Cranky #2 spent a particularly chilly holiday at CGF because of the window pictured here. Single-paned, northern exposure, with a storm window that’s not trying very hard. C1 and C2 each received two snuggies for Christmas, and they wore both of them to keep warm in this north bedroom. A tribute to early 20th century style and engineering, this window is impossibly tall and impossibly drafty.
All this elongated draftiness was amplified during by the Great Christmas Eve Blizzard and Door Failure of Ought Nine. On an evening when the wind was up, the mercury was down, and the snow falling at a steady pace, the lock on the entry door went on vacation, and no one in the Cranky household could get it to return our calls. We coaxed, reasoned, and pleaded, but all we got in return was the box-lock answering machine: “Leave a message if you want, but you’re hosed. Losers.”

MC found the possibility of being house-bound on Christmas Eve kind of charming. The Cranky family huddles around a propane heater and eats microwave popcorn with fake butter flavoring, just like in the olden Cranky days. But the house party voted down cozy romanticism. Instead, Cranky men applied hammers and screwdrivers, and removed the offending door from its hinges. The Cranky men are a hearty bunch; a thermometer reading 19 degrees was in plain sight, yet entrance and egress was their goal. With the door removed, we enjoyed complete access to both house and farm. If the cattle had heard about our open door policy, we’re sure they would have stopped by for some hospitality. Our scores for accessibility were perfect, but our energy efficiency suffered.

MC is confident that Teenaged Nephew will grow up to accomplish many good and great things, but to her mind, his greatness was fortold by his heroism during the Great Ought Nine Blizzard and Door Failure. With only a screwdriver and a can of WD-40, Teenaged Nephew repaired the Cranky box lock and brought beauty and body heat back into our holiday. We think there’s a MacArthur genius grant in his future.

President Obama has observed that “insulation is sexy stuff”; MC may be impossibly naive, but she doesn’t see that claim as a part of a dangerous Marxist environmental initiative to divert our tax dollars to Home Depot. Based on her recent Christmas Eve adventure, she can state from empirical experience that not freezing in a blizzard is, in fact, a turn-on. Having a front door in place when it’s snowing outside is practically pornographic. Her task before the next snowfall is to upgrade the leaky window and restore credibility to the unreliable lock. Because higher R-values are the new sexy.
–MC

Comes now a reality program called Hoarders, designed, apparently, to let the untidy desktop crowd feel superior about the untouchables with living room collections of 30,000 beer cans. MC’s favorite bit of television analysis is the revelation that attention deficit disorder prevented one featured subject from tidying up her overstuffed residence.

ADD explains so much about the garage at CG Farm. But more about that later. First, MC would like to take issue with Hoarders‘ these-people-are-deeply-troubled premise to speak in defense of Those Who Gather. What the untrained eye might see as a weirdo’s collection of empty prescription bottles, she would argue, is another person’s embarrassment of wealth.

What if the Hoarders gurus brought their de-cluttering techniques this scenario? Well,
they’d lose their chance at ever restoring their Robbins & Meyers H-model ceiling fan. The Fan Man, located in Dallas, apparently
gets inspiration by keeping his inventory within arms’ reach. We’re saving up for a restoration of a glorious H-model, rescued from the Cranky Hometown Bijou Theatre by UM. Fan Man can be as eccentric as he wants to be as long as he can rewind the coil and find us some replacement blade hardware. When you’re looking for 90-year-old hardware, Those Who Gather are savants, not bipolar clutterers who need their Xanax refilled.
(Fan Man shop from UM; Robbs & Myers image from vintagefans.com)

Did MC get the fender part for her ’67 Plymouth Belvedere from Ebay? Please. That vital piece of Mopar engineering was collected from a pasture, where it was lovingly conserved with very many of its high-performance friends and watched over by attentive goats that kept weeds at bay. We understand that Cousin Tom’s wife had a yard sale a while back, so some of those car bodies may now be lost to history. See what we mean about the dangers of de-cluttering?

MC once scored some terrific glass drawer pulls from the house next door to El Azteca. There were bathtubs out in the yard; it looked like an antique shop. OK, a really low-budget antique shop. So when she asked for cabinet knobs, she had no idea she would be led into the house, through a labyrinth of boxes, to inspect the merchandise. There, hanging on a nail beside a bed, were the perfect drawer pulls. Yea! When a person rolled over, MC realized that she was standing in someone’s bedroom. Which just happened to be a hardware showroom. But still. Bathtub/drawer-pull guy was a serious member of the Those Who Gather society.

Back in the day, MC’s father expressed his gathering tendencies in his office/garage. When it fell to MC to conserve these treasures, she mentally grouped them into categories: Stuff that Won’t Burn and Stuff that Will Burn. The “Won’t Burn” category was by far the largest. What do you do with half a dozen broken oil-well drill bits? MC’s father picked them up because they were trash in his field, yet now they’re 40-pound garage objet d’arts. Each time she found an object that seemed perfect for the scrap pile, members of her tribe would tell her something like: “That’s the PTO shaft for the Allis tractor,” or “That’s the jet rod for the xyz windmill.” Useful stuff, lovingly gathered and faithfully conserved, in the middle of the garage bay.

MC has since added a fabulous broken floor lamp to the garage mix. She’s sure she can find a craftsman who can display its ’30s wonderfulness in an appropriate fashion. It’s not like she’s on a deadline or anything. It’s been gathered, and that’s the fun part.
–MC

The Crankies collected several images during their Not-Spring Break that deserve consideration and analysis. So here they are, with thoughtful, incisive annotations.

Here is our Well Guru, checking out our problematic water well. Please observe the stick in guru’s left hand. This is a water witching stick; guru used this stick to find a new source of water on CGF, where we can drill another well when the time comes. That’s one powerful stick.

This image would fall in the “adding insult to injury” category. It’s a deer product. First the deer eat CGs’ trees. Then they defecate beside the trees. A way to autograph your work, if you don’t have opposable thumbs.

Cranky #2 likes to arrange and photograph other people’s pretties; these fruity coasters are from Gardener Friends’ collection. After sharing chicken pot pie with the Cranky family, Gardener Friend let us memorialize the event.

And finally, here’s this spring’s installment of calf-crop cuteness. Say it loud: I’m black and I’m proud.

–MC

Consider the Irish. They’ve got that Celtic mysticism thing going on. Joyce and Yeats give them plenty of literary firepower. There are those haunting songs and a certain (albeit disputed) charm that allows the Vice President to say the f-word on national television and not appear to be a lout. Their national holiday gives the world annual license to get knee-walking drunk. What’s not to love about them, I wonder? Maybe a few of MC’s relatives.

MC thinks that perhaps her great-grandfather took the whole potato famine business too personally. In any event, the lore that has come down to her about P.S. O’Hern has not described him as a harp-playing lad with a sweet tenor voice telling droll stories over a pint. The Patrick Stephen stories tend to be about land acquisition and the complicated division of his assets among his 12 surviving children.

In the bottom left photo, there’s a house behind the zeppelin-sized pig. The pig, relative to the house, must be about the size of the the living room, if the house has a living room. P.S. O’Hern and his wife Mary Jane raised 13 children in that house. According to lore, when one of his 10 sons received his acceptance letter to West Point, the son threw down his shovel and declared he was finished, forever, with farm work. P.S. seemed to have had that effect on children.

P.S. O’Hern’s last living son died recently at the age of 101, after being profiled by every major news outlet in the state. After you hit 100, folksy geezerdom becomes irresistible, and Charlie acquired a stack of press clippings. His attentive caretaker also shared and archived many of the documents in his house, including the images shown here. In these photos, Uncle Chuck and a horse are standing in the bed of a pickup, a fairly low-security arrangement for the horse, and not so great for Charlie either.

The stories that persist about Uncle C indicate more than a passing resemblance to his father. For example, when one of his nephews served on a submarine, he was asked to fill out a questionnaire and explain, “Why did you join the Navy?” Morris Dale wrote, “Uncle Charlie.” When his officers asked for clarification, the nephew said, “If you ever worked for Uncle Charlie, you’d know why I joined the Navy.” The people who worked for Uncle Charlie drove pickups without heat, used machinery long after it had completed its depreciation schedule, and received only modest compensation. A pair of them were changing a flat on a dilapidated trailer filled with cattle when Uncle C came upon them and made inquiries. Uncle’s hired hands didn’t lack for snap. They told him, “You didn’t give us enough to do, Charlie, so we’re rotating the tires on this trailer.”

The axiom about age having its privileges is true in Uncle C’s case, particularly since he outlived the folks who could contradict his version of family history. His very presence, in a house that made P.S’s look like a McMansion, seemed the essence of his father’s ideology about getting money and keeping it. Perhaps the ancient Celtic charm in MC’s family was snuffed out by nasty English landlords. Maybe MC’s relations were profoundly moved by the rich brother in The Quiet Man. But somehow “Danny Boy” morphed into Gordon Gekko with an 8th grade education.

Cranky #2 met Uncle C when she was about 3; by that time she had considerably more teeth than he had. Herr Cranky made the introductions, saying, “Here’s another red-headed O’Hern for you.” Uncle C observed: “There’s a lot of us.” Maybe that’s the ultimate prize of these generations of tight-fisted tenacity: we endured.
–MC

After kvetching about inclement weather, broken appliances, and a gimpy water system, MC would like to raise up a positive event that transpired during the Cranky Girls’ trip to the farm: preparing the garden. In fairness, this chore took place efficiently and productively because MC had very little to do with it. In the picture above, 1)Cousin Tom is driving 2)another neighbor’s tractor and pulling 3)Uncle M’s cultivator. This neighborhood cooperation looks suspiciously like socialism, which we all know from the health care reform discussions is a dangerous threat to our freedoms. But this particular sharing of community resources must be OK because Cousin Tom has more guns than any self-respecting socialist could own outright. MC will be on the lookout for vegetables with bolshevik tendencies.

Cranky #1 ramrodded the decorative portion of the garden, clearing out roots and weeds to make room for the morning glories and other flowery additions that we will encourage to climb up the new corrals. Cranky #2 was concerned about what these vine-y plants will do when they reach the top of the corral and have no place left to go. MC would deem the effort a success if the flowers–or Cranky #2– grew taller than the pigweed does this summer.

Burning grass in the yard might seem like a page from the “we must destroy this village to save it” school of horticulture. But MC is following best practices here. She planted a patch of lovegrass the size of a baby wading pool in pile of construction dirt. It grew into tall, plume-y clumps, just like the real deal. Real lovegrass farmers burn off their dead clumps to let the new grass grow in faster. MC is a real farmer, by damn, and she had the lighter in her pocket to prove it.
Lovegrass burning shows a bit of gardening savvy; dirt on the face, however, is the hallmark of quality gardening. Those children that Mrs. Obama invites to work in the White House garden don’t look nearly dirty enough when they’re done, but maybe their sisters don’t throw clods at them. In any event, blowing bubbles reflects the satisfaction of a job well done.
–MC

This portrait of UM’s fine Angus girls was taken the day after CGs refugeed back to warmer climes. Fleeing south just a few hours ahead of blizzard like migrating birds on methamphetamines, the CGs missed the high drama of this weather event. But the Angus girls are doing a fine job of color commentary: “Spring? We rather think not.”

The CGs heard a great deal of mewling and puking about how this cold snap manifested itself in the People’s Republic of Austin. It was miserable! exclaimed the Longhorns baseball fan. Not to diminish the discomfort of those Disch-Falk bleachers, but we think the cows’ game was more likely to have been called on account of weather.

Cold at CGF can be a merciless affair, since the wind chill factor amplifies even a modest temperature change. Step outside and get a greater appreciation for Robert Scott and his stiff-upper lip pals at the South Pole. MC’s favorite cold weather story involves a frozen water line at Uncle Sid’s house. Pipeline was excavated; pipeline broke; pipeline had to be replaced, all in meat-locker conditions. It was a day-long affair. When Uncle Michael limped back to CGF, his concerned mother asked about the everyone’s well-being. “It’s so cold the snot’s frozen on Sid’s face,” was the reply.

MC is thinking that maybe it was Not-Spring at CGF, what with the snow and all. Upon reflection, the cranky water system added up to a sort of Not-Break. In total, then, the CGs enjoyed a Not-Spring, Not-Break. Whatever. We’d do it again in a heartbeat.
–MC

Meta Cranky’s hometown is the source of a number of guilty pleasures. Sopapilla Cheesecake, as noted previously, is just one example. Without the good example of Herr Cranky, the CGs stay up too late watching movies, practice driving cars and pickups in the deserted driveway, and observe a shoes-optional policy, regardless of the weather.

In some circles, top-of-the-lung Methodist hymn singing is a guilty pleasure. In Cranky Hometown, there are particular summer services where the hometown congregation dusts off its Cokesbury hymnals and cuts loose with the rip-snorting early 20th-century classics that are redolent of brush arbors, IOOF halls, and WPA projects. These hymns may be the Cheese Doodles of music world: musical gourmets may sniff, but if they ever get a taste (“Wonderful Grace of Jesus,” anyone?), they’ll be licking the fako-food coloring off their fingers and binging in dark closets.

Let’s clarify: We’re not talking about the three-hanky sob-fests that Drama Queen trenchantly calls “Wurlitzer Schmaltz.” I respect your right to adore those Victorian snoozers like “In the Garden,” but please understand that because MC has the attention span of a gnat, these classics are wasted on her. MC’s guilty pleasures are the ones with the jingly Rudyard-Kiplingesque rhythms and the friendly toggling between a thrumming, repetitious bass line (think come, come, come, come, Come to the Church in the Wildwood!) and soprano riffs that approach Queen-of-the-Night elevations. MC feels rather self-conscious about revealing that she is fascinated by retro Protestant musical arrangements, but she remembers that she saw Joe King Carrasco at Club Foot, Warren Zevon at the Stone Pony, and Lucinda Williams at the Electric Lounge; she doesn’t need to prove her hipness cred to anybody.

This week, a beloved hymn-singing member of the Cranky Methodist Church passed away. Aged Alto Friend never learned to read music, but her uncanny ear unerringly found the harmonic thirds, fifths, and sevenths that give depth and feeling to a melody line. Because Alto Friend was all about those retro hymns, the choir offered up a medley of her favorites at her funeral, and MC, on the ground at CGF, got to participate. As the choir loft Magnified the Precious Name of Jesus, MC watched the we-get-it grins form on the faces of her friends and neighbors, the grins that people of a certain age usually produce when they hear ABBA on the grocery store muzak.

In the homestretch, the upper voices stretched out a chord describing the mansions bright and blessed. The men’s voices stalwartly answered with with equal horsepower from the back pew. Then as the choir was bringing it in for a landing, MC’s spotted Alto Friend’s daughter, a school classmate. Alto Daughter was weeping, as daughters will do at their mothers’ funerals, but she also was singing along. MC hadn’t considered this series of events, and she almost had to sit down to think about it. She hasn’t yet figured out why the image of singing grief was so moving, but it has something to do with incongruity. “When We All Get to Heaven” is an irrepressibly happy song about the Big Chill. For MC, it’s an adorable, slightly kooky period piece, like a Chambers stove with a ThermoWell. But when it’s your mother’s favorite, it’s kooky and beloved and powerful all at the same time.
–MCG

MC touched base with her cranky roots today as two delightful cousins came to visit with their charming children and grandchildren. C2 couldn’t keep the news to herself and called Herr Cranky to announce how many new friends she had made. C1 met a boy cousin her very own age, and she laughed at a number of age-inappropriate jokes. MC smiled at the way this branch of her tribe tells stories with a particular rhythm and pacing. One story has MC’s uncle enlisting a wee small cousin to back a car out of a driveway. When tiny tot backs the colossal ’65 Chrysler 300 into an impediment, Uncle reproaches her, saying sadly, “Goddamn, baby, I thought you said you could drive.”

Happy Grandmother cousin arrived bearing multiple gifts. One was powerful and dangerous, and right-thinking families wouldn’t allow their children around it without supervision. Happy G calls it Sopapilla Cheesecake, and Paula Deen must be weeping hot, bitter tears that she didn’t think of it first.

The other gift was a friendship quilt dating from the mid-1930s. The character of individual signatures implies that family members and friends embroidered their names on the blocks, while MC’s grandmother, she conjectures, combined them into a small artifact of remembrance. There’s hardly a name on the quilt that MC can’t associate with a farm, a house, or a face.

The blue “Mrs. Melendy” block with the dramatic green capitals in satin stitch was made by the grandmother of a MC’s Best Friend Since We Were Four. “Nevada Duncan” is by the sister of MC’s great-grandmother, profiled previously, while “Flossie G” is her grandmother’s sister. MC can’t help but notice that her own family’s blocks are tidy and neat, but without the flourishes of, say, Mrs. Melendy, or Lucy Ellis, whose block has swoopy capitals that would look at home in an illuminated manuscript.

MC’s own mother, then a girl, makes an appearance in this quilt, performing respectable work in a block that does not yet connect her cursive-style letters.

Happy Grandmother cousin’s generosity gives MC a small window into the dynamics of a long-ago neighborhood, where flamboyance and personality could be expressed with a needle and thread. MC knows that searchable genealogical databases are invaluable for finding out information such as Obama’s Irish heritage or whether you’re related to the bastard son of the Duke of Gloucester. However, Nevada Duncan, Flossie G., and Kathleen are warm and snuggly, while Mormon geneology records and the baronetage are not.
–MCG

Today, Meta Cranky will rationalize undone farm projects by imagining that she’s living in a Before Picture, which ultimately will be upgraded to an After Picture. For example, Uncle Sid and Cousin Tom built this shiny corral last spring. It’s sturdy, ingeniously designed, and it lets you load your cattle without being kicked or trampled. However, those master welders didn’t budget for landscaping. So the CGs spent a sunny afternoon putting in climb-y type seeds that C2 picked out at the Big Box store. We can hope that the After Pictures, taken mid-summer, will feature shiny corrals covered in blue morning glories that set off the our cow friends’ brown eyes.

Our Yorkshire friend, whom we’ll call John of Beverly, worked his usual alchemy and convinced our front doors to latch properly. In the After Picture, however, these doors not only will close but will have working locks, courtesy of the Highly Recommended Locksmith. Apparently, you’ve got to service your locks every 90 years or so, or home security will suffer.

All too frequently, MC is presented with a troubleshooting issue that makes her think: Geez, didn’t we just fix that? Upon reflection, however, the problematic item was just fixed about 30 years before. In the interim, stuff happens. The map of Europe has changed, but the air compressor and the Toro mower in the garage remain the same.

–MCG

Gardener Friend has a Things To Do notepad that fascinates Cranky #2. At 8 a.m., C2 labored to write her name at the top and, if time had permitted, would have included “Woke Up” and “Ate Breakfast” to mark those accomplishments off in an orderly fashion. C2’s approach to lists reminds Meta Cranky of the way her former employer’s New York office handled production deadlines. The deadlines for Texas editors were always the ones posted on the schedule. The New Yorkers’ deadlines were generally the day they emptied their ashtrays and finally finished their manuscripts.

While there’s a great deal of satisfaction in marking off The Things I Do Anyway on one’s Things To Do list, the Crankies had to blaze a new path today and buy a washing machine. MC lowered her expectations to the “Hopeless Losers” setting and made for the big box store. There, she found not just her heart’s desire, the plainest of top-loaders, but also surprising moments of glad grace.

In MC’s experience, finding customer service at a big box store is like looking for the elusive Ivory Billed Woodpecker in the wilds of darkest Arkansas. You can hear it calling from afar, and experts declare its existence, but there haven’t been any confirmed sightings in 60 years. Cynics, take note: First, a Guy with Clues located our a wierdo light bulb. Then he observed to C2, pleasantly and confidently, that playing with the broken sample bulb we brought wasn’t an option. No hard feelings. She surrendered the broken bulb to MC’s new BF, the Guy with Clues.

Now, gentle readers, hold onto your mousepads: there were TWO Guys with Clues in the same big box store. This one not only found our modest appliance, he devised a diversion strategy to keep C2 from playing PBS Kids on his computer. Can you run two aisles over and find the blue washer for me? How about the red washer? Bet you can’t lie down in the bath tub. Bet she fell for it like a jive sucka. I heard the angel choirs singing. No eye-rolling while C2 sat on a lawn mower or tried to flush the demo toilets. I light a candle for Guys with Clues at the Customer Service Altar. Simultaneously, I weep for the legions of Big Box customers who are wandering, zombie-like, in warehouses nationwide, unable to drive home until they find an associate to get a toilet flapper thingy from the back for them. America’s DIY-ers are doomed to wander around like the Ancient Mariner because I bagged the last Guys with Clues.

On the car ride home, the Crankies orally listed the things they had accomplished in their outing: Swam at the Y. Ate Gardener Friend’s oatmeal. Bought a light bulb. Had a tea party with a cousin. Got flower seeds for a garden. Climbed a rock wall. Ate a noteworthy navel orange. But which of those things made their “Best Of” list, Meta Cranky wanted to know. C2 refused to prioritize; every item on her list was her favorite. C1, nursing sore fingers from her rock climbing, was of the same mind. But, with its smell still wafting through the car, the navel orange had the inside track.
–MCG