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  As she aged, Mae moved more and more slowly, her legs encased in brown cotton stockings, her feet shod in thick-heeled shoes, as she worked her way up the aisle of the Pleasant Ridge EUB Church to her piano. There she took her seat, ready to accompany hymn singing. She remained seated until Reverend Lester Matthews began his sermon, at which point she rose carefully from the creaking piano bench and resettled herself on the short pew next to the piano.

  Mae seemed to sense when Lester was winding down. Moving with the stealth of a housebreaker, she hoisted herself to a crouching position and steadied herself with a grip on the piano, returned to her bench, her hands poised for the final hymn of the service.

  My Uncle Vern played piano, the only ridge farmer to do so, at least the only one who had stayed with lessons long enough to acquire the degree of skill and confidence to play for an audience. He was always asked to play a solo for the church Christmas program. Although Mae joined in the praise of my uncle’s performance, I have wondered if she might have felt jealous or overlooked. I had heard grownups tell one another in quiet voices that she didn’t always play all of the notes, that she sometimes improvised her own chords in the left hand rather than playing the song as written. Other than those faint criticisms, no one seemed to pay any more notice to her weekly efforts than if she had been the furnace in the church basement.

  Sometimes the Youth Fellowship sang for the Sunday service on special occasions. Usually, Mae came to the church to play for our practice, but once when our youth directors Sandy and Cody couldn’t make it, we gathered at her house for practice, all of us clustered around the piano in the tiny flower-papered room.

  After all of us agreed that our rendition of “Bringing in the Sheaves” was as good as it was going to get, Mae began playing rollicking tunes on her piano—to our amazement, as in our innocence, we felt that her old upright only worked with hymns. Then she called to Elmer, who opened a door and emerged reluctantly from their bedroom. “Get your spoons,” she directed, her face ruddier than the fading sunset of her graying hair, and to our surprise, he hurried to the kitchen and returned with two tablespoons. He sat on a straight-backed chair in the crowded parlor, and as Mae played, he held the spoons in one hand, one spoon on top of the other, in such a manner that when he tapped them against his thigh, they made the ringing sound of castanets. Mae played faster and faster as Elmer played along with her, the spoons dancing up and down and around his skinny legs as if they had a life of their own, and some of the girls in our group spontaneously began to do an improvised dance.

  When Mae stopped playing and turned to us, we expected a scolding about the impropriety of dancing (one of the thou-shalt-nots in EUB church doctrine), but instead she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I don’t think it would matter if you danced. Just push the furniture back against the walls.” She began playing again, Elmer providing accompanying percussion, and we slid back tables and chairs and floor lamps to make an open space in the center of the room, dancing like angels on the head of a pin, careening into one another as we joyously flailed about in time to the music.

  At last, when it was time to go home, Mae became very solemn. “Don’t tell Sandy and Cody,” she cautioned, and we silently nodded in agreement.

  When I was a boy, clergymen were always men. Samuel Johnson once said of women preachers that it “was like a dog walking on its hind legs. It is not well done but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Few people on the ridge had heard of Johnson, but they would have agreed with him.

  Shoving this misogynous attitude aside, in retrospect, church ladies helped keep the institution afloat. Minnie and Mae might have been gossips, their appearance easily caricatured, but in reality, they were both talented ladies, and I remember them not for their religious devotion but as pillars of the community, women who were relegated by the times to roles as powers behind the throne. Their humanity softened our lives on the ridge.

  The Church Band

  The Pleasant Ridge EUB Church band did not have seventy-six trombones to lead a big parade, nor did we have a hundred and ten cornets close at hand. But we had our very own music man in Reverend Lester Matthews.

  The reverend’s day job was clerking in a hardware store in town, work that no doubt supported his Sunday calling, officiating at two services, first at the Pleasant Ridge EUB Church and then down the valley to the Buck Creek Church for a second. He might have had little interest in starting up a band if it hadn’t been for me, an aspiring young musician limited both by a modest talent and a mother who could not bear to hear me practice, shouting at me to take my Flutophone outside if I wanted to play it. But what I lacked in musicianship I made up for in versatility. In addition to the plastic wannabe recorder, I played piano (selftaught, sneaking over to the church on my bike to practice on the EUB upright), flute (the high school band director talked me into it at the end of my sophomore year), and clarinet (the fingering was similar to a flute).

  I belonged to the EUB Youth Fellowship, as did every other non-Catholic farm kid eager for a social life on the ridge, and when someone told me that Reverend Matthews had a complete set of sheet music for marching band from an earlier youthful enterprise, I approached him with my idea for forming a church band and learned that he had not only the music but music stands and even a snare drum.

  He scratched his chin thoughtfully as I explained that because nearly everyone in the Youth Fellowship was in band at Ithaca High School, we had enough musicians to cover all the parts. To clinch the deal, I told him we would need him to be our conductor.

  And so the Pleasant Ridge Evangelical United Brethren Church Band was formed, a roster of musicians not much lengthier than the name of our group. At our first rehearsal, about a dozen musicians showed up and covered most of the parts, although some of us had to share music stands. Our sound was good and loud, perhaps the acoustical effect of the cement block walls and the low ceiling of the church basement where we were practicing. Although we were fewer in number, we sounded almost as good as the high school band, and some of the marches we played were the same ones we had performed in school.

  Our preacher-turned-band director waved his arms while we played, more keeping time with us than setting a tempo or suggesting dynamics, but he was doing his best, his red face beaded with perspiration on his forehead.

  In retrospect, I realize that our ensemble was more like a wind chamber group, with generally only one instrument to a part. In addition to our adult trombone and trumpet players, musicians included cousin Kay on bass clarinet, my sister on flute, cousin Don on drums, neighbor girl Sharon on first clarinet, me on second, and Sharon’s brother Junior on baritone horn. Alan Subera, who was only a freshman but the best musician in the high school band, played tuba. My uncle Vern was the only trombonist, and one trumpeter whose name I have long since forgotten drove up from Richland Center for practice in our church basement.

  We had only two gigs, our first a talent show that was performed one warm summer night on a hay wagon pulled under a yard light next to the front steps of the church as an improvised stage. We would have had more room on the raised platform at the front of the church, but out of deference to the sensibilities of the more devout churchgoers, I thought it best that we played “Washington Post” and the rest of our limited march repertoire out in the open air. Our audience was a small but very appreciative crowd that enjoyed the novelty of a church band.

  Our second concert was held as a part of the christening of the new pole shed that the father of Don and Kay Johnson had completed earlier that summer. The structure served as our concert hall, and once again, a hay wagon served as our stage. This time, Don and Kay’s little sister Judy sat under it providing Lawrence Welk–style soap bubbles. Our audience applauded dutifully, but while we had gotten better as a group, we were less of a novelty.

  And the summer was coming to an end. I was going back to college in the fall and the other student musicians, back to high school. Uncle Vern put his trombone back
in the closet, and Reverend Matthews returned his sheet music, stands, and drum to the basement, and with them the memory of the one summer that the hills of Pleasant Ridge came alive with the sound of big band music.

  The Catholics

  For the evangelical folk on the ridge, our faith was conventional and our commitment casual. The Catholics, however, with their faithful adherence to elaborate rituals, seemed as exotic as if they had been Hasidic Jews.

  As evangelicals, we went to church for the Christmas program several days prior to the holy day so that we could celebrate the actual holiday at home with Santa and our families. We kids recited poems, sang songs, and acted out the birth of Christ, the guys wearing bathrobes and the girls sheets, the closest we could come to Middle Eastern costumes.

  We did go to church on Easter Sunday, as our religious observances did not interfere with the visit of the Easter Bunny. My mother made new dresses for the occasion, both for my sister and herself, and would put the ham in the oven before we drove to the steepled white frame church that I could see from my bedroom window.

  The third regular attendance at church was Children’s Day, the Sunday at the conclusion of a week of Vacation Bible School when our program was part of the worship service. While Mae sat at the upright piano, graying-red braids crowning her head, plunking out “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” we marched in two lines. The two tallest kids led the way, one carrying the American flag, the other, the white Christian flag with its red cross. The lines diverged at the two aisles and rejoined on stage, standing in formation as the flags were repositioned in their holders. We sang hymns (always “Jesus Loves the Little Children”) and recited Bible verses (“Suffer the little children to come unto me” was a favorite, although the suffering part was unsettling).

  And then we were good, for the most part, until Christmas. True, we had those on the ridge who were regular in attendance, such as Minnie, who lived directly across the road from the church and taught a Sunday school class, Mae the pianist, and Sandy, who always came early Sunday morning during winter to fire up the wood furnace.

  But otherwise, the congregation seemed to consist of a few stragglers, usually a total assembly of less than a dozen. Luckily Reverend Matthews had a day job clerking at a hardware store in town and a second EUB service down the valley at Buck Creek following ours.

  In retrospect, the peripatetic personality of our pastor seemed fitting for the rather disengaged flock he shepherded on Pleasant Ridge, most of whom never took him literally. We were forbidden by church doctrine to dance, to play cards, to drink alcohol, and to attend the cinema, among other sins, but most of us winked at each other as we continued to transgress.

  However, our Catholic neighbors marched to the more insistent beat of their own drummer. Their parish priest made pronouncements, and parishioners fell in line, especially regarding church attendance. Just as postal carriers pledge that “neither snow nor rain nor sleet nor hail nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” our Catholic friends never let the natural elements keep them home on a Sunday morning. A heavy snow would find the entire family shoveling their long driveway, hoping the township snowplow would make it through in time for them to complete the ten-mile drive into town for Mass. We EUBs would have looked out our windows and respected the blizzard as God’s will, even though some of us were within walking distance of our church.

  Those of us who had been invited to Catholic weddings and had sat through a High Mass were impressed and confused by the devotion on display. No one understood a word of the Latin being spoken, and we were never certain when we should be standing, sitting, or kneeling. Despite the pageantry of the service, the colorful rituals, the comings and goings of the celebrants and participants, the Mass seemed very long.

  Confession was another oddity, going into a telephone booth–like box and telling a priest, usually one you had known for years, about your private sins! The idea seemed rather embarrassing to us. We imagined that if we had to tell Reverend Matthews about our wrongdoings, he might gossip about them with neighbors who came into the hardware store.

  The statues of the Virgin Mary that decorated lawns and the use of rosaries for prayer seemed exotic and magical. We had nothing like that in our religion, only pictures of Jesus, sometimes standing in a flock of sheep, with a mournful, worried look on his face.

  Card-playing was a universal recreation on the ridge. Typically, a couple or two would be invited to play cards for the evening (often euchre, sometimes 500), drink beer, and end the evening with a lunch. A small child or two might be brought along and put to sleep atop the bed holding coats.

  When our Catholic neighbors were either hosts or guests on a Friday night, lunch was never served before 12:01 so that the salami or big bologna could be brought out for sandwiches.

  The Catholics seemed to belong to an exclusive club, one that appeared obsessive from the perspective of those of us who were lukewarm Protestants, and that lack of commitment no doubt contributed to the decline of our church.

  The old Evangelical United Brethren church, after a merger with the Methodist congregation, closed for many years. But now it has been restored, an artifact commemorating the Lord’s Acre Sales, the Mother-Daughter and Father-Son banquets, the charity quilts pieced by the Ladies’ Aid Society, and those programs at Easter and Christmas, when the church served as a spiritual center of the community. The gleaming white building with its impressive steeple looks as if it is waiting patiently for a new congregation to settle into its rows of vintage pews.

  Now when I step inside the sanctuary, its hollow emptiness seems to flutter with the better angels of the long-ago community on the ridge during my boyhood.

  Hills and Valleys

  While it is true that we had a wonderful panoramic view from Pleasant Ridge and that on a clear day we almost could see forever, sometimes we nearly needed to put rocks in our pockets if we hoped to walk in a straight line from the house across the road to the barn.

  If we were nestled in a valley, we would have been sheltered from the gale-force winds powering the windmill that pumped water from the ground when my great-grandfather lived on the farm. We could still see the basket-like crotches at the tops of the white pines in our lawn, the consequence of the trees being topped when they were younger so as not to obstruct the predominately western wind.

  And if my great-grandpa had lived in the valley, rather than on the exposed spine of the ridge, we wouldn’t need to pump water because it would have bubbled placidly out of the ground in springs, pure and cold.

  From the top of the tower ladder in every direction that we turned, we could see faraway farms perched on the series of hills that made up the ridge. If we climbed the ladder on the exterior of the silo, or inside the barn up to the windows of the haymow, the effect was much like peering from a low-flying airplane.

  But as a boy, I dismissed the view, even with a nighttime sky, the yard lights of distant farms twinkling like fallen stars, and the clustered lights of faraway Bunker Hill, like an earth-bound constellation.

  My problem? The only water I saw was pumped from the ground, collected in the small milk house tank that cooled our cans of milk or in the stock tank that watered our cattle during the summer. The one exception was the spring snowmelt when the ravine in our woods temporarily became a river and I could trudge through slushy snow down the hill to marvel at the phenomenon, lamenting its ephemeral existence. Soon, my bank-threatening river would once again become a barren ditch, and my fantasies of fishing and boating and swimming would all be washed away.

  On the other hand, my Johnson cousins, Don, Kay, and Judy, lived on the upper Little Willow Valley, a farmstead that in my mind could have been the setting for Rebecca’s Sunnybrook Farm. The house was nestled at the head of a valley shaded by a giant cottonwood tree that snowed its down on the lawn in summer, a beautiful effect.

  Behind their house, five springs merged like fingers of a hand into
a brook that ran by the house, a constant lullaby during warm summer evenings when windows were open while the family slept. In the kitchen, a handpump brought cold water up from the springs. The stream continued down to the barn, where it ran through the milk house cooling the cans of fresh Jersey milk until the truck arrived and hauled them to the cheese factory.

  But the centerpiece of the homestead was the house, now captured in pastels by family matriarch and outsider artist Naomi Johnson. The traditional farmhouse was well porched, with not only a screened porch facing the road but also one in back that opened onto the springs, and most wonderful of all, a doubledecker on the end of the house facing the cottonwood tree and the bluff behind it. The lower level was open, with stairs leading to the screened top level, used by the Johnson grandparents, who lived in a second-story apartment.

  The large dining room served as an open-concept family room, a term that didn’t exist when I was a kid. A big parlor wood-stove made the room cozy for dining at the large square table or for relaxing on the studio couch or rocking chair. But we all knew that the oversized easy chair with the brown leather upholstery cracked from wear and age was off limits to anyone but Verne Johnson himself, my first cousin once removed.

  The family no longer owns that property, and the new owners have razed the kitchen–dining room wing of the house and remodeled the remaining two-story part into a modernized vacation rental home. They have landscaped the lawn and springs with native plants, all with the best of intentions for being environmentally responsible.

  But for me, the charm is gone.

  Maybe grass just seems greener in the valley to a child who was raised on hills.

  Snowbound