Howdy
My great grandpa moved to Kansas from Ohio in a wagon train. Great grandma had a scar on her leg she claimed was from an Indian arrow. It was probably from climbing over a fence.
They settled outside Satanta, took to subsistence farming, and had a couple kids.
One of them was my grandad. Grandad avoided the war by being too young, and not an idiot. There were things grandad didn’t talk about.
He married my grandma, who was a town kid, and built a four room house on a quarter section outside of town. No running water, shitter out back. No title. In those days you just marked it off.
The railroad came in. Farming for income became practical.
The Spanish flu started. They called it “a bad flu season”. It would kill fifty million, but it started there, in his tiny county. He never talked about that either.
More people came in, and they plowed up all the sod. Didn’t know better. that made the dust bowl. Great clouds of dust that went on for counties. Couldn’t breath. Everybody left. Environmental refugees during a massive depression.
Knocked around. Grandma went to relatives.He sent money to grandma when he could.
Got a job moving cement with a steel wheel wheelbarrow. Cussed as he was, it must have been darn hard for him to keep talking about it fifty years later. He always made sure he owned a good wheelbarrow.
Saw his first automobile. Liked to talk about that.
Moved on, got a job building wooden grain elevators. Sit atop a wall a hundred feet in the air with another man. Pull a board up on a rope together. Hike yerself up with spikes on your boots, slide the board under you. Hammer it down. Repeat for the next 10 hours.
Lots of men moving around, doing anything to stay alive, driven off farms by dust or the depression. One town where they were working, the town doctor and his wife did what they could. Let two men use their carriage house as a home. One was my grandfather.
Life carries on whatever the circumstances. One day the other fellow visited a woman of loose repute in the town. Came back later that evening, shaken up. Turns out she was trans. Grandad gave rough practical advice. If it bothered him, don’t go back there. Talked about that just one time. Told me that story when I came out.
Drifted North to Salina, where he got a carpenter’s labor job. Carried boards, sawed, paid attention. Always first on the job site, never acted tired. Paid attention. The boss noticed, and started teaching him how to make windows and doors, the finish carpenter trade. Eventually he would start Ogborn Construction.
Fifty years later, Ogborn Construction built a home, using pre-made windows of course. A few years later a tree near the house blew down in a storm, and the owner called us back to repair it. Problem was, the company no longer made that exact window, and of course it had to match the others. My grandad made one last window by hand.
Took to writing doggerel poetry. Formal education had ended in 6th grade.
He finally died at age 88. Had a stroke. He was roofing at the time. Lift a pile of boards from the truck on your shoulder. Walk across the lawn to the ladder. Climb up. Hand to my older brother on the roof. Repeat. Kansas, in August.
He had a son in the late 1930s, my dad. Taught Kansas wheat in summer, blue sky, amber wheathim the trade. Other than the army, he never did anything but work for Ogborn Construction his whole life.
Dad had an office with fake wood paneling, and decorated the wall with antique tools on hooks. One day in 1974 one of them, an edge plane, was missing. A real mystery. Who could have taken it, and why, pray tell? It had little cash value. End of day my grandfather walked in carrying it. He’d decided it was the best tool to put a fancy edge on a built in cabinet.
My dad married a hillbilly woman whose mother lost the farm after her drunkard husband ran off. She once told me she married him to get out of Sleeper, Missouri. She wanted to be an artist. Instead she opened a real estate agency out of the construction company office and raised 3 kids.
Two of them settled down to the carpenter trade. The eldest took over Ogborn Construction. The youngest went to work carpentering elsewhere. The oldest built cars, did drugs, died young. Youngest dropped away from Kansas anger and turned to painting. Filled his house with mom’s art and his own. Real quiet, didn’t talk about much of anything.
The middle one was always odd. Smart, read science books. Too fragile to work at the construction site, helped out by doing lots of architectural drawings. Went off to college. An old Kansas tradition, the kid too smart, ambitious, or not fitting in who leaves for the big city.
Studied physics – nobody else in the family knew what that was. Had a secret. Knew she was a girl, and nobody else did. Well, the family kind of knew, they just didn’t talk about it, following family tradition.
That was me.
In college I finally decided it was suicide or do something stupid and get a sex change. Being an Ogborn I chose stupid of course. Was told by the department chair it would be more convenient if I were not to return for my senior year. I was more interested in computers by that point, spending nights at the giant campus computer. Turning the craftsmanship of wood to the craftsmanship of numbers.
Moved out west chasing the computer industry. Decades later ended up in rural Oregon. My need to make things with my hands had gotten to me, I was sharing a well equipped shop with a similar minded fellow. I made sure the shop had a good wheelbarrow.
That’s who we are, we Ogborns. We’re from Kansas. We appreciate good wheelbarrows.
And now I read in the papers that they’re gonna put bounty hunters on me if I go in the damn bathroom and they’re demanding I turn in my driver’s license. I gotta tell ya, that’s dumber’n a dirt sandwich. Some ass is gonna tell you I’m not the people they want in Kansas. Given there’s about one person per county in some parts, there’s plenty of room for all of us, and I don’t want him in Kansas no neither.
My mind is, if’n I bother ya, don’t come over. THAT there is Kansas. As for me and that lady my grandad met, we’re over here on the porch sipping ice tea and pissing where we please. You mind yer own business, and stay off my damn property and outta my damn outhouse. And you can piss where you please too.
Annie, what was born n’bred ‘n grewed up in Salina.
Image by Carol M. Highsmith, US Public Domain, LOC Catalog