I’ve been enamored with story for as long as I can remember.
Whether through oral tradition, book, or film, the telling of a story grabs my
attention in ways that border on addiction. If I give myself permission, I can
watch Law and Order reruns endlessly, captured by the opening tease and the “so-do”
of its haunting theme music.
I’m often on the lookout for stories with historical content
or personal connections to place or person. When we first moved into our house,
I had great hopes of discovering a diary or journal under the eaves of the
attic in the hundred-year home, as I knew its walls had great stories to tell.
But alas, no literary discovery has been made.
My friend Judy (best known as the Dr. Judy of Kroc Center
fame), is in possession of pages from a nineteenth-century diary that she
shared with our writing group. The writer detailed her days on the farm, and as
Judy read, I jotted down my favorite phrase: “Today, I basted my corset.” I’m glad
that’s not on my to-do list for this week.
Often, the words scribbled on the pages of our daily lives
are just as ordinary as the corset-construction, little different from social
media posts detailing meals prepared and trips taken. So when my friend Pete
handed me a paint-splattered folder, filled with onion-skin pages of typing and
penciled words in cursive handwriting, I wondered if I’d find any corsets
between its covers. Instead, as I created a Word document to preserve the pages
of his mother’s writing and to print a few copies for his family and friends, I
found a wonderful combination of history, adventure, and philosophy woven
throughout the true account of a young family’s attempt at a “Green Acres” type
of life, absent the television-watching pig, Arnold Ziffel.
If the plot line of “Green Acres” is a bit hazy, it told of
Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert), a New York lawyer, and his wife, Lisa (Eva
Gabor), who, sight unseen, bought a rundown farm in Hooterville. It’s hard now
to believe the popular network comedy debuted more than fifty years ago, as I
can still sing along with the theme song. “Green Acres is the place to be, farm
living is the life for me . . .”
Almost twenty years before the Douglas family decided to
move to Hooterville to follow Oliver’s dreams, Larry and Alice Twitchell forged
their own path from the city to Mifflin, Ohio. Had Alice’s account of their
experience on a run-down farm not languished in that folder since the
mid-fifties, I might have thought their small farm had inspired the popular
comedy show, as they had nearly as many misadventures as did Oliver and Lisa.
Their only vehicle was a surplus army truck that served as
tractor and family car. A middle-of-the-night ceiling collapse, the cantankerous
oil stove, (evil smelling varmint that it was), the vagrant bovine Josephine, and
brandy-fed chickens all give a glimpse of humor alongside the back-breaking
work of life on a farm with no running water, no electricity, and a land so
worn out that “even the weeds look tired and weak.”
Like Oliver, they too hoped for a new life, even as they
were urged to abandon their dream. “No matter what you do to this,” said
Larry’s brother Jack, “it’ll never be any better than its worst. All of his
work will be just thrown away. If it were mine, I’d burn it down.” Larry responded
to Alice, “If you can stand this discouraging place, we’ll do our best to make
it work.”
And that they did. The young carpenter and his artist-wife
created “the frame in which we shall dwell,” a simple home, an adequate
livelihood, and a childhood remembered with joy and adventure rather than
deprivation.
In recording her experiences and her philosophical
observations, Alice Twitchell collected “fragments out of life” that she was
afraid might “die away when the telling is done.” Fortunately, hers is a story
whose telling is not yet done, as “the essence of new dreams richly blend with
the old” in her book, “Burn It Down,” now available at Local Roots and
amazon.com.
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