The Sixty Fifth on the Church Lawn

The farm on the ridge road

My father is Clair Shirk. He was born in 1937 in the same stone farmhouse where he and Mom still live, on a ridge road above the Juniata River in central Pennsylvania.

He started milking at fourteen, when his own father hurt his back pitching hay.

He milked for fifty-two years after that, morning and evening, Christmas and Easter, the day each of his girls was born. He sold the last of the Holsteins in 2003.

Mom grew up two farms over. She says she decided on him at a hymn sing when she was sixteen and spent the next six years waiting for him to notice.

They were married on the second Saturday of June in 1961, in the little white country church at the bottom of the hill, the one with the maples along the lawn and the cemetery out back where both sets of their parents are buried now.

It rained that day. Not a sprinkle, a real June thunderstorm that came over the ridge at ten minutes to two and dumped water on the church lawn like somebody had tipped a bucket.

Dad’s cousin Elam Zook was his best man. Elam grabbed a black umbrella out of the vestibule and ran out to her father’s car and walked Mom up the walk to the church door, holding that umbrella over her and getting soaked to the skin himself.

There is a photograph of it in their album. Mom is laughing with her veil plastered to one cheek.

Elam is grinning, water dripping off his nose, his thick black curls flattened to his head. I have looked at that picture my whole life.

The forgetting started about two years ago. Small things first. Where he put his hat. Whether he had fed the cat.

Then the names of the men at the feed mill, and the year he sold the cows, and the road to the hardware store he’d driven ten thousand times.

The doctor in Lewistown called it early dementia. He said it would likely move slowly, and that people with Dad’s kind often keep the old memories long after the new ones go.

He said music stays the longest. I wrote that down on the back of a receipt and kept it in my wallet.

Mom takes care of him by herself. She will not hear of anything else. She lays out his clothes, she cuts his meat, she reads him the Juniata Sentinel every morning whether he follows it or not.

She is 87 years old and five foot one and she has never once complained to me.

What happened at Christmas

I need to tell you about Christmas, because I didn’t understand Vonda until I understood Christmas.

We were all at the farmhouse for dinner. Vonda brought the ham, the way she always does. When she carried it in and set it down in front of Dad, he smiled up at her and said, “Thank you, ma’am.”

Then he turned to Mom and asked, very politely, who the nice lady was.

Nobody said anything for a long second. Then Mom said, “That’s Vonda, Clair. That’s our oldest.” And Dad said, “Well, of course it is,” and patted Vonda’s hand, and asked her to pass the potatoes.

He knew her again ten minutes later. He called her Von, which is what he has called her since she was a baby. But I watched my sister’s face, and something in it closed that day, like a barn door sliding shut.

She went out to the porch after dinner and stood there in the cold without a coat for a long time. When I went out to her, she didn’t turn around. She just said, “Don’t,” and so I didn’t.