My favorite time of year

LITTLE ROCK — This is pretty much my favorite time of year. I have always really enjoyed the fall season, first, for its relief from the July heat and August humidity; second, for the colors as the tree leaves turn from green to shades of red, yellow and golden brown; and third, for the activities that normally go with the fall of the year.

2012 has been an unusual year in north Arkansas, as usual, with everything dried up and seemingly lifeless in the mid-summer, then quickly livening up as the rains came in late summer and early fall. Grass in the pastures sprang up again, many farmers got another cutting of hay, and fall has brought a brilliant display of hues and colors both to the decorative trees of lawns and streets in town, and to the wood lots out on the farms and countrysides.

The passing years have brought many changes to the farming that we see and do in our part of Arkansas. In my early years, during the 1940s, much more general farming was done around our area, with horses and cows, chickens and hogs, and sometimes even a few sheep and goats, although those were pretty rare. With that variety of livestock, the crops were very different then.

Whereas today our farms are mostly about pastures and hay for cattle, our crops used to include corn, oats for the horses and othergrain crops like wheat or barley, plus hay and pasture crops of several kinds. We liked to put up as much alfalfa and clover hay as possible. Those made for productive milk cows. The corn and other grain was often ground and mixed with other grains and supplements to make feed for all the livestock, especially the cows and laying hens. The horses got their oats. The hogs got our leftovers from the house, plus some ear corn, and so on. In those days we tried to produce as much as possible of the food we ate, so we had large gardens. A chicken was always handy for getting ready a chicken dinner. Fall was for hog killing and processing. Today, for most of us, food comes from the grocery store, and how easy it is to forget that food has to be grown somewhere by a farmer.

Fall has often been election time, when we elect our President of the United States. I won’t say that elections in the years ago were less hotly contested than today’s campaigns, but as I recall, after an election the campaign was over for a while. Today, it seems that the campaign still goes on, we start looking for who will run next time, and thecampaign against the newly elected President may become even more fierce. In the earlier days, we tended more to think that whatever party the new President was from, he was our President, and we would work with him to manage the country as well as possible. Politics in those days was not so doggedly ideological as we see today. Especially during the years of WWII, we tended to think more about our unity as a nation, despite our differences, rather than seeing ourselves as battling camps representing unreconcilable political absolutes.

Then, fall is Thanksgiving time. I am convinced that giving thanks is one of the healthiest and most helpful things we do as a people.

And, I enjoy Thanksgiving as a time for gatherings of family and friends, taking note of the blessings we have received, and enjoying activities together that make for strengthened families, greater bonds of friendship and an increase in community spirit. I enjoy the coming together of churches for shared Thanksgiving services, the gatherings of families for Thanksgiving dinner, and football games, volleyball games and the beginnings of basketball season.

I enjoy the season when we start having more vegetable-beef soups and stews and chili; when we enjoy pie suppers and ham and bean dinners; when we start thinkingof roast turkey and ham, and dressing and cranberry sauce and other grand meal fixings. Some of our old Ozark meal traditions have kind of faded, as our area becomes more cosmopolitan. Now, we are a people from everywhere.

No longer are we mostly Ozarkers whose ancestors came here from the Carolinas, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee. These days we are from California, New York, Wisconsin, Illinois and Iowa. In our Ozark tradition, we ordinarily had three meals a day, like other folks, but we didn’t call the meals the same. For many of us, breakfast was breakfast, but at noon we had dinner and in the evening it was suppertime. It took me considerable adjustment to get used to having breakfast, lunch and dinner. I suppose to me dinner represented home and farm noon hour, whereas lunch seems like something you would get at Blackhawk Grill. Likewise, suppertime has a comfortable sunset feel to it, while dinner in the evening seems like something you would go out for. I guess I’m still an Ozarker at heart.

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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.