All Is So Long Ago

“Evening Land,” a first-rate Swedish book of poetry contains a refrain that causes me to travel to other times in my memory with these lines, “With old eyes I look back. All is so long ago.” He talks about his life being spent far away, “In another world or as if in another world.” His imagination had taken him elsewhere in his earlier life, but now “all is soon over.”

I have a large collection of images that I’ve boxed and stored on a shelf in my memory. Every once in awhile I open the box and and look at them again. Some are small and light, others weigh heavy. They have accumulated over the years. I’m lucky because the box is large and continues to fill. Let me reach in and grab a few.

I’m standing in a hayfield reaching under a windrow of hay to hook my finger in the handle of a crock jug. Hot and thirsty, I hoist the jug high in the crook of my arm and drink long, cool swallows from it.

I’m a small boy and my grandpa has taken me fishing at Lake Teawaukon. He baits my hook and throws in the line while telling me, “Don’t take your eyes off that bobber!” I don’t for several long hours. Small perch pull it under and make it bob and bob. He takes me home at twilight just as a full moon rises. I look at it and see a bloat bobbing, bobbing, bobbing in the face of the moon, in my supper plate, in my dreams.

Goose bumps chill me when I lie in bed while a raging winter storm howls in the eaves. I’d imagine a woman was screaming inside the blizzard wind.

I’m in the barnyard. A bull eyes me from a distance in the pasture. His hooves kick up a dust cloud filled with hate for the man-child he spots. He charges. My fingers dig and claw into the wall of the barn, and I gain the rooftop just as he arrives snorting and bellowing.

We’re in the hayfield again. I’m a boy and always want to be where the men work. I’m given the simple job of cleaning out the spilled hay from underneath the stationary stacker. As it raises to offload its hay on the top of the stack, a main wooden beam breaks and hundreds of pounds crash to the ground just as I’ve stepped away.

With the arrival of spring I shed my long underwear and heavy overshoes to finally glory in the lightness I’m feeling. In the spring wind I watch fresh-washed clothes sailing and billowing with the wind.

Saturday night and we drive along the gravel road to Enderlin but we stop  at the railroad crossing by the Center Farm for a long train. It is being pulled by a steam engine blowing smoke and steam as it climbs the grade out of town. Sometimes another engine pushes from the rear helping it gain speed.

A long burlap bag hangs from a tall, shaky scaffold and waits there for me to toss in a twine-tied fleece and crawl in to pack it down. The bundles of wool accumulate, and the wool glistens lanolin-rich that soaks into my pant legs and softens the leather of my shoes.

What are my earliest memories from so long ago? There was a rooster that kept attacking me in the yard. With a long stick and one swing I removed that threat permanently. It ended poorly while finding eggs to gather and bring to my mother when one I’d placed in my pocket broke. Later leaving the farmyard and wandering down the gravel road, I entered a slough with tall reeds where my dog accompanied me.  His flagging tail alerted an uncle driving by whose curiosity caused him to stop. 

Unfortunately, some memories become stone and stay in the box. Maybe they will be dug out again in the future, but they are deeply bedded history that I can’t revive. Some of them deal with times I should have said something, but didn’t, and there are times when I should have kept my mouth shut.

The singer John Prime succumbed to Covid a few years ago but left us with one song called “I Remember Everything.” He writes, “I remember every tree. Every single blade of grass holds a special place for me.” Although we can’t take the words literally, they do hold meaning. With a little effort, we can remember much.