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The Farm

This is a post that is long overdue. Something new has happened on Waschke Road. Readers of vinemaple.net know that my partner and wife, Rebecca, and I decided over a year ago that we had to put the Waschke homestead on the market. The homestead had become an overwhelming burden. Rebecca and I share between us arthritis, diabetes, heart failure, and multiple back surgeries. We simply couldn’t take care of the homestead any longer and neither our son nor daughter were interested in taking over. I hated that, but life is life. I was never much of a farmer to begin with and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, diabetes, and arthritis just meant that taking care of the homestead was impossible.

Long ago, our son Paul established a deep bond with my dad while he was growing up, and he is as deeply tied to the Waschke homestead as I am. I knew when we decided to put the homestead on the real estate market that Paul would be deeply affected, but I saw no alternative. Paul has had severe health problems for a number of years. I won’t go into the details, but they made it impossible for him to seriously consider taking over the homestead.

For me, this was heart breaking. The homestead is not just a few acres of land. It is the embodiment of a relationship between a plot of land, a layer of topsoil, and a family, which is a body of love and trust. Times change and relationships change. The connection between the Waschke family and the land on Waschke Road has changed as generations change. My own relationship with the Waschke land is tenuous. My wealth, such as it is, is mainly derived from my efforts for a dead billionaire on Long Island, New York, not the land on Waschke Road, but my spiritual worth, equally such as it is, comes from the acreage that my father and grandfather built in a century of tending the land. When we decided to put the homestead on the market, that spiritual worth crumbled. I was pained, but I saw no alternative. I could not carry on. You take your knocks.

Several months ago, what I consider to be a miracle occurred. Paul started on a new medication that changed his life. Suddenly, severe limitations disappeared, and he and Lanni, Paul’s wife, could contemplate taking over the homestead.

Now, I am so proud to say that Paul and Lanni Waschke, with their son Dario, are taking over the Waschke homestead. Paul and Lanni have many plans and I am excited to watch their plans unfold. This is so much better than selling the homestead. Paul and Lanni are the fourth generation on the homestead. I have hopes that Dario will be the fifth, but I am content to wait for the future.

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Johnny Jump Up

My mother loved Johnny Jump Ups. Her birthday was toward the end of March. As her birthday approached, she went out into the woods, looking for Johnny Jump Ups. They were among the first spring flowers to appear on the woods floor. Johnny Jump Ups are wild pansies. I don’t have any pictures of Johnny Jump Ups from our woods.

Generic yellow pansies. Grant [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Grandma Waschke cultivated pansies that she grew from seeds, mostly purchased from Tilllinghast’s seeds down in LaConner.

My mother had nothing against my grandmother’s cultivated pansies, but she had no passion for them either. My mother went to business college and learned to be a bookkeeper. Before she married my father, she was a bookkeeper at various businesses in Lynden and Bellingham. My grandmother grew roses and pansies. Mom tended the vegetable garden and searched for Johnny Jump Ups and Easter Lilies (Trilliums) in the woods and tried to transplant them to grow in the yard.

She succeeded with the trilliums. They grow well on the north side of the house. They are most likely up now, uncurling their leaves. They will bloom in a week or so, the white blooms turning purple as Easter arrives and the season wears on. There are blue, pink, and white violets in the lawn. Violets and pansies are the same thing, but the violets in the lawn are not Johnny Jump Ups.

In our woods, Johnny Jump Ups are small bright yellow flowers with a black accents that look as if they were drawn with a sharp crow foot nib and black India ink from the finest and blackest charcoal. The black in the generic photo above looks smeared compared to my mother’s Johnny Jump Ups. They grow in bright yellow and green beds on the bleached gray leaves of the woods floor. My mother succeeded in digging Johnny Jump Ups from the woods, generally under spreading big-leaf maples, and transplanting them to little clay pots she lined up on the window sill above the kitchen sink. The blossoms lasted a week or so and lived on as nice little green plants, but they never bloomed a second season. Pansies are perennials, but gardeners usually replant them each year, as my grandmother did.

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A Retired Software Architect

Mornings, I have walked Waschke Road and its fields covered in the fog, and wandered through the foggy woods. Bitterly cold winter ice fog, gentle late summer ground fog, sodden brooding November fogs. Wisps of vapor drift three steps away. Waiting for sun, watching daytime moons, searching for hounds, bay horses, and turtle doves.

Photo by Christopher Waschke

Fog on Waschke Road comes from the west, the Salish Sea, the Straits of Georgia, the Straits of Juan De Fuca, the Islands of Japan. China. The fog floats up the Nooksack, Silver Creek, Deer Creek, slides on greased skid roads, rolls on gravel, asphalt, and concrete. It comes up from the red loam and down from the gray sky. From the water to the land, settling in among the firs and cedars.

Owls glide in the morning fog with muffled wing flaps, field mice scream as red talons pierce their downy pelts and lift them from their damp tunnels, carrying them beyond the fog and into the treetops and the gables of the barn.

Flying owl. C9 Photography

Software architects build castles of fog. Wood, steel, and concrete castles break your toes, collar bones, and skull when forces are unbalanced, but software castles are drifting electrical signals. Software architects dispel them with “cd /; rm -Rf *”. And, trust me, they never forget how.