The Silver Spoon

This is another piece inspired by family and a very special place that they have kept going for four generations. 

The Silver Spoon

Anna Rohaly

    I am sitting in a sandbox with my baby cousin. All but a cornerstone is gone of that little white farm house. For over a decade, my grandfather Bill has promised us grandchildren a quarter for each piece of glass we find in the yard and throw in the trash can for him. The farms looks tremendously different. The house has been replaced by a mobile home, the woods are taller, and my great-grandparents no longer sit on the lawn and enjoy the family. Instead they lie beneath the ground resting in peaceful death. Yes, a lot has changed.

I dig my hands into the sandbox. Pamela and I are building a sandcastle. She is building the towers, I am digging the moat. As my hand slips through the finely ground stone, I hit something smooth and straight. I veer the moat to find the end of my new found treasure. Through the warm sand I see a peek of blue gray. Metal. Pushing more sand aside, I find a silver spoon, tarnished and worn from years underground.

     The silver spoon once belonged to my great grandmother Julia. It had sat in the drawer of her ever bustling and warm kitchen, reflecting her image each time she pulled out the shining silverware for dinner. As Julia grew older, she and her husband Joe spent less time at the farm house, opting instead to spend their time in the city where neighbors were close by. The silver soup spoon was only taken out and eaten with when the whole family gathered on the farm for a cookout or when the white haired Hungarian couple sat down to a quiet dinner before a long drive back to the city. Because Julia and Joe preferred life in Chicago to life on the farm, they both missed out on one of the most exciting days on the farm. The silver spoon was there for it all.

     On June 19, 1991 no one was on the farm. The sky outside the little windows, trimmed with black, was swirling gray and stormy. The rain came down in gentle waves at first but soon grew into sheets of water pummeling the small trees that covered the farm's overgrown ground. Lighting split the sky from end to end and the thunder rattled the loose metal latch on the screen door. Out on the porch, the wood was slick from rain and the noise was almost deafening as the water drummed on the roof and broke through the screen to ping against the metal cans of gasoline sitting by the wall. The lightning struck in the distance. The storm was not even close yet.

     The trees that grew on the old fence row were taller then the others and as the wind hurtled through they bent and shuddered. The ferocity of the rain and wind snapped branches which fell to the ground, edges sharp and bleeding out sap. Mixing with the rain, the sap fell to the ground unnoticed. The lightning struck again, closer.

    Through the eves of the little house, the wind moaned. The lilac bushes, preparing to blossom around the house, shook. They scrapped against the closed windows which from the inside of the house looked like stained glass under the streaming rain. Everything inside sat as if holding its breath, waiting for the storm to pass, waiting for the silence. Instead another bolt of lighting crackled, right outside.

This bolt of lightning was not just splitting the sky, it was splitting a tree in the fence line. The tree, a once strong and powerful oak, splintered and lost one of its largest branches. The branch fell from the tree, twisting through the air until it met not the ground, but the power line which ran up to Julia's little farm house. Meeting the line, there was a moments pause in the decent of the branch. It was like the calm before a storm. The calm ended with a hiss as the wire pulled loose from the pole attached to the little farm house. The branch plummeted straight down to earth and the wire followed, spraying a shower of sparks. The wire caught on the roof of the porch.

    The sparks continued to pour from the wire and as they met the rain, they sizzled and steamed. Within minutes, the roof was flickering with flames. The rain continued and smoke rose in thick clouds as the fire began to dance across and through the roof, eating any dry wood, shingles, and insulation it could find through the sodden surface. A beam of wood cracked under the attack of the fire and fell to the slick porch below. The heat of the fire fell with it and caught onto the dry wooden rockers, the small stand that held Joe's cigars and Julia's cup of coffee. It snaked across the floor and licked wickedly at the base of the tin cans which lined the wall.

    Had the house been alive, like in ghostly stories of haunted buildings, the little house would have screamed. But the little house, filled with Julia's crochet afghans, her silver spoons, and her happy memories, sat silently as the tins of gasoline ignited.

    The explosion ripped through Julia and Joe's little white farm house, trimmed in black, twisting the grand-kids' metal bunk beds, shattering the glass in the windows, and destroying their once happy home.   Glass from bottles, jars, plates, and cups flew like bullets from the house, landing in the woods over one hundred yards away. The silver spoon hit a wall, burst through the shattering house, landed twenty yards away.

    If the neighbors down the road had thought the thunder was loud, the explosion deafened them. Through the woods they could see the fireball, consuming the splintered structure of Julia and Joe's house. They called 911, but it was too late. The house was gone, all those memories, gone.

    Standing up from my seat in the sandbox, I wipe the gritty sand from the spoon's handle. It was once badly bent, as though a shovel had been sent through the dirt and hit the stem of the spoon, bending it nearly in half. I bend it back into shape. There is still a kink in the metal, but it is as spoon-like as it might once have been, sitting snugly in a drawer in my grandmother's ever bustling and warm little kitchen. No longer shiny, it still reflects her love of that kitchen, of that house where she survived the Great Depression, where she raised her children, and fed her husband dinner each night. Maybe he once ate off of this same silver spoon. Either way, the house is gone. However, maybe the memories have not yet turned to ash. Maybe they just need to be dug up.

    The idea comes quickly. I abandon the sand box and my cousin and head for the mobile home. I cross the big wooden porch to the screen door and let it slam shut behind me. Turning left I head across the ugly blue shag carpeting to the first bedroom and, entering, open the closet door.

My younger brother is in an amazing Boy Scout troop and after selling an ungodly amount of popcorn for the troop, he was awarded a metal detector. It is now in the closet of this small room, kept company only by an osculating fan and bunk beds. I open the box.

    I pull out the long, narrow piece of equipment. Holding the handle, I turn on the small screen that sticks away from the base of the pole that attaches the handle to the circular piece at the bottom. I have never used this before but figure it can not be too hard to figure out. I drag it out to the dining room and lie it on the shag carpeting.

    Crossing to the other side of the room, I open a small wooden cupboard and pull out some small flags that look like the ones used to mark buried gas mains or electrical lines. These will be my markers for anything I find. Picking up the metal detector, I head out to the remains of the old barn.

    The old barn had stood about seventy yards from the house. Long before the house was blown to bits, the barn started to lean. Julia was so nervous about the leaning walls and her grandchildren playing in the building, that she pestered Joe to tear it down. They burned it to the ground and now only the stone foundation remains, half buried in sandy earth.

    I turn on the metal detector and begin to sweep it across the ground, hitting the stems of the small yellow flowers, which makes a swishing noise. The noise is mingled with the static and occasional beeping of the metal detector. It is a noisy process. Soon my mom and aunt wander over, carrying little Pamela who had gotten sick of the sand box. They watch as I sweep the corners of the old barn. The beeping of the detector picks up and turns into a solid beep when I get about three feet from the corner. I mark the spot with a flag and keep moving. Another solid tone. Another flag. Within a short time, I have nearly a dozen flags planted.

Turning off the metal detector, I go to find a shovel and a bucket. My aunt and mom disappear and come back with my dad and uncle, who arrive with more shovels. Together, we all begin to take turns to dig up the buried treasures of the farm. The memories. I find a horse shoe from Old Nelly, Joe's plow horse, I find a plowshare. Dad finds the end of a hoe and a hammer head. Uncle Kevin digs up a screw driver and some nails. All of these objects are put in the bucket. Mom and Aunt Linda take them into the mobile home and wash them off.

    An hour later, when we are done shifting sand, we call my grandfather, Bill. I call him Opa. Opa listens to the list of items we have found. Each one conjures up a memory from the way the farm used to be. The time Julia had hacked off the head of a snake that had entered her garden with the metal hoe. The time he and Joe had climbed to the roof of the barn to fix some leaks and watched as a wall of rain covered the hot sunny day. Helping his father plow the fields and plant the acres of crops. The chores he had done, the jobs he had worked. All the memories came back, were shared, savored. We had literally dug up the memories of this place and hearing them come spilling from my Opa, showed me that I had been right. The memories were still here even if they were buried.