A
JULIA PEARSON
fter several weeks of sheltering in our Minnesota residence due to the global hammering of the coronavirus, signs of spring at last are appearing through our windows. Robins, redwing blackbirds, warblers, and amorous wood ducks are achingly seen by both heart and eyes. The stone mantelpiece in Selma and T.C. Steele’s “house of the singing winds” comes to mind. It was engraved by Gustave Baumann with the salutation: “Every morning I take off my hat to the beauty of the world.” It feels authentic in my own home in this strangest of times. I like to sit with the morning’s coffee and savor the visits in memory of friends and kin. It can’t be labeled “sentimental” since everyone is doing it now, because it is soothing and entertaining at once—the funny stories around proms and graduations, June weddings of earlier years, and newborn animals in forest and barnyards. Brown County always presented one of the best places for star-gazing due to its lack of light pollution.
38 Our Brown County • May/June 2020
photos by Kate Remmes
Universal problems and tiny personal ones seem smaller with the sky looking down on us, so Brown County becomes a chosen mental sanctuary and setting in daydreams. An afternoon visit in years past with Pauline Hoover comes to mind. She told how she attended a one-room schoolhouse in Brown County. Fridays were special “hot lunch” days—students brought hotdogs and their teacher cooked them in a coffee on the school’s woodstove. Another native Brown Countian told me how he carried a lunch of butter or jelly bread wrapped in newspaper to school. From the time he was nine or ten years old, he bought his own school books. After school he worked for 25 cents a day and dinner: cleaning chicken houses, mowing lawns, cutting firewood, and carrying water for home use. Another woman spoke in earnest of the hard winter months—when poverty was a constant neighbor in the Indiana hills. Children trudged
