(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

I drive an old Ford pickup with a touchy choke and bad springs.  The engine’s O.K. and there’s only a little bit of rust on the body.  It’s good, dependable transportation.

My wife drives a little Mercury.  It’s not nearly as old as the Ford.  It has more than 80,000 miles on it and is starting to get a little rough around the edges.  But it, too, is good dependable transportation.

What do you drive?  If you’re like most of us, your car or truck isn’t anything out of the ordinary.  It probably runs O.K. most of the time.  You can brag a little if it starts reliably in the winter.  It may or may not have good tires, bad springs or a touch choke.  I’ll bet it’s just good dependable transportation.

But secretly you envy the person who drives a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or Mercedes.  Only in our wildest dreams do you ever think of owning a Rolls Royce.

In that secret fantasy of yours you are speeding down a twisting mountain road.  The top is down.  The wind and the scenery slip by in an exhilarating rush.  Your high-performance automobile hugs the road.  Its big engine pulls you and your dream car effortlessly up the slopes and around the turns.

Then in this fantasy, the road straightens and levels out.  Now you make your dream car really unwind.  You guide the gearshifts smoothly through its notches.  The speedometer edges higher and higher.  You wave gleefully as you pass those poor folks in their run-of- the mill Fords, Chevys and Dodges.

Alas, it is just a fantasy.  Your reverie is broken by the harsh bleating of car horns behind you.  The stoplight has turned green during your daydream.  Sigh.  You and your dependable transportation are back to reality.

But for those of you who drive “dependable transportation” take heart.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave us something to cheer about this week.  The EPA released its list of the top 10 gas-guzzlers this week and guess who made the list?

A Lamborghini was number one.  Ha.  I’m sure glad I didn’t buy one of those.  There was a Rolls Royce on the list too.  You and I are fortunate not to own one of those gas hogs.  There was a Ferrari or two on the list too.  It would be very, very environmentally irresponsible to own a Ferrari.  I certainly wouldn’t want to be environmentally irresponsible.  Would you?

Find yourself a copy of that list and study it.  Go ahead and gloat if you want.  It’ll make you fell a little better about driving your “dependable transportation.”

And when you’re done gloating, please observe a moment of silence for the poor saps who actually own one of these fuel-hungry luxury cars.

And if you own one of those cars, then I’m sure I speak for the rest of us when I say,” We feel so, so bad for you.”

 I think my brother decided that we would have the smudge to end all smudges, those fires that smoldered through the night to keep the hordes of mosquitoes at bay. 

We used the loader and scraped and cleaned the pile of left over straw, wet and molding, out of the dirt alongside the hay shed, watching the rats and mice scurry to the waiting cats on the sidelines.

We cleaned up some of the musty old silage, usable for feed, and barely burnable…barely being the key word.

We moved onto the barn, taking out heaping forkfuls of left over hay and straw, unused and wasted by the cows, now wet and soggy.

It was mounded out in the pasture, on the western edge of the grove of trees that the entire family refers to as “Uncle Hank’s Woods,” named after the beloved uncle that once owned them.

How would we get a wet pile of slimy, unusable feed and bedding to burn to create a proper smudge?

My brother was just getting warmed up.

Every sack from the granary, left over from our weekly grinding of feed was thrown into the loader bucket by myself and my brother Jaime, as older brother Jack sat on the tractor with a happy gleam in his eye….there would be a fire tonight!

The loader moved back to the barn, where we loaded up boxes, packaging, and bottles from the various chemicals and cleaning supplies used in the milk room.  Feed sacks and big piles of twine were carted out and put on the loader.

Finally, the last stop was the house.  The normal garbage that would go into the burning barrel (our family incinerator used for miscellaneous papers and household waste), bags from salt for the water softener, various boxes and containers carried up from the basement…in short, anything that we no longer needed and was flammable.

“That is a heck of a fire you kids are planning…are you sure it is just a smudge?”  Dad asked suspiciously.

“Oh, yes father…” brother Jack responded, then threw in an evil laugh for good measure, “BWWAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

This was the brother that had lost his eye lashes burning papers…

As Dad finished milking, Jack took the final steps…

“You need to make sure you get a good burn,” he lectured as he filled two big jugs, one with gasoline, one with diesel fuel.  Then taking a long piece of twine, about thirty feet long, he slowly lowered it into the gasoline.

“Fuse,” he said simply, looking at his younger brother’s questioning eyes.

As poured the gasoline and diesel onto the mound of sacks, bottles, papers, wet hay, moldy straw, and silage, he seemed to work joyfully, like a man content with the world…that he was going to set into a raging inferno.

Pouring out the last of the gas into the very heart of the pile, he took the twine-fuse and took it back to where Jaime and I were standing – Dad letting us go out to help as he finished up milking.

Laying a match on it, we watched with anticipation as the fuse rushed to the waiting pile.  Nothing.

“Huh.”  Jack said, “Maybe I should just go and light it.”

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The pile ignited with a flash.  A plume of burning straw, feed sacks, and papers rocketed about a hundred and fifty feet up in the air, above the tree tops of Uncle Hanks woods, and up into the sky, raining down around the raging fire that moments ago had been a gas soaked wasted feed and garbage pile.

We three boys were sent running from the blast.

As the fire died down and proceeded to smoke as a good smudge should, we headed back to the farm.

“What the heck were you kids doing out there?”  Dad demanded. “I saw a burning plume shoot up over Uncle Hank’s woods!”

“Lighting the smudge.” Jack said simply.

 Minnesota’s state bird is the mosquito.  Minnesotans know that is a joke.  Those Minnesotans that have faced down some of their home state mosquitoes aren’t laughing.  In one of the old Paul Bunyan yarns, it was said that if you wanted to stop a Minnesota mosquito, you best use a twelve gauge shot gun…though that would really only slow them down.

In all seriousness, the mosquitoes may not be as big as black birds, but we do raise them by the trillions and they are vicious blood suckers.  Literally.

Checking fence, weeding garden, cutting grass, feeding cattle, sitting on the porch – all places you had to fight off the buzzing hordes.  It was annoying.  It was vexing.  It sapped your strength and was just down right irritating.

And the problem wasn’t just for the humans.

As much as it irritated us, we always feared the heat and humidity of July and early August when we knew that the hordes of buzzing insects would crescendo through the prairie pot holes, when we knew the pain and frustrations they would cause for our bovine friends.

Our cows pastured in a forty acre plot that was a mixture of prairie, slough and woods – in short, perfect mosquito habitat.  Starting in June, we would start spraying down the cows morning and night with a cattle version of OFF to keep the fly’s and mosquitoes away.  If we were lucky, a good stiff wind blowing across the fields would also keep the mosquitoes grounded and away from the harried bovine.

During the height of the attack, if there wasn’t a breeze in the air, Dad would inform us at morning breakfast that day, we would be preparing the big gun – the smudge.

My family loves to burn things.  Thanksgiving Day we hope for little snow cover to allow us to burn off a few sloughs before snow fall.  The height of the burning season has to be the annual smudges used in the fight against the mosquitoes.

Usually, there was an accumulation of things around the farm that needed to be burned.  If we were lucky, there might also be a fair amount of it that was also slightly wet.  A silage box of musty hay out of the hay barn mixed with a soggy left over straw bale from the prior year, along with a few seed sacks, newspapers, and twine from the barn, mixed with a touch of gasoline and diesel fuel to make sure that it started could burn all night if piled properly.

And boy did it smoke.

After milking, before the cows could even cover the ½ mile from the barn to the pasture along the fenced in alley way along the road, Dad and us boys would be out there, lighting the pile of damp refuse on fire, watching the flames lick the sky.

But within minutes, what had been an inferno was soon just a massive smoking pile of heat.  You would think that cows in ninety degree heat would hate that hot mass of warmth sitting on the edge of their feeding area.  On the contrary, they loved it.  The smoke meant no bugs that night.  I swear you could see the cows follow the cloud of smoke as it drifted across the pasture in the evening air.

As we would drive out of the pasture, you could almost see all of the cows turn and look at us with their eyes conveying the message, “Thank you – we’ll make sure you get extra milk in the morning.”

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

I’m a food junkie.  I love Oreos, cheese curls, Doritos, Snicker’s bars and ice cream.  If it has fat, sugar or salt, I probably like to eat it.

With that in mind, I guess I should consider myself lucky that the filling I needed done this week was the first i’ve needed in more than a decade.  The decade even included a five-year stretch when I never saw a dentist once.  The American Dental Association would be appalled if they knew.  Does five years without seeing a dentist make me dentally incompetent? 

Anyway, i’ve returned to the fold of responsible tooth owners now.  I take my place in their chair every six months as recommended by the venerable ADA.

My dentist, Gary Luna, is a nice guy.  He always seems genuinely happy to see me, even when we meet at the gas station.

He is also the most courteous, thorough, and gentle dentist i’ve ever been too.

Still, I can’t work up much enthusiasm for my semi-annual visits.  I know he knows what he’s doing, but I don’t like the idea of somebody poking and scraping around in my mouth.  Even it is for my own good.  And I absolutely hate that polish that his hygienist uses to shine up my chompers after they’re all done cleaning them.

The thought of the whole process set my stomach churning a week before my visit.  And of course, either Dr. Luna or his hygienist will ask whether I have been flossing or not.  I hate that question.  I always go home with clean teeth and a guilty conscience because I hate flossing as much as I love junk food.

Thank goodness the visit is never nearly as bad as I imagine it will be.

During this week’s visit I found out that I had a cavity.

It’s probably just as well that I came back the next day for the filling.  I didn’t have a lot of time to get an ulcer over the situation.  The 24 hours was enough to dredge up memories of all of those filling that I had done back in junior high.

I have a mouth full of fillings with a mind full of painful memories to go along with it.

At 7:30 the next morning, I was back in the chair.  They dabbed a little topical anesthesia on the inside of my cheek and then gave me a couple of shots of novocain.  He drilled.  He filled.  He conquered.  By 8:05 I was on my way back to work.  It was the quickest, easiest filling i’ve ever have done.  It went so well that I began to have second thoughts about my irrational fear of going to the dentist.  Still, it was not the best way to start the day.

Dr. Luna seemed pleased with the procedure though. “This is the first one of these we’ve done together, isn’t it?” He observed cheerfully as I was climbing from his chair.  “Hopefully we won’t have another for another two or three years.”

Actually, Dr. Luna, we’ll need to talk about that timing.   I think I prefer my fillings about a decade apart.

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

With all the fantastic electrical conveniences we have today and all the accomplishments of modern science and technology, I think we’re all getting a little jaded and cynical.

Home movies don’t cut the mustard anymore.  Instead of grainy images of our families at a picnic or on vacation, we want home video cameras with instant editing and title-screen functions.   Stage shows don’t hold much thrill when movie studios spend $100 million to bring us Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2.  Homemade ice cream isn’t such a treat now that we can wander down the street and pick from 44 hand-packed favorites.  Statues of our heroes don’t excite us.  We want Disney animation and sound tracks.  Who marvels at the sound of a passing train when we can watch a space shuttle landing?

It seems that modern technology has robbed us of some of the little joys in life.  We want bigger and better and the good things of the past don’t seem good enough anymore.

Mount Rushmore, America’s Shrine of Democracy, is celebrating it 50^th anniversary this year. You’d think that after 50 years, people would get tired and bored with it, just like everything else.

Personally, I’d never seen the monument before my trip there on July 1.  It was a cool evening and as the sun sank behind the monument, we took our seats in the darkened outdoor amphitheater.  The park rangers gave a little program on the history of South Dakota and the monument.  Then they showed us a movie about Gutzom Borglum and how he carved his dream into the side of a mountain.

We all sang the “Star Spangled Banner” and it sounded good, not like the raspy, out-of-tune version you hear the crowd singing so often at ball games.  And as the last strains drifted off among the ponderosa pines of South Dakota’s Black Hills, giant banks of lights flashed their brilliance on the four stone faces.

In those giant beams of light, the faces looked new, as if Borglum had just finished sanding off the rough edges only hours before.  I can’t see how Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt could have ever looked better.

I couldn’t help myself.  I got this great big lump in my throat and a couple of little tears in my eye.  I guess it could have been just me.  Heck, I was thrilled to see the Corn Palace at Mitchell, S.D., too.  But I wasn’t the only one feeling emotion at Mount Rushmore.  Cynicism and boredom dropped away from the people in that crowd.  People were genuinely moved and impressed.

Why do people get so worked up about a 50- year-old statue?  Perhaps it is the sheer size of the monument.  Or maybe it’s what the mountain represents.  Could it be that people are still impressed that 50 years ago men used dynamite and jackhammers to run a mountain into a beautiful monument?  Maybe it’s a combination of all those things.

I really don’t know, but I liked it.  It would be awfully nice if we could all capture that feeling a little more often in life.

Between the normal seasonal jobs on the farm that needed to get done – the spring work, planting, cultivating the corn, cutting, raking, baling, and bring home the hay (three times each summer), checking fence, working cattle, milking cows, grinding feed, fixing equipment, cultivating corn, harvesting the wheat, barley, and oats, chopping silage, feeding the young stock, the daily feedings…There were those jobs that came less often, the downtime jobs.  Cleaning shop, washing the pipeline, painting the buildings, hauling manure, and perhaps the least favorite chore on the farm, cleaning out the hay barn.

The hay barn was the cavernous area of our barn – the second story, above the first floor where the cows were milked.  When empty, it was like an aircraft hanger with one big door high on the eastern half and one lonely bale elevator running front to back used only once a year when filling the hay barn to shuttle the bales from the elevator outside – which lifted the bales from the hay rack up to the door.

Through the normal course of use, a natural layer of hay built up on the tongue and groove wooden floors.  Hay falling off the bales as they clattered overhead during unloading.  Bales busting during the transfer – or during the fall from the elevator up top to the hard wood floor below.  Bales broken in the dead of winter trying to pry them out of the stack with frozen fingers.  In the end, this loose hay tended to pile up – and it needed to get removed.

Sometimes, the hay barn wouldn’t get cleaned every year – the normal demands of the farm, those necessary tasks to grow a crop and keep the animals happy came first.

The first time I remember getting involved with the endeavor of cleaning the hay barn, it had been some years since it was last cleaned.  After a couple of hours of pitching hay down, Dad used his ingenuity to build a wooden rake, that when pulled by the tractor outside and when held down by the weight of three boys inside, would pull the hay loose and out the small door into a waiting silage wagon (a large, high sided trailer with moving slats on the floor that could deposit things into a neat pile behind it).

Dad was a pretty handy guy, but this was one invention that didn’t work as billed.  It came down to us boys and the pitch forks.

Once the job was done, we all had the same reaction…never again would we let it get that bad.  The problem was, it was a terribly dirty job – with old, moldy, musty hay, that was hot, and heavy to remove.  It was not fun.

Never-the-less, for the next ten summers until Dad sold the cows, I made sure that any free day in June was spent up in the hay barn, pushing the dusty, musty hay from the prior year.

Yes it was hot, dirty, demanding work, but it was also a respite from the normal.  I’m not sure why, but up in that cavernous barn, day dreams could just take shape.  In the twilight hours, it would become the open sky on some deserted plain where I was exploring.  Sometimes, the building would become the Senate chamber in the US Capitol where as president I was called on to deliver an inspiring address.  Sometimes it was the building where the board of directors of my corporation met to discuss weighty issues on our business.  Sometimes the cats stalking a mouse nesting under the layers of musty hay became the big cats of the Serengeti stalking their prey.  Sometimes the swooping barn swallows were the eagle warriors out of the Narnia books.  Sometimes the near miss with the rotting floorboard was another adventure from one of the adventures of Doctor Indiana Jones.

In the end, despite the dust, the mold and mildew, the sweat and hard work, sometimes cleaning out that cavernous hay barn were some of the most adventuresome vacations I took as a kid…and I could still be home for the evening milking.

I was small enough to remember the day that scared me from camping.  It was a beautiful summer day, but the woods behind our house looked especially dark and scary to my preschool eyes.  The towering elms, oaks, and box elders provided a canopy for the prickly ash, cockleburs, and grass.  From the safety of the yard, I’d gaze into the dark, thick stillness of the woods and wonder about the dangers that lurked in the forest.  The ticks, the poison ivy, the poison oaks, the swarming mosquitoes, hordes of gnats, and a myriad of other creepy and crawling things that lurked under the cool shade of those big trees.In reality, it wasn’t a forest – merely a shelterbelt, unplanted by human hands – still more or less virgin forest, bigger then most shelterbelts, but easily walked around in ten minutes with fields and pasture bordering on all sides.  But to my very small preschool view of the world, it was a wild and dangerous place.

It was worrisome to me then as I watched my older brother Jack and three of his friends don packs loaded down with camping supplies and prepare to walk back into the thick underbrush.  I heard Dad tell them to be careful with the campfire.  I heard Mom tell them to remember that the house was only about 100 yards away.

I watched with mix awe, fear, and pride as I watched them march down the small trail that lead past the old Allis Chalmers that rested on the edge of the wilderness and back into the underbrush.

For a while that late afternoon I paced the lawn – the known world for me, wondering and worrying about these brave four facing the wilds of the woods. My thoughts were quickly distracted by the sandbox down by the two pine trees and normal world of preschool play on a beautiful summer afternoon.

It was only when Dad and my oldest brother Tom came up after milking, and telling me to get inside for supper that I noticed the sound of thunder in the distance.

Less then an hour later as we sat around the supper table, the thunder and lightning now very close, that the sky opened up and sheets of rain pelted the kitchen window…our thoughts turned to the adventurers outside in the wild weather.

The rain was just abating when we spotted four people coming running out of the woods, soaked to the bone, and looking for the comfort of a hot meal and dry place to sleep.

To my preschool ears, the events sounded harrowing.  They had found a nice clearing, about thirty feet off the trail leading back to the old machine shed, a big, natural grassy area, and had set up the tent and laid out their sleeping bags, and generally preparing the campsite.

It all sounded quite pleasant.

Until the rain started.  It was then that they realized that the reason that it was such a nice clearing is because nothing could grow there due to the normally standing water that would be there..yep, they had managed to set up camp in the middle of a small slough.  So once the rain started, their camp became more of a lake then a campsite.

It was about this time in the story that we all noticed the itching they were doing.  What started as an odd behavior became near violent…as they took off their water logged coats, the bright red marks on their arms, legs, and other parts of their body reveled that at least one thing could grow in that low spot…poison ivy…

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

If you wanted to celebrate life in Boone County, all you had to do was stroll around the Boone County Fairgrounds last week.  The ’91 edition of the Boone county Fair was better than ever.

Appararently I’m not alone in my assessment.  Officials estimated that about 23,000 people came to the fair to have a look around this year.  That’s up by at least 1,500 people from last year.

I attended the concerts on Friday evening.  Even if Michelle Wright and Joe Diffie had mysteriously lost their voices, the sunset, cool breeze and the sounds and delectable odors drifting over from the Midway were probably worth the price of admission.

But Diffie and Wright were in top form and I doubt if there was a toe that wasn’t tapping by the end of the evening.  I don’t know who books those country concerts for the Fair Board, but that person deserves a raise.

I wandered around the exhibit buildings.  Next time you hear a youngster using that old refrain,” I’m bored! There’s nothing to do.” Introduce him or her to a local 4-H club.  It seems that most of the 4-Hers who were showing off their handiwork at the fair probably don’t use that line too often.

At a time when rural traditions seem to be fading in many areas, it’s nice to see participation and attendance growing at the Boone County Fair.  Some may argue that county fairs have out-lived their usefulness, but the Boone County Fair show that is not the case.

Where else can our youngsters show off their diverse and amazing skills and talents?  At the same time, they gain self-confidence, self-discipline and communications skills.  They also learn the importance of teamwork, responsibility and planning.  Those skills are taught in too few places today.

Where else can you get acquainted with new friends form Pilot Mound, Boxholm, Madrid, Boone and Ogden?  They live so close, but our busy lives keep us so far apart from them.  Opportunities to meet and get to know these neighbors are too few.

If you look beyond those things, the Boone county Fair is still a great attraction.  With all of the entertainment (much of it free), the food (most of it delicious), and the things to see and and learn (all of it interesting), the Boone County Fair is certainly one of Boone’s County most underrated annual attractions.

Over the years, the Boone County Fair has changed.  It has managed to retain its rural flavor while broadening its appeal to include a growing urban audience.  If the fair is to continue its success, it will need to continue meeting that challenge.

I expect that it will.  Congratulations to everyone who participated in and helped plan the 1991 Boone Count Fair.  It was great.  I can hardly wait to find out what’s in store for next year.

(Tom Jirik wrote columns in several newspapers in Iowa from the late 1980’s to the mid 1990’s.  This column originally appeared in the The Boone Today) 

My wife is recovering for a summer cold.

She stumbled home for work last week, sodden with tissue in hand, and collapsed into bed.  “I’b so sick, I tink I’b donna die,” she groaned.

“Dud my poor baby hab a code?” I asked cheerfully, mocking her nasal condition in an attempt to cheer her up.

It didn’t work.

“Just wait,” she wheezed with venom dripping from her voice,” You’re going to catch this cold.  And when you do you’ll know how miserable it is.”

She’s right.  I’m sure to catch her cold.  But I’ll press onward with life because that’s what men do when they get sick.

You won’t hear us men complaining about our minor ailments.  We neither want nor need sympathy.  Men are genetically destined to suffer through our illnesses with silent strength and endurance.

But I pity Mary and all the rest of you who are suffering colds.  Despite this stretch of nice, weather, or perhaps because of it, an epidemic of summer colds is sweeping through.  Boone.  Take a walk downtown and I bet you’ll see at least several people who look like they’ve through the wringer a time or so.

They have wadded up, wet tissues in their hands. Their noses are running.  Tears run from their eyes.  It looks like any movement might be their last. Just seeing them makes you feel bad.

A February cold is tolerable.  The weather outside then is so cold and brutal you almost   expect to have a cold in February, you’d be huddled inside with come hot chocolate and steaming chicken soup anyway.

So a February cold doesn’t really change your attitude or lifestyle all that much.

A summer cold is much worse.  You don’t expect to get sick n the summer. Summer’s heat and humidity make all that congestion   and mucus almost too much to bear. Things happen during the summer.

There are concerts and ball games and picnics during the summer. You miss them because of your summer cold. A summer cold is probably one of the most non-lethal diseases you can you can contract.

Mary claims that I’m the biggest baby around when I get sick.  She’s expecting the worst from this summer cold that I am coming down with.

I could explain why she’s wrong, but my throat feels a little sore and my nose is starting to run. 

I’d better end this column here and go to bed before I pass out or something.

If you happened to see Mary, tell her that my pillows need fluffing and that some chicken soup would be awfully nice.

 The summer storms on the edge of the prairie, it was something that we quietly looked forward to, but also dreaded.  As the showers of May and the downpours of June turned into the prairie pounders of July and August, we always kept one eye to the western sky.

We would watch the extended forecast on the ten o’clock news with great interest.  We even learned how to interpret the forecast.  During a wet year, a thirty percent chance of thunderstorms meant we had to be extra careful.  During a dry year, a thirty percent chance of thunderstorms barely caused us to raise a finger.

Throughout the day, we would listen to the radio.  Milking in the morning would give us the first sign of trouble – if the daily forecast called for severe weather through the area in the evening, we knew to start listening in the afternoon to track the progress.

By noon, the first showers would start to be reported far on the open plains far to the west of us.  We knew that as they approached, the heat of the day, the normally high humidity, and the cooling temps of the evening would be the perfect incubator for the most dangerous of storms.

All through the afternoon and evening, we would listen to the reports.  As we gathered around the pick up if Mom brought lunch to us out in the field, the first signs of big storms to our west would start to be reported, popping up from the earlier showers.  By the time milking time rolled around, there would be watches and warnings posted up and down the valley.

It seemed like the scariest of storms would come rolling in after sunset.  We would watch the news and weather as a family, and if the line of storms was set to cross over before midnight, often times we would sit up to wait it out.

If the storms were far off, we would bet that they would break up before they hit us.  But there was also the risk that they could intensify even more in the air that just didn’t want to cool down.  Then, we would be waken in the middle of the night and hustled downstairs into the living room to the flash of lightening outside the windows and the ever growing crescendo of thunder out the window.

Sometimes the storms were innocuous, a simple summer rain storm.  Sometimes there were thunderstorm warnings.  Sometimes, in the most extreme of cases, there was the tornado warnings flashing across the television…or if the power was out, the battery operated radio.

In all the times growing up in my eighteen years, despite some really big, serious, storms, I never once remember anyone in our family panicking, getting hysterical, or even cowering in fear. 

There was usually a lot of looking through the flashes of lightening to see the rainfall, see if there was hail, see if how bad the wind was blowing.  There was also a lot of wondering..I wonder if this will hurt the wheat.  I wonder if I shut the tractor windows.  I wonder where the dogs were hiding out the storm.  I wonder if how the neighbors are fairing.  There was also some laughter and joking, especially during some the big, serious storms.

I think part of it was the calm demeanor of my parents.  I think part of it was the Holy Candle that my folks had specially blessed by the priest for severe weather and always had lit and burning when the sign of severe weather struck.  I think part of it was the comfort of being surrounded by family.  If anything bad were to happen, at least it would hit us together, and sometimes, that seemed like a much more powerful force then anything Mother Nature could throw at us.