The Bell Tolls

Boy, what a whirlwind weekend!

Our dog, Pongo, had pneumonia and I had to take him to the vet Friday morning. I had massive amounts of cleaning and laundry to accomplish. My sister, Suzi and family from Minnesota, along with Casey and Kim and Brady were coming back to stay for the weekend. We had my Aunt Avis’ 80th surprise birthday party to attend on Saturday. But with everything happy going on this weekend, it was also pinched with sadness.
　
Some of the happenings this weekend made me reminisce about younger days -- days back on the farm growing up. One thing, the spike of my sadness, which set this off was I received the news Saturday afternoon that my cousin, Ron Lee, passed away. Ron led a full life and, in fact, his obituary said it the best "Ron lived his life to the fullest and did it his way." As we all should. I really think that there should not be a moment in anyone’s life that they don’t live life to the fullest and to the best of their ability, to do it their way.
　
I may have talked about this before (see my 2/18/10 post "Spring May Not Have Sprung But I Am Preparing For It"), but Ron was the cousin who bought the bell from our family farm auction. He wanted to have something to remember our farm by. Memories that he recalled from his younger years when he would come out to our farm were that his mother, Helen, would always holler at him to stay away from the bell and not to be constantly ringing it. (Let's just put it this way -- the Lee boys were mischevious!!! Hahaha!!) So when the bell came up to be sold at the farm auction, he bid on and got it so that he could now "ring that damn bell whenever he wanted to." Hahaha! That was Ron.
　
Ron is actually my third cousin. His dad, Vern, was my dad’s first cousin and in Vern’s earlier years, he farmed on his family farm not too far from our’s. He gave up the farming life after a few years and moved his family to Madison where he worked in construction, as did all his three sons, Ron being one of them.
　
Growing up, there was always one thing constant with Sundays at the farm. Either we went visiting (which was not as often) or someone was always visiting us. We had a few relatives from Madison that loved to leave the city and go visit the country folk (us). The main ones who came to visit were Vern and Helen, and Sherman (my dad’s first cousin, also) and Virginia. As their families were growing up, they (like Ron did) learned to come to enjoy the trip to the farm. If we had plans to be home and the weather was nice, we usually knew that someone would probably stop out. Most times there were never phone calls, just dropping in. So we always planned a big Sunday dinner. Living on a farm meant that you could always embellish what food you had by what you had frozen or canned from the garden, could currently handpick from the garden or what meat you had frozen from the last butchering. We had cows, pigs and chickens, which meant we usually had plenty of meat on hand. We also had a big vegetable garden so fresh veggies were plentiful. And my mom loved to can peaches and pears when they were in season and not too expensive at the grocery store. We would buy them by the crateful and can them immediately.
　
Sunday dinner at our place with company would be something like a beef or pork roast (from one of our cows or pigs), mashed potatoes (from our potato field) and gravy, cream style corn (frozen from our sweet corn field), a tossed salad (all the greens and fixings from the vegetable garden), homemade bread or rolls, canned pears or peaches (off the shelves from the last year's canning sessions), milk (brought in fresh from the milk tank every morning and home-pasteurized) and a homemade dessert or cake. In our family, you could be short on money, but would always have plenty to eat by pulling something out of the freezer, off the canning goods shelving from the basement, from the milk tank or from the root cellar.
　
I didn’t like the butchering process, I didn’t mind the canning process, picking things in the garden was much more fun than the constant hoeing that was needed, but most of all, I hated planting the potatoes and even more hated digging them up. When it came time to pick the potatoes, we would pick until our backs felt like they would break but at the end of the day we would drive back from the field to the house with a heaping truck box full of potatoes and that would last a whole year. (I didn't mind if when riding or walking behind the truck, a couple would fall off. Sometimes I would be tempted to jump off the truck or stoop to pick up any stragglers jumping ship, but most of the time my back hurt so bad, I'd let them roll away, just to plant their seed for the next year). Later in the year and when running toward the end of our potato stash, we would have nothing left but the little runts and when you are feeding a family of nine, one meal could mean peeling a lot of runts. But, all-in-all, we were very self-sufficient on food and that, of course, meant doing (and/or putting up with) all the above work.
　
When Vern and Helen and the kids (Ron, Jim and Gary) would come to the farm, they enjoyed the homemade farm meals even as much. Helen would comment frequently that she missed the amenities of the farm. Farming had been in their blood for years, so they loved to come out as much as they could, many weekend throughout the year. Sherman and Virginia would stop out often, too, with their youngest kids (Susan and Sharon), and sometimes both families would drive out at the same time. They lived on the same block in Madison. Sherman was a carpenter in Madison and when he finally got around to having some spare time, he even remodeled our kitchen. Even after Helen and my dad passed away, Vern would still find the time to drive out to the country to visit. It was all these visits years ago that ignited the need for Ron to buy the dinner bell on our farm.
　
At the time, Ron felt he was keeping it in the family. Fortunately or unfortunately, he didn’t realize it until years later that he was on my dad’s mother’s side of our family and the bell had been passed down on my dad’s father’s side of the family keeping it with the family farm. For how long? It has a date on it of 1869. That’s a long time. After I got older and more sentimental about family heirlooms, I told Ron many times that if he ever decided he wanted to sell the bell, he should let me know and he agreed he would give me first dibs at it. But, in the meantime, he had mounted it on the back of his truck and wherever he went, he rang the bell. He had tied a rope to the handle of the bell so he could ring it from inside his truck even when driving. When he was on construction sites, he would be asked to ring the bell and even driving around Madison, the same would happen. Most of all, though, he would just ring the damn bell whenever he felt like it.
　
Ron finally decided a year-and-a-half ago that he would sell the bell back to me. I hadn’t gotten around to getting it from him yet, when my sons took the secretive effort to surprise me with it for my 50th birthday. They had taken the initiative to contact Ron and to set up a time to pick it up. I remember my son, Casey, telling me how Ron had told him to be up to his place (on the Saturday morning of my party) at 8:00 a.m., as Ron wanted to complete the transaction in time to be able to go to the Farmer’s Market early on the Square in downtown Madison. He initially wanted him there earlier than 8:00, but since Casey was coming from Chicago, he thought it would be too difficult. In fact, he was having my brother-in-law, Greg, come along so he could pick it up with Greg's truck to take it to the party because Ron was selling the bell with the mounting he had built. Anyway, Casey said that he hadn’t realized that Ron was such a talker and storyteller. He said when they got there, he figured he would hurry and pay for it, then load it into the truck to head out right away so Ron could go to the farmer’s market. He soon found out different. He said Ron started talking and telling stories, and Casey soon realized that Ron wasn’t in as much of a hurry as he thought he would be. Casey said that his one regret on that day was that he couldn’t stay longer to listen to these stories. At that time, his health had started to deteriorate, so it didn’t surprise me entirely when I got the call from his baby brother, Gary, on Saturday that he had passed away. I wasn’t surprised, but I wasn’t entirely prepared for it either.
　
I last saw Ron at his brother Gary’s 50th birthday party in October at a country VFW just outside of Madison. Gary had told me about the party and said he wasn’t inviting any other extended family because he didn’t want them to have to drive the distance to get to the party. Gary and I had always had a close bond, being the same age. In addition, he had made the special effort to be at my surprise 50th so I wanted to be at his, too. So, Bob and I took the time to attend, which even if Bob wouldn’t have gone along, I would have gone by myself. I’m especially glad that I went because it was the last time I saw Ron. We, in fact, spent most of the afternoon visiting with him, his girlfriend Sally and his son, Ronnie, along with Gary and his girlfriend, Shirley. (One fact to know, we have always called Ron and his son, Big Ron and Little Ronnie – I don’t think that, even now, that will change any time soon).
　
I had family staying at my house most of the weekend and so later in the day on Sunday after everyone left, I cleaned up the house, relaxed for a little bit, and while Bob was out spreading manure on the fields, I took Pongo outside to let him romp a little bit.

That is when I saw the bell. I smiled when I saw it because I knew exactly what I needed to do. I went over and I rang the bell. As it tolled away, clanging from side to side, I thought to myself, God needed another storyteller to add to his pack and he gained a good one this time. It was my little signal to Ron that every time I toll the bell, I toll it for him and he can go ahead and tell another story.