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>From the book: Christmas In Dairyland (True Stories From a
Wisconsin Farm) (August 2003; trade paperback)
http://ruralroute2.com
As we drove along the dirt road north of our farm one Sunday
afternoon, the color of the sky reminded me of Mom"s silver
cream and sugar servers when they were tarnished and needed to
be polished again.
Since morning, the sky had been cloudy, but now at
mid-afternoon, the clouds had grown much thicker and darker.
Earlier in December we had gotten a little snow. Several
forty-degree days had melted most of it, and the landscape was a
combination of dun-colored grass, black tree branches and the
russet color of certain oak leaves.
Every year in December, Dad and I went on a Christmas tree
expedition, and we were on our way now over to what we called
our "other place" to cut a tree. During the summer, I made
frequent trips to the other place, a second farm my parents
owned that was about a mile away, to help Dad with the haying or
just to tag along when he checked on the corn or the oats or the
soybeans.
But after school started, I rarely went to the other place, and
it always took me by surprise how different it looked in the
winter. Instead of green alfalfa and timothy and clover waving
in a warm south breeze, what had grown back after third crop was
now brown stubble that trembled in the face of a north wind. The
fields were strangely silent now, too, without the songs of
meadowlarks and bobolinks, and the bobwhite quail which lived in
the narrow section of woods lining the road.
We were only about five minutes into our journey when Dad
shifted the pickup truck down into first gear and then eased
into the field driveway. The rutted track that ran along the
edge of the hayfield was so bumpy that a merry jingling came
from the glove compartment -- probably a few bolts and washers,
along with a couple of wrenches and maybe a screwdriver or two.
When you"re a farmer, you never know when you might need a
wrench or a screwdriver or a bolt.
"Is it going to snow, Daddy?" I asked. Now that we had gotten
past the trees lining the road, the sky had opened in front of
us again.
Dad leaned forward to look up through the windshield.
"I"d say there"s a pretty good chance," he replied.
"How much?"
My father shrugged. "Don"t know. Maybe quite a bit. Wind"s out
of the east. And that usually means we’ll get at least enough to
shovel. Could be a lot more, though."
When we reached the pine plantation at the other end of the
field, Dad turned the truck around, driving forward a few feet
then backing up, then driving forward and then back again,
forward and back, until we were facing in the direction we had
come. He let the engine idle for a few seconds before shutting
it off.
"Daddy?" I said, as we started walking toward the rows of
planted red pine. "When do you think it will start to snow?"
Dad stopped and tipped his head back. "Soon," he said, "that
wind feels raw and damp."
When my father said "soon," I was not expecting it to start
snowing within the next ten minutes. At first, while we were
cutting the tree we had selected, only a few random flakes
drifted to the ground. By the time we reached the truck and had
securely stowed our Christmas tree in the back, it was already
snowing harder.
"If it keeps up like this all night, you won"t have school
tomorrow," Dad said as he started the truck. He slowly let out
the clutch, and soon we were retracing our route along the field
driveway. He turned on the windshield wipers, and with each pass
-- clickety-snick, clickety-snick -- the wipers cleared an arc
through the wet flakes plastered to the glass.
After we had pulled onto the dirt road, Dad shifted into second
gear, although when we reached the "Y" -- where you could either
turn left to go toward our farm, or right to go toward the house
that had at one time been part of our other place -- he shifted
into first gear again.
"Hope we make it up the hill," he said, glancing at me. "Wet
snow makes the road kind of slick."
It was touch and go for a few seconds when the back wheels
started spinning, but finally we reached the point where the
hill leveled off. Trees grew on both sides of the road here, and
to the right, a steep bank gave rise to a small wooded hillside.
"Look," Dad said, pointing toward the bank. He inched over to
the side of the road and stopped.
I peered through the curtain of falling snow. The bank looked
pretty much the same as it always had -- exposed tree roots,
patches of moss and bare spots where flat sandstone rocks had
slid toward the road.
"What do you see?" I asked.
"Wintergreen," Dad answered. He shut off the truck and opened
the door.
Wintergreen?
The first time I had tasted wintergreen, I decided that it was
my favorite flavor. Peppermint was a little too sharp, although
candy canes at Christmas were all right. Spearmint didn"t taste
like much of anything. Wintergreen, it seemed to me, was just
right. In my opinion, Teaberry gum was the best, with
wintergreen Lifesavers following as a close second.
Dad liked wintergreen too. Lifesaver books were popular gift
exchanges at school for our Christmas party, and if the person
who had drawn my name gave me a Lifesaver book, I would trade
with other kids who had also gotten books. Sometimes I managed
to acquire several extra rolls of wintergreen. Then I would
share them with Dad. I thought Teaberry gum was better than
candy because the taste lasted longer, but Dad preferred
Lifesavers. Gum, he said, stuck to his dentures.
During the summer, every time I went to town with Dad to grind
feed, I hoped he would buy a package of my favorite candy or
gum. Not at the feed mill, of course. They didn"t sell Teaberry
gum or Lifesavers at the feed mill. But if we went to the
restaurant for pie while we waited for our feed, or if Mom had
asked Dad to pick up a couple of things at the grocery store, I
would try to talk him into buying some gum or candy.
Going to the feed mill with Dad was a summertime activity,
however, and there were long stretches during the school year
when I never even saw a package of Teaberry gum or a roll of
Lifesavers, much less had any in my possession.
So what was Dad talking about when he had stopped the truck and
said, "wintergreen?"
I stared at the embankment and then at the hill beyond but I
couldn"t see anything out of the ordinary. I shut the truck door
behind me just as Dad scrambled nimbly up the bank into the
woods.
"It"s growing all over here," he said, pointing to the ground.
"They"ve got berries, too."
I struggled up the bank behind him to get a closer look.
Underfoot were small plants with shiny green leaves.
"That green stuff is wintergreen?" I said.
My father nodded. "Like what they use to make gum?"
"Yup. Here. Taste."
He reached down and picked a couple of small, pinkish-red
berries, popping one into his mouth and handing one to me.
I sniffed the berry. It smelled like wintergreen, all right, but
I wasn’t one bit sure about eating the thing.
"Taste it," Dad urged. "You"ll be surprised."
So, I ate the berry. It had a strange consistency -- sort of dry
and mushy, all at the same time. . .and then my mouth was filled
with the marvelous taste of wintergreen. The same as my favorite
gum, but different, too. More delicate.
"It"s good!" I exclaimed, grinning. Then I frowned. "How come we
haven"t seen it before?"
"Usually too much snow by this time," Dad said.
"What about in the summer, though?"
"Too much underbrush and other green things."
"And this is really the stuff they use in gum?" I asked.
Dad took his cap off, slapped it against his leg to rid it of
snow and then put it back on his head.
"Well. . .they probably don"t go into the woods and pick wild
wintergreen. People probably raise it and sell it, and I think
they might use the leaves rather than the berries, but yes, this
is the stuff."
By now the snow was falling so hard it made a hissing noise as
it struck the copper-colored oak leaves above us. Unlike other
trees, some of the oaks, I had noticed, keep their leaves until
spring.
"How do you know so much about wintergreen?" I asked.
"Oh," Dad said, "when we were kids, we used to pick it so we
could make ice cream."
I turned to look at him. "Ice cream?" "Our kind of ice cream,
anyway. A little dish of snow with winter-green berries mixed
in."
Suddenly I struck upon a wonderful idea.
"I know! I can try some right now."
I took off my mitten, picked a few wintergreen berries and
scooped a small handful of fluffy, fresh snow. I put the berries
in the snow, and -- well -- I have to admit it was pretty tasty.
I put my mitten back on. "Didn"t you have real ice cream when
you were growing up, Dad?"
My father smiled. "Sure -- sometimes. Not store bought, though.
We made our own with a hand-cranked ice cream freezer. But that
was mostly in the summertime. We thought wintergreen ice cream
was an awful lot of fun."
Dad had been the middle child among several older brothers, an
older sister, and three younger sisters. My grandparents had
worked as cooks in a lumber camp in northern Wisconsin in the
early 1900s. Many years ago, long before I was born, Dad had
made his living cutting pulp wood.
"Daddy? How did you see the wintergreen from the road?" I asked.
My father hesitated before answering. "I didn"t see it. Not
today, at least."
I stopped trying to adjust my mitten so the thumb lined up like
it was supposed to and turned my full attention toward Dad.
"Remember last fall, when the county forester came out here?" he
asked.
"Yeah, I remember."
Just on the other side of the small wooded hill was a two-acre
stand of tall red pine with a couple of rows of white pine next
to the road. Dad said the trees were among the oldest of the
plantations in the county that had been planted just after the
Great Depression to keep the sandy soil from eroding. Nearly
every year, the forester would come out to check on them. One
year he used Dad"s pine trees to demonstrate a brand new
trimming device to foresters from other counties.
Well," Dad continued, "while we were out here, I decided to take
a little walk. I don"t get much of a chance just to walk around
back here."
"And that"s when you saw the wintergreen?" Dad nodded. "I was
waiting for the right opportunity to show it to you."
He turned back toward the truck. "It"ll be dark soon. We"d
better get home. The cows are waiting to be milked."
As we slid down the embankment, I glanced over my shoulder.
Wintergreen.
Growing in the woods not far from my house.
And in that instant, I knew gum and candy would never again
taste quite the same.
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