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.