Today we think of Sharon as she attends to final services for her beloved husband and closes a link within the chain of life.

You see, it’s rare when we are able to witness a link close within the chain of our life.  Usually we can only see the individual links in hindsight.
We hear a familiar song, or stumble onto a reminder, and we recognize all that existed within that memory has changed completely.  Perhaps we live in a different place; perhaps we hold a different job;  perhaps we are surrounded by entirely different people than those who exist within the stirred memory, within the previous link.  We can see them clearly in hindsight, but never actually see the closing as they are forged.
It’s profoundly rare to be cognizant of the moment the link closes and a new link begins.  It is more rare, still, to participate in the closing.

For many beautiful reasons Sharon holds a very special place in all of our hearts; so instead of presenting a story of time remembered perhaps you will pause with us for a moment – and join us in sending your thoughts, prayers and heart across the miles.
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I am sure many of you start your Sunday mornings off in the same way I do.  After we grab that first cup of coffee, we look forward to a stroll back in time to a place we have never been, but yet we have seen often.
We slow down and take that turn by the old mailbox, down the long predictable driveway, and just there is the old familiar farmhouse.  Just over there is the barn, and the fields stretch out in a vista before me.   The sky is an endless blue that meets the fields, but we know stretches forever.
We hear the sounds of pans rattling through the open kitchen window; from somewhere we hear the sound of farm machinery, maybe a tractor off in the distance.  Yes, my Sunday is off to a great start with Sharon’s guided tour as I begin to read her latest offering of Mailboxes And Old Barns. (more…)

The first Band Day in Williston, North Dakota was held in 1932 which was not a very good year. The Depression was settling in and making itself at home.
An invitation was sent to high schools in the small agricultural communities of western North Dakota and Eastern Montana  asking them to please show up in uniform on a Saturday in May and march the length of main street while playing Sousa’s best.

~~~~~~~~1932~~~~~~~~

• This and the next year are the worst years of the Great Depression. For 1932, GNP falls a record 13.4 percent; unemployment rises to 23.6 percent.

• Industrial stocks have lost 80 percent of their value since 1930.

• 10,000 banks have failed since 1929, or 40 percent of the 1929 total.

• GNP has also fallen 31 percent since 1929.

• Over 13 million Americans have lost their jobs since 1929.

• International trade has fallen by two-thirds since 1929.

Congress passes the Federal Home Loan Bank Act and the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932.

• Top tax rate is raised from 25 to 63 percent.

• Popular opinion considers Hoover’s measures too little too late. Franklin Roosevelt easily defeats Hoover in the fall election. Democrats win control of Congress.

By the 1950s, 60 or 70 bands in sparkling full-color, feathered and polished finery were marching every May,  led by majorettes ranging from 3 year old beginners to state champions.
The lead unit was always a large color guard and each band had its own flag bearers carrying the American Flag and their state flag.  With 60+ American Flags going by, there wasn’t going to be any sitting anyway so no one brought chairs.  If anyone got really tired, they could just perch on the edge of the sidewalk.
Bands with 20 or 25 instrumentalists from small schools are applauded for successfully completing a simple countermarch in front of the review stand.  The larger bands, boasting 50 or 60 members (or very occasionally, a few more) may tie up that spot for five or six minutes with detailed maneuvers that, from street level, just look like people walking back and forth in front of one another.  There was a daytime television station broadcasting in black and white so the efforts of the bands who could do complicated stuff were filmed, broadcast and preserved for those who had TV sets.
Band Director Lloyd Bjella (at left in the photo below) was a legend in his own time.  Mr. Bjella directed two and sometimes three small bands from neighboring towns, including Epping, where he directed the band for 33 years. Alone, these small schools  couldn’t afford a band director; but together, they hired Lloyd Bjella.  His bands were separated in the marching order to allow him to march with the first band, hop in the car that was waiting for him at the end of the parade route to be driven back to the starting point where he would join his next band as they began their parade.  There was always a noticeable crowd response to the second (and third) band, to let Mr. Bjella know that his effort was recognized.  He was one special, quiet and irreplaceable, Norman Rockwell kind of man.   He was our very own Music Man who never had anywhere near 76 trombones.
Behind the last band in the parade was a gaggle of The Cutest Little Twirlers: 3-7 year olds dressed identically, and strutting their skills.  The applause they got was matched only by that given the Bag Pipe Band from Canada which was always the highly honored Very Last Unit in the parade.
Those Bag Pipers kept every farmer, farmer’s wife and youngster rooted in place until they passed.  We loved those bag pipes. Even in memory it seems to me that hearing those bag pipers once a year was our version of flying to Paris for dinner.
After the 90 minute parade was over, the picnics began.  Many among the hundreds of families [including the farm families who had gotten up two hours earlier than normal to get the cows milked and chores done] had also brought an entire full course picnic meal, with enough food to last through the afternoon.  Their dinners were spread on a blanket in the park several blocks from the parade route.  At about 1:00 o’clock, the first of the twenty minute concerts by all those bands would begin as they played all afternoon on stages set up in each corner of the park with room for the largest bands, and cozy enough for the smallest bands’ fans to enjoy them up close.  The majorettes would perform during these mini-concerts as well.
That was the day of synchronized twirling by up to 4 majorettes (per band) who performed complicated split-second routines including 30 foot-high baton throws with splits and backbends thrown in by the cream o’ the crop.  (Cartwheels were owned by all.  Splits and backbends were left to the best.)  These park performances went on until 5 o’clock.
Those who didn’t have cows waiting at the barn door 60 miles away and who had the extra $2 or so to get into The Big Field House on the north edge of town might attend the evening concert put on by a mass band made up of several of the biggest bands present.
Band Day does not need one word’s worth of embellishment or exaggeration.  Anyone who lived those days can still taste the sounds and knows the sights by heart.
Family.  Long day.  Making music.  Personal effort. Hometown pride.  Very good times~~back in the day.

Somehow it seemed that the first day of school was always a perfectly sunshiny day that still had the smell of wheat chaff in the air.  The hollyhocks on the east side of the house were so tall by this time that they leaned over the sidewalk, the sweet peas were about done blooming and the cottonwood trees were anticipating cooler fall weather.  It was good to go back to school with a new plaid skirt or jumper, new blouses and a jacket or sweater.  My brother and I always stood for a picture just by the open door of the school bus that first morning.  It was a sign of the times that those in the photo didn’t resist and onlookers didn’t snicker at it.  The Photo By The Bus was expected ritual for any household with a camera.
The first grade teacher had taught first grade since the Civil War, as we understood things.  She was friends with the really old ladies in town, because she had grown up with them.  Her hair was always in a tidy little chignon snugged up against the back of her neck.  She was never unkind and her students were never unruly.  Her rules were few and clear, and she did not speak to her students outside of the classroom.  She was our Wizard of Oz but much better by far:  if the curtain had ever been pulled back on her most private life, she would have been proven to be wise, kind, helpful, prim, educated, sturdy (in her firmly laced, low-heeled black shoes) with absolutely nothing useless or pretentious in her life.  She had never married, but had more children of her own than anyone I’ve ever known.
The second grade teacher had flowing hair and brown eyes like mine.  She divided us into reading groups: each of us became a meadowlark, a robin or a bluebird. The meadowlarks knew they were the best readers but they were birds first and were never silly enough to think that being a meadowlark was somehow more important than being a bluebird.   She liked learning new things and asked my Dad to bring his slides from the 1952 family trip to Maine and New York and Canada and show them to the class.  My classmates watched quietly and listened to his explanations about big buildings and water falls.
The third grade teacher was a serious piece of work and a source of fear to the bad boys in the class who didn’t want to be quiet.  Her son was in the class, but he never had to worry about being shown favoritism.  Each morning we recited the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag and prayed the Lord’s Prayer together.  The boys (including the two sets of boy-twins in our class) were always quiet when we did our pledge and our prayer.  At Thanksgiving, we learned Psalm 100 by memory and recited it in our classroom every day for a couple of weeks.
The fourth grade teacher was a little scary, but kinder to the girls than she was to the boys.  (I think the boys scared her a little)  Just like the children in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, the country kids were each assigned a Blizzard Home by the end of September. Most of our farm homes didn’t have phones, so if a blizzard swept in during the day the Superintendent of Schools would have the long distance operator connect him to a radio station 45 miles away.   The Country Mothers would listen to the radio when the weather went bad on a school day and be reassured that their children would be safe for the night and come home the next afternoon with stories about somebody else’s house.  When I was in fourth grade, the teacher was my Blizzard Home.  I was the average skinny and tough farm girl and she weighed at least 250 pounds, so when she gave me a pretty pair of pajamas to wear that night she gave me some big safety pins as well so I could pin them tight. (Book recommendation: The Children’s Blizzard narrates the 1888 disaster  when a blizzard swept through the upper midwest catapulting forecasters, teachers, parents and children across hundreds of miles of open prairie, without warning,  into a battle for the lives of the children who had been turned loose from school and sent home as the weather was moving in. Everyone fought.  Many of the children were absolutely heroic. Hundreds died.)
The fifth grade teacher was timid.  She was very sweet.  In fifth grade, the boys were usually quiet~~I think because they didn’t want to cause her any trouble.  We were old enough by that time to recognize internecine squabbles among the teachers and knew at one point that two or three of them had decided to pick on her.  Sometimes when she came back to our room after noon lunch or recess, we could see she had been crying.  We never talked about it among ourselves, but we knew and it made us sad.  I asked my parents if they would invite her to our house for supper, giving as my reason that the other teachers weren’t being nice to her.  Nothing more was ever said about that, but they invited her and I got to ride along with my Dad when he drove nine miles into town to bring her out, since she didn’t have a car.  I was so proud of her as we ate our supper together, and so proud of my Dad and our farm when we walked out in the pasture later so she could see the Indian Rings and get a view of our little town off in the distance.
The sixth grade teacher was known as (not in exactly these words, but surely with Capital Letters, whatever the words were) She Who Is To Be Feared And Obeyed.  All of the girls fearfully obeyed her and got through ok.  The bad boys fearlessly disobeyed whenever they thought they could get by with it.  When they got caught, their knuckles got hit hard with the flat side of a ruler, during which transaction the rest of us had our eyes firmly fixed on the open book on our desk top.  On Valentine’s Day that year, we had the Flat-Best-Ever Valentine Train. Each of us built an individual train car (featuring our name on it) out of construction paper: freight or passenger, open box car or closed, locomotive or cattle car.  On Valentine’s Day, Valentine Cards were put in the individually named cars.  It was a beautiful sight, as each of the construction paper cars were, indeed, 11 inches long.  Each of them had four wheels.  It was a lovely sight.
In her second career, the sixth grade teacher and her husband bought the local Tastee Freeze where they hosted one of the community’s favorite hangouts for several decades.  I visited with her there about the time I turned fifty. She said she remembered me, and asked about my brother as well.

Mom and I were at the regular Ladies Aid meeting at a neighboring farm where they had a phone. I was playing quietly with my friends and then the phone call drew a line through the middle of the afternoon.
Earlier that day, Dad had gone to the town hospital to be with his father who had suffered a stroke some days earlier. Thus ended the journey that had started at Juland, Denmark in August of 1874.

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After their marriage in 1893, Grandpa Soren and his wife emigrated to the United States. Their ship docked in New York City in April of 1894 and they immediately took the train to Nebraska where many other Danes were already part of the farming communities scattered across that big open country.  Danish arrivals in Nebraska surged around 1890, and the departures of many of those same Danes for northeastern Montana, 10-15 years later,  are also recorded in documents from the time.  The Plainsman Museum in Aurora has detailed records of the region’s earliest pioneers who had built towns and established farms following the breaking of a freight-road along the Platte River around 1850 which facilitated the arrival of both people and supplies.
Conditions in 1894 Nebraska are preserved in the old newspapers [compiled in The Way Was Long, A Collection of Historical Newspaper Accounts of Hamilton County,  Nebraska].  Four months after Grandpa and Grandma’s  arrival, the following appeared in the Aurora Newspaper on August 15, 1894:

Nebraska is seeing hard times this summer.  Corn is king in this state, and until July 26th, the prospect for a bountiful crop was never better.  About 10:00 a.m. on that day, there came from the south a breeze that filled every heart with terror.  It was heated as though it had come from the burning sands of Sahara, and long before night, the corn leaves had become parched so that there were no hopes for the making of the full ear.

Two days later, on August 17,  W. W. Cox, the Editor of The Republican-Register,   exhorted the community to start developing solutions for what they were facing:

“Necessity is the mother of invention” is often quoted, and as we are now brought face to face with a necessity, let us reason together a little and see if we can’t devise some means to supply the necessity, or the lack of moisture in the soil to insure good crops one year with another.  We are firmly of the opinion that water from the Platte River can be brought onto all of the table lands in Hamilton County in sufficient quantities to insure a good crop every year….

There are many natural basins on all of these divides that could be filled early in the spring and kept filled the year round from which to draw when needed in addition to the regular supply.  If the proper move was made, this work could be commenced very soon, and in that way give all of our people the work they will need to carry them over till they can raise another crop, instead of asking for aid as some are thinking of doing.“

5 months later, on January 20, 1895, one Cal Wilson of Marquette writes a letter in which he describes what they have endured:

…we have not raised a crop here for three years.  The year 1893, I raised 300 bushels of corn off of 95 acres, and in 1894, I had 120 acres of corn and did not get one grain of corn.  Think of it.
Since 1891, actually, there has not been hardly anything raised.  I did well in 1893, but while I did that, a mile south of me, the farmers did not get anything.  We happened to get a rain that those fellows did not get.

They must have thought they had dropped off the earth.  Like most immigrants, they had used every resource they had, determined to leave the familiar to get “here” ~~ and “here” was not looking good.

Grandpa first worked as a farmhand, and then rented farmland for ten years until the family went north to Montana in February of 1908, riding in the immigrant freight car where he tended his Noah’s Ark collection of two horses, two cows, two pigs, one cat and crates of chickens. He also brought the wagon, the grain harvesting binder and the plow.  His three sons  (12, 10 and 7) rode in the coach car with Grandma Soren.

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In 1957 when Ebenezer Lutheran Church celebrated its 50th anniversary, Grandpa was mentioned in the memory book as one of those who was “always ready and willing to conduct reading services and supervise the Sunday School whenever we did not have a pastor to take charge.” [It was called a “reading service” because when it came time for the sermon, it was simply read aloud by the appointed person from a book of sermons.]  The same book also describes an interesting episode from some civic meeting, circa 1910:

We’ve been told that on one of those early days, the settlers called a meeting to discuss road work, new schools and the like.  At the meeting, a certain man told the crowd that some of the bachelors and girls that had filed on land weren’t complying with the Homestead laws, and made a motion that a committee be appointed to check on them and see that they lived up to the requirements.
Another settler jumped to his feet and made the motion that they hang the man who had made that motion, saying these youngsters were doing their best, that many had to seek outside work in order to live and make the necessary improvements on their claims.
No action was taken on either motion

After Mom got the news of Grandpa’s death on that pleasant afternoon in June of 1956, we may have left for home earlier than usual.  These drawn out afternoon Ladies Aid meetings usually featured new recipes and much visiting after the meeting was over.  We went home quietly to begin preparation for the funeral.  Natural death and the resulting activities required of the living seemed to manage themselves quite predictably.
In the decades since, especially with many recent,  sympathetic studies published about the Amish community and “how they live faith,” I’ve occasionally been drawn toward the thought that the Amish were not the only Amish in the 1950s.  Within the harsh lines drawn by life and death, in matters of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, it seems to me that we did “sort of live Amish” when those lines intersected our daily lives.
As I think about what the day felt like~~the day that Grandpa Soren died~~ I’m reminded of the lyrics of Three Bells that describe the birth, life and death of one “little Jimmy Brown.”  Beyond the words, it is perhaps the quiet and lilting melody line that paints the picture:

In “a village hidden deep in the valley among the pine trees half forlorn….there on a sunny morning little Jimmy Brown was born.” And then the day he died: “From the village hidden deep in the valley one rainy morning dark and grey, a soul winged its way to heaven.  Jimmy Brown had passed away. ….and the little congregation prayed for guidance from above….”

Emily Dickinson had a comfortable sadness in how she used words regarding death.

The bustle in a house the morning after death is solemnest of industries enacted upon earth~~
The sweeping up the heart, and putting love away we shall not want to use again until eternity.