My Chores

sam was a man

grinned his grin

done his chores

laid him down.

Sleep well

(e.e.cummings)

On dull Ohio mornings I throw on an old jacket and pull on old snow boots my neighbor gave me after her husband died and strike out into the cold to feed the animals. Birds feast from a feeder we’ve had for nearly 20 years; squirrels wrest kernels of field corn from cobs impaled on spikes driven through 2x4s by my father not long before he died, also nearly 20 years ago. Feeding the animals is my winter chore.

As I trudge though the snow and cold I feel the presence of generations of German-heritage farmers looking over my shoulders. My “Myers” family crossed the Atlantic in the 1750s, and in the following decades moved state-by-state from Pennsylvania to Ohio to Illinois and finally to Iowa in the 1890s. I feel those farmers walking with me. They arose hours before dawn, set fires in fireplace, furnace, or stove, put on thick layers of warmth, and headed into the dark to “do chores.” They fed, watered, checked on and tended to, and cleaned up after cattle, hogs, horses, chickens, and more. In the evening they repeated the ritual.

I sometimes went with my grandfather, father, and uncles to do chores, first just accompanying them, then later “helping” them. But I feel back beyond those I’ve followed to their barns - I feel all the way back to Christian Moyer/Meyer/Myers of York County, Pennsylvania. I convince myself that I know how he felt on bitter cold mornings, out doing chores.

But I don’t really know how any of them felt because our lives - mine, my families’, the animals’ - do not depend upon my feeding song birds and squirrels and white tail deer (in cleanup position). If I stopped doing my chores, who besides my wife would notice? It would be hard to prove that a jay died because I had stopped filling my little feeder, and who would care? He was ultimately on his own...wild. And I don’t have to clean up after any of them, which I like because I scooped a lot of manure out of my dad’s hog barn when I was young. My chores are optional; my German-American forebears did theirs to survive.

My grandparents’ Myers had six children; two became full-fledged farmers. Those six children produced 16 grandchildren, of whom two ended up farming for their livings. I am not aware that any of their great grandchildren see farming as their future. It’s a story often told in rural Iowa.

So I doubt many beyond my generation will feel what I feel when I feed the animals living in the woods behind our suburban home. If not, what will be lost? Some say nothing, but they would be wrong. Just going out in the cold for a ritualistic feeding of wild animals testifies to the interdependence of all living things, places me out in the larger world in which I live, and judges humankind’s careless excess and waste. I feed birds and squirrels so I won’t forget that we all exist together.

More personally, when I feel generations of ancestors fighting their way through snowy air to feed their livestock and their living, I know some part of them still resides in me. My remembering the long march of Myers men places me in a human lineage to whom life yielded no easy successes. I become wary of the comforts I enjoy. I anticipate tomorrow’s chores in the seriousness with which I take life and responsibility; in my attention to signs of approaching danger or threat; in my fascination with and concurrent suspicion about the ever new world we are so busy trying to create.

As long as I can think, tomorrow will always be on my mind because I feel those farmers’ early morning walks to the barn to care for their animals. They whisper to me that, each morning, I must roll out of bed to share seed and grain with our animals, and so do my part to help the world beyond my walls survive, and myself in it. I value their example.

But there are mornings I wish I’d never heard them.

Paying Attention

For as long as I can remember I have known John James Audubon’s painting of four pileated woodpeckers. A 32” tall reproduction by R. R. Donnelley and Sons of Chicago, where my grandfather worked as a printer, hung in my parents’ home until my mother gave it to us. Now it hangs in our family room, still in a plain wooden frame that bears the marks of a long-forgotten ceiling leak.

The painting communicates life and death. An adult female and an adult male perch on a dead tree trunk. The female holds a large caterpillar in her long bill. Two juvenile males, perched on a horizontal branch growing from the trunk, face and look to be calling to each other. The birds’ blacks and whites topped off by bright red crests convey bold power. A grape vine twines around the branch; from that vine hang narrow bunches of purple fruit, clustered in the center of the painting, just above the heads of the younger birds. The tree speaks of death; the birds speak of life; the caterpillar speaks of life consumed by life; the grapes and the young birds speak of generations to come. The scene’s interplay of life, death, and fecundity is dynamic and vital.

The Donnelley print holds special meaning for me, because it helps me remember my maternal grandfather, James Bohaty. I do not know if he himself worked on this particular print, but I am confident that if he did it is perfect. I recall grandpa’s exacting person and standards when I see “Pileated Woodpeckers.” Once I saw the original Audubon in a natural history museum; it meant no more to me than this reproduction, one of many avenues by which his life has come to mine.

Though I have been aware of “Pileated Woodpeckers” all my life, I have not always paid conscious attention to it. Like most things that hang around our lives, I regarded it more as background to real living than as living itself. But it was always watching me and my families grow and change, even if we did not know it.

One afternoon I was vaguely staring out our kitchen window when a flash of black and white and red caught my eye. It was near a stump that pokes out of the ground under an evergreen tree. I immediately knew the species of bird, though I had never before seen a living one.

Our backyard’s pileated woodpecker foraged there for no more than 30 seconds, and then, as quickly as it had appeared, it disappeared into the woods beyond. Large as it was, the woods swallowed it completely. Active as it is, I have never seen it again, but I know it lives nearby.

As soon as it flew away I walked into our family room and studied our Audubon reproduction with renewed interest. Then I checked out Peterson’s Bird Guide – yes, a pileated woodpecker really can be a foot and a half long. I had finally seen the living bird. I was grateful for the six-and-a-half decades that had prepared me to know it when I saw it. I may not have recognized it “in the feathers” had I not been passively aware of its picture for a lifetime.

Which is more real: the reproduction of the painting I have always lived with, or the actual bird I saw for a half a minute?  I have learned that awareness over a long term is just as real as attention given to the present moment.