“He’d always been that way…”  10 min

“A risk I took…”

(Writing inspired by Tinkers by Harding)

            It was fall 1981. Farmers who had taken out bank loans for fancy farm equipment worth more than the land they were farming, were going bankrupt. Foreclosures, auctions, livestock sales were the talk of the rural areas of the Willamette Valley. But this didn’t affect Stanley Swanson in any way…he didn’t go to equipment sales or enter into the gossip at the Lutheran Church on Sunday mornings. He wasn’t like that.

            He’d bought his sixty-nine acres in Evans Valley with cash in 1931 when he and his new bride had come by train with their thirteen cows and a trunk full of Alma’s items for the house. Out from Minnesota they’d come to start a dairy. He’d never borrowed a dime or hired anyone to help with the farm. He was like that: proud, self sufficient, and solid in all ways. He did the farming. Alma did the housework and took care of their daughter and two foster children. Being an orphan himself, Stanley felt it was important to take in foster children as a payback of some sort. But he didn’t much like the antics and silliness of children and left Alma in charge there.

            Everything changed for Stanley the day the stroke blinded him. He’d been tilling his lower alfalfa field when everything went black. In the days that followed, car keys, tractor keys, milking, haying, bill paying, and all chores requiring sight were turned over to others. But from the confines of his walker and rocking chair, he managed to hold the place together and care for his beloved farm until the weeds littered the pathways and tractor trails, skunks and coons nested under the floorboards of the barn, and wasps’ nests hung in great paper globes under the eves of the house. Then, when Stanley could no longer care for himself or the place, he lay down in the woods and died.

Ruth