I Am Telling About Gleaning Life-Lessons From Grampa and Gramma Allen, Though they were poor, they were rich!

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

 

I Am Telling About Gleaning “Life-Lessons” From Grandpa & Grandma Allen’s… They were poor but they were rich!

 

 

 

 

Grandpa Allen becomes very ill and he is confined to twenty-four hours a day, bed-care.  While I was pastoring a Wesleyan Methodist Church in Charles City IA, I flew home on some other urgent family business.  I wanted to visit him.  I went by his farm-home; it was dark and dank.  I learned that he was at his son’s, my Uncle George’s family-home; Aunt Harriet, a professional caregiver was lovingly nursing, feeding, and tending Grandpa Allen.  I found him homesick for the past and he literally begged me, as he had many others, to take him back home.  It was my opinion, that he did not just mean, back to the farm-home, but back to the secure healthy happy past, the home he had planned for, loved, lived in, and remembered.  Even though knowing that he was fading in mind, when he pled with me to take him back home, it tore at my heart… Though full of faith in God, he preferred the place and peace in his warmly remembered home-bed, known with Grandma Allen.  Though many were around him, he felt lonely.  He said to me, “Duaine, if you ever loved me, listen to me.  I want to go to my home.  I do not want to die here.  Please take me to my own home.  You are one who will listen to me and obey me”.  “What a timely compliment!”  “I want to go home and die there”, he said to me. I thought, “Why hadn’t he asked me to go split a dozen full-cords of firewood, or milk a dozen cows, or dig a dozen bushels of potatoes?”  I had always done whatever he had asked, as perfectly as possible.  “Not this time!”  With a tortured soul, I prayed with him.  I hugged him, kissed his forehead, shook his hand, while his eyes looked into my heart, waiting, waiting… and I finally squeezed his hand again, and slid my from his, and said, “Good-bye”!  This was the other time, I knew he felt angry, and betrayed.  Broken-heartedly, I had to depart for my next flight from the Albany Airport, and leave him there in that warm, clean soft hospital bed, under excellent expert care.  On the flight home, I cried.  Upon my return to Iowa, I received the agonizing phone call, informing me that Grandpa Allen had died.  I could not even get to his funeral!  I loved him!  We grandchildren felt the loss of one of life’s rare grandfathers, Grandpa Allen.  I remembered my last visit with him, when I reconciled myself to his heaven going, the life he lived, and death he died, and the heart and mind full his “Life-Lessons”!

I began to mull over my thoughts and memories about these wonderful people, the Grandparents and one-by-one this narrative took shape. They spent their daily routines at simply living.  It occurred to me that most of life was just doing what life demanded; merely to stay alive… that was their lives’ work.  They took for granted so much we will never know.  We take for granted so much that they never knew!  I will forever live grateful to them for all the “Life-Lessons” they taught, by their precepts and by their examples… by just being whom they were.  Pretension did not exist in their humble world of country-life, where character, reputation, hard work, faith, family, and friends defined their wealth, worth, and what they treasured.

“Life-Lessons” are confirmed in this life, through the lives of others, and by God.  However, from the lives they had lived, they seemingly innately understood the prerequisites far beyond a good college education… even without one, for the familiar to us factors like team endeavors, for divisions of specialized labor, for setting agendas, for establishing priorities, for budget control by increasing income, or decreasing expenses, and all this without a board of directors.  Moreover, we computer savvy grandchildren talk in a language they did not know; about multitasking, stock advances, major accomplishments, blackberry calendars, extensive travels, and personal influence.  The hard-working Grandparents perfectly, harmoniously followed their calendars according to the day in the year, on the wall calendar, “The Farmer’s Almanac”, and they had gotten every job done, on time, and learned from the “Life-Lessons” taught to them, those same ones they taught to us.  Their life’s experiences, confirmed, “Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How” had concise answers! “What you do, and what you do not do, again!” “What to be and what not to be”!  What really matters, is not what changes, but what never changes, those “a priori” assumptions of faith written in the fabric of the Universe, for all.

They blew out the lamps and turned on the lights.  They took off the muddy boots and put on the polished shoes.  They paved their dirt roads.  They traded in their icebox for a “Frigidaire”.  They got three pounds of “Sue Bee” honey in a bail-wire pail rather than from a wild bee tree-hive.  They put the “broom and pan” in the corner and turned on the “Electrolux”.  They had hung up their grain-sack garments and put on “Spiegel’s Catalogue” offerings.  They laid down their ‘pen and paper’ and answered the telephone.  They took down their horse barn and put up a tractor garage.  They bought hunting and fishing licenses.  They grew with their age!  But, the much they retained, we retain!  Nevertheless, they lived quiet happy satisfied lives. They read the Newspapers: “The North Creek News Enterprise”, “The Glens Falls Post Star”, “The Grit”, and always “The Farmer’s Almanac”. They read the Bible every day after breakfast and prayed together, before he went out to his day’s work.

Time marches forward, inevitably altering all things familiar to them in the temporal, but establishing and confirming the absolutes in the eternal.  Probably they would have preferred to turn the calendars back, rather than forward, not because they despised progress, but they genuinely questioningly pondered, “If or not the apparent advances were in fact improvements and advantageous.  Their own grandparents knew Abraham Lincoln’s presidency and the influence of the Civil War.  Their own generation had endured the plagues of war during, World Wars 1 & 2, the Great Depression, the Korean War, and the Viet Nam War.  Grandpa Allen had lived through “the horse and buggy” and “trips to the moon and back”.  Orientation to their time in history, and its reality conflicted with new assumptions and cultures, mores and habits, methods and the “whys and wherefores”.  Their generation witnessed the inventions or introductions of television, telephone, electric power, paved roads, indoor plumbing, and transitions from kitchen wood stoves with hot water reservoirs to ranges, and independent hot water heaters.  However, at their times of death, their “Life-Lessons”, were their secure foundations, absolute assumptions, and their Christian faith!

With them, and theirs, I ponder, “Has, what is forever important, changed… really?”  Does progress necessitate trampling our history with disdain or is our own history rather built upon the very foundations, that were safe, strong, good, and secure, for them, a history of “Life-Lessons”, upon which we must build.  They taught us that we must both value, “Doing and Being”, That is doing good things, and being good in heart, in motive, and nature. “Temporal and Eternal”, it is not either, or, but, both and!  Right? Yes they both assumed the worth and value, both intrinsic, and extrinsic, in everything, everybody, everytime, and everywhere… “Don’t do it right just because I am right here… do it right, because you are right here, and ‘He is!”

An Interlude and a musing about musings: My musings are surrounding some special people, my Grandparents.  From their by-gone era, they have conveyed to me a profound legacy, which I dare to share with you.  These are honest recollections from my vivid memories from these people, places, things, and events, circumstances, and conversations.  I am aware that any two people, including husband and wife, children, siblings, friends and relatives remember the same event and report it differently, and that is, as it must be.  Many of the things that I share here will omit some of the things you might include and value more, and I interpret my observations and experiences differently than you might.  As in all of my writings, I want absolute genuineness and factual accuracy in true-life authenticity.  However, in perceptions and experiences I must and can only report what I know.  My Brother Ron read this, and on some of the reported conversations, he was also present but focused on something else.  When, for example, one evening Dad and his boys were visiting with Grandpa Allen standing on the Garnet Lake Road near his home.  We were on the house-side directly across from Grandpa Allen’s driveway to his barns.  I asked Grandpa Allen about that bright whiteness in the heavens that spread across the sky from one side to the other, while making a broad sweeping gesture.  This night was most clear, with a crisp brilliant starry sky.  He answered me in detail, while Dad had gotten into the car and brought it up beside us.  Right then and there, Ron and Tim where playing with Grandpa Allen’s dog, throwing the stick for “Lady” the cow dog, to fetch, and tussling with her.  Grandpa Allen continued to answer me about the Milky Way, and Constellations, by name and the Big and Little Dippers and The North Star.  Though they were there, my younger brothers did not hear these pieces of information that I reveled in and appreciated, not because they did not care or hear, but because their focus was upon “Lady” and play and not the sky.

The below photos are of my Grandparents: John & Hester Dalaba, my Maternal Grandparents and George & Cora Allen, my Paternal Grandparents.  Both families had nine children and both of my parents are each the fifth child in their families.  Both families lived on the same Chatimac Mountain ridge about two miles apart.  Dalabas had two boys, Lyndon and Oliver and seven girls, Violet, Blossom, Pansy, Daisy, Rose, (Who is my mother), Fern, and Carnation (or Carnata or Candy is also in the picture above), and they were known by his teasing brothers as, “John Dalaba’s Flower Garden”.  Allens had one girl, Mary the eldest and eight boys, Frances, Harold, Arnold, Lester, (Who is my Father), Gerald, Keith, George, and Joseph Lee (Also in the picture above.)  Two of the Allen boys married two of the Dalaba girls, Harold & Pansy and Lester & Rose.

Crane Mountain on Garnet Lake Road Johnsburg NY

GRANDPARENTS

The Dalabas – John & Hester    –   The Allens – George & Cora

 

Our Grandparents were Much Loved:  I loved my Grandparents greatly, as did all of us, their fortunate grandchildren.  We also knew that they loved us, all of us.  Almost all that I tell about the Allens in my musings could also be true for the Dalabas.  Like all grandparents, I suppose, ours wanted the best for each of us, as they so often communicated it and quite plainly, “Now pay attention!”  “On the other hand, you must learn this!”  “You will need to know this!”  “I want to tell you something that you must never forget!”  “Did not I tell you?”

Grandparents Teach “Life-Lessons”: They needed us to learn all we possibly could from the much they had to teach us.  They acted, as with conviction, that they must augment our schools and our parent’s teaching and influence, that is, especially while we were their young grandchildren.  Grandparents are not exactly the same as our parents, are they?  I suspect, partly because they are older, and wiser, and seemingly possessing a whole lot more patience and even time, despite the fact that they were always busy and possibly because they usually only had one or two or three of us at once and even that only for a relatively short time on any given visit and whenever.  However, for me it seemed easier to learn a lot from them, more quickly.  They managed to convince us that we must understand, so that we could be good and profitable citizens and prepared for our own lives when we reached adulthood responsibility, which I remembered thinking, “That is forever and a long way away!”  “Little did I know what they knew?

Grandparents’ Profound Influence, Proliferates: They all remain an incredible influence in my life, though Grandma Cora May (Millington) Allen passed away in 1965 and Grandpa George Fayette Allen passed away in 1975.  Grandpa John Nobel Dalaba died when I was five years old in 1951 and Grandma Hester Bavarlestone (Rist) Dalaba, died in 1989 when she was 93 years old and I was 43.  The Dalabas had forty-one grandchildren and the Allens had forty-nine grandchildren, so subtracting double cousins and siblings, I had 65 first cousins and we all were and remain close friends and enjoy reunions, visits, and holidays.  I loved and respected all of my sixteen aunts and sixteen uncles.  We all frequently visited each other and remained secure, gracious, and amorous.

Grandparents were Good People, Living Their Own “Life-Lessons”: Practicing what they preached, our Grandparents were all very good people.  The Dalabas were Pentecostal Holiness folk, and the Allens, Wesleyan Methodists.  Both were hard working farmers, nearby friends, and neighbors and to us, superb grandparents.  All four of my grandparents were born in the late 1800s.  However, I have very nice memories and fine things to say and share about all four of my grandparents this story is mostly about my Allen Grandparents and especially, Grandpa George Fayette Allen.  I will tell you only what I know, and saw, and heard.

This “A MEMO” is an interjection written in 1981, ‘copied and pasted’ here from my own letter to my brother Tim.

“A MEMO” From LA CA and About Back Home on “The Farm””:  from the desk of L. DUAINE ALLEN

 

I left my Childhood-home, the Family, the Farm and the Grandparents in 1965 to go to college.

Fifteen years later it began to come back to me of my childhood life and its real worth to me!

July 30, 1981 Duaine & Pamela Allen and our Family 21127 New Hampshire Torrance, CA 90502

 

To My Very Dear Brother Tim and Sister Cindy, Brian and Serina,

I write warm Christian greetings to all of you. God bless you dear folks.  It was heartwarming to receive your lovely letter.  Tim, we have to do this kind of thing more often.  Every line of your letter was a genuine delight to read.  Thursday night, that is tonight, I got home from work at about 6:15 PM, and we sat down for family dinner and after saying grace (as you well know… an Allen tradition).  I asked Pamela the regular questions, “Honey Pam”, I said, “Did we have any phone calls or visitors?”  Moreover, she said, “No, there were no phone calls or visitors and I haven’t checked the mail box yet”.  Well, you know how I always anticipate “fan mail”, love letters, phone bills and the like, so I excused myself and made my way in a quick manner, and lifted the lid on our house-wall POBox just outside the front door, and what a perfect surprise for me, and I shouted, “Well, praise the Lord!”  “What is it?  What is it?”  They all asked, all five of them.  “Well,” I said“, here is a genuine, valid, bona-fide letter from the East coast, and I do declare, if my eyes tell me the truth, it’s a letter from Tim & Cindy”.  Well, with no time wasted, I served the family each their plateful of Pamela’s perfect kitchen best and then I picked up your letter and read to the entire family.  Your epistle was welcomed and appreciated.  You can imagine how perfectly the timing and the message.  Your letter had a part for everyone.  You both can be certain; it was a very special gift, to see their hearts warm, as Uncle Tim and Aunt Cindy cared enough to write to them.  Thanks; write again, would you please?  It was a blessing.  You will by now have received a letter from the West Coast that was a general epistle written once and copied by Xerox and mailed to about two dozen families – Allens, Tices, Dalabas and friends.  A little impersonal perhaps, but at least it shared some information with lots of “Kith and Kin”, easily and quickly.

We like it here very much.  Geographically, we are about seven miles from the Pacific Ocean at Redondo Beach on our west.  We are near Long Beach and the Queen Mary, and LA harbor, on our south, about eight miles, downtown LA, on our north, LAX (or LA International Airport), right near by, Watts where the race riots broke out and spread countrywide.

The Goodyear blimps are a mile from our house.  There are four such blimps.  A blimp flies over our house 20 to 30 times every day at 30-minute intervals some days.  I gave Dad a brochure about the blimps, but I did not tell him the Home Base Blimp-Pad is only about a mile away.  Culturally, in our last home in Sylmar CA we lived (near 70%) with a Mexican population.  Here in our new home, Torrance CA and our new church in Gardena CA we live with about 30% White (like us) – 30% Negro – 30% Oriental – and 10% Mexican and foreigners.  “If I ever thought about being a missionary…  I am NOW it!”  In our present Christian school, GVCS, that I superintend, these are the exact percentages we at GVCS, must maintain, that I have written for general population. The weather in our new home is about 15 to 20 degrees cooler here than our last home for four years in the scorching San Fernando Valley in Sylmar CA, neighbor to the Mojave Desert.  However, here too we will receive the same hot dry winds, those strong annual autumns’ “Santa Anna Winds”, and blowing desert sands fifty miles per hour for two weeks straight.  The Pacific Ocean tempers our new climate nicely.  Most often, it is foggy in the AM, hot and sunny in the PM and cooler in the evening tempered with the ocean breezes.  We now contend with a cloud formation, I doubt you can comprehend, “SMOG”.  The Nation’s freeway systems began here in southern California, in this large megalopolis comprised of 80 separate cities, covering four hundred square miles, and is well developed and travel through it, is easy, yet at 60 mph it still takes 2 hours from east to west from one side to the other and the same north to south.

In the “LA Basin”, we are not too far from famous places like: “Knott’s Berry Farm”, “Disney Land”, “Busch Gardens”, “Universal Studios”, “Magic Mountain”, “Water World”, the Pacific Ocean, “The Griffith Observatory Park”, the six famous cemeteries, each built with specific themes, “The Forest Lawns”, “The San Andres Fault”, “The Angeles Crest Forests”, “The Santa Monica”, “The San Gabriel” and “The San Bernardino Mountains”, “The Mojave Desert”, “Cathedrals” “The Towers”, “The Museums”, The Pavilions”, “The Convention Centers”, “The Bonaventura”, “The Huntington Memorial Library”, “The Rose Bowl”, “Jet Propulsion Laboratories”, and some of the largest churches, libraries, shopping malls in America, lots of responsibility, and good income, (But I’m Still Homesick).

What more could a country-boy want?

“You can take the boy off the farm, but you can never take the farm out of the boy.”  That is an ancient cliché, but it is a cliché because it has withstood the test of time and I will attest to its veracity.  You folks live in heaven, and do not even know it.  I am still a little homesick!  All of LA is reclaimed desert and all trees are planted and fragile, and in our front lawn between sidewalk and pavement, in the berm, and those trees belong to the city, … you can look at them and maybe even dare to touch them, but watch out!

I have wanted my children to know what you and I grew up with and knew!  I want them to know, the same joys, delights, the same freedoms, the beauties, the scenes of nature, the buildings of dams, the making of tree houses, the swimming in the creeks that we dammed up with stones, rocks and sod, the running loose with the dog, the running foot-loose and fancy free, picking roses or wild flowers for mom or the slinging of the crusty cow-flops, the original Frisbees, the sling shots, the bow and arrows, the cedar darts, the fire-crackers, the playing with the tractor and the doodlebugs, whether hitched to a plow, disc, trailer, old auto hood, or wagon, or not, the feeling that the entire out-of-doors was ours, the playing with our cousins and neighbors (without fears of drugs, murders, sex, sadists, homos, that’s enough), playing in the dark, the hide-and-seek or the capture the flag games, or the climbing out on the roof in the moonlight, or sliding down “Barney Hill” at fifty miles an hour, the playing in the hay mow, the chasing of the pigs, the milking of the cows, the feeding of the chickens, the wonder of chrysalises and butterflies, discovery of little mice nests, with the mom and pop, mouse and the wee little ones, the picking of the apples, berries and cherries, the maple syrup making, the smell of smoke from a stove wood fire, the camp fire, or the sugar house fire, or burning brush, the plowing of the fields or the snows, the hoeing of the corn and potatoes, the blowing of the ? Baritone B-Flat horn, the building of the radio kit for a “super heterodyne five circuit radio receiver” for shop classes, or remember riding on Ferdinand, our bull calf’s back until he’d stop so quickly we’d fall off his back into the grassy pasture, the monthly cutting of the trees so we could each sell one cord of pulp at $17.00 per cord and buy our own school clothes, shoes, pants and shirts, the carrying of the water on the tractor for home and farm, the digging of the potatoes, even the ugly parts like, the slaughtering of the meats, the visits to Grandpa and Grandma Allens & Grandpa and Grandma Dalaba-Capwills, and the visiting of our home churches on the way to our visit, the churches that we loved and still love.  Remember how many wonderful times we were sitting on the creek banks or down on the beaver dams and just sitting there and just thinking and talking and praying and dreaming, just loving life and breathing in clean air and enjoying four distinct seasons, listening to the sounds of nature, and just pausing to reminisce?  Not yet aware that life could be other than this, elsewhere.  Yet, I know God has called me into the ministry and I am convinced and believe that my children will love life and learn just as much as you and I did, about life and love it and enjoy it as much as we.  I do not know how; I cannot even imagine how, but I believe God is a good God and does this for all his ministers and their families.  I’ll never get used to the fact that the houses are so close that when my neighbor’s phone rings, and I answer mine; when he lays in bed and tells his wife “I love you”, Pamela turns head to me and says, “Duaine, I love you, too!” when scolding my children, the neighbors’ begin to cry.  (There is not much exaggeration, either.)  They call New York City, the Big Apple – Sin City; they call Chicago, the Windy City – business city; they call Miami, a hot retirement village.  Well, LA in the Land of Make Believe, and it is not just Disney.  Back home in our rural and in most suburban areas, aunts, uncles, cousins, neighbors know each other well and care much.  What is real is family-love and friendships, a stable support system for individuals, genuine relationships, long and deep!  If someone goes to another’s house for a meal, everyone knows about it.  It will be in the, “The North Creek News Enterprise”.  People care.  They even know when you light your lamp or flush your stool.  Out here, the opposite poses a problem for so many.  Nobody seems to know anybody else and many family units seem broken; each man, woman and child seems to be left, fending for himself, and on the freeways all sixteen lanes wide seem filled with lonely drivers, all in a big hurry to get there, somewhere, anywhere.

I know why I am here!  Sin is big, but I preach God’s Word and see “good things happen”.  Most adults leave for work early before rush hour traffic-jams, so our school has morning day-care at 7 AM until 9 AM, with breakfast, then school from ( AM until 3 PM, with lunch, and then day-care from 3 PM until 7 PM, with dinner.  The kids often fall asleep on the way home, they tell us, as they ride home with equally fatigued parents.  We serve hot delicious, nutritious meals, three times daily, plus snacks.  Many of these students are here twelve hours per day.  I have been here one month this week and I have led over 300 of these precious schoolchildren in the sinner’s prayer throughout this school of six hundred-fifty students, and visiting in each class through-out the days.  On the playground, in the corridors, in the classrooms, wherever and whenever, we meet them, they seem to want to know acceptance, worth, security, friendship, and just a little minute of personal time to tell or to ask about something, wondering if anyone really cares and if anyone really loves them.  We assure them that Jesus does love them and that we do too!  I really love you.  You are forever my family.  Write Soon, Won’t You, Duaine

Grandparents’ information sources brought them closer to their changing world.  They loved and used the orange-yellow “Farmer’s Almanac” and appreciated its recommendations.  I saw them refer to it occasionally, and heard them ask each other, “What did the “Farmer’s Almanac” say?  They got the “Grit” newspaper from Tommy Armstrong, a near neighbor up towards Garnet Lake, and by the end of the week, they could report its contents, nearly verbatim.  Because they lived in the mountain valleys with no direct line of sight to any TV transmission-towers, the best TV reception from their best antenna approximated snowy images faintly visible, and its sounds usually noisy static, during their entire lifetime.  There big brown radio connected them to their outside world.

They chatted with a new breed of information source, the door-to-door peddlers… who were driving about the countryside in new station wagons, with product offerings now readily available in our stores.  However, peddlers also brought with them new tidbits of information, insights, and opinions, from life about the county and beyond.  With Grandma Allen’s apron money, she purchased an “Electrolux Vacuum Cleaner” from one such fellow.  This occasioned one of the only times I heard them tiff, about anything.  Grandpa Allen declared, “But we don’t have any rugs!”  Grandma Allen retorted right back, but we sure have a whole lot of floors, with sawdust, bark, dirt, and stuff coming in from out-of-doors, somehow.”  She continued, “Besides, he told me that this new broom thingy would sweep it all up.”  They sat down, prayed grace and shared their meal together… though Grandpa Allen, a notorious tease, did enjoy sharing this story with each new guest for quite sometime, even two or three times.  Even Grandma Allen saw the humor in it all.

Grandpa Allen finishes his dinner… Grandpa Allen’s own massive steel wheeled tractor was way too cumbersome for these haying fields and therefore would not be in use on this haying-day.  With his permission and with a great sense of pride, I had taken “Barney and Cub” down to the river to drink their fill for the day’s chores in the haying field.  When I returned with the harnessed team, I stepped into their kitchen just as he was finishing his dinner-lunch.  Oh my, the satisfying smells alone were an intense temptation to invite myself to their table… though I restrained myself!  I observed him taking one of Grandma Allen’s canning jars, full of a quart of his fresh milk and drinking the whole quart, at once.  He finished the home-fried potatoes, salted, and peppered, fried in Grandma Allen’s own churned butter.  I noticed that Grandma Allen put cream in her tea and in his coffee.  He ate his last bites of venison and fresh homemade bread.  He sopped his bread in some homemade current-jelly and tearing off another piece of bread, sopped some in his own maple syrup, in a saucer.  I noticed that the syrup left in the saucer, he drank.  His salad was a whole carrot and a handful of fresh green stalked onions.  Most of us, of their forty-nine grandchildren almost never ate at their table though we often enjoyed some of our best chats during visits at their mealtimes.

Especially influential was this story about being a Gleaner from Grandpa Allen’s, “A Haying Field Lesson”.

This is the “Haying Field Lesson”: This story took place one beautiful summer day, the kind of blue-sky, fluffy cloud, gentle breeze ideal day on loan from heaven, when my father and we, his children, Ron and Tim and our cousins, Jim and Dave and I, Duaine were helping in the haying fields on Clifford Cross’s farm, typically.  Dad had just gotten this new “Farmall Cub Tractor” and tools for loose hay, a sulky haying rake, and a loose hay haying loader.  We were helping Grandpa Allen whose team of horses, “Barney and Cub”, were standing on this opportunity in the shade under the edge-fields dense maples, standing and ready, hitched to a haying wagon, awaiting the next command from my Grandpa Allen.  Dad proudly and with delight whisked his new tools about the field, first raking up and down the field’s invisible corridors making rows of hay mounds and next straddling these mounded rows with his small pneumatic rubber tired tractor, wagon, and haying loader in tow.  Some of the grandsons were in the haying wagon with Dad making load, but with side-racks.  I had ridden the sulky rake behind Dad’s tractor making the mounded rows.

Now I was with my Grandpa Allen, and his team, “Barney and Cub’.  With a three tined pitchfork in my hands, as he had in his, and I was learning and he was teaching me, how to make a square load with this loose hay that would stay on the wagon piled high during the miles back to the barn’s haylofts.  He artistically weaved the forkfuls of hay into tightly woven bundles and placed in patchwork patters that tied the whole load together.  Old-fashioned… yes but it had worked for him for many years.  From the ground, Grandpa Allen advanced the horses about the field, simply with ‘Giddy-Yup” or “Whoa There” or “Gee, and Haw” with astounding proficiency, until both wagons were now loaded.  Again and yet another trip, with horses, tractor and both wagons full of hay, we went back to the barn.

The Barn swallows welcomed us with their commanding calls back to their barn… as Grandpa Allen’s horses and wagon pulled onto the barn floor beside the humongous bay on the right, and the lofts above the milking barn on the left.  Above the milking barn, the hay would also serve as insulation for the animals during the forth-coming winter months when temperatures could frequent zero and below.  Whether to the team of horses’ Whipple-tree or to the tractor’s tow bar, the rope would affix and that long strong rope passed through a barn window up to the pulley in the barn’s peak over the center of the bay.  The rope passed through that pulley and down to the new load of hay.  At this end of the rope, four huge forks tines, attached, which were skillfully pushed down into the loose hay, not too deeply, and not to shallowly.  The horses or the tractor would pull the rope forward, lifting from the load of hay, the first forkful.  Quite like a giant hand, the hay would lift from the load.  Raised high from the wagon, the forkful would swing from the load in the middle of the barn floor out into the large bay when Grandpa Allen would pull the trip cord.  The large handful of loose hay would drop and near miss those of us mowing away with pitchforks, putting the hay evenly about the bay into the four corners and in between until the load was offed.  The forkfuls of hay would broadly swing back and forth until it was above where it needed to drop into the lowest place.  The falling hay blew vast clouds of hay, dusts and seeds swirling about us, visible in the bright sunlight coming through cracks in the barn-board walls and whirling and twirling in and out of the light and shadows, peppering us sweaty fellows, blanketing us with layers of field-dust.  We anticipated a cool swim in the Mill Creek after haying daily, just to rinse off sweat and chaff.  Grandpa Allen commanded the tractors, the horses, the boys, and the men with polite but certain calls, understood by all and obeyed instantly, lest injury should haunt us, and for necessity to accomplish the jobs.

The men respected us, the boys and granted us responsibility with the tractor and the next load.  On this beautiful waning summer day, we returned to the same fields from whence we had loaded six loads of hay into the bay.  We could all see and we all judged that that there was nearly another whole load left.  What was left on the field was raked into windrows, and upon our arrival to the field, we eager young beavers proceeded to make this load by ourselves, while the men cooled in the shade of large maples and they leaned against the field stone wall, and stood with the horses sipping Grandma Allen’s sweetened iced tea, tainted with mint leaves, sharing a chit-chat of glorious other days.

Grandpa Allen teaches a life-lesson about gleanings.

Grandpa Allen began to teach his most valuable life-lesson for the day.  When we excitedly and proudly had finished with finesse this seventh load, our own last load of hay for the day, and the field was now visibly bare we drove our tractor hauled load over to the men under the maples with some pride, distinction and quite some measure of satisfaction, expressing to ourselves and them, “A job well done… ayah?”  When the anticipated, “A job well done!” did not come back, but rather, “The job is not yet finished!”  I remember feeling, “aught oh!”  “Aught Oh!”  It was then that Grandpa Allen began to teach his most valuable life-lesson for the day.

In my own mind, I rehearsed lessons for the day.  I thought that we had already learned plenty, even on that very day; “riding this new loose haying rake”, “using this new loose haying loader”, “learning the proper careful use of the pitch-forks”, “making the loads of loose hay tie together”, “sharing turns at each station and responsibility”, “pitching on”, “making load”, “the unloading”, “mowing away”, “obedience to each succinct command”, “quite like the horses”, I thought to myself  and yet, one more life-lesson and job, we did not perceive and could not have conceived.  At first, when Grandpa Allen instructed all of us to go and retrieve the hand-held haying rakes with wooded teeth, one for each of us, with the instructions to go over the entire field by hand, from the far edge and to rake this way with these hand tools, for the last load.  I thought, “Grandpa Allen, the field is clearly empty.”  I wondered to myself, “Grandpa Allen, are you upset or angry with us?”  “Maybe for using our new tractor, instead of the team, and tools, or maybe we had talked too much, or maybe we had unwittingly disobeyed a vocal command.”  Such thoughts coursed through my mind.  But without voicing any of this, we kids and the men all obediently began raking the empty field, and, “low and behold”, as we raked together from across this empty field, I was astounded that we gathered another full load of hay, and this was our eighth and largest load of these fields, and all from what Grandpa Allen called, “The gleanings”.

Grandpa Allen had taught another life-lesson and this one was about gleanings.  This one “life-lesson”, would characterize my ministry, and, has since 1964, until now, and in large measure, even defines it.  I have gone about this country raking up the gleanings with equal joy and energy, as on the day Grandpa Allen taught us about gleanings… gleanings from every country, town, little village, and cities… helping these gleaned ones to find homes, pews, podiums, benches, stations, factories, mines, mills, stores, farms, jobs, pulpits, families, and friends, rural, city and suburban.  That life-lesson, learned that day, I realized, was the “life-lesson”, that would define my life’s work, my pastoral office, and my evangelistic ministry.

Grandma Cora May (Millington) Allen: My Grandma Cora May (Millington) Allen was deeply loved and much cherished by all who knew her.  Grandma Allen was very special to me.  She was a churchwoman and she never wanted to miss church, but Grandpa Allen rarely ever attended church.  Grandma Allen loved God, and Church and Sunday School and following the morning service, an assembly, called by the Wesleyan Methodists, “The Class Meeting”, in which every church member weekly stood in turn, and gave a testimony, quoting a newly learned scripture, sharing prayer requests, confessing to temptations or failures and making reaffirmation of their commitment to God.  This was in the John Wesley tradition required of the members of his “Methodist Holy Clubs”.  Grandma Allen also attended mid-week Prayer meetings, Bible Studies, revival, and missionary services.  Grandma Allen was tender of heart and spontaneous in worship, deeply convicted and frequently, she raised a white handkerchief as a flag, and waved it about while singing in reverence or testifying of her love for God.  Commonly, while sitting with her in Church, I observed that during services, in her sweet tenderness, she usually spoke softly, meaningfully, tearfully and reverentially.  She always requested prayer for and prayed for the salvations of every one of her friends and relatives, weekly.

Grandma Allen was also intent in typical “Life-Lessons”, teaching whoever might be there with her.  She taught about making soap, or jams, jellies and fruit preserves or canning venison or orchard fruits and garden vegetables.  She would take us to her garden with her and a hoe for each one and she taught the art of hoeing weeds and banking potatoes right there beside her, or she would give each of a pail and we would pick beans together.  Later we would sit on the stone steps just outside her kitchen door snapping those green and yellow beans.  She taught us the making of sourdough pancakes or small curd cottage cheese on the back of the kitchen wood stove.  She taught about well water hardened with high mineral content or soft spring water, fresh as rain but from deep within the earth.  She taught boy, or girl, how to mop or sweep or to hang curtains or carry firewood, correctly.  She taught about making bread, cornbread, and biscuits, and flavorful stews, soups and gravies, and satisfying switchels, a sweet gingery vinegary beverage to cut summer thirst, sweet root beer sodas, and coffees and teas, white and sweet.  In addition, by team effort they produced some apple ciders.  Grandpa Allen preferred his cider chilled, with just a little bite, not sour and not fermented.

A race was never announced, but subtly, it was understood, … with both Grandparents, that it should be, “bean for bean” or “hoe for hoe” or “tit for tat” and so all was accomplished, by cooperative team-effort.  Life was and all happened and the sun shone, and the animals giving birth, grazed, and the rains rained and the leaves budded, swelled, fruited, colored and dropped.  The snows snowed and trees budded again and grew.  Their “Life-Lessons” trained me, fascinated me, and enhanced all of us their enamored grandchildren.

Grandpa Allen tended the livestock, his herd of cows, claves, horses, swine, and poultry . After milking the cows at six AM and six PM he separated some of the milk into cream and skim milk, from his milk in her kitchen, on the DeLavel Separator. He explained that he cranked at precisely sixty crank-revolutions per minute on the clock. This was the perfect speed to separate the cream and the skim milk. The skim milk and the cream poured out of the two spouts into separate crocks.

Grandma Allen keeps busy churning butter and mopping her kitchen floor.  Her sister, Aunt Inez during a brief visit, share a chat while mopping the floors.  Grandma Allen warmed the cream on her kitchen-table near the windows, to catch the morning sunlight and then churned the cream into butter, paddled it, salted it, molded it into one-pound blocks, wrapped in wax paper, and sold it.  She preferred a large wooden salad bowl, as her butter bowl, for expressing the excess buttermilk.  Then salting it to taste, mostly for preservation to protect it from becoming rancid, then she molded it in wooden molds for measuring and shaping the butter, before wrapping.

Grandma Allen gives a Pulpit Bible for a college kid’s classes: One Sunday while we were at church, Grandma Allen asked me to come by the farm-home on Monday to have lunch with her.  She wanted to give me some things and to talk with me about my future and my college plans.  I told her that I had applied to and had been accepted at three colleges, Houghton, Marion, and Roberts Wesleyan.  From my birth, according to a little tidbit, she shortly shared with me, she anticipated that I might become a preacher.  The next day, she said to me, “When you go to college, you may be able to use these tools”.  Grandma Allen then gave to me several Sunday School Bible Lesson books that she had paid many cents for, each, and some challenging missionary stories.  She had used these books, marking them quite methodically, I observed, as I thumbed through each one, standing together, with her.  This was a tender moment.

Grandmothers dedicate a Grandson to God:  She again told me a story about when my other Grandmother, Grandma Dalaba, and she Grandma Allen, had traveled together to visit my mother and me, at my birth.  Grandma Allen told me that they laid their hands on me, prayed for me, and blessed me, a new infant.  Because, both had together dedicated me to the Lord, right there, in the Glens Falls Hospital, she now encouraged me, saying that it did not surprise her that I was now seriously considering becoming a minister.  (Uncle Sam discharged my Dad just two days after my birth, she remembered.)

Grandma Allen again, prays for me.  I had mentioned to her about my quandaries about the ministry, whether or not I should become a minister.  She again tenderly laid her hands on me, one hand on each arm, while we were standing together.  (I mention this standing, because at that time, her health disallowed her much standing.)  She fervently prayed for my decisions and my future ministry and me, for the wife I would marry and for the family I would have, and for the life, I would live.  Then, and since then, I counted this experience both, as a blessing and as a prophecy.  I still cherish those holy moments and that prayer was a sacred gift and as a profound promise from God.  I reveled in this blessed, prophetic, and captured moment.  She subsequently asked me to share in the value of these items in the box that she was giving to me, items that she cherished.

Grandma Allen said, “I know that you will value and use these items.” “I hope that they will help you.”  She continued, “Our pastor, Pastor Robert C. Finley was about to raze our neighboring Mill Creek Wesleyan Methodist Church building, the one just up the road, and she gestured.  He gave this Pulpit Bible to me from that Mill Creek Wesleyan Methodist Church.  I know that you will value and use these”, she repeated, moist-eyed and sentimentally!  I did rely upon that very Pulpit Bible, an 1877 edition, for my college career in ministerial studies.  I still have it right here with me.  Fortunately, it had several valuable tools not readily available elsewhere, including detailed outlines of every book and chapter of the whole Bible and it gave a superb synopsis of the messages of the entire Bible, by major subjects.

Grandma Allen continued with her brief history lesson of our own church’s background.  “That church building had been a vital link in the “Underground Railroad”, she continued, “The Wesleyan Methodist Church” broke from the Methodist Church on that very issue, slavery.  We did not appreciate the concept of others being used as slaves, and we did our part to help many slaves secure freedom up in Canada”.  “During the time of my own grandparents,” she explained to me, “slaves would come to the local churches before dawn, and leave after dark.  She continued this amazing story, “Having been well fed, tended, bathed, laundered, mended, and loved, then they were sent onto their next station, rested and with a bag of abundance for their harsh journey, north to freedom and Canada”.

Just a few short months after my Lunch-Chat with Grandma Allen, she became increasingly ill.  She continued to encourage all others and herself, rehearsing Psalms 91.  There on her bed, and what became her deathbed, she retold a war story about Uncle Gerald, while on the battlefield during World War 2.  She had faithfully prayed for each of her family daily!  Nevertheless, on one particular night, she knew that God so convicted her to wake up and to pray, and pray she did, and not for her several sons in the same war, but specifically, to pray for Gerald.  She and he, noticed the time, corresponded by mail, and verified that it was at that exact time.  He was in a fierce battlefield fight and took a bullet in the chest, while on the far side of the globe, far away from her.  She had slipped out of her warm bed; this very same bed, and out into the cold and onto her knees in fervent intercessory prayer for Gerald.  We have all heard Psalms 91 used by her as the prayer she prayed for Gerald that night.  We have all heard about the pocket Bible he had in his shirt pocket that arrested that potentially lethal bullet.  It has been proudly on display for all to see, since then, and it is to the amazement for all of us; to correlate the time of the bullet and the time of her prayer and the Psalm.  That the bullet stopped at Psalms 91, right in his shirt pocket Bible, the prayer she believed!  I have held it in my own hands.  Uncle Gerald displayed his proudest war souvenir token on his mantle clock shelf always.  Rightfully so, Grandma Allen glorified God, for that souvenir token was to her, answered prayer.  The “Life-Lessons” she taught still teach!

(Psalms 91 New Living Translation)  Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty.  This I declare of the LORD: He alone is my refuge, my place of safety; he is my God, and I am trusting him.  For he will rescue you from every trap and protect you from the fatal plague.  He will shield you with his wings. He will shelter you with his feathers.  His faithful promises are your armor and protection.  Do not be afraid of the terrors of the night, nor fear the dangers of the day, nor dread the plague that stalks in darkness, nor the disaster that strikes at midday.  Though a thousand fall at your side, though ten thousand are dying around you, these evils will not touch you.  But, you will see it with your eyes; you will see how the wicked are punished.  If you make the LORD your refuge, if you make the Most High your shelter, no evil will conquer you; no plague will come near your dwelling.  For He orders his angels to protect you, wherever you go.  They will hold you with their hands to keep you from striking your foot on a stone.  You will trample down lions and poisonous snakes; you will crush fierce lions and serpents under your feet!  The LORD says, “I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name.  When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble.  I will rescue them and honor them.  I will satisfy them with a long life and give them my salvation.”

Grandpa Allen calls everyone home to the family farm-home… everyone to come to their farm-home… all the family… all the friends, because she was very ill.  Despite her intense illness, she spent her last moments with each one in rich apropos farewells rehearsing pleasantries.  Grandma Allen slipped into a peaceful sleep and made her entrance into the heaven she anticipated.  What a “Life-Lesson”!

Her passing was at the conclusion of my High School career just a few months before I left for a Wesleyan Methodist College to become a minister, and just short months after our earlier special visit.  She believed and had said, “Duaine, you were dedicated to God as an infant, and you are called of God, now, as a man!”  I am very glad that we had our visit, when we did!  Her death cemented my heart-energies to “The Call” and focused my attention on priorities and her “Life-Lessons”.

Grandpa Allen asks questions of me, about God and faith.  Some short years after my college education, ordination, and a little experience in pastorates, I had again returned home for one of many familial visits.  Grandpa Allen and I connected heart to heart, as we loved to do, and we pondered together, the much behind us and the much before us.  Some long time after Grandma Allen had died; he had married his second wife, Grandma Inez, one of his former schoolmates.  They got along famously!  I lived away a ways, during most of their marriage, and never had gotten to really know her.  Shortly thereafter she too, died.  He was feeling quite lonesome.  Thereafter, he pretty much stayed on top of his mountain, at home, during this time and would even send others to the store for him.  He frequently said, “I’ve got to stay home…  I’ve got to tend the home-fires.”  During his lonesomeness, he had turned his heart and thoughts towards God and the Bible, more than ever.  He told me, “As one gets old and ready to die, it is not a good time to forget about God.”

Grandpa Allen invites us for a Visit.  On yet another occasion, during a brief visit back in the Adirondacks, my dear cousin Stella and I went together to visit Grandpa Allen, in his farm-home, as we had done, while children.  Amazingly, he asked both of us about our faith and our growth in Christian living.  This surprised us both.  He often had mentioned God, but not this directly.  Frankly, he had left that important stuff, up to Grandma Allen.  Always before it seemed that, he spoke more generally, and not so specifically.  However, this was quite direct, enough so, that Stella and I both looked at each other and smiled.  My beloved, honored, and valued grandfather asked me questions about God, faith, Christian living, heaven, and hell.  He said to me, “Duaine, now that you have studied the Bible, in college, received ordination, and have been pastoring, I ask you to share with me some of the truth you have been learning and give to me some insights on these subjects and help me to understand more clearly”.  What a daunting request!  Though my Grandfather was my senior, he himself was still eager for “Life-Lessons” and insights.  He was a continuing student, but I chose to chat with him on these subjects, rather than to presume sermonizing and teaching my own mentor, teacher and venerated Grandpa Allen.  He told us that several months ago, he had begun a regular weekly, in-home Bible Study from some pretty devout and wonderful Christian people, and he believed that his faith was growing, but he still had some honest questions.  After answering him and sharing with him, we prayed and we departed.  I went back to my next assignment.  Some months later, I heard that he was very lonesome and quite sick and that Mom, Aunts, Pansy and Harriet, and many others were tending him in his home.  He worsened.  They procured a hospital bed for his home.  Then they had to move him!

Collating “Life-Lessons” from Grandpa & Grandma Allen took a life-time of their influence, learned while we were children and teenagers… I want to reminisce some of these poignant nostalgic memories.

Toy Whistles: He made toy whistles, quite like a recorder, for his grandchildren.  In the springtime, he took sapling sticks from the light green/yellow stripped, Lyndon or Basswood bushes, and ingeniously crafted precise whistles for each of us.  He taught us to take about a six-inch piece of the sapling stick.  Demonstrating, with his sharp pocketknife he cut the bark layer only down to the wood.  He made this cut about two inches from the mouthpiece end of the whistle.  Then he slipped the cut bark off the wood, saving the bark, and then whittling the exposed wood, he made both a “V-groove” and a breath-notch, from the lip piece to the “V-groove”.  Then he returned the bark to the wood by slipping it carefully back onto the whittled wood.  Then he finished with a cut for the sound to escape, in the bark, to create the high-pitched whistle.  The bark of these sapling wood sticks could only be removed from the wood, while the sap flowed, during springtime, and for only that brief time.

The Ice House, Canning Jars, and Cold Well Water: He harvested ice from nearby lakes with ice-saws and cut huge blocks of ice.  With ice-hooks, he hand carried these blocks to the horses’ sleighs or wagons.  Back at home, he stored the ice in the ice house attached at the back of his farmhouse.  Stored, insulated in sawdust, and ready for Grandma Allen’s icebox cooler.  Whenever the ice supply failed or for convenience, whatever foods needed cooling for preservation, which could not be pickled, smoked, or salted, they cooled in the well.  I observed that they used glass jars with raised lettering that I traced with my fingers, “B-a-l-l”, “K-e-r-r”, or “M-a-s-o-n”.  These very handy canning jars came with lids, and they found many uses and often-stored butter, milk, and any other of many food items.  They tied each jar with a small long heavy twine and let it down into the well’s cold water, and tied the small ropes at the far side of the well crank.

Grandpa Allen enjoyed his life, not because he told me so, but because I observed him enjoying life.  I saw him angry only a couple of times and rarely frustrated. However only on one occasion, he and she disagreed strongly, very strongly, about something, I know not what, while she stood in the door way of their home and he about twenty feet away from her in the tractor garage, kneeled down working on the tractor, and they had a lively discussion. Though a next door neighbor, and so very often there, that was the only time I saw them upset with each other. I do remember one early-spring day that was very cold, following a long bitter cold winter and the firewood supply was nearly exhausted, and he had to resupply the firewood for the home-fires.  In an untypical aggravation, he accused himself for not having planned better.  I realized that even with the best-laid plans and preparations, emergencies could still come up.  I went with him to load the wagon.  Usually, though never caught off-guard or unprepared, he felt that this time he had been. I heard his determination to preclude such a thing again. And that was that!

Grandpa Allen enjoyed his life, I observed. However, mostly, he lived life in an agreeable routine that felt comfortable to him.  A pleasant man he was, to all.  He appeared principled, energetic, purposed, and directed.  His motivation seemed to come from within. He always knew instinctively what was next on the agenda. He was steady, not hurried, not slow. He was diligent. He was focused, conscientious, and ambitious.

Grandpa Allen’s Curiously Quipped Quotes spoke “Life-Lessons”: Quoting famous others, on many subjects, he often quipped a quote.  On this occasion, he referred to using the whole tree.  “Waste not; want not!”  For the bitterly cold days so familiar to his home turf there in the frigid Adirondack’s winters, he prepared firewood.  Nevertheless, he also used the occasion to earn cash.  He sold the logs, the pulp, and some of the firewood.  He wisely cut down the trees and used every part of the tree, often some of the trees’ trunks were for logs, and some parts of those trees’ upper trunks and larger branches were for pulp and the rest of those trees were for firewood. He even dried chainsaw sawdust and shavings for kindling. This amazed me.  He even used the light branches and twigs as kindling and some of the leaves for mulch.

We Grandchildren were Running For The Joy Of Life, To Nowhere, For No Particular Reason: I joined cousins and kids in the fun and frolic of running afoot up and down his many, dirt roadways naturally resultant from his activities throughout his woodlands, fields, and clearings for the logs, pulp, and wood.  Especially delightful, were the roadways near to Kibby and Mill Creek, and my favorite were those through his dense woods.  Sometimes, the roadways were strewn with fallen leaves, bark, and rocks, or with winter snows, spring-mud, slush, and ice.  Kids and we cousins, played long, hard, and often, out in Grandpa Allen’s fields, neat woods and their roadways.  On a few occasions, we used doodlebugs and tractors and traced these paths.  Uncles created the doodlebugs, which were severely modified auto chassis with a shortened frame and driveshaft.  Uncles removed the sheet metal and the heavy hoods.  The hoods slid down hill in the winter snows, or attached to a long strong rope towed behind the tractor doodlebugs, and transport large loads of firewood, barrels of water or blocks of ice or for the rides of your life.  Fortunately, no one was ever hurt!  The doodlebugs rear axles were just behind the drivers’ seats.  They retained their engines, but supped up and tuned for the power of a tractor and the speed of a jalopy.  Grandpa Allen reminded us, “Tractors are tools for work, and they are not toys for play”.  “Tractors must be kept for work.”  “Play with the doodlebugs, all you like, but after school, and remember work, and chores always come first.  However, you must repair the ruts and banks your doodlebugs’ spinning and sliding wheels make on my roads when done!  Do you hear me?” Partly jesting and partly not! “Yes Sir!”, chimed in.

Grandpa Allen’s Honey Bees were wild, on the Flowers and in the Trees: He collected honey from wild honeybees.  He searched for their hives by following the workers pollinating his crops and field-flowers and his planted rows of sunflowers, along side his tractor garage and chicken coops, on the honeybees’ return trips to their hives, high up in an old tree.  He listened intently for the bees humming, in the hive.  He adeptly harvested the honey with specialized tools and paraphernalia, following advice from the neighbors, the Almanac and his remembered calendar for the time of the year, so that the bees could rebuild, resupply and survive.

Grandpa Allen’s “Life-Lessons” from His Barns, Pens, and Coups were Valuable: He had two barns, one for his teams of horses and one for his several milking cows.  His chicken coops for housed flocks of “Rhode Island Reds” brown eggs and “White Leggers” for white eggs, produced an abundance of poultry meat and breakfast and sale eggs.  His several pigpens and sheds housed his herds of field swine, in inclement weather.  Producing pork was profitable.  He laundered and dried hen feathers for bed pillows and feather beds.  From the trees in the low pasture, he collected butternuts and walnuts for drying on the upstairs floor of his garage.  Beyond what he grew, he found it to his advantage to buy some of the grains for chickens, pigs, and cows at the local “GLF” or “Grange League Federation”.  The fifty and one hundred pound bags of grains came in very nice cloth, which Grandma Allen used as materials for dresses, aprons, curtains, bedding, et cetera.  Grandpa Allen always used the natural occasions with the farm’s chores to teach “Life-Lessons” to his grandchildren.  So, whether, in the pens, the coops, or the barns, or out in the field’s pastures, gardens and haying acres or out in the woods, where he was lumbering-logs, paper-pulping and fire-wood cutting or meat hunting, or finding and collecting wild-bees’ honey, apples, he taught valuable “Life-Lessons”.  We grandchildren eagerly learned and observed these “Life-Lessons”.  Now, these “Life-Lessons” are foundational for our lives, throughout, and since then… these “Life-Lessons” that worked in potato patches and haying fields work for me, in mission fields and ministry stations.

Grandpa Allens’ Smoked, Brine-Pickled, and Sugar-Cured Meats satisfy many.  He maintained active hog pens, both for selling piglets and for producing pork; smoked, brine-pickled and sugar-cured.  He had a large smokehouse that could hold an entire large hog hung by the heel-tendons and produced each meat-carcass smoked with the savory barks of any of several trees, cheery, hickory, maple and other flavors, and smoked to light, medium, or dark.  He maintained large stone crocks for salt-brined and sugar-cured meats.  He had large earthen crocks in his cellar for these salt-brines and the sugar-cures, and shared his recipes with Dad, and his other sons.  Inside the earthen crocks, the cut meats would float to the top, if not weighted down, so he placed oak boards and a large rock on top of the contents of each stone-crock to keep the meats submerged. When time to bring to the kitchen a piece of pork, he’d lay it on the cutting board and carve off a piece as if to verify its perfection, and nod to Grandma, “Okay it’s ready for you to fix, whenever you need it.”

Grandpa Allen enjoyed our help as much as we enjoyed helping him: He routinely called me, or one of his other grandchildren to fetch his cows on every rainy day when the cattle would be as far away from the barn and at the farthest point in the pasture.  Like the Huckleberry Finn narratives, Grandpa Allen occasionally allowed us to take turns cleaning the cow stalls and the horse barns.  I watched him administer medical liniments to the horses’ legs, a thick salve, called “Bag Balm” on the cows’ teats and carefully cleaning their wounds with warm soapy waters.  He took very good care of his livestock.  One of the first warm sunny days of a summer vacation, with Grandma, I really enjoyed watching him train a frisky new calf to drink from a pail of milk suckling his fingers approximating its mom’s teats, submerged in the milk.  I asked if I might try that, and he said, “It will hurt your fingers!”  It did!  That little calf sure had a big suck.  When the pail was empty, the calf butted it about, playfully.  He had several grandsons help him while winnowing and throwing his wheat into a humongous fan powered by the tractor’s “PTO”.  The strong wind generated a gale force that blew all of the light chaff up into the air and away with the wind.  All of the heavier grains, wheat, barley, millet and oats or what ever else, he was harvesting on that day would fall about the same short distance from the fan making mounds of grain.  He would bag the grains in burlap and put the bags onto the wagon to take to the gristmill, for cash, barter, or flour.

Grandpa Allen’s Cellars, Bins, Racks, and Shelves: He kept his cellars dark where he filled his potato bins and apple bins.  His bins were about four feet high by four feet wide by eight feet long.  I believe that he told me that he could put about forty bushels in each bin.  Every autumn his cellar shelves were laden with kitchen-canned goods prepared through the summer.  He filled his root cellars with waxed root crops and his cabbage racks were hanging from the cellar ceiling in tightly packed rows of drying cabbage and large onions.

Grandpa Allen’s Fruits, and Berries, Wild and Tame: He picked berries for Grandma Allen to turn into table spreads.  In the summertime, he invited us to go with him as he hiked up Crane Mountain to pick the plentiful blueberries, covering the mountain.  He took us to the fields to pick strawberries.  He took us to the briar patches, over by the old sawmills and up beside the nearby abandoned quarries and mines to pick the raspberries and the blackberries, from the abundant thriving bushes.  I asked him if he had planted the briar-berry patches.  “No!”  “And don’t fall into the quarry; I’d have to leave you there!”  In my opinion, his apple orchards were the least well-tended thing on his entire farm, but still fed the table with eating, baking, and sauce apples.  On one occasion, he took us to see, his deer drunk with the fallen sour apples, staggering.

Grandma Allen’s kept her own flower garden and her own vegetable garden. She love her lilac bushes and rose bushes for the flowers, and the asparagus plants for the table, she also kept in the flower garden. She maintained her own fine seed vegetable garden. On many occasions, she invited any who came to visit to bring a hoe to her garden and hoe a couple of rows of vegetables, with her. It was like a law to them… They never said “Will you go hoe my garden? No, they both always said, “Will you go with me to hoe my garden?” She warned that if the bean-plants were wet with dew or rain, they would rust and die, if we touched them while they were wet. She took pride it the gardens, and while hoeing, talked about some story from childhood, pleasant incident, humorous anecdote, or a ‘life-lesson’.

Grandpa Allen’s Cedar shingles were for houses mostly and kids: He produced a cedar shingle with a specialized saw-attachment for his table saw powered through his tractor’s “PTO” or power-take-off pulleys via a large, wide, and heavy canvas belt daubed with thick black sticky tar.  With these shingles, he shingled his entire home and garage.  He also sold shingles to many others.  He made a fascinating toy fashioned from a shingle dart for us with a few of these shingles that we all thoroughly enjoyed throughout our childhood.  The large flat wedge-shaped shingles he whittled to the approximate shape of a ping-pong paddle.  The handle being the thickest part of the dart and was the heaviest part and the pointed end of the flying dart that invariably stuck into the ground upon its return from high in the sky.  The fan part was the thinnest part of the dart and became this flying rockets wing.  He cut a notch in the crook at the juncture of the handle to the fin in which a knotted rope lodged.  The separate piece was the launching tool, held in the right hand… a stick with a rope maybe 18” long attached at one end of the stick and knotted at the other end.  With the left hand, he taught, hold the fin taunt, and aim the pointed end towards the sky and with a strong whipping motion of right hand propel the dart up, very high into the sky.

Grandparents both often taught me without me realizing they were teaching me…, as they were prone to do with each of their grandchildren.  We all loved to visit with them.  I visited them often.  I garnered wisdom from them by their precepts and by their examples.  They were wise, knowledgeable, and understanding, country-folk.  They were practical and as they themselves often observed “having horse-sense” was tantamount to being smart, and probably, “a bit better than being educated, by books, but not clever enough to come in out of the rain”.  They could read the Bible, newspapers and almanacs well.  They could write notes and letters superbly, both having especially excellent penmanship.  They could do arithmetic, to determine charges at the counter, or to settle on the board feet in logs, or an amount owed and due.  However, neither had a great deal of education, beyond, “The McGuffey Readers” in their local one-room schoolhouse.  Incidentally, I think that those “The McGuffey Readers” would be a challenge for most of us.  Very often, I not only heard them both reading the Holy Bible to each other as they did daily after breakfast and praying together, but I heard them in casual conversation remarking about the Bible in relation to the news and recent frequent chat with relevance.  Both were capably skilled well in the many facets of their lives’ work required of them habitually.

Grandparents’ Social life was at its’ country-best: On occasions, I traveled with them, and my brothers and cousins, in their little “1960 Ford Falcon”, and heard them both express satisfaction with life.  Their discussions were jovial, on these infrequent visits to the stores in Johnsburg and North Creek villages.  Grandpa Allen, would roll down his car door window and pretend there was a spittoon out there somewhere, and whenever he rolled down his window we dove for the other side of the car, and no one preferred to sit directly behind him for that reason.  In their day, folks would gather around the potbelly stove beside the pickle and cracker barrels, to play checkers, or dominoes and mischievously, to taunt each other at the local general store.  Over at the “The GLF” or “The Grange League Federation”, Grandpa Allen would join the men sitting atop the piles of bags of grain, before loading his own.  They could be chewing on a cud of new tobacco, or a timothy straw or a “Juicy Fruit” or just the fat.  Grandma Allen picked up some staples, from each row and carried on her own conversations with the neighbor-ladies, swapping recipes and progress reports of cellar stock, breads, gardens, curtains, and table spreads.  Down at the “IGA” or “The Independent Grocers Association”, they also shopped.  Often heard were remarks about the weather, the news, and maybe some recent events possibly something even cataclysmic, and earth-shaking, but usually not, but only routine exchanges.

We lived just about a quarter of a mile down the road from my Allen Grandparents. Grandpa George Fayette Allen was a respected friendly and helpful neighbor there in the rural Adirondack’s countryside where eking out a meager existence required deft, skill and intuitive persistence.  At the time, my story begins, my father, Lester Earl Allen was serving Uncle Sam, during WW 2 in the Coast Guard, and two days after my birth he was honorably discharged.  Several of my Dad’s brothers were also in the Navy and Army during World War 2, and at the time of my birth, my Allen Grandparents moved within Warren County NY from their farm on Chatimac to a new farm on the Garnet Lake Road in Johnsburg New York.  He had moved to this new farm anticipating increased productivity on the larger acreage.

Grandpa Allen was skilled as a sawyer, a woodsman and on a few occasions for brief periods, he also worked for hire on jobs near to his farm both as a garnet miner and as a highwayman constructing and paving dirt roads, especially the road to North Creek from Sodom.  However, he was forever, by his preference a farmer.  When I think about my grandparents, I think mostly about what they taught me, both by their examples and by their precepts.  I recall them as the presenters of “Life’s Lessons”!

Learning Integrity is His “Life-Lessons” for me on this day: From all of us he assumed personal conscientiousness, accountability, and integrity.  I learned the differences between, borrowings, takings, and stealing when Grandpa Allen had changed the spark plugs in his tractor and while at his table with Dad and him, whilst they were conversing; I picked up the old plugs lying on the windowsill and played with those old plugs on his table.  We heard more sonic booms overhead, from Plattsburg jets, and they were discussing those and other things.  Assuming them trash, since he had replaced them with new, I took the old plugs home with me.  I did not even put them in my pocket, but played with them in my hands while going home.  Upon discovery, even before we got home, my father returned me with the plugs to Grandpa Allen’s home, and immediately, I had to confess to my thievery.  This was a hard situation.  I had not intended to steal!  I did not think that I had stolen.  I thought I had Grandpa Allen’s assent.  I thought they were trash.  I thought that if he were going to throw them away, I could make toys of them.  That was so hard; I did not want to be doing this to Dad or to Grandpa Allen.  It mattered to both men that I had the plugs.  I knew I would never again make such unwarranted assumptions.  Taking things without permission could be misunderstood, very easily, as stealing.  Grandpa Allen and Dad taught me.  I had to confess that I had stolen those plugs!  Without declarations of my thoughts or intents and without defense, excuse, or denial, I confessed.  After listening to Grandpa Allen and Dad, I felt that I had sinned.  I did not have to work up any tears.  They flowed.  I was so deeply sorry.  Dad and He forgave me for my sin.  They worked together to make this a “Life-Lesson”!  He refused excuses, and demanded honesty, carefulness, justice, and best efforts.  He spoke God’s word, “you must avoid even the appearance of evil”.  He was kind, but firm!  He laid the plugs back on the windowsill, where they lay for years.  I think Grandpa Allen left them there to remind me, or maybe that was just where he would know where they were.  “When in doubt, don’t!”  “Okay, Grandpa Allen”.  “It isn’t their worth, it’s the act!”  “Yes, Grandpa Allen, I understand!”  He quoted, “Ask and you shall have!”

Wisdoms: “Grandpa Allen” taught us, his grandchildren, about husbandry, plants and animals, forestry, and orchards, nuts and fruit.  As an Adirondack Mountain-man, he knew the life-saving significance of directions remaining conscious of compass directions, day or night, and keeping orientation of N-E-W-S while in the woods, especially.  He taught the necessity of dry matches, a sharp jack knife, and being careful of thin ice over moving water, while following rivers downstream.  He taught the value of finding the North Star, at night, and landmarks by day.  He taught about the cycle of the seasons, vernal and autumnal equinoxes and summer and winter solstices.  He taught about day and night, gaining two minutes of sunlight every day between December 21, the first day of winter, and June 21, the first day of summer, and loosing two minutes of sunlight daily from June 21 to December 21.  He taught that the first days of autumn and spring were equal days of sunlight and darkness.  He taught about latitude and longitude, and hours of each day measured by meridians.  Intrigued himself, he taught us about the Milky Way and he told about the Almanac’s names for at least a dozen constellations of the Zodiac and others of the heavens, while pointing them out to us, on different occasions.  He was fascinated, himself, as he named them: Aries (The Ram), Taurus (The Bull), Gemini (The Twins), Cancer (The Crab), Leo (The Lion), Virgo (The Virgin), Aquarius (The Water-Bearer), Pisces (The Fishes), Orion (The Hunter And His Belt), Pegasus (The Winged Horse), The Great Bear (Or The Big Dipper), The Little Bear (Or The Little Dipper).  “Constellations of the Zodiac” Microsoft ® Encarta ® Encyclopedia 1998 Illustration © 1993-1997 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.[1]

He educated all of us on many captivating subjects. He spoke about how to read many of nature’s weather signs.  “The red clouds of the morning dawning, come with warning, and the red clouds of the night dusking, bring delight.”  “The rustling leaves of summer turning up, while the Blue Jays are squawking, announces an impending storm”.  “The leaves changing color announces the geese migration”.  The “fussy wussy wooly worms” are predictors of deep cold snows.  “If the woolly worm’s head is more black (darker) than colored, the coldest winter months are at the beginning.  If, however, the woolly worm’s coat is more black than brown, the worse winter is going to be”.  “The larger the size of the ground squirrel’s stockpile and the extra bushiness in the squirrel’s tail indicates severe winter weather”.  If squirrels start collecting large numbers of acorns early, that is another sign of a bad winter”.  “If the hornets’ nests are high in the treetops, there is a mild winter coming, but not true if those nests are closer to the ground”.  “If the anthills are high by July, a snowy winter is coming”.  “If leaves seem to stay longer on the trees in the fall, it is a sign of a bad winter”.  “If onionskins are thin, that means winter is supposed to be mild”.  “A warm November foretells of a bad winter, however, if the first snow falls on unfrozen ground, expect a mild winter”.  “Once smoke descends, fair weather ends, a smoke rising high might mean more clear skies.”  He taught about fun things like training our pet dogs to fetch the cows, sticks and other kids.  He answered our “Whys”, about the “salt-licks” that he stuck on a post out in the pasture, “For the livestock’s health”.

“Life-Lessons”, are practical: They never took attendance nor prepared lesson plans, but school was always in session.  “Life-Lessons” just naturally emanated; “It is darkest before dawn”  “You begin your barn chores at dawn and dusk”  “Eat the healthy breakfast, dinner, and supper set before”  “You don’t have to like it; you just have to eat it!”  “Take all you want but eat all you take!”  “Work hard and play fair, and be a man about it!”  “Be happy, healthy, and well adjusted!”  “Speak your mind, but be sure that your brain is in gear before you wag the tongue.”  “Always tell the truth, even if it will get you into trouble!”  “If it is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well.”  “Discipline yourself and you won’t need someone else to do it for you!”  “Take care of your animals first; your lives depend upon them.”  “Don’t be afraid of hard work!”  “Learn to take the bitter with the sweet!”  “Help in carrying the load of others!”  “Don’t worry about who gets the credit, just get the job done!”  “Don’t fret about the halfhearted efforts of others; Shame their little efforts with your many efforts!”  “Always help the weaker!”  “The one carrying the load has the right of way!”  “Help make it easy for the next person!”  “If you open it, you close it!”  “If you spill it, you wipe it up!”  “If you mess it up, you clean it up!”  “If you empty it, you refill it!”  “If you turn it on, you turn it off!”  “If you take responsibility, you are responsible!”  “Take responsibility!”  “Be responsible!”

Grandpa Allen teaches “Life-Lessons” about Fences and Hard Work. Lessons just happened.  Hard work just was.  Property boundaries just were.  Certain designated territories, others, and ours, must be respected, and not only people but also animals, like the large pasture belonging to his huge bull.  He taught us to, “Work smart, not hard”!  “Use the, “Okanogan””.  He cajoled us to act wisely and to behave well.  He forbade us to conduct ourselves unthinkingly, “Think before you leap!”  “Do not wear the bright red color sweater you are wearing, in that huge bull’s pasture.  “Wear appropriate clothing for the job you are doing”.  Respect property-boundaries marked by big massive rock wall fences between neighbors, built by rock masons.  Respect field-boundaries, stone-fences marking out our fields.  The field boundaries, on the other hand, are marked by stonewall fences, stones just thrown into piles and rows, from the fieldstones and rocks exposed after freezing and thawing and gathered each spring from the adjacent fields.  Those stones were tugged, rolled and thrown onto his horse-drawn sliding stone-boat and thrown off onto the ever-growing stone-fences at the edge of each field along the tree lines.  Often, he had remarked, while we helped him, “My farm is one of the best in the Adirondacks… for growing stone fences.  Throwing an old pair to each of us, he said, “Wear these leather gloves while throwing rocks”… jesting, “I can get more work out of you!”

He even taught “Life-Lessons” about the worth of little electric wire fences.  It was one beautiful Sunday afternoon that I was sauntering my way across the fields and through the woods, up to Grandpa Allen’s to join with the Sunday crowd.  They usually gathered out under his front-yard apple tree on such a lovely day as this one was.  Sure enough, I crossed the Kibby Creek on an old fallen log, reminiscent of a thousand times before, and just as I broke through the shaded woods, I came out into the sunny pasture.  In the distance, I heard their familiar indistinct joviality and felt familiar with their kind of happy playful talking.  As I meandered through the pasture, towards them, I must have caught their eye, for they all began to call to me with increasing animation, shouting.  At first, I could not understand them, and then I did, “The bull is charging!”  From my curious but calm oblivion, I awoke!  Looking with them in panic, back over my shoulder, I felt the rushing bull, closing in upon me.  A million things began rushing into my thinking.  I was running now with breakneck speed, wondering, “Does that monster care about little wire fences?”  I catapulted myself to the ground while rolling under that very little electric-wire-fence.  Lying there on the grass, I looked back to see Thunderbolt stopping with all four feet, right at the fence, on his side.  Now he was snorting, pawing and continuing to threaten me.  Grateful for barely visible little wire fences, I picked myself up from the grassy pasture field, to dust off my cherry red sweater, when I exclaimed, “Grandpa Allen, I thought that you always kept “Thunderbolt” in that other pasture!”  “He is just having a little Sunday visit with the cows.”  Grandpa Allen said this, laughing with all of the uncles and cousins who were having the heartiest belly laughs, laughing and laughing.  I tore off my cherry red sweater, rolled it into a ball, and stuffed it under my tee shirt.  I had provided them with the Sunday afternoon sport and entertainment for a perfect day!  I tried to enjoy this episode, and to see the humor, even though at my expense.  I trembled, post facto.  I am so very glad that “Thunderbolt” respected Grandpa Allen’s little wire fences!  “Oh, Duaine, I trained him to do that with fences!”  He explained, “When he’s young, I touched him twice… good for life!”  “It goes for kids too!”

He instructed each of us to avoid his habit of “Redman” and “Beechnut” Chewing Tobaccos.  He would drink from the fresh cold spring water pail and pass the dipper on to us.  He had just gone to the kitchen door and used the spittoon, and pulling his big blue bandanna-handkerchief from his hip pocket and wiping his mouth, stuffing it back into its pocket and then gotten the dipper from the fresh cold spring water pail, for his drink to slake his thirst.  When he passed it to me… he observed my hesitation… he asked me, “Do you feel yourself too good to share a cold drink of water with me?”  However, I did not prefer to, I did… and for that, I received his approval!  I learned at that moment, the worth of his approval was above that of my selfish prejudices.  He was teaching us in this and multitudes of other ways to do what we don’t prefer to do… to accept others by changing ourselves without requiring others to accommodate us… to refuse to be judgmental and critical of all others in every way they might differ from our own ways.  Despite his bad tobacco habit, he used situations to teach good “Life-Lessons”

Tool Maintenances, Mowing, and Bee Stings: He had just finished grinding and sharpening his tools, using his round stone grinding wheel, powered by a foot-peddle, that he cooled with dribbling water while sharpening each tooth on the mower’s cutter-bar, and his axes, spades, and shovels, and each “Scythe & Snathe”.  I watched him replace some broken teeth with new on the cutter-bar using the hammer, chisel, anvil, and rivets with washers, and then he reassembled the cutter-bar.  “If it’s broke fix it, ‘n if it ain’t, don’t”

One day Grandpa Allen was mowing with his team and riding the mower. While he was mowing, and with his permission we, niggling grandchildren were walking far behind him when the cutter bar sliced wide open a ground hornets-nest.  My little brother Tim, closest to the team, was stung seventeen times.  For some reason the others of us were only stung a couple of times.  Immediately, Grandpa Allen sized up the screaming-terror behind him.  He assumed responsibility.  I saw him leaping from the mower, and while running, he swept up my little brother into his arms, while still running, and he carried Tim already much swollen, rushing into the farm home, where he laid him on the kitchen table, “fearing for his life”, he later told us.

He and Grandma Allen prayed softly, as she quickly made a soda paste to paint onto his stings before his transportation to North Creek, the seven miles to our Doctor Grunblat’s office.  Taking care of the most important task first, is always most important!”  This severe episode showed me that though he had mowing to be done, Tim took precedence.  Tim received his loving and caring attention.  Sometimes even harnessed horses and haying work must wait, sometimes when something else maybe even more important, than what you would prefer to be doing!  His concern gripped me!  Even though I thought of Grandpa Allen, as a tough hard working, very strong outdoors kind-of-guy, and though he was a man’s man, he was a good man, with a loving caring heart for all of us, his little bothersome grandkids.  “Heart-Touching!”  I felt of my stings, “Ouch!”

Whether he was Republican or Democrat, I really do not know… but I do remember hearing him in very animated conversations with some of his daughters-in-laws and others remarking about the 1935 Social Security Act, for some reason back in the news.  I did not know what that was, but I knew he did not like it.  I was a little intimidated by the intensity of this debate.  My parents assured me this debate was only their entertainment and sport, but I remembered that Grandpa Allen finished his end of that conversation with his observation, “When anyone would get to that age and need it, it could very possibly, already have been spent!” “Having convictions, with strong feelings is very important, even if others disagree!”

His Discussions Entertained Us: He believed in private property and personal ownership.  I heard the discussions between his company and himself on the subject regarding Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s efforts for the Adirondack National Park Agency, newly formed.  I was not aware of all of this, in 1968.  The Agency had wrapped itself around his private property and suggested its authority and its new laws, superseded his own rights.  According to his discussions, a God-fearing, law-abiding and voting-citizen, he wrestled with his own rights, regarding his land, trees, deer, honey, apples and all else and agency rights.  “These are all on my own land.”  He had life long fed his family from the prevailing abundance including venison, on demand.  I heard him wondering, “Who are these gentlemen down in the city demanding that we go hungry, and so these ‘city boys’ could better determine the methods for deer-herd population control?”  Eventually they would all learn to live together in perfect harmony, but, “Wow”, the birthing process, reminded me of the Genesis curse on Eve’s birthing.  Around Grandpa Allens Oak Scroll Stove there were many discussions solving all the problems of the world.  He often jested, “If they would just listen to me!”  During such chats, Grandpa Allen enjoyed munching on his roasted butternut, sunflower seeds or fresh hot buttered and salted pop corn, homegrown and freely offered to all.  Though not everyone agreed with him, he maintained his opinions and equilibrium!  “Yep, I knew what you think and why, but I also know what I think, and that is what I live by!”

He Casually Spoke About God: He assumed God’s existence and spoke to me so, on several occasions.  I know, because I asked him specifically, and he affirmed that our daily lives depended upon God.  Those who did not take time to learn the truth may not have considered him a religious man, but though never lecturing, he glorified God with conviction in brief comments, gestures, and faith-statements.  While a zealous Bible-thumping teen-ager, I grilled him, respectfully, but persistently.  He believed in The Bible, Creation, Salvation through Jesus Christ and Heaven and Hell, because he told me so.  Regarding God’s glory replicated in nature all about us, he spontaneously listed the remarkable succession of seasons, the astounding weather patterns, the majesty of our Adirondack Mountains, the awe-inspiring cloud formations.  Like this one rare instance, while Dad was backing out of Grandpa Allen’s driveway, he knocked on Dad’s car hood.  He exclaimed to all of us, in the car, “You must get out, and see this awesome sight!”  He had Dad back his car into his barns’ driveways, about halfway to the barns, in this, the dark of night.  We all piled out to observe on that January 31 1961 evening at 6:47 PM, that brilliant blue moon, the rare second full moon in the same month that was just appearing, rising from behind Pine Mountain, just as a picturesque cloud floated into the scene with wispy tails trailing, decorating the night-heavens.  I wished then that I had a camera or canvas and brush to capture this instance.  The full Moon raising in the east, just behind the Pine Mountain and in front, the cloud’s Majesty struck us all, with awe!  All of this beauty and power in nature is way beyond man: the snows, the winds, the rains, the bright cloudless days, the darkest overcast nights.  “It is easier to believe He did it than that He didn’t!”  “It is here!”

Daily Devotions before Work: After chores and breakfast and before the day’s work, He would read the Bible every morning with Grandma Allen and he would kneel by her red chair where she usually sat and they would pray aloud softly in turn with deep reverence and respect.  I felt most honored, to witness them, this and to know their genuine devotion.  This affected me very deeply.  After their devotions, he removed his slippers and put on wool socks and rubber boots, while admonishing me to be thoughtful and careful and said, “Duaine, don’t just trust everybody who is nice to you, to truly have your best interests at heart.  Be smart and keep your eyes and ears open to God.  He will guide you.  You can trust Him!”  Then he said, “It must be nice for you to have a snow-day off from school, but I still have to go to work… come again won’t you!”  After he pulled on his heavy barn coat, he was ready to face the cold and the snow.  I was surprised that he pulled on woolen lined sheepskin leather mittens and not gloves.  I mentioned it.  He told me that they were warmer.  I felt the chill surge through the front door as he exited, and I saw Grandma Allen shiver with the chilliness, and I jumped over “Lady”, the cow-dog, to get her shawl from the other chair.  “We must talk to Him, while we are alive and well, if we want Him to listen when we are not!”

Important conversations just happen and most often, spontaneously: There in rural country life, few kept a social calendar or made appointments for visiting or for receiving visitors, but Grandpa Allen hosted causal drop-ins, family, friends, all neighbors, maybe coming for hair cuts, business associates and partners, the pastors, all with delightful, involved and animated conversation.  Nevertheless, he did have his limit with talk.  On at least one occasion, I remember Grandpa Allen adroitly saying to me, “Duaine, I hope you never loose your curiosity and your ability to ask questions!”  That was usually right after I had asked one too many questions for that day.  “There’s a time for talking, and then there ain’t a time for talking!”

Fishing at a New Lake: He took us fishing.  Grandpa Allen’s lighthearted fun entertained us, while he taught us.  It seemed to me, that whatever he did was natural, easy, fun and the right thing to do next.  He seemed infatigueable.  “Nothing was too hard!  “Nothing was too easy!”  “If it had to be done, it had to be done!”  After the day’s activities and the evening’s chores and supper, on several occasions, he took several of us fishing.  By kerosene lanterns, we, the kids, dug the dunghill earthworms and white grubs, got the poles and tackle boxes ready, and then we all proceeded to any of the many lakes and streams at the foot of, Eleventh, Huckleberry, and Crane Mountains.  For us this was fun and sport but for him it was for a next meal.  He taught about fish with scales and fish without.  He taught about top or surface feeder-fish, clean scalely fish like trout, middle feeder fish, and bottom feeder or scavenger-fish, unclean smooth slippery fish, like bullheads and suckers.  He wanted trout!  Dad said that he would take any caught… and not to throw them back, but to put them in his fishing Creole-basket.  Grandpa Allen might say, “Put him back to grow some-more.  I like ‘em bigger!  I want mine, filling my plate!”

The Long Walk: I fondly remember one special night when Dad, Cousin Henry, and he, took us fishing at the foot of Huckleberry Mountain at a lake, I had not known, before that night.  After the cars had taken us as far as they could go, coming to gully-washed ravines, on these narrowing rutted-dirt mountain roads, we got out of the cars and slipped into the pitch-black misting darkness to relight the lanterns and begin our trek.  Grandpa Allen carried his stainless steel milking pail that night, and I asked him, “Why”.  He informed me that he needed a large trout to put alive in his fresh water spring to eat all bugs and intruders, back home.  Moreover, he did catch a large fish that did live in his spring for years.  That trek became a phenomenally pleasant unforgettable and superb long walk.  In and out, each, it seemed probably a couple of miles; our swaying lanterns were casting their bouncing shadows.  We kids were chattering and bantering with each other, from in line behind the men.  They were walking with calculated steps and speaking deliberate thoughts to each other, evidently enjoying this trek as much as the forthcoming fishing.  The mingled sounds of our boots crunching the gravel roads with the melodious night-symphonies nature presented were now enveloping us.  As they spoke, a gloom began to resonant with their faintly scary “panther” and “bear” stories retold for the kids’ benefit and other yarns of vaguely mysterious animal creatures of the woods, “real and imaginary”.  The sounds of the gentle raindrops splattering on the rustling leaves, in the hazily chilling breezes swaying the trees began mingling with my excitement for the fish-catch.  This entire scenario etched indelibly upon my mind a valued memory.  The preparing for fishing, the going fishing, the fishing, the fishing clean-up and eating the fish were all benefits of fishing and each aspect of our fishing episode was as important as all of the others!

I still cherish this country-life, the kitchen table, with the warmth of their love and this unspeakable atmosphere.  I can still imagine the feel of the scales and of the smell of cleaning the caught fish.  I can still feel the fried soft delicate fish flavors; moist, rolled in flour and fried in butter and those exceptional frying aroma.  From any place, any time those savors, tastes, and sights create reminisces from Grandma Allen’s kitchen.  Uniquely loved sensory satisfactions learned then remain deep down, where they reside to delight the heart and the palette.  Those savory flavors, proffered with this trout, her fresh sourdough pancakes, served with warm butter, real maple syrup, her griddled “pomme de terre” cakes, offered with new milk gravy or sawmill-sausage gravy.  “Always delicious, and nutritious, and making one feel ambitious”.  The warmth of these moments and the warmth of the Grandparents’ love equaled the warmth of their home.

Maple Syrup: Annually, for the brief springtime weeks during the crisp freezing nights and the warmer sunny thawing days, when the maple sap would flow, he collected sap in buckets at the tap of tapped maple trees, and boiled down about a barrel of sap for each gallon of maple syrup produced and added nothing but fire.  His maple sap-boiling table was outside in nature, out in his pasture in a natural bank and not in a sugarhouse as most others.  He built his table on a metal framed stand set into the natural dirt bank to hold and control the heat produced from burning pulp-sized pieces of four-foot long, four inch diameter sticks as fuel for the syrup making.  He created a generous supply of pure maple syrup, maple cream, and maple sugar-candy.  The collected cold clear sap would slowly flow through a floatation valve in a controlled flow into this convoluted sap table.  It had parallel panels as though one long trough, but folded back and forth upon itself.  The intense fire boiled the sap in this stainless steal boiling pan and the excess water evaporated.  Left behind, was the syrup.  The sap flowed through the parallel panels in the stainless steal-boiling pan passing through openings at opposite ends, in the bottom corners, back and forth becoming increasingly thicker, sweeter, and browner and at the catty-corner of the table from the sap inlet; he opened the syrup outlet spickett to fill the next gallon jug with pure maple syrup.  He tested the sap/syrup and right when the now ready maple syrup aproned and did not drip off his wooden ladle and on a candy thermometer, at precisely 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the boiling point of water for that day, he would fill jugs, with some of the world’s best light amber flavors, and medium amber savors.  Several Cousins, at the end of the run, took over-boiled down syrup and twirled this very sticky maple-jack onto a stick, like a lollipop, of pure caramelized sugar maple flavored.

Collating “Life-Lessons”© by Duaine Allen 1946.03.02

 

Reverend L. Duaine Allen

Pinnacle Towers – Apartment 509

10 Cole Street – Wellsboro PA 16901-1239 (570)-723-1956

lduaineallen@gmail.com, lduaineallen@yahoo.com