Wintergreen
>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