things were going clippingly when suddenly the mower set to smoking horribly, bad-looking gray puffs of smoke coming out all over the place.  I shut’er down fast and kinda backed away.

Figured out the problem pretty quick which is when you push a running mower up a sidehill and you have failed to replace the dipstick, you create a hot oil fountain and as the oil leaks and sizzles and smokes and you stand there in the greasy mists of toxicity you realize that let’s say burning hot smoke off a lawn mower causes brain damage you can breathe easy because apparently you didn’t have that much to work with in the first place.

Yep.

The COOP Photos: Chapter 2

COOP Photo Chapter Two - Silos

Each chapter of Coop features a photograph taken by my friends John and Julie.  This is the photo at the head of Chapter Two.  These are the wooden silos that stood attached to my father’s barn since the day it was constructed.  They were marvelously done, made of many laminated strips of wood nailed together with thousands of hammer blows.  I remember shoveling silage early mornings before deer hunting and seeing the fuzzy buttons of frost on each nail head.  Dad only used the silos a couple of years.  Mostly they stood empty, and we used to scare ourselves by climbing them and looking down.  They seemed even taller than they were because each one had a five- or six-foot concrete-lined pit dug in it at the base.  Up at the very top there was a platform and railing covered in pigeon poop.  The roof was very low and if we crawled around up there during the day we’d hear the gritch-gritch of disturbed bats, which made us duck even lower and not want to put our fingers anywhere we couldn’t check first.  The gallery of snapshots below illustrates some of those details.

In the spring (much the same time as when the chapter heading photo was taken) I used to nestle with my back to the concrete in the space where the two silos curved together.  It was out of the wind, and I could feel the sun.  I wrote about this nook on page 162 of Coop.  There was another deeper nook on the other side of the silo that used to grow up with brush and my brother John and I would hide in there with our bows and arrows to ambush grackles when they came to steal from the corn crib.  Mom planted asparagus around the barnyard side of the silo decades ago, and it still pops up there every year.

The silos are gone now.  Dad had them taken down last year.  I wished he wouldn’t, and even made some contact with some barn restoration and vintage lumber folks, but in the end it just didn’t work out.  Salvaging an old wooden silo is something everyone always says “you should do”, and when you get right down to it, you find out why it so rarely happens.  Time and finance.  Meanwhile, Dad had done the numbers on how much it cost him to have the silo roof rebuilt (it was beginning to fold) and re-shingled, and with the year’s planting to be done and the roofers coming, opted instead to have my brother over with his track-hoe, and now the silos and all those nails and that concrete are buried deep for some other millennial generation to discover.  I am a sentimentalist and a preservationist, but I am slowly finding ways to appreciate the practicality of old farmer moves like this.  Writing about it in the next book.  In some ways, they are on to something about freedom.

Studying these photos while posting, I have only just now noticed that the black and white silo image is reversed, and that it is also reversed in the book.  Does that qualify as an “OOPS”?  It wouldn’t be the first time.  The cover image on the hardcover version of Truck is also reversed.

Swine A-Snoozing

First night we had the pigs, it rained.  A fairly cold rain.  Since this was also the first night the pigs had ever spent outdoors, I worried they wouldn’t know to go in the hutch.  So at around midnight I went out to check, and sure enough they were all stacked up against the outside of the hutch, getting soaked.  One by one I carried them inside the hutch (a big plastic silo cut in half).  Due to the rain, mud and pigginess of the task, when I was done I headed straight for the laundry room and then the shower.  But I slept well knowing they had been tucked under a roof.  And I was rewarded in the morning when I went out to check on them.  First of all, I could hear the snoring (seriously) from twenty feet away.  And then when I poked my head through the door, I was greeted by this sight:

Pigs Snoozing