On the farm, chores were not dispensed democratically, they were assigned by the powers that be. The powers that be, of course, were our parents, and my mother assigned me the job of burning the papers.
The papers were collected in a brown paper bag in the broom closet in the kitchen. The brown paper bags came from the Grand Union or the West Side Meat Market, usually with groceries. This was a form of recycling. The brown bags would be filled, over the course of days, with “the papers”. “The papers” was a euphemism for any waste, trash, or garbage which could burn. For generations, burning the papers was a chore on every farm and country house.
The burning took place in a fifty-five gallon drum, or a smaller one, with the top cut out and holes cut in the side with a cold chisel. (Does a barrel have just one side? I can’t get my head around that.)
I hated burning the papers. I didn’t like lighting matches. Somehow the phosphorus on the matches would stick to my fingertips and, as the match caught fire, so too would my fingers. I just wasn’t that good at it and tried to get out of it. But once my mother made up her mind, there was not much of an appeal process available. If you tried to appeal a decision of our mother’s to our father, the outcome of the appeal was much more likely to leave you in a worse condition than your original state. So the appeal process ended. Except for Grandma.
When my Grandfather died young and my parents bought the farm, Grandma Phelps built and moved into a small red house on the edge of town. Grandma’s house was on the way home. If we walked home from school, or Sunday school, her house was a halfway house and we could stop there for a drink of water, or, if winter, for hot chocolate, to say hello, or we could stop there later, when older, if we road our bikes to Bradley Park to play ball, or if we were attending the summer events in the park hosted by Coach Marone.
Over the years the red house became a place of refuge. Somehow grandparents were different from actual parents, more understanding, laid back in a secure way. When my grandmother asked, “What’s wrong?” I answered, “My mother makes me burn the papers!” I thought I could find an ally.
“Your mother works very hard,” she said, “you need to help her around the house.”
“But kids aren’t supposed to play with fire,” I tried.
“You’re not playing with fire, you’re working,” said my grandmother with frustrating logic.
“But when I try to light the match, when I push down on the phosphorous part of the match to keep it on the strike part, some of it gets on my fingers and my fingers start on fire,” I said and held up my finger with its blister.
“Well then you have to practice, and move your finger away from the flame faster, and start the match without touching the phosphorous.”
There was just no getting around it. Here the two ladies of the farmhouse were united, and no generational gaps could be exploited. And, even the older woman who had surrendered her house to the younger, and about whom the younger would one day be heard saying, privately, yet proudly, “I have now lived in this house longer than she,” even with all that, the two women were united in their beliefs that each of them, both of them, each in her own way, had been worthy of the farmhouse, and that boys, boys were meant to work.
So, I was out in the cold.
The burning can was out the long back porch overlooking the stone wall, the pastures below, and the black river. I took out the bag of papers and went out the back door and along the porch and down the steps to the ground. From here a path led past sprawling lilacs and down to a cove a yew trees, like dwarf cedars, and I skirted the edge of the yews and there was a plank across a small drainage brook.
The burning can was here then, shielded from the house and out of the wind, and on the edge of an abandoned garden in which rhubarb grew between the weeds and now wild daffodils, the spot shaded by young locust and a slight hill to the west.
Burning the papers was my first chore on the farm and it lasted many years.
One day, coming back up the hill from the yew trees, the matches still in my hands, I looked at the ground between the lilacs and backstairs and I spied the edge of a coin, a silver dollar. I picked it out of the ground with the wooden matches. Later, when I told my grandmother what I had found she said, “I think your father lost that coin there in 1936.”
© 2015 Richard L. Phelps
