You Stinker!

There is a group of people who are disdained for the way they smell. Not so much for the methods they use to smell, but more for the aromas they exude. This downtrodden demographic is commonly known as “guys.” The subgroup of this group that suffers the most is known as “husbands.”

Let’s face it: women have a much more acute sense of smell than men. Females can detect a single malodorous molecule at a hundred paces. Guys, on the other hand, can’t tell if a baby needs changing until the diaper’s odor has become strong enough to stop a charging water buffalo. This is just one reason why women are generally better mothers than men.

 It’s nearly always news to a guy when his wife informs him that he stinks. Certainly he may have noticed how those vultures fainted as they flew overhead. But that didn’t necessarily prove anything; after all, the vultures, being guys themselves, were probably playing it for laughs.

 Skillful husbands can intuit when their impending personal odors might be offensive to the female olfactory system. As such, many husbands have perfected the tactic that is known universally as “silent but deadly.”

“Oh my Lord!” a wife may suddenly exclaim in the middle of a gripping episode of Breaking Bad, “What did you eat? Week-old road kill?”

 “What?” the husband might protest. “I don’t smell anything! It was the dog!”

“We don’t even have a dog!” This is why the marriages that last the longest are those that involve household pets.

Foot odor has long been my personal albatross. Taking my clodhoppers off at the end of a long, hot day could empty the house. It was often broadly hinted that my socks would qualify as an EPA Superfund site. I, on the other hand, didn’t think that my feet smelled all that bad. But then again, that’s also how I feel about lutefisk.

Once, when I was a teenager, I acquired a blazing case of athlete’s foot. Just taking off my boots and peeling away my socks was pure agony. A search of the medicine cabinet yielded a small bottle of a liquid athlete’s foot remedy. Ignorant regarding such things, I doused my toes with a generous squirt of the stuff. I was later told that my bellowing could be heard several miles away. My toes felt like they had been thrust into a vat of molten lava! It was as if a miniature Fukushima were taking place between each little piggy.

 I shared this tale of woe with an uncle who replied that he obtained a wicked form of athlete’s foot while serving in the Merchant Marines. Upon returning home to the farm, he was able to cure the malady only after he cut the toes off his boots, thus exposing his tootsies to fresh air and sunshine. He was a tough guy, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he did this even though it was the dead of winter.

Then there is the issue of B.O. This can be a tricky topic, as there is no objective standards regarding what passes for “a little funky” and what constitutes “a stink that would scour the rust off a plowshare.”

 For instance, I was recently yakking with an elderly bachelor dairy farmer when he asked if I could give him a lift to his pickup which sat on the headland of a nearby field. I said of course.

 He climbed into the car and the air instantly filled with the choking aromas of dried dairy cow manure, diesel fumes and old guy B.O. These odors intermingled with a level of bad breath that can only obtained by washing down a cud of smokeless tobacco with a quart of stale coffee. I rolled my window down as we slowly bumped our way to the field.

“Something wrong with your eyes?” asked the old guy.

 “Must have got some dust in them,” I replied as I frantically gulped fresh air.

“Well, they sure are watering a lot. You should probably get that checked out.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” I said between deep tokes of outside air, “What’s up with that car air freshener hanging from the back of your cap?”

 “That’s to keep the skeeters away. Might look silly, but it works pretty darn good!” “What about the smell?”

 “That there’s a bonus feature. Wearing a air freshener all the time cuts way down on body odors. I bet I take only half as many baths!”

 Wow! It was hard to imagine how he’s still single!

The Frog Assassin

So I was mowing the lawn the other day when it occurred to me that I’m a frog assassin.

This was not a goal I had set for my life. It’s not like I went to a special ops school where I and other fresh-faced cadets were drilled about the habits of hoppy amphibians: the places where frogs tend to vacation, which bars they are most likely to frequent after work, their favorite brand of shampoo. That is, if frogs used shampoo. Which I’m pretty sure they don’t.

A highly-trained cold-blooded James Bond-like frog killer I am not.

But there I was, rubbing out numerous frogs as I piloted my lawnmower across our front lawn. Well, not exactly rubbing out. The process was actually more akin to hitting the “liquefy” button on a blender.

Perhaps I should have felt guilty about mowing down the hapless hoppers, but what could I do? The silly frogs weren’t getting out of the way quickly enough! And some of them actually leaped toward the mower, as if they had a death wish or were vying for a spot in a Jackass movie.

In any case, I felt not the slightest bit of remorse. I saw it as natural selection via gas-powered lawn care equipment.

We seem to have an overabundance of frogs this year. You see them at night in the headlights, tiny liquid green arcs that erupt randomly from the road. You would never see any self-respecting toad behave so, tempting fate in the inky asphalt darkness.

Maybe the profusion of frogs can be explained by this year’s weather. Up until several weeks ago, the road ditches near my house held ponds of water. Judging by the amphibian chorus that serenaded us each night, there was a megalopolis of lovelorn frogs residing in those ponds.

But summer wore on and the water gradually disappeared. Imagine it from the frogs’ point of view. You and a bunch of your buddies are living it up in a virtual palace. One day, you notice that your mansion has shrunk considerably; in less than a week, your digs have completely evaporated!

What’s a frog to do? One of your pals points out that yonder lawn is green and inviting, a jungle of damp grass. Let’s move in there, urge your buddies. What’s the worst that could happen? It isn’t like that lawn ever gets mowed.

One of those Lilliputian frogs somehow found his way into our basement. We know this thanks to the loud chirrups that are emitted by our downstairs squatter. I have searched for the little bugger, eager to serve him an eviction notice, but he somehow knows to shut up if I so much as think about going to the basement.

I don’t know what he’s living on, but hope it’s cobweb spiders. There certainly seems to be a plentiful supply of those things in the cellar!

Sooner or later, everyone who drives a car will visit automotive mayhem upon some furry or feathered or slimy creature. You might even see the critter at the roadside, debating over whether or not to cross. It’s easy to imagine what’s going through their head:

“Should I go? No, that car’s coming too fast! Wait! It’s slowing down and swerving to give me more space! I bet I can make it! Here goes! Hey, he’s speeding back up! AIIEEE!!”

Some of us country folk -- myself included -- will actually try to take aim at these jaywalking varmints. This is only happens on roads where there’s no traffic and the critter in question is clearly a pest, such as a mouse or a gopher. Sadly, I have yet to see a traveling salesman standing at the roadside debating whether or not he should go for it.

I am by no means the only person in our family to commit motorized mayhem. My wife recalls the carnage that once followed when she drove the lawnmower over a nest of baby mice. And she’s especially adept at “grilling” deer with our car, a particularly expensive method for obtaining fresh venison.

Our sons remember an incident that occurred when they were yet too young to drive. They were riding in the car with their grandma when a striped gopher scampered across the lonesome gravel road.

Grandma suddenly swerved -- toward the gopher! “Darn!” she muttered, “Missed the little bugger!”

The boys were taken aback. This was a side of their kindly grandma that they had never seen!

Later, when they told us of the event, they ended their tale with, “Who would have thought that Grandma is a killer?”

I could only grin. It runs in the family.

Spring Cleaning

Spring cleaning can be a hazardous voyage for me.

It happens nearly every time I try to neaten things up. I launch into the cleanup project under full sail only to find myself run aground on Memory Lane, shipwrecked upon the rocky shoals of the past.

The most recent spring cleaning of our basement is a good example. I was making tremendous headway when I paused to consider the fate of a large wooden box. Should I simply chuck the entire box and assign its unknown contents to oblivion? I opted to paw through it first to see if it held anything of value.

A mistake.

The early decisions were easy. I have always thought that the term “artificial Christmas tree” was an oxymoron, so goodbye synthetic tannenbaum! I then hit a major snag in the form of a lath basket hauled up from the grungy depths of the box.

My gosh! I had totally forgotten about that basket! I dimly recall rescuing it some years ago from my grandparents’ old house which sits slowly moldering out in my grove.

The basket held clothes and other items Grandma Nelson had saved. In order to examine its contents, I dumped the basket out onto the basement floor. Its newspaper liner was dated April, 1961 -- exactly half a century ago! It suddenly became imperative that I study this time capsule.

The clothing Grandma had saved was rotted to rags, but other items were worthy of scrutiny, including a hardcover book titled “Tom Swift and his Sky Racer.” If that title sounds quaint, there’s a good reason: the tome bears a copyright date of 1911.

Apparently, Tom Swift was a teenaged genius, adventurer and inventor extraordinaire. The book breathlessly relates the tale of Tom and his homebuilt “aeroplane”, which, judging by the book’s lone illustration, was constructed from plans drawn up by Leonardo da Vinci.

Another extremely interesting item is a 1961 Sears catalogue, which contains everything the modern consumer could ever want.

Sears offered baby chicks, Smith-Corona electric portable typewriters, and those jiggle-inducing belt massagers. A “huge 23-inch TV” was priced at $200. Monochrome, of course; the widespread broadcast of color TV signals was still a few years off.

Also sold by Sears was a “Famous Enfield .303 Rifle, Pride of the British Army” for the princely sum of $11.88. Rebuilt automatic transmissions started at $99.95, about the same as a new Kenmore wringer washer. A pair of ladies shoes cost $3.33, while foundation garments that resembled self-propelled underwater weaponry could be purchased for 87 cents.

The basket next yielded an item that really grabbed my attention: a Successful Farming magazine that was dated August, 1957! Just two months before my birth! My recollections of that time are somewhat dim, so I thumbed through the publication to see what sort of world had welcomed me.

Among the top traits that stood out was the large number of articles and ads that were aimed at the homemaker -- a reminder that this was an era before farming had transmogrified into Agribusiness.

There were numerous ads for such things as mounted corn pickers, although one blurb was peddling equine liniment. It seems that not everyone had yet made the jump to mechanical horsepower.

One ad featured an image of a 1957 Chevrolet station wagon. Normally, a station wagon would be considered stodgy, but the ‘57 Chevy model somehow managed to look cool.

Amidst the cookie recipes and the ads for spark plugs and Kool-Aid and Terramycin is a full-page advertisement touting an exciting new innovation called “atomic-electric power.” Wonder how that whole thing worked out?

A bank statement from December of 1945 reveals that Grandpa had nearly $500 in his checking account, a sizeable sum for that time. Also in the basket was Grandpa’s husking hook. Its leather straps are still in pretty good condition, and slipping it on reminded me just how huge Grandpa’s hands were. I am definitely hanging onto that husking hook.

A letter from Grandma’s cousin Pauline in Jewell, Iowa is dated February 4, 1908. In the first third of the letter, the writer divulges that she regrets having not written sooner and that she’s now finally getting around to it. The second third is commentary on the chilliness of the weather, and how are you folks, and we’re just fine down here. The third section of the letter bemoans the fact that writer is now out of space and that she had best close.

Not real riveting stuff, which just goes to show that they weren’t all wordy Wordsworths back then.

My wife eventually called down the basement stairwell to see how things were going.

“You’d better call the rescue team!” I replied. “It’s happened again! I’ve become marooned in the past!”

Mandolin Man

Drive onto Larry Groon’s farmyard northeast of Arlington and you won’t see much out of the ordinary. The farmstead sports the typical assortment of outbuildings, along with a majestic farmhouse.

But step inside Larry’s workshop and things begin to take a turn for the unusual. The unremarkable array of woodworking tools share space with an extraordinary assortment of stringed musical instruments. Here hangs a banjo; there sits a stylish mandolin. A shelf holds a partially assembled guitar.

All of which were built by Larry.

“My son Steve and I milked 60 cows in a stanchion barn until it burned down in 2000,” said Larry, who will be 72 this year. “We talked about getting back into dairying, but eventually decided against it.”

Larry and Steve rebuilt the milk house, which Larry now uses as a woodworking shop. Larry has since constructed numerous pieces of furniture for his wife, Joan.

About 5 years ago Larry began to toy with the idea of building a stringed musical instrument.

“I’ve always wanted to do art, but lacked the skill,” says Larry. “I thought that maybe building something musical would satisfy my artistic impulses.”

Larry found plans for a mountain banjo in the pages of a Popular Mechanics magazine.

“It’s the sort of banjo they would traditionally build as a first instrument for a kid in the Appalachians,” says Larry. “I followed the plans to the letter. But the neck is out of proportion to the body, so it sounds out of tune when you play the high notes.”

Undaunted, Larry next purchased plans for building a mandolin.

“I figured that a mandolin is small and would take less time to build than something like a guitar. But I soon learned that building a mandolin is fussy work.”

Larry recalls how he felt when he first installed the strings on his first mandolin.

“I was so nervous, my hands were shaking,” he says. “I finally had to leave it and come back later.”

But the results of his hours of fussy work exceeded his expectations.

“It sounded good. Certainly I made some mistakes on that first mandolin, but that’s how you learn.”

Larry denies possessing any special musical abilities or artistic skill.

“I’m a three-chord wonder; I can play three chords and wonder how I can even do that. I learned that constructing stringed instruments is mostly engineering and that if done well, engineering can become a thing of beauty. Building mandolins is my way of creating art.”

As Larry built more mandolins -- he has now produced a total of 19 -- his skills grew. He gleaned advice from an Internet forum for luthiers, and the UPS truck began to bring exotic wood from across the globe to the Groon farm.

“I like to use local wood whenever possible,” says Larry. “I’ve made instruments from a felled ash tree that grew on our farm and have used black walnut that I bought from a guy at Milbank.”

Larry was soon hankering for new challenges. He began to construct guitars and has built ten so far. He just put the finishing touches on his first hollow neck lap steel guitar and recently completed an Irish bouzouki made from native ash.

Larry has added some of his own tweaks to his purchased mandolin pattern. So it has been with his guitars.

“Our daughter Linda likes to play music and we got started talking one day about designing our own guitar. After a good bit of debate, we came up with something that we thought would work.”

A twinkle in his eye, Larry unfolds a large sheet of paper that has a guitar outline drawn upon it. Flipping the paper over reveals that it’s actually the outer layer of a seed corn sack.

Like all farmers, Larry improvises whenever possible. For instance, he uses a homemade rig built of scrap iron to heat the wood that will be formed into the sides of his instruments. Beef bone is used in the bridges of his guitars.

“Bone is traditional, plus most agree that it produces a superior sound,” says Larry.

Asked how many hours it takes to build an instrument, Larry replies, “About a month.”

The musical instruments produced in Larry’s workshop are a wonder to behold, with intricate inlays and a silky smooth finish. Art has truly been achieved through engineering.

Larry has now reached the point where he has begun to instruct others in the craft of lutherie.

“I would like nothing better if more people came to my shop so I can pass on what I have learned,” he says.

Asked if this is a hobby or a passion, Larry replies, “Neither. It’s a gift from God. He just waited until this time of my life to give it to me!”

The Vinegar Man

The tiny town of Roslyn sits amidst the Glacial Lakes Region of northeastern South Dakota, a district of shimmering lakes and low hills. To the casual observer, Roslyn is just another ordinary prairie hamlet.

Ordinary -- until one spots the International Vinegar Museum that commands a prominent position on Main Street.

The how and why of the International Vinegar Museum begins with an extraordinary man named Lawrence Diggs.

My wife and I had an opportunity to visit with Lawrence recently at Rosie’s, a bar/ café located across the street from the International Vinegar Museum.

“I started out as a West Coast radio DJ, then moved onto the TV business,” said Lawrence regarding his life before vinegar.

After spending a decade in the broadcast biz, Lawrence decided to become a paramedic. “I wanted to find a way to give back,” he said when asked about this quirky twist in his career path. Giving back is a common thread in Lawrence’s life.

Being a paramedic in a major city taught Lawrence many skills, including the ability to start an I.V. on an unconscious child in the rain, and stabilizing a shooting victim as bullets whizzed by.
Lawrence again followed his instinct for giving back by traveling to the west African nation of Burkina Faso.

“I helped establish the first ever emergency medical service in Burkina Faso,” said Lawrence in his unfailingly affable manner. “People there didn’t even know what an ambulance was.”

It was during his sojourn in Burkina Faso that Lawrence became interested in vinegar.
“They have huge sanitation problems over there. It occurred to me that what they needed was something that can kill germs, is cheap, and can be easily produced from local ingredients. Vinegar was the perfect fit.”

Lawrence discovered that there was no definitive textbook about vinegar. Undaunted, he studied vinegar and literally wrote the book about its production.

Lawrence told us that vinegar has been around for the entirety of recorded history. Conversing with him was like attending a lecture given by a very lively and engaging instructor. When the discussion turned to the wonders of our world, especially the vinegar microbe acetobacter, Lawrence murmured reverently, “I see evidence for God in everything.”

“Hannibal used vinegar to split boulders in his path as he marched his army, which included war elephants, over the Alps,” said Lawrence. “That was over 2,000 years ago. This tells us that the ancients had a deep understanding of vinegar‘s properties. His feat wouldn’t have been possible without a long history with vinegar.”

My wife and I asked how one makes vinegar.

“Vinegar can be produced from anything that has enough sugar or starch,” said the Vinegar Man. “Beer and wine work especially well. They’re always trying to turn into vinegar anyway.”

We asked where one might acquire the proper bacteria for making homemade vinegar.

“It’s everywhere!” grinned Lawrence as he gestured at the air. “All it takes is a source of sugar or starch and maybe a little acetic acid to kick-start the process.”

Homemade vinegar is similar to any other home-produced item.

“You’ll never get exactly the same result twice. That’s the beauty of it. We have been conditioned to expect that everything we consume will be absolutely uniform. But by doing so, we miss out on the deep richness of variety!”

So how did you end up here? And what’s the deal with the museum?

“After I wrote the vinegar textbook I came to be regarded as an expert, so I started a vinegar consulting business. I came to Roslyn on vacation and liked the town so much that I decided to stay.

“Roslyn was looking for something to set it apart and draw people. I told them that they needed to create something that was totally unique. They looked at me and said ‘You’re the uniquest thing we’ve got. Why don’t we do something based on your business?’ This was how International Vinegar Museum and Roslyn’s annual Vinegar Festival were born.”

Has the Vinegar Museum succeeded?

“It’s been a success in that it put Roslyn on the map. It’s succeeded in that our kids are proud when people say to them ‘Oh! You’re from the town with that Vinegar Museum!’”

Lawrence recently handed the reins of the International Vinegar Museum the Vinegar Festival over to the town of Roslyn.

“My goal is to resume my vinegar consulting business,” he said. “Another of my goals is to travel to poor countries and teach them how to make and use vinegar. I don’t know how much time I have left on this earth, but while I’m here, I want to give back as much as I can.”

One gets the feeling that Lawrence will achieve all his goals -- whether it’s traveling to a small nation to teach vinegar production or changing an ordinary small town by helping it launch a very unordinary festival.

Hunkering

The economy is in the news a bit nowadays, which is
about like saying that the sun tends to rise in the east.
Every day brings yet another boatload of bad economic
news. The weight of it presses down on us and makes us want
to huddle in the basement like children hiding from a summer
thunderstorm.
It's been said that the only difference between a
recession and a depression is our collective state of mind.
If that's the case shouldn't the government, just to be safe,
start pumping Prozac into our water supply?
A farm machinery dealer summed it up best recently when
he commented, "This country would be a whole lot better off
if people would just quit listening to the news!"
Not listening wouldn't change the fact that it has
gotten tough for many. There is no shortage of pain as folks
watch their dreams melt like a snowman in May. But as dire as
things may seem, there can be no doubt that we will someday
find our way out of this ditch.
America is still the greatest country on the planet.
She is still the land of opportunity, full of ambitious,
energetic and inventive people. New industries and new jobs
will rise from the ashes of this recession, or downturn, or
whatever you want to call it.
While this dip in the economy is probably not as bad as
the Great Depression, we can certainly take some lessons from
that era. One of them is the lost art of hunkering.
Hunkering can be summed up by a bumper sticker I once
saw: "I've done so much with so little for so long, I can now
do almost anything with just about nothing!"
I was a farmer for most of my life, which meant that I
was self-employed. There was thus little chance that I would
be fired for, say, showing up late for work. On the other
hand, my boss could really be a jerk and often forced me to
work long hours. My wages generally fell somewhere between
"little" and "none".
Because of this, my wife and I perfected the art of
hunkering during our early years together.
Certainly we would have qualified for food stamps back
when we were a struggling young dairy farm couple with two
small kids at home. We never applied for them, though. Pride
was a factor, but I also thought it weird that a guy who
raises food would get food assistance from the government. In
any case, we never went hungry.
This was because we hunkered. We did without such things
as nights at the movies, and planted a large garden. When one
of my cows broke a leg, we butchered her and my wife canned
most of the meat. We dined for many months on the delicious
beef stew that was once a Holstein named Becky.
We also ate road kill, thanks to my wife's uncanny
ability for "grilling" deer with the car. Such events are a
pain in the neck for us, but generally fatal for the deer.
When we were young and poor, we never let a little thing like
tread marks on a carcass stand in the way of fresh venison.
Speaking of cars, we did everything we could to save
gas. We had a Chevette -- basically a roller skate bolted to
a lawn mower engine -- which got about 50 miles per gallon.
It had a stick shift, so I would extend our gas mileage
whenever we went downhill by popping the tranny into neutral
and killing the engine.
I often drove many miles out of our way so we could save
gas by coasting down a hill. My wife argued that this used
more gas than we were saving, but women tend to have a poor
grasp of the automotive world.
Another hunkering method involved saving on electricity
by burning candles. My wife has always had a thing for
candlelight. When I met first her, my wife's apartment had
more candles than a Medieval monastery.
Luckily for us, our family knew about this and often
gave my wife candles for Christmas and birthdays, along with
extra-special candles from Rome for the Fourth of July.
One evening we were enjoying a cozy candlelit meal when
my wife caught me staring deeply into the flickering flame.
Smiling warmly, she reached across the table, squeezed my
hand and murmured, "What are you thinking?"
"I was thinking about how all this wax is going up in
smoke," I replied, "And what it's going to cost to replace
these candles. But I believe I've come up with a way to make
them last longer. What do you call that stuff I'm always
digging out of my ears?"

The Flax Man

"The trouble with this country," said an old farmer to
me recently, "Is that hardly anybody grows flax anymore."

I asked him to elaborate and he was only too happy to
oblige. "It's as if we've lost our imaginations. All you see
out in the country these days is corn and beans, corn and
beans! Why can't folks plant flax and pretty things up some?"

I couldn't disagree. I have always had a soft spot for
flax, one of the prettiest and oldest crops known to man.

It's a bit unsettling when you first catch sight of a
field of blooming flax. A patch of ground that was a carpet
of emerald green a few days earlier is now a glorious sky-
blue. It's as if a lake had somehow suddenly formed out in
the middle of nowhere, a body of water that, incredibly, runs
right up over the hilltops.

The spring when I was fourteen, Dad proposed a deal: in
exchange for my labor during that coming summer, I could have
a small piece of land to farm.

I jumped at the offer. When asked what I planned to
plant, I answered in an instant. Flax.

I would like to say that this decision came about after
a diligent and comprehensive study of market conditions. I
would like to say I made an intelligent choice based on a
cold and calculated analysis.

I would like to say those things, but they wouldn't be
true. Flax was selected simply because I thought it looked
really pretty in full bloom.

Part of our deal was that I had to pay for some of the
expenses, such as seed. When the time to plant flax arrived,
I drove to our local grain elevator and purchased eight
bushels of seed flax, enough to plant my eight acre patch. As
I recall, the seed set me back seven bucks a bushel.

As I loaded the seed, the elevator manager offered me an
opportunity to lock in a harvest delivery price of $4.35 per
bushel. I would like to say that after considering all
possible market contingencies I told him that I would take my
chances, but that wouldn't be true. I simply didn't like the
term "lock in", and besides, I was too busy imagining how
pretty my field of flax would be.

When my flax had grown to about ankle high I noticed
that it was infested with various weeds. These would no doubt
mar my flax's prettiness and also reduce its yield.

I consulted the elevator manager, who advised me to
apply a herbicide. After purchasing eight acres' worth of the
recommended weed spray, I made the application, following the
label directions to the letter.

Or at least I thought I had. When I went to check on my
flax the next day, it was dying! Every flax plant was curled
over into a freakish and unnatural posture, mirroring that of
the targeted weeds.

My first farming venture was a total bust! I couldn't
bring myself to look at the field for several days. I finally
did, thinking perhaps I could tear it up and sow some fast-
maturing crop and salvage something from the summer.

But, wait! A field of flax stretched out before me like
a luxurious emerald-green carpet! I would have hugged it if
it were possible to get my arms around those eight acres.

A few weeks later I nearly broke my face grinning as I
strolled through an eight-acre lake that ran up over the
hill, a lake comprised of millions of tiny sky-blue flowers.

As I recall, my flax yielded fifteen bushels to the
acre. I very clearly recall that by harvest the price had
rocketed to $7.10 per bushel. I would like to say in all
truthfulness that this was due to nothing but pure dumb luck.

It took only about an acres' worth of flax to cover my
expenses. But even more profit lay out in the field in the
form of flax straw.

We baled the flax straw and sold it at our local
elevator. It was hard to believe that this scratchy, dusty,
dull-brown, stick-like substance would eventually become fine
linen, that flax can be made into very comfortable slacks.

The popularity of flax could be seen at the elevator's
straw stack, which was wider than our barn and just as high
and stretched for a full quarter of a mile.

That summer was quite profitable for me; I certainly
made more than Dad would have paid in wages.

And that was too bad. Because I got the impression that
farming was like having a license to print money and spent
the next 30 years trying to duplicate that summer, chasing
profits that were as illusory as a sky-blue lake that appears
to run right up over the hilltops.