Of Old Men and Dogs
“C’mon, Sis,” I call, following the trail around a bend
in the timber. She’s off nosing under some deadfall for rabbits and squirrels,
so I call again, a bit louder. This time she hears me, picks up her head, and
trots back over to the trail. “Good girl,” I coo, putting my hand down by my
side so she can nose my palm, a habit we’ve had since she was old enough to
reach. Sis has never been the type of dog to jump up to greet me, but she and I
do share a language, a bond born of years of walks and hikes like this one. Her
ebony coat, normally full and wavy but now shaved for the summer, reveals even
more gray hair than last year, and she tends to chase rabbits even less. Then
again, I’m sure my head shows a few more gray hairs, also, and I find myself
resting more on the rocks around me than I used to.
After one particularly steep climb, I stop again to sit
on a boulder and catch my breath. The late-July afternoon sun beats down on the
open sections of the trail, so I perch on the edge of the timber, just inside
the shade line. As my eyes adjust to the change in light, I notice specks of
red in the vegetation around the sun-warmed boulders in front of me. Clearly,
Sis, who snoozes with her head on her forepaws beside me, could care less, but
curiosity tugs at me. Crouching down, I’m amazed to see dozens of red
raspberries! I stand and look more closely; there seem to be bushes everywhere
on this hillside, and most all of them are loaded with the red fruit. Although I’ve hunted berries in these
mountains for several summers now, never have I encountered more than a few
raspberry bushes at a time, and then with only enough fruit for a taste. Usually my family and I pick chokecherries or
gooseberries, both more abundant here.
Stooping down again, I pick a few; the ripe ones seem to
fall off their core at the slightest pressure, just the way I remember picking
them back in South Dakota as a girl.
Their sweet-tart goodness bursts in my mouth – better than candy. By now
Sis has noticed that I’m eating -- her radar for that particular action
is as sharp as ever -- and she comes over, tail wagging. “No, girl, these aren’t for you; let’s see if
I can find something else.” I rummage in
my fanny pack for a snack, and finally come up with a package of slightly
crushed crackers. I’m not as prepared for our hikes these days as I used to be.
This afternoon, I only decided to go after Shawn came in from the field early,
unexpectedly, and offered to watch the kids so I could get away by myself for a
while. So I grabbed a water bottle, my fanny pack with its notebook and pens,
and my sunglasses, and loaded Sis in the back of the truck. It was only on the
way up the mountain that I realized I’d forgotten something to eat. Now, Sis is
satisfied with the broken crackers, and I’ve got all these berries around me to
snack on – sometimes God comes through in the best ways.
“Hey, girl, let’s walk a
little farther and see what we find.” The raspberries have given me a new drive
to explore more, hunt farther on up the trail. I don’t feel the strain in my
legs as much now; the pleasure of spotting another bush outweighs the heat and
fatigue of this afternoon.
The entire area seems to be covered in thickets; I’ve
heard of places like this, but have never seen one. The thrill of finding the
fruit takes me back years, to my grandpa’s garden, where picking raspberries
was one of the chores that fell to my sisters and me. Grandpa’s bushes were domestic, and so thick
and tangled that only skinny kids could fit in some places to pick the sweet
red jewels.
Grandpa’s garden was a wondrous place by South Dakota
standards. Of course, the usual practical crops of carrots, lettuce, tomatoes,
and other vegetables grew there. But around the edges of the garden were plants
you didn’t usually find in a place where rainfall was erratic and land was
apportioned to more sure, safe plants.
In early summer, we girls crawled through the dense mat of strawberries,
picking gallons for Mom and Grandma to put up as jam. In the fall, if we’d had
a wet summer, we sometimes had enough luck to pick a crop of apples from the
trees planted on the west end of the garden. And always in July, there were the
raspberries from the thicket that covered nearly a quarter of the plot.
This garden, however, was Grandpa’s retirement project.
When he and Grandma had lived at their first Dakota farm, just a mile down the road, she’d tended to
the gardening herself, and had grown the crops there that were the most
practical and economical. Grandpa had been too busy milking cows and raising
field crops to fuss with such work. But when he turned over management of the
dairy to my mom’s oldest brother, and he and Grandma moved down the road, the
planting and tending became one of Grandpa’s favorite pastimes. Though he still
fed out calves, drove the tractor, and helped with whatever farm work was
needed, he’d find time to lean over the garden fence at the end of the day.
Sometimes a relative or neighbor would drive into his
yard to find him in the garden, flat on his belly. “Dad, what are you doing?”
my mom would always ask, slightly alarmed.
“Oh, this darn jenny,” he’d spit, pointing to a skinny
vine that curled around the tops of the carrots. Besides farming, Grandpa had
worked for years for the Soil Conservation Service, and bore an extreme dislike
for weeds of any kind. One in particular, creeping jenny, became enemy number
one. Rather than spray with herbicide, he would patiently, painstakingly dig
away at the ground with a long screwdriver, careful not to chop the roots,
until he could tug the entire plant from the ground. These he piled up, then
carried out of the garden to the burning barrel. Despite his valiant battles,
the jenny seemed to be winning the war, coming back each year without fail.
It is probably Grandpa
Quinn, of all my ancestors, who endowed me with a storyteller’s voice. Grandpa
was famous in three counties for his stories, and his travels for work or
pleasure always took him to homes where he would love to visit for hours.
He would preface a story by
saying, “Maybe I’ve told you this before, but. . .”, and the listener became a
captive audience. Yes, we kids did hear many of those stories over and over
again; yes, perhaps we could have been using our time more productively than
listening to those words we already knew. But in truth, I remember the hours I
spent listening to Grandpa’s stories as some of the most precious of my
childhood, and I wish I could give my own kids that same kind of privilege.
There was always plenty of work to do around the farm and garden, but Grandpa
must have believed that the stories he told were important for people to hear.
He gave time to storytelling, the same way he gave time to digging weeds and
planting impractical plants. Grandpa knew how to give time to life.
