I grew up on a dairy farm (Holstein cows and John Deere tractors) in Branch County, Michigan. My little town of Litchfield (just over the line into Hillsdale County) didn’t–and still doesn’t–have a traffic light, just signs to help one navigate around the town park where M-49 and M-99 intersect. Is it any wonder that my hometown had an entity known as the Litchfield Farmers Club?
This is on my mind because of a picture I came across Saturday when I was doing some cleaning. The photo lives in the back pocket of a picture album my mom put together for me years ago. In that album, my years up through college graduation are recorded in pictures that document familial and societal changes: the growth of my family from one child (me) to five (twin siblings bring up the rear in our family line-up), the switchover from black and white to color photography. Then there’s that 8×10 picture of the Litchfield Farmers Club. The club members and their children posed to catch a moment in our town’s, in the club’s history (It was 1965, according to the writing on the back of the picture. I think it was one of the club’s milestone anniversaries–the fiftieth? It could well have been that, because, if I recall correctly, my grandparents had also belonged to the Farmers Club in their day.) I’m guessing my parents ordered one of those pictures for each us kids, knowing that someday we’d be mature enough to appreciate them
I remember the night that picture was taken. I know it was hot, because I was a wearing a sleeveless dress that I’d gotten for my 10th birthday that June; that was the birthday my mom and I celebrated by attending the stage play of The Sound of Music at the Tibbetts Opera House in Coldwater, Michigan. I’ve not worn much yellow in my life, but I liked that dress, yellow checked with navy trim, and I wore it every chance I got. Either the IOOF Hall or the Municipal Hall above the fire station was the setting for the photograph. I know it was one of those two upstairs places in our town where, over the years, I attended a number of banquets and wedding receptions, since, other than the school gymnasiums and the youth center, those were the largest gathering places in Litchfield.
As I look at the picture, it is in many ways like looking at a rolodex of names and places from my childhood. Even today, I can name just about everyone in the picture, tell you where they lived, and who their kids were. I’ve been at most of those people’s homes, since Farmers Club met monthly and the members took turns hosting the meetings. During the summer months, the meetings were on the first Friday evenings. During the winter months, when farmers’ schedules aren’t as demanding in the daytime since there are no crops to deal with, the group met for noonday dinner meetings on those first Fridays. So, when we were little, before we were in school, or if the first Friday happened to fall on a day off of school (as it often did on Christmas break) we got to go to those meetings with my mom and dad. (It was at one of those meetings that my brother Paul accidentally locked himself in somebody’s bathroom and had to be rescued.) I can picture the kitchen of just about every lady in the photo. My parents were one of the younger couples in Farmers Club, so a lot of the kids pictured there were in high school–they were the kids who rode the same school bus as we did but got to sit in the back, who played on the high school ball teams, and who marched in the band at every Memorial Day or Wonderama parade (“Wonderama” was our small town summer celebration–now they call it “Sweet Corn Days”). My uncle was a farmer too, so my cousins are seated near us in the photo as well. I point out to my son the Swedish couple, Gunnar and Astrid Enquist, who raised sheep, gave us orphan lambs to raise, and always let us stop by after Halloween trick-or-treating for a cup of hot chocolate and some ooh’s and ahh’s for our costumes. I see my first 4-H leader, Evelyn Evans; my favorite club meeting ever at her house was when we brought unusual foods to taste–I had my first exposure to okra and to pine nuts in her kitchen. I see Mr. and Mrs. Ferry whose name I always thought was cool (until I found out it wasn’t “Fairy”). Names like “CarlandClaraDawson” and “WoodrowandLoisSouthfield” roll off my tongue–they don’t click in my mind as anything but duos, people who came as a package deal. The names on the club roster were the last names of the 4-H members whose livestock projects occupied the stalls in the 4-H barns at the county fair each September. When I looked at that picture on Saturday, I realized that there are a lot of single, short threads in the weaving of my life that originate with that tapestry of people.
When I visit my hometown now, I still pass some of those farmers’ farms. Some are now run by the second or third generation. Some aren’t farms any more. Most of the elders in the photo are dead, having faded one by one from the scene over the past dozen years.
But, when I look at that picture, I still hear the laughter, still hear the singing that accompanied every Farmers Club meeting, still remember my mom and dad talking about what they would answer for the roll call question at that night’s get together, still can feel the warmth of caring and concern in that circle of friends united by the common bond of making things grow and caring for living creatures and producing goods that would nourish and supply many others outside of that circle.
And I smile.
Through Changing Eyes 