Wannaskan Almanac for Thursday July 26, 2018 By WannaskaWriter

I thought today was Wednesday, sorry. I lost track thinking I had one more day to write this piece when my wife corrected my thinking, as she is known to have to do on occasion by pointing out my error, to which I responded, “I love retirement.”

Well, it’s true. One can lose knowing which day is which because of the loss of structure a full-time job created for you, a routine that often prevented you going to work on a day you commonly had off, or otherwise encouraged you to show up for work as was expected of you. You remembered the days of the week and as you were “living for the weekend,” you looked forward to it. Retirement means realizing that when someone tells you to “Have a nice weekend,” you say to yourself, “It’s Friday?” Hooyah.

Sure, losing track of days could be an indicator of old age. I am into my late sixties, afterall, and it wouldn’t be unusual for someone possessing the high water marks that I do, not to remember certain things. But I’ve long been amazed, if just facetiously, how anyone on the planet could remember exactly what they had done on what day and exactly what was said or not said, or what the music it was they listened to, or just what car they were driving. Especially frustrating, are those people who remember, verbatim, what lines were said during a movie or television show and/or lyrics of songs that everyone else in the world remembers, and then have the gall to give me such looks of incredulousness for not knowing.

My explanation is that I have not spent nearly all my waking moments in front of a TV or in a ‘movie house/show hall’ or in bars or at concerts to know such trivia, although, I admit, my lack of this popular knowledge sometimes prohibits a wealth of conversation between us. I don’t find value remembering things like this, that are unimportant to me.  You do value them and that’s fine, just don’t criticize me for my lack of it. As for thinking Thursday was Wednesday, that’s on me.

I’ve been thinking of different things, as I go about my days lately. One of them has been the memory of years ago, when I realized that the people who lived here, when I was growing up, my aunt Irene and uncle Martin Davidson, were who made this farm so special to me. That after they, and their house, moved to Roseau in 1969 to three doors east of the Eastside Grocery, and after their big barn was moved in 1971 to just west of L.K. Foss’s Skime Store, the magic of the place seemed gone from it. I don’t think we were able to replace it for anyone else in the same way, nor in the same flavor. We’ve planted many trees, not so many memories, but lived here trying to grasp what its natural essence was before humans intruded on it in not so a permanent way, living here the year around, rather than as a camp for Natives on their seasonal rounds or as a camp for people traveling through, to be close to water and herbs for themselves, and grass for their horses, and wood for their fires.

Likewise, we’ll leave no grand house nor barn nor outbuildings, no real mark upon the land but the spires and crowns of trees we planted, and their thousands of offspring. Even many of the old implements leftover from the Davidson era have moved on with others when salvage prices were good. There’ll still be junk, our little accumulations, hardly a dump truck full of worthless things I had never gathered up myself, although I had good intentions. Oh, an old stable I built in a hurry too, that still stands in the woods west of the house today after thirty years, and yeah, a few cedar posts with twisted nails in them that once supported black spruce rails and made a corral for our two Arabian horses we had in the late 1980s.




 

All WE'LL LEAVE ARE SPIRES AND CROWNS OF THE TREES WE PLANTED

 

I’ve been taking a photographic inventory of my ‘pony-sized tractor’ implements, that I’ve accumulated one by one over the years, as the late Layton Oslund of Wannaska called my two-wheel drive Massey-Ferguson 180 diesel tractor. Not requiring anything so massive as any of my neighbors need, I am happy owning a little Toyota 4x4 pickup, a 7' Farm King two-stage snowblower that I bought in 1997, the four-bottom Massey Ferguson trip beam plow a neighbor sold me, an old 5' Squealer Model Bush Hog mower that does a pretty decent job if I drive slow, a 40’ Fargo spray rig that I had Solom Machine Shop cut down to 20’ a few weeks ago, a 3-point 8' cultivator, a Solom Machine shop custom made 10’ 3-point blade, and my most recent acquisition, an even more ancient International six-foot tandem disk I bought last month from a guy near Oklee, from whom ‘I remembered’ I had purchased the Fargo sprayer six years earlier. I told him to keep his eyes open for a bigger disk... .

7' Snowblower

3-pt blade

 

Massey-Ferguson 180 diesel and MF 4-bottom trip beam plow

  

Old Squealer Model 5' Bush Hog mower

 

Modified Fargo sprayer with one boom extended

 

8' cultivator

 

An ancient International 6' tandem disk

1986 Toyota 4x4

As things go when you're retired, I wondered what was the prettiest thing my brother-in-law, Clair Baldner, from Iowa, ever saw while he was driving his open Massey-Ferguson tractor, over sixty-five years ago, other than maybe his young wife bringing coffee out to him in the field, or later his daughters helping out during harvests, or much later his granddaughters, at some stage in their lives there on their beautiful Dallas County farm, because as I drove my ‘pony-sized’ tractor yesterday--Wednesday, I guess it was--clipping CRP for a friend, the field that I was mowing was pretty beyond expectation, because, afterall, it was in Golden Valley Township....

Prairie flowers

 

Not so golden Golden Valley