Nokomis

 

The house I called the Nokomis house was actually in the middle of nowhere. It was about twenty miles to the nearest town and if I wanted to go to the show it meant a seventy mile round trip. The house had been built by this farmer's parents when they were young and it was probably just a cabin type home to begin with. The kitchen and living room were slightly separated by a large wide double opening and a very narrow bedroom ran along side them. The bedroom had no closets, just two boards, one on each end with four clothes hooks on each, which I assumed were his and hers!. There were two doors, one at each end of the bedroom leading into the living room or the kitchen. I had to use the door on the side of the bed I got out of, because there was no room to walk around it. 

It looked they had added a bathroom and an enclosed staircase to two bedrooms upstairs later on. Each bedroom had a bare bulb hanging in the center of the room, connected to a string they strung over to the door so I could pull it and turn the light on as I went in.

There was an enclosed porch attached to the kitchen and behind that a concrete foyer that had two doors. One went to a new double garage and the other out the side of the house. I looked upon this as my guarantee no snakes would get past all this into the house, because there were snakes everywhere! I didn't know this until I began mowing the yard or I might not have moved in. The house actually looked nice. It was just uniquely old fashioned.

The bath tub was so filthy when I moved in that it took me three days of soaking and scrubbing to clean it before I considered it usable, but they were heavy good quality fixtures. There was no stove, but I had a microwave and I bought an electric stove second hand from Goodwill in Springfield, nearly fifty miles away. There was a dishwasher, but even after it was repaired it only worked twice before failing to drain again. There was a pile of junk in the upstairs bedroom. I hauled most of it out to a concrete burn pad in the back yard, but I found a door with seven glass panels that fit between the kitchen and glassed in porch. That worked great for my cat, Midnight. He could use that missing pane as a door to get in and out to his litter box.

However Midnight disappeared the day after he moved in. I looked everywhere for that cat and only the fact that his food was disappearing kept me convinced he still lived there. He was a very large, long haired black cat who probably weighed fifteen pounds. I began to think he was like the Cheshire cat and could make himself invisible, but it turned out he'd taken up residence inside the rolled up carpet in the closet. After a couple of weeks he came out.

Eman8tions came up from St.Louis and we planted a 75 foot diameter sunflower labyrinth in the back yard. He dug the holes and I crawled along behind him planting seeds. (I still wasn't aware of the snakes.) As the weather got nicer I needed to mow the grass. First I went around and picked up about a million spent shell casings and corn cobs, then I revved up my hand mower and got to work. The first time I waited too long and the grass was so high I had to rake it up like hay and carry it by the armloads to the ditch across the street. Thank goodness the snakes did not make an appearance in my arms! Later, mowing became a full time job as the weather improved and the grass grew faster. I would start mowing early in the morning, stop for lunch and continue on until it got too hot. Once I got to the end it was time to start over and do it all again.

I wore an old sun hat, leather work gloves, and drank gallons of water, About this time I discovered the snakes. The first one I saw was a dead baby one and I felt bad, hoping I had not mowed over it and killed it. After that they would suddenly appear in a place where I had not seen them a moment before, leaving me totally freaked out. I really am afraid of snakes. They don't make any noise and you never know where to expect them.  One lived right at the end of the labyrinth, which kind of destroyed the peaceful meditation of walking it for me. It would slither away just as I approached that part every single time.

One afternoon as I was mowing, the mower locked up and I thought, oh, another corn cob, so I jostled the mower up in the air to dislodge it and a swirling, writhing snake came flying out! I felt almost sick. I had probably cut that animal and I was also quite startled by it. I didn't see any blood on it, but when I looked down at my feet I realized I was standing in a huge mass of writhing snakes! I guess they call it a mating ball. I called it my worst nightmare. To my credit I finished mowing the yard, shaking like a leaf, because I knew that was my job if I lived there, but I was hyper-vigilant after that.

I learned that one of the downsides to getting back to nature was that snakes, mice and bugs are part of nature and the farmers loved the snakes because they ate all the others. However quite a few mice escaped the snakes. I never really saw them, but my kitchen cabinets and drawers were just full of mouse turds. I could scrub them out at night and the next morning they'd be full again. I ended up putting all my dinnerware, utensils, pots and pans, etc. in large plastic cases on the counter. Leaving the cabinets to the mice. I put out some Decon once and one poor dead mouse smelled so bad I found his rotting dehydrated body on the porch, but nothing changed in the kitchen, so I stopped that. I put out live traps, but I never caught one mouse. I don't know what they ate. I kept all food in my refrigerator whether it needed to be there or not.

Then there was the living room carpet. It was very old variegated green and brown shag. Just perfect to hide the little bugs that would sometimes crawl across it.

I asked my landlady how to deal with all these things because her house appeared spotless, but then so did mine! She just said, "Grandma used to kill them black snakes with a shovel if they got up in her yard." I couldn't imagine myself doing that.

In total frustration I did pour Mop and Glow around the snake area in the labyrinth one day and my sister used to tease me that now I would have glow in the dark snakes crawling around the yard.

It was the perfect place for bird watching. I put up feeders and blue bird houses and saw all sorts of birds. There were finches of every sort, cardinals, crows and starlings of course, pheasants, and even quails. It was a bird watcher's paradise. It was not a paradise for blue birds though. They laid eggs and some of them hatched, but eventually they all flew off and I found dead babies and leftover egg shells in the houses. The farmer said the snakes probably got them.

I also had house wrens who persistently built their nests over the lights by my doors. I would knock them down immediately, before they laid any eggs and hope they would go build somewhere else. I don't think they ever got the idea.

I was miles from people and it was so quiet out there I could hear if two people were talking in a nearby field, but one day I heard what sounded like a crowd at a football game. Curious, I walked out my back door and there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Canadian geese and snowy white geese flying over my head.  Some were so low I could actually feel the wind beneath their wings! And they kept coming for a very long time, maybe twenty minutes! I've never experienced anything like that before or since and doubt if I ever will again. It was breath taking.

The geese liked to settle in the empty spaces and the farmer and his friends liked to come out with shot guns and kill them. It seemed wrong to do that. I would be riding my bicycle down an empty country road and suddenly hear blasting coming  from behind the trees. I knew they were shooting geese.

One weekend Eman8tions and I brought his granddaughters out to visit. I got out my little table and chairs and used the linen table cloth my grandmother made me, just like I did for my own children. We played dress up and had a tea party with my beautiful antique doll china. I made tiny sandwiches and bought minature Oreos, cheese balls and a tiny cake. It was so much fun. That night he built a fire in the back yard so we could roast hot dogs and make s'mores. The girls chased lightning bugs and put them in jars like children have done for hundred of years. They had never done any of these things and they were enchanted. So was I. This was part of living the dream for me.

We sat there in the dark and we could have been any pioneers on the Illinois prairie at any time in history. As the moon grew brighter the coyotes began howling and calling to each other. First on one side of us and then the on another until we were completely surrounded by what felt like hundreds of them. It was awe inspiring and a little bit scary.

During the time I wasn't mowing the grass, I was tending the sunflowers and one afternoon as I stood there with the hose, the ground shook! Now we really don't have earthquakes in this part of the country. There have only been two that I can remember in my lifetime, but the earth under my feet vibrated! I wondered if it was going to crack open and I would fall down into a crevice like I'd seen on old movies. I finally ran in the house and called my brother, Tom. The earth wasn't vibrating where he was thirty miles away. He said maybe it was moles. That was pretty scary too. Imagine moles big enough to do that!  Several days later I discovered there was a rock quarry five miles away and they had been blasting.

I got used to the total deep darkness of country nights and even found it charming when I turned on the outside lights to see deer in my yard! Of course when the light came on they ran away. Have you ever heard the sound of deer hooves on hard packed fields? It's intriguing. Of course the deer were there to eat the peonies and other flowers I planted, but I figured that was the price I paid for the experience.

I turned one end of the long downstairs bedroom into a cozy little library and wrote My Thots in there and for a while I thought I was there forever. I began trying to figure out how much heating oil to order for winter. The only unsettling thing, besides all the critters was the overwhelming smell of old lady's perfume that would occasionally envelop the house at night. I told myself it was probably the smell of her powder or soap in some cupboard that hadn't dissipated. 

By July the novelty was wearing thin. The corn near the house was getting taller and taller. It came up to the second story windows now. and the sunflowers along the edge of the labyrinth were also extremely tall, while the middle ones barely topped three feet.  That gives you some idea of how potent modern day fertilizer must be. All I could see from my house or my yard now was corn, tall, endless corn. I was living on an island inside a sea of corn. That must be what a rat feels like in a maze.

I found a ladder and climbed up to wash the second story windows on the outside. I could see the corn reflected in the glass and the sky behind it and to this day I still think I also glimpsed a woman staring back at me! I nearly fell off the ladder. I tell myself it must have been my own reflection, but the hair was wrong and so was the blouse. And yet it was only a glimpse. Maybe I confused the sky and the corn with my own self? My son Jim and his wife came to visit me and they slept in that upstairs bedroom with no problems at all.

In August Eman8tions invited me to come live with him for a while. My nephews helped me put all my things in storage and I put my piano in my sister's house. I was very careful storing everything. One of my nephews gave me wooden pallets from where he worked and I lined the floor with these. Then I put bags around to absorb moisture and repel rodents. I wrapped, or packed everything in waterproof containers. Finally I packed up my cat and my clothes and set out for St.Louis.