This was in Iowa, during the teens and 20s of the last century. The vegetable garden was formally known as a “truck garden”. After harvesting, the vegetables were trucked off and sold at market. This is how Grandpa Potter made a living.
Getting into the garden early meant getting the work done before the heat of day had settled in. Grandpa Potter, as Dad often told the story, would look up at the sun at nine o’clock, check his pocket watch, then announce, “Well, this day’s about shot!”
By nine am and after five hours with his kids in the garden, Grandpa was lucky that he hadn't been shot.
Grandpa Potter and my dad
The day was already shot
So when Dad was rolling his griping butt out of bed in the predawn hours of summer, the birds were beginning their day as well, and welcoming the Potter gardeners to the glories of nature. Of course, all the birds had to do was sit in the trees and sing. They never had to hoe the onion field.
That’s why, even years later, the cheerful tunes of the robins and finches, the flirty whistle of the cardinal, and the lilting melody of the meadowlark absolutely pissed off my dad.
The birds caused him to have nightmarish flashbacks to his gardening youth. Dad loved to sleep with the windows open. But when dawn’s early light struck up the overture, the windows were shut and the birds shut out.
Oddly, though, Dad loved onions and always planted plenty of them in our garden as I was growing up.
For me, dawn always was and still is my favorite time of day, especially in spring and summer. And for the very reasons which Dad held in contempt: the songbirds.
I’ve always been an early riser. Maybe because I was born early in the morning and I figured, “What the hell. I’ll just stay up and see what happens. Coffee, please!”
When I was a little boy and I wanted to go outside and play after cheerily springing out of bed at 6 am like some insomnia-addled freak, my mother would tell me I had to be very quiet so as not to disturb the neighbors and to stay off the grass because the dew would soak my shoes.
So, I’d sit on the front stoop and listen to the birds. They were the only friends I had at that time of morning and I cherished their company.
I got to where I could identify most birds by their song. Robins, the optimists of the bird kingdom, have a “cheerup cheerup” in their warble.
Cardinals whistle a melody, but can pierce the dawn stillness with a shrieking “p-toooo, p-toooo!” Jays have that rakish “caw”.
Grackles, or as we commonly call them, “blackbirds”, don’t sing. They just bitch all the time with a sort of liquid screeching. They must be the only species that suffer with PMS.
One summer our neighbor, Old Mrs. Anderson, bought me a book all about birds. It’s a pocket-sized paperback, chock full of pictures and encyclopedic information.
I speak of it in the the present tense because, after more than 50 years, I still have that book. It’s a treasure and so was Old Mrs. Anderson, who later had her eyes pecked out by a brooding flock of blackbirds with PMS.
To this day, there’s nothing more peaceful, even spiritual if you will, than having my coffee at dawn while listening to the birds come alive with song. Those are the carefree moments when I feel aligned with the planets and in communion with the saints.
The early morning song of the birds is soothing. Too bad they couldn’t have soothed my dad.
But, to Dad’s credit, he never made me weed the onions at 4 am. That’s what he had Mom for.
Oh well, she was up anyway.
Copyright 2010 by Wendel James Potter
No comments:
Post a Comment