By the time you read these lines, your editor will be en route on a brief and unexpected trip to sunny California, or perhaps home from same. Maybe it is brutal to break the news to you-all so abruptly, but that is the way it was broken to me. In the midst of one of those days of which the song was definitely not written, "It's so peaceful in the country," a call came from my sister Margi in Urbana. Would I by any chance be able to drive out with her to California in her son David's car to meet him when he lands in San Francisco from Korea? Oh my goodness, this is so sudden! When would you leave? Tomorrow!
She waited to set the exact date till David got his sailing orders, and the plan had been for a young officer's wife to go along to meet her husband out there, and at the last minute she couldn't go. So it was up to Margi to find a traveling companion or leave the car at home and take a train, plane or bus. Still in a state of shock, yours truly agreed to go, provided the start could be postponed one day. California is lovely, and anyone would be glad of a chance to go, but really, if I'd had my druthers, I'd have chosen places nearer home, with a little more time to prepare.
Even without this phone call, the day was practically in convulsions here. It was like having a second earthquake hit before you got your breath from the first one. (Dad warns us to look out for earthquakes when we get near California.) The men were sorting spring pigs, after having welcomed 12 litters of fall ones in the previous two days (108 new pigs so far). It was the day for an interesting farm management tour to which they planned to go at about 10:00 or 11:00 o'clock, but due to the innate obstinacy of the genus swine, the pigs were not sorted till 12:30 and men and hogs alike were too tired to go anywhere; to say nothing of the unexpected dinner which mother had to prepare. But they picked out 110 barrows for market and 70 gilts to save and got them duly shut up in the proper pens. At 7:00 in the evening the truckers came to load. After which grandfather had to go to Ransom for an elevator meeting to help plan a big community picnic for Sept. 7, and your editor had to go to Kernan in the other direction, to help plan for the annual Harvest Home on Sept. 16, and the hired man and his family left for a two-day vacation down by Bloomington. Dad and Wilbert and his family stayed home, and well content they were to do so.
After my committee meeting, there was some planning and typing to do concerned with the Harvest Home and some installments to prepare for the Corn Belt Farm Dailies. That took till 3:00 o'clock in the morning, and the general feeling was that we had really danced the whole night through, which the song lauds as a pleasant procedure. This morning the washing has been done and some desk work; there are left the odds and ends of getting cash and travellers' checks, doing ironing, packing and sundry small tasks. Dad (who refuses to go with us, either with grandfather because it is too hard a trip for him, or without him because there is no convenient place for him to stay) is trying to persuade us to go by train instead of driving, thus saving both time and strength. I'm willing to yield right now but will have to wait and see what Margi says. If she says the word, we'll hop the El Capitan and be on our way. Of course, since the sole object of my going was to be a driving companion, there would be no point of my going with her on the train. But, dear me, after have sustained the whole shock of deciding and packing, you wouldn't make a change just on that account, would you?
Save for the above items and the routine canning of peaches and tomatoes, our simple rural life pursues the even tenor of its way.
Hoping all of you are the same, I am till further word, cordially yours. -- Hope.
Memory Gem
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are. -- Samuel Johnson.