Mailboxes and Old Barns: It Wasn't All Peaches and Cream

Have you ever had a dish of peaches and cream?
Not half-and-half. Not Cool Whip. Cream.
The thick cream from our cow’s milk would be called whipping cream in today’s check out lines but it was just every day cream on the farm, kept in the cream can in the fridge.
The cream can was galvanized tin and probably held something over a quart. It had been re-purposed from some grocery-store purchase, perhaps orange juice since fresh fruit wasn’t available in winter. Juice from cans like that always had a metallic taste. The paper that announced the original contents had been stripped off and sharp edges around the edge ground away and the shiny can is now, forevermore, the cream can.
There was another cream can made of sturdier stuff that stood about three feet high. It held five gallons accumulated over a period of weeks in the cool basement before it would be taken to the train depot where it was put on the next freight to Williston. It was delivered to the creamery where it was combined with hundreds of gallons from other five gallon cream cans, bottled and delivered to all the grocery stores in the same towns from which it had come, and then returned as an empty on the same freight train westbound. My father always got the very same can back because it had a metal name tag with our rural route box number in raised metal letters, attached with a small wire to the handle.
Some of it became became homemade ice cream on a hot July Sunday afternoon- in the shade of the old porch on the north side of the house – the one that always had daddy long legs spiders under it.
Those daddy long legs were a favorite weapon in the hands of older brothers. It was routine entertainment to pick one of them up by one or two legs and toss them toward any girl in the vicinity whether she be sister or the sister of a friend.
The boys threw the spiders and the girls dodged them, yelling a bit as they did.
The very quiet girls who were held up as worthy role models (for the consideration of those of us who were not quiet) seldom had spiders thrown at them. I still think the reason is that the boys were afraid they’d start crying, instead of yelling like we did just before we started planning some harmless revenge.
But I digress – back to the warm-from-the-cow cream and the peaches.
Fresh peaches in August, peeled and sliced, lay supine in the big dish that was sometimes called an ice cream dish. Today it’s called a peach dish and cream is poured over the peaches before sugar is sprinkled over both.
Slow consumption is the rule for this event and even teenagers know this is something to be savored because at the half way point, the combination of cream and peach juice is the color of a quiet sunset, the sweetest nectar imaginable.
Peaches and cream sure was (peaches-and-cream is singular) something, but anyone worth their salt also knew that life wasn’t all peaches and cream. We certainly knew that.
Three years plus of MBOBs now and I’ve not talked much about the things that were not all peaches and cream. The painful memories and harsh events. The unkind women or the occasional man discovered in the midst who turned out to be a liar.
I haven’t talked much about the fears and tears of farm parents whose young son had shot the neighbor’s horse, all in an effort to see how close he could get to shooting the horse without hitting him (it was the second to the last shot).
Sometimes there was public shaming that served no purpose. Sometimes low profile public shaming served great purpose and bore the fruit intended but even that doesn’t have to be talked about…
…and now the sheriff is driving up their long driveway because the neighbor – who is not angry but is out a plow horse – has to take steps to recoup his lost and doesn’t want to accuse the boy directly, so he drove into town and asked the town cop to call the sheriff.
The boy is found hiding in the basement behind the freezer.
The neighbor was paid for replacement of the horse and after some passage of time, hearts resumed the decades-long sense of being at ease in one another’s presence, able to sit quiet over a cup of coffee and a piece of pie.
I haven’t talked much about the grief of the old couple who had a small farm that barely kept them fed who got the news that their son had finally gotten himself killed as a result of his wild motorcycle riding on country roads…an event predicted by their neighbors and friends for a long time – people who worried for him as well as for themselves. They all practiced Extreme Defensive Driving on the narrow roads for fear he might be coming at them at ninety miles an hour around the blind curve and they warned their own teenagers to have nothing to do with him.
A few years later his parents were found dead in their tiny house the day after they returned from their annual winter pilgrimage to an equally tiny house on the edge of some orchard near San Bernardino, California where they could live more cheaply during the winter. Travel was cheap, too. Gas was between twenty and thirty cents a gallon, and they packed their food for the trip before they left so that no food was purchased on the road. It was far easier to heat a tiny California house than put a furnace in a tiny Montana house.
They had returned very late the night before from California, arriving in late April to get their little wheat crop planted. The little house was chilly. They built a little fire in the single pot-bellied stove to take the chill off and because they were so tired, they didn’t remove the newspapers from the stove pipe right away – the stove pipe that was the exhaust. They sat down to rest in their old stuff rocking chairs – just a bit before getting ready for bed but then they fell asleep never woke up as the house filled with carbon monoxide. No shame in that, but an extremely painful loss for the community.
Neighbors noticed the car in the driveway the next morning and were excited to see they were back for the summer. By ten o’clock there was, strangely, no activity in the yard. Better go and see what’s up.
I haven’t talked much about the fears of mothers whose daughters got in what amounted to serious trouble in those days and impacted the family for a lifetime. The oldest daughter went to visit an aunt in Western Montana [a distant family member who no one had ever heard of] and when she came back eight or nine months later, she and her siblings were very quiet around the rest of us kids for a long time.
Nothing unkind was ever said about them or to them. Anyone saying such things would soon have their own problems with the neighbors if they weren’t careful. But the heartbreak was three feet deep in that farm house and neighbors who loved them tried to have them over for coffee more often to break the loneliness.
I figured out twenty-some years after the fact that the reason some relatives suddenly disappeared from view behind the family moon and never reappeared had everything to do with a new baby whose grandmother was the wife of his father. There were also details about the North Dakota State Penitentiary involved in that figuring-out. I’ve never talked about those things and I won’t. No. It wasn’t all peaches and cream.

This post, on Easter, is an acknowledgement that there are things that I have chosen not to talk about. Neither public nor private shaming are inherently good or inherently destructive but both were a dynamic in our community as they were in many such communities in the 1950s.
It’s a fact that unnecessary talk about painful facts can become retroactive shaming. It’s also a fact that in the year or so before the MBOB posts became part of TCTH, I noticed that even people who didn’t know our family liked reading the word pictures. People who didn’t even know our family found value in them.
It seems there’s a magnet within us that yearns for something good. Something strengthening.
There’s something within us that wants to respond when we hear great heavy church bells ring.
Somehow forgotten metal shavings lying deep in the heart are drawn to the surface when presented with thoughts of a Vermont town square that has a little white church and out of control daisies along a fence line…or thoughts of a bunch of cowboys sitting around a campfire in the evening after the cattle are settled down… and we find ourselves hoping with them that the coyotes heard in the early hours of the previous morning didn’t come back.
Simple thoughts about streaks of spilled white paint on a steep barn roof that still make me laugh, because I remember my Dad laughing about it.
Our hearts yearn to see and hear and respond to something that is good.

I’m no dreamer. I’ve seen too much not to know that it’s not all peaches and cream, but I have also seen good things diminished and brushed aside with pseudo-sophistication or cynicism silently suggesting that that’s just too Norman Rockwell. Or perhaps it’s brushed aside because we’re afraid of being seen as naive?
I’m so grateful for all you who identify with the good memories and who sometimes just need to hear that your own good memories are valid.
The simple goodness that is part of your life, then or now, is powerful.
The MBOBs of each of us, together or separately, are reminders that it is possible to love well and live well just because we choose to – now.

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A dear friend in Minnesota hugged me well at the funeral last month. She grew up on a farm during the ’50s and ’60s and hated every minute of it because her father was a slave driver who was bitter at his lot in life and made sure that everyone around him paid a price for it, beginning with his wife and children. Believe me, she has no fond memories of growing up on a farm. She has always hated everything about farms and farm life.
I gave her a copy of MBOB The Book anyway and hoped it would not cause pain, since I had the farm girl life that her father’s choices prevented her from having.
She read it and emailed me. Told me how it brought her to tears that had some healing in them. That some of her childish dreams were affirmed and she knew that the dreams she dreamed were not false or poor – dreams about having time to climb trees and chase her siblings.
The choices of others obscured them but there was nothing wrong with her dreams and there was nothing wrong with her. Reading the MBOBs told her heart that she was right all along.
Others have emailed me saying that they tuck the word pictures away as their own since their own stories are a little more like my friend’s, or perhaps a stable family and neighbor-love were just not part their young years.
It seems to encourage good people to hear good things and be reminded that they are not crazy for aspiring to live easy and clean.
It’s been on my mind for a long time to try to put this on the table in some specific form so I just decided to do it now in this time frame that is still transitional for me. Do it and get it over with, I guess.
I wanted you to know that I know now and I have always known that it wasn’t all peaches and cream. I don’t have illusions now about what it was, and I certainly didn’t have illusions then. I was seeing it from the inside. I had a front row seat.