At random 8/10

Sunday, August 10, 2003

This being summer, my wife Ginny and I have once again assumed the identities of Stumble and Bumble, that renowned married couple of daring and resourceful house builders and fixer-uppers, whose occasional lack of technical skill is more than offset by a rugged perseverance that would shame an airedale fighting for a bone. The farm we're concentrating on this year is the 10-acre spread southeast of Nevada, where, shortly after the Civil War, the Confederate Captain Bowen, who owned a wood house there, returned to his home to find nothing but ashes and his wife sitting disconsolate beneath a nearby tree. After hearing that the damn yankees had burned their house, Captain Bowen assured his wife that he'd build a house no one could burn down. One hundred and fifty years later -- and with a little help from the Mid-Continent Reconstruction Company -- the exterior of the two-story stone house stands stout as the day she was built. Maybe more so. Can't do two things at once, so, near the house and with help from Steve Stafford and sons, we built a barn with an upstairs studio apartment and a downstairs garage/workroom, and left the stone house until the bank account could recover. I took my legs, sat in a chair outdoors, and painted row after row of siding a Ralph Lauren shade of "barn red," which then got nailed to the outside of the barn. Inside, Ginny built workbenches galore, leaving space enough to accommodate the John Deere. Then she tackled the staircase from the first floor to the second, leaving, for me, enough room for railings on either side of the stairs, and, at the L-shape turn in the stairway, a gigantic floor-to- ceiling, triangular cabinet, which is as much to give me momentary added balance as it is for storage. Upstairs, in the roughly 20-feet by 20-feet living room/study we have colonial window-and door-frames that positively glitter with white paint. In the living room we have windows that give us lot of pleasurable sun light, and we have a large TV and, you guessed it, plenty of bookcases -- lucky, because at the end of this academic year I have to vacate my academic office, which was giveme this one year, while I will be "on sabbatical." The attached kitchen is 9 feet by 12 feet, and the upstairs bathroom 7 feet by 10 feet. The whole place is air-conditioned, which makes all farm work except tractor work bearable. As it is, in the late afternoon and early evening hours, I can climb up on the John Deere and, watching out for the flower beds and small, newly-planted things, mow the long grass inside the borders. Outside the barn, Ginny has built a wealth of flower gardens, not all of which I knock over every time I mow the lawn. Since, with my susceptibility to seizures, I'm no longer fit to drive my convertible truck around the highways and byways of Vernon County, I have to limit my driving to the John Deere tractor on the farm. But that's okay. Given a nice, sunny, not-too-steamy day, I enjoy driving the tractor around the 10-acre spread, just as I did around the 85-acre pecan farm near Milo. It's not as smooth as our 85-acre pecan farm out on County Road E -- in fact, I'm sometimes glad the thing comes equipped with a safety belt. But there's less to cut, and I can always pull over and grab a soda. Since the tractor in motion produces its own breeze, I can get a nice suntan, too. I hear that, early in his patrician life, when Franklin D. Roosevelt filled out his federal income tax returns, under "occupation," he wrote in "gentleman farmer." I'm now retired, but I can't shake the habit of seeing myself as a writer. True, I still write a weekly column for the Sunday Herald, book reviews for Library Journal, and as of August 13, drama reviews for the Nevada Daily Mail, but who am I kidding? Maybe I should once again join the Missouri Philological Association and research some topic of the work of. Scott Fitzgerald which hasn't already been done (and good luck with that), and write a paper for their yearly meeting. Or maybe I should try to start writing -- again -- on a novel. In the absense of that, I think I'll have to describe myself as "a gentleman writer," who alternates with my other persona, the "gentleman farmer." This is how a split personality is born.

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