Old-fashioned conversations better than tweets any day

By Mychal Wilmes
wilmes@agrinews.com

Date Modified: 05/27/2010 9:37 AM

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It may not have been the the perfect Mother's Day gift — an electric frying pan seldom is. However, it is practical.

There is much to be said for practicality in our remarkably zany world where young adults and children text, twitter and share their opinions and deepest thoughts on something called Facebook. Those forms of communication and lightning fast, but I question their practical effectiveness. Many progressive adults are equally adept at using the new communication mediums. I'm not one of them.

I don't have a cellphone and don't text. Computer literate, but not a Facebook or twitter user. I marvel at my son and others who bang out messages on their hand-held instruments while carrying on a live conversation with another person face-to-face. The person in the room may be getting short-changed, but even if they mind they generally don't complain.

From another era — when party lines ruled and the hot news in the immediate farm community was shared from a tractor seat — it seems a little out of whack.

Sam cannot imagine talking on telephone whose short cord meant it couldn't be taken out of the kitchen.Therefore, secrets — juicy or mundane — were hard to keep.

Kathy wasn't much excited about the electric frying pan, although she soon made Iowa pork chops in it. Flowers may have been a better choice, so I picked a purple hosta from the bed and presented it to her. The flower didn't have much impact, either.

I depended on the girls to present better presents and they didn't disappoint. Rachel gave her mother a beautiful potted plant and Sarah produced a neat and large hand-written card, colorful helium-filled balloons and a ticket to a Twins baseball game. Sam was content to share the frying-pan credit with his father since he road along to buy it.

Kathy insisted on a special breakfast, which with Rachel's help turned out to be a three-egg omelet with chopped chives, fresh volunteer onions from the garden, taco-flavored cheese, and garlic as a secret ingredient.

Kathy suggested that I might want to visit my mother's grave site that day, which would amount to a three-hour trip.

"Naw, I talk to her every day as it is,'' I responded.

I also talk to my father and my two sisters who have passed on. It doesn't make me daffy, because our visits involve snippets of past conversations. On this particular morning I visit Joanne and watch her feed the young chickens she kept warm with a big heat lamp in the granary. She raised more than 100 fast-growing birds. The chickens pretty much spent their short lives walking the short distance between the feeder and waterer. Eating machines with a feed efficiency that would cause the Leghorn roosters that roamed our yard all summer long to blush.

Joanne was a master poultry butcher, which made her invaluable in a farming community where people sometimes too busy to do it themselves. Joanne charged a mere pittance, maybe a $1 a bird for chickens and a little more for ducks. She was happy when customers didn't want the gizzards because she could cook them up for her family.

Mother, beyond reasonable doubt, would be making rhubarb upside cake today. She would also be on high alert, sending her youngest son out to check to see if any Muscovy hens had hatched a brood. I have never been able to replicate the rhubarb cake's glaze, but someday the ducks may return.

If the weather was good, chances are Dad was planting corn with the four-row pulled by his reliable WD. He didn't often work Sundays, but when the oak leaves were the size of squirrels' ears, it was time to hit it hard. He was by some accounts a nervous Nellie who fretted too much over what some considered small things like wet weather.

Mothers Day 2010 broke cool, with a few clouds that didn't threaten rain. We walked down the driveway and spotted a wild turkey strolling in a just-planted soybean field. The creek flowed fast and clear. The dogs splashed in the water, returned and made us wet when they shook the water off.

Sam and Rachel hadn't brought their cellphones along.

We were talking the old-fashioned way. It felt good, especially because the occasion gave me an opportunity to visit with the older generation.