I spent my high school summer years staying with relatives on their Athens County farm. This was the ’50s and my Aunt Hazel and Uncle Orville had not quite adapted to indoor plumbing, but they did have it. The outside privy still had some traffic. And while Uncle Orville owned an Allis Chalmers tractor, he also didn’t sell Dolly, Molly or Rex, three large Belgium work horses; when two worked, one rested. It was a nice arrangement because I got to loaf with the off horse.
Jul 12 2012 | Posted in
Sylvia Zimmerman |
Read More »
I once owned a mangle for a very short time. I bought it at a farm auction and had my husband and others haul it home. A mangle is the size of a small freezer, but in those days, because its chassis was mostly steel, it took four men to move it! Mine only ran one time before smoke bellowed from inside and it quit, the little red light went out and with it a small symbol of a less complicated living.
Jun 28 2012 | Posted in
Sylvia Zimmerman |
Read More »
I hate air conditioning, institutional AC that is, not car or even one’s home where it can be regulated. I think AC turns us inward, content in an artificial world of self-indulgence. I think only of myself and suffer when a manager at a restaurant or a grocery store or a professor in a college classroom says, “We cannot change the temperature; it originates somewhere else.” That somewhere else is usually hidden in a control panel in a subterranean room where only the jailer has the key. If ever I have felt a prisoner, it is being compelled to sit in an expensive restaurant next to a vent hurling cold air onto my neck and back. I have been reduced to wrapping not only a slight sweater around my shoulders but also several napkins. In a fit of despair I once had a waiter put a serving tray on top of a register that blew cold air onto my legs and up my skirt. Marilyn Monroe should have such troubles. Try price comparison while shaking from subzero ambient AC at your local food chain. I now take a winter jacket along with my purse and sacks, an extra burden when outside it is a fine 85 while inside a terrifying 65. I am furious at being a victim of such commercial universalism, not to mention my own individual surrender to out-of-control “control panels.”
Jun 14 2012 | Posted in
Sylvia Zimmerman |
Read More »
I don’t know another species of the workforce so forgiving of its mistakes than a farmer. A surgeon has great guilt over his botches and carries insurance to help him through. Acts of nature, of course, afflict the farmer and he, too, can carry crop insurance, but he cannot protect himself from acts of his own stupidity. He must just stand there and despair, quit or ask forgiveness and then return it to others. I think this is the stuff of humility which rightly so comes from the word humus or soil.
I am not sure many people understand what Post-Modernism is or why it matters much. Most of us think we are living in modern times. How then can we speak of Post-Modernity? This is not back to the future talk or fantasy futurism, but rather worldview language and how we hold the happenings in our lives. Nevertheless, I do want to go back in order to bring us up-to-date. Let’s start with the first Axial Age. This was the time of the great philosophers and theologians: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Prophets, the Buddha, Confucius, the Upanishads, Zoroaster. Because these thinkers and writers saw all of life integrated and of one, politics and religion, nature and man existed out of a single purpose and there was a mighty force at the center of life. All creatures, events, present and future were held together for a reason not readily understood but embraced in mystery.
May 29 2012 | Posted in
Sylvia Zimmerman |
Read More »
I ran over a five-gallon plastic bucket with my tractor and tore a rent in its side. Using it to haul feed or water was no longer viable, but it still could be turned over and sat on while bottle feeding calves. Over time, however, the tear bulged under the weight (reader discretion advised) and so yesterday morning when I went to move the bucket to the next pen, a cat crawled out. For a brief time, he had found comfort under the bucket which was under me.
My grandmother was born in Ostrander to Elizabeth Maugans and George Webster Case. She and her twin sister were put in shoe boxes and then into the warming part of an old cook stove. This “incubator” worked well; they both — Erdeen (my grandmother) and Aliene — grew into substantial women whom their youngest brother Gerald would call The Beef Trust!
May 18 2012 | Posted in
Sylvia Zimmerman |
Read More »
My mother would have been 100 on April 1. No one ever forgot her birthday — the only benefit of being born on April Fools’ Day.
