Dear Lyla,
Daddy and I tell you all the time that growing up is about making mistakes and learning from them; without failures every now and again it is pretty difficult to measure progress. You may be surprised to note that making mistakes, and by extension learning, is a lifelong process. When I was about the same age you are now Bumpa learned a rather hard lesson about animal physiology and the ancillary uses of the common garden tomato. As you know I grew up in Northern Minnesota on a lake in the middle of the country. The seasons in Minnesota are beautiful but they are very short, especially the growing season. Grandma Jo took advantage of the rich, black soil on the top of the hill next to the house to plant a prolific garden in the early years that we lived there. Bumpa would bury the innards left in the fish house from the anglers’ daily catch right next to grandma’s garden so the vegetables that she planted would be hearty and plentiful. Grandma would can vegetables all summer so that when winter came we never ran out of good things to eat. One summer Grandma Jo’s garden was so robust we had sweet corn, green beans, peas, cucumber pickles, and gallons upon gallons of tomatoes; I can still see the jars in my mind’s eye in seemingly endless lines on the shelves in the cellar. Grandma was so proud of her work and the family would be grateful to open up those jars in the dead of winter and taste a little bit of sunshine that had been preserved by her skillful hands. Fall soon approached; with the changing of the seasons and the drop in temperature wild critters sought shelter any place they could find it and Bumpa made it pretty easy for them to find. The cellar where grandma stored all of her canned goods was very spacious and had several rooms that mirrored the footprint of the house above. In some of the rooms there were very small windows that sat level to the ground. Sometimes Bumpa would open the windows to run hoses or cords through them, depending upon what he was working on down in the basement. One ill fated day Bumpa forgot to close a window and a skunk found its way into our cellar. I bet you can imagine grandma’s reaction when she realized that she had company when she went to fetch a jar or two from her underground pantry. Bumpa tried everything to coax that skunk back out of the window through which he came, nothing worked. Bumpa knew you had to be careful when dealing with a skunk, if they feel threatened they will spray the aggressor with a stink so powerful it will burn the inside of your nostrils. Grandma and Bumpa debated endlessly about how to deal with the skunk (I am sure many of the local farmers weighed in with their opinions as well). Bumpa finally decided that enough was enough; he would get rid of that varmint once and for all with minimal risk of a skunk shower. Bumpa was under the impression that if you could shoot the skunk in the head and knock out the nerve centers the skunk would be incapacitated and unable to spray. Bumpa was a good shot and took the skunk out, but Bumpa was wrong; it turns out that skunk spray can be released as the body relaxes postmortem and the stench is considerable. Autumn in Minnesota is quite chilly with snow flurries often arriving before Halloween, but that fall every window in our house was open in an attempt to dissipate the skunk odor. As you might surmise, Bumpa stunk to high heaven since he was only a few paces from the skunk at the time of its demise. I like to imagine that there was an awful lot of chuckling by our country neighbors when they heard the story; there sure was no shortage of advice on how to get rid of the smell. It turns out that tomato juice is about the best thing you can use to get rid of the noxious fumes. Bumpa took several baths in grandma’s canned tomatoes that fall and it was days before folks could tolerate being in the same room with him. To this day I am not sure if grandma was more aggravated by the smell that hung in our house well past the holidays or by the fact that her precious garden bounty was used as an anti-skunk bubble bath for Bumpa. This story gives me comfort little one; comfort in the knowledge that it is human nature to make mistakes. But the hope is that we learn from our errors and never make the same mistake twice.
Letters To Lyla 