Marian’s house

My American grandmother, Marian, was always a bit of a mystery. Maybe because by the time I was old enough to have more grown-up conversations, she was quite old herself.
Or maybe it was because she was always overshadowed by the legend of my grandfather, Irv.

What I do know is that Marian grew up in the northwest Iowan town of Paullina, in a very strict Calvinist Scottish family where drinking, dancing and other forms of fun were banned.
A teaching job eventually took her to Meservey, in north-central Iowa. It was there that she met Irv, an atheist, gambling, master dancer.
Well into their thirties, they got married and quickly produced three daughters and a son. The first two daughters were born into a one-room house, with the youngest sleeping precariously suspended over the eldest’s cradle.
With the long years of the Great Depression eventually easing up, they managed to acquire their own farm, where my grandfather raised tens of thousands of turkeys.

My memories of Marian revolve around summer trips to the library, her extremely long and angular brown Plymouth, her reading chair tucked away in the corner of the living room and her recipes.

Marian was famous for her cooking, producing amazing white and brown bread every day, at least one dessert at every meal, and of course, countless turkey dishes.
Whenever my mother makes one of Marian’s recipes – such as cheese soufflé and Swiss roll – she inevitably says “it’s not as good as Marian’s”.

So, on our way to South Dakota, we took a detour off Route 18 to Paullina, to get a sense of Marian’s earlier years. It’s a tiny town, welcoming visitors with a sign reading ‘Paullina, the best of small town America’.

My aunt Jean had given us a description of how to find Marian’s house: a two or three-story square shaped former farmhouse – older than all the neighboring ranch-style properties - on the south side of town.

We followed her suggestion of asking an older member of the community which home had belonged to R.C. Brown. The first person we saw, a lady tending the gardens of the Lutheran church, was able to show us the white, shingled house adorned with red, purple and pink hanging plants.

Seeing the house made it a bit easier to imagine Marian as a young girl, a daughter of a prominent family in the small town. There remain some of the features that were probably around in that day: the post office, dinette type place, grain elevator and water tower seen in all Iowa towns and the lake just outside of town.

We had lunch at that lake, part of Mill Creek State Park, on a Saturday afternoon blessed by the lingering Indian summer (everyone says the Midwest didn’t get a summer this year, but we were lucky enough to enjoy it once it did finally start at the end of August). There were a few RVs parked, a couple of families sitting by the lake watching their kids swim, and a father and son fishing in the water.

We swam, christened our red camping chairs (Coleman, and very comfortable!), had sandwiches prepared in the Airstream and just enjoyed the quiet afternoon.

Perhaps Marian and her family used to come to this lake.

We liked Paullina.

Dear Jean and Richard

Dear Jean & Richard,
Thanks so much for letting us stay on your farm this week, it was especially kind since you weren’t here for most of it.
Sorry we kept getting delayed by vehicle issues, we did know you had to go to Peoria to help look after your newest granddaughter, Zhi Yu, who was adopted from China. She had cleft palate surgery last week, and needed full-time care to recover.
Well, we’ve had a great time on the farm. Doing the chores you left us – feeding the cats, dog, sheep, horse and fish (hope we didn’t leave any out) and walking down the lane to the roadside mailbox – was fun and allowed us to be pretend-farmers. Thanks for asking someone else to do the pigs!!
Sophia fed Gus about 25 dog treats per day, so he’ll probably be pretty spoiled by the time you get back.
It’s great to see her enjoying all the things I used to love doing here as a child. She has really embraced farm life and particularly loves taming this year’s crop of cats.
Daniel spent most of his childhood in the countryside, so he is loving spending so much time outdoors and observing nature.
For me, it’s the quiet things that have been best: being back in same home you’ve always lived in, watching dust clouds rise up from the gravel roads from the rearview mirror, looking across endless fields of corn and soybeans towards a horizon miles and miles away, listening to the chorus of crickets at night, admiring pink and purple fried-egg sunsets in the evening and then skies powdered with stars and planets by night, and sleeping deep slumbers brought on by full days in the fresh air. And, it’s the first time I’ve gotten to see the crops yellowing and browning towards harvest-ability.
From the garden, we picked fat, juicy tomatoes, dug crisp potatoes, plucked tiny lima beans and selected a few choice yellow and orange marigolds to display on the table.
As instructed, we helped ourselves to all that you left in the fridge:
- The homemade things: pickles (kosher dill, bread-and-butter, cinnamon ones), grape jelly, strawberry jam (like sticking your nose into a just-picked super-ripe strawberry),
- More garden things: chunked kohlrabi, unpeeled baby carrots, cucumbers, the onions Sophia told you we like to eat whole and raw
- The leftovers: creamed corn, slow-cooked beef, ham, the green beans (yum!) and the Jello salad
- The things you bought for us: lettuce, peaches, apples, bananas, black olives, peanut butter, beer
- And your special hot chocolate mix! I remember using that recipe when I was growing up, and want to make it again here so we can take it on our trip – very helpful, since we’re struggling to get Sophia to drink milk
As far as how we’ve occupied ourselves, we’ve explored many small towns in this rural part of northern Iowa – Klemme, where you live, Thornton, where you and my mother grew up, the resort town Clear Lake, prosperous Garner, local metropolis Mason City, and Forest City, the home of Winnebago.
We went to your mechanics in Forest City, Danny at Lichtsinn Motors for the truck, and Ken at Ken’s RVs for the Airstream, and were pleased with both the level of service and price (and the bags of popcorn offered at Lichtsinn’s). To keep us busy while the vehicles were being looked at, we did the Winnebago factory tour, visited the hardware store (we are really looking forward to trying out the hand-powered mini-mixer), bought a few things for the trailer at the going-out-of-business antique shop and twice had coffee at the Cabin Coffee, which is friendly and seems to have big hopes of expanding throughout the Midwest.
Eldridge and Gladys, your cousins who live a few farms over, hosted us one afternoon and showed us the family book they had compiled – amazing to hear about relatives born in 1875.
It’s been fun talking to you on the phone each day and telling you about what we’ve been up to in your absence.
Sorry we’ll miss you by just a day, and my parents by two.
And thanks for having enough love, space and generosity for so many people.
Love,
Claire, Daniel, Sophia & Lulu

Ps. Enclosed is a photo of the watercolor Daniel did of your house and the farmyard. He’s experimenting with a new style of painting for our American trip.

Bug City

We bought a top of the range tent, with the intention of luring visitors with deluxe guest accommodation. It is tall enough that Daniel, who’s 6’3, can stand comfortably in either of its two rooms. In fact, the tent may even be larger than the Airstream trailer.
It boasts bay windows, screen doors, stowage areas and cupholders.
I don’t know what it is about cupholders in America, but they seem to be very important and are prominently mentioned as key features of many products such as camp chairs and cars – my sister Annie says her car has 16 of them. Sophia loves the two that fold out of her new booster seat and likes to put all kinds of things in them. We use the two we’ve got, both in the front seat, for coffee and tea when we buy them on the road. What we notice is that cupholders make it harder to throw cups away.
Anyway, here’s the tent:
http://www.amazon.com/Columbia-Cougar-15-Foot-10-Foot-Person/dp/B00170JZE4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=sporting-goods&qid=1253248054&sr=8-1
We ourselves also plan to use the tent, despite the fact that I’ve only slept in one on a handful of Girl Scout trips and then again on the Inca Trail, while Daniel says camping makes him feel sick. Sophia, though, has been asking if we can start sleeping in the tent ever since it arrived in the mail.
Daniel managed to follow the included instruction pack and set up the tent at my aunt Jean’s farm in Iowa, with help from my cousin Vince, his wife Amy and two of their three kids, Leah and Daniel.
Vince, who’s always taken his role as Eldest Cousin very seriously, drove everyone down from their home in Mankato, Minnesota, especially to see us. He greeted us with his trademark bear hug, made sure we were all happy and healthy, charmed Lulu when she screamed, and then took us on a ride in the huge John Deere tractor he uses when helping my uncle, Richard, out with the farming.
Minutes after the tent went up, Daniel ran over in a panic: “There are millions of bugs in the tent, it’s Bug City!”, he cried, searching all our faces for an explanation. There was none.
Does anyone know whether tents are supposed to attract bugs? There was no mention of this phenomenon in the many customer reviews on Amazon.
A few hours later, there was carnage in the tent, where all the bugs had met their end. Ladybugs, gnats, flies, sweatbugs (they look like small bees, but don’t sting), strewn all over the tent floor, in between the mesh screens and zip-up windows and lining the seams. To say say they numbered in the thousands and were measured in half-inches is not an exaggeration.
So the tent remained erect from Sunday afternoon until Thursday evening, when Sophia and I went in with a Shop Vac, trying not to hoover up the couple dozen or so daddy long-legs feasting on the carcasses.
Of course, then a bunch more bugs flew in. And then the poles for the bay windows got bent out of shape.
We have to call Columbia and figure out the tent thing.