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Wild Krumpos

Tag

Mom

17 entries

1982

  1. Friday, January 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

    Chess-Club Farmer

    I often return to an image of my father in the hayfield: plaid shirt darkened with sweat, straw hat pushed back, a stem of hay sometimes held loosely in the corner of his mouth like he belonged to an old…

  2. Friday, January 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

    The Keeping of Things

    We had horses my whole childhood. That was one of the facts of the farmstead, as natural to me then as the barn, the garden, the chickens, the machine shed, the old trees. Horses were not decoration. They were part…

  3. Friday, January 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

    The Salesmen at the Kitchen Table

    Two salesmen came to our kitchen table when I was young. One sold my parents knowledge. The other sold them death. That sounds too dramatic, maybe, but that is how it arranges itself in memory now. Both visits happened early,…

  4. Thursday, July 1, 1982 · Don Krumpos

    Parent-sickness

    One summer my mother went to Maine for about a week, though at that age a week felt nearly geological. An era. My sister and I stayed with my grandmother at the cottage on the Bay. Ordinarily this sounds idyllic,…

1984

  1. Sunday, January 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

    Not Made for the Fair

    Every year of grade school I built something. Second grade was a papier-mâché earth, cut open to show the layers. Crust, mantle, core — the planet sliced like fruit so you could see what it was made of. I did…

  2. Sunday, January 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

    One Railing Off

    It rained most of the weekend, and when we came out onto the overlook the valley was giving itself up to mist. The trees below were half-erased, the far ridge gone soft and white, the whole place breathing through wet…

  3. Wednesday, August 1, 1984 · Don Krumpos

    The Cook

    Once a year, my father had a reason for me to skip church. On the morning of the Grace Lutheran summer picnic, we did not put on church clothes. We did not sit in the pews. We got up early,…

1985

  1. Tuesday, January 1, 1985 · Don Krumpos

    The Silent Curriculum

    There were things the farm taught without explanation. No one sat you down and said, this is what country life requires. The lessons arrived through chores, accidents, deaths, and the strange adult certainty that some hard thing had to be…

  2. Monday, July 1, 1985 · Don Krumpos

    Talked Us Free

    My father believed in long drives. Not the modern kind, broken by motels and careful pacing, but marathon drives measured in thermoses. Twelve hours. Sometimes fifteen. He did almost all of it himself, hands steady on the wheel, one elbow…

1986

  1. Wednesday, January 1, 1986 · Don Krumpos

    That's How I Learned

    My father was involved in so many building projects that I sometimes have trouble separating them. They blur together now into one continuous image of him: work clothes, tools out, some old building opened up around him, a problem waiting…

  2. Tuesday, July 1, 1986 · Don Krumpos

    The Cost of Work

    I grew up believing my father could do almost anything. He could fell trees, pour concrete, rebuild chimneys, coax tomatoes from difficult soil, repair old machinery with improvised brilliance, and somehow keep a farmstead, a house, gardens, animals, and a…

1987

  1. Thursday, January 1, 1987 · Don Krumpos

    Tea on the Back Porch

    I could tell my father loved my mother dearly. Not because he said it often. Not because they were romantic in any dramatic way. They were not a movie kind of couple. Their love belonged to a different language: rural,…

1990

  1. Wednesday, July 25, 1990

    Wednesday, July 25, 1990

    The weather has been beautiful. Donny's been on a canoe trip since last Sat. He went with a group from church. Steve Rebitski is his partner. I'm sure they're having fun. They're due back this Sat. morning. Helen stayed overnight…

1991

  1. Tuesday, January 1, 1991 · Don Krumpos

    The Good Money

    Around my freshman year of high school, my father finally moved to day shift. I do not remember the exact date. It may be in my mother's journal somewhere. What I remember is not the calendar but the feeling of…

1993

  1. Friday, January 1, 1993 · Don Krumpos

    What He Couldn't Give

    The question is harder to answer than it looks. If you ask me what my father could not give, I have to pause. Because in the obvious ways, he gave plenty. He gave hugs. He said, "I love you." Not…

1995

  1. Sunday, January 1, 1995 · Don Krumpos

    Call Me, I'll Come

    After my mother died, something in my father loosened. Or dimmed. As a younger person I sometimes thought of it as him not paying as much attention, and there was truth in that. Some vigilance left him. Some energy that…

1999

  1. Friday, January 1, 1999 · Don Krumpos

    The House That Held Him

    My father, with my grandfather's help, put a full new central chimney into our farmhouse. That sentence seems almost unbelievable to me now. A chimney is not a shelf or a bench or a toy barn. It is not a…