JULIA PEARSON

After 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. 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.

photos by Kate Remmes

Another woman spoke in earnest of the hard winter months—when poverty was a constant neighbor in the Indiana hills. Children trudged through snow drifts to get to school, their feet wrapped in burlap sacks for extra warmth. One Christmas cash money was in such short supply that oatmeal was the family’s supper. When winter passed, picking blackberries was a way to bring in funds. She told me how her grandma was sad because Grandpa had no shoes to wear as he went into the prickly berry canes to fill the baskets of berries.

I always thought “salt of the earth” aptly described the people who lived through these earlier times. The salty flavor of life must have come through the salt in the sweat of all their hard work and the salt of their tears—tears of hearty laughs and tears of deep sorrows.

I remember the story of how Ralph Parsley wooed his honey, Garnet. He said that he found her at church in Spearsville. The young couple hung out with friends at Poore’s Watermelon Patch, and wed in Trafalgar on August 14, 1938 after a courtship of three years. Ralph lived and farmed on Gatesville Road for around 70 plus years. At his funeral in 2012 at Unity Baptist Church, Parsley’s son, John, recalled that the hymn “Love Lifted Me” was hummed or whistled by his father during his daily farm work.

Springtime in Nashville is colored with the purple of wisteria on building walls and fences and irises in beds. Daffodils, jonquils, and tulips are their own punctuation for the awakening season. I miss the white blossom riots of dogwood trees on the hillsides on route 46 between Bloomington and Nashville. It’s just too cold for dogwoods to plant their feet here in the “Land of 10,000 Lakes.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Earth laughs in flowers,” and it seems especially true in 2020. The season is ripe for smiles from the ground up. I can hear the excited chatter of school children arriving in big yellow school buses at the Pioneer Village—field trip season. The smell of coal smoke and the clang of the hammer against anvil at the blacksmith shop beside the chestnut tree. In this phantom scene in my mind’s eye, Ada Jones and Nel Hamilton are directing students to Dr. Ralphy’s office, the pioneer homestead, the loom room, and the old log jail. All the activity draws the attention of shoppers who ask if they can join the school children and learn about early Brown County pioneer life.

After ten inches of snow this past Easter Sunday, our Minnesota spring is several weeks behind Indiana. My husband, Bruce, and I are finding it a delightful “stay-cation” to wander through our backyard—siting a rabbit hunkered down under the pine trees and chipmunks peeping out through the cracks of the retaining wall. We can see where our dog, Suki, has found hidey-holes to watch for squirrels and rabbits.

We join the rest of our global citizens appreciating Mother Earth for the unfolding daily miracles of springtime. And I agree with Ralph Parsley, “Love Lifted Me” is the best music playing in the background.