Please scroll down and get the Sousa music going before you begin reading this morning….  

At four thirty on a July morning when I was about fifteen years old, I was awake. Unusual. Don’t know why.
The house is quiet. Dad has breakfast and heads down to the barn to milk the two cows before beginning a long day’s work around six o’clock.
My bedroom on the second floor of the big farm house is actually the farthest point in the house from the front door or the back door, so slipping out of the house isn’t a matter of just stepping out of the door. But it’s a quiet, somewhat balmy morning and I suddenly realize that if I wanted to, I could go for a bike ride in my pajamas. I want to, so I do.
A pajama bike ride is one of those things that just needs doing – like climbing the windmill or getting up on the barn roof when no one was home – so off I go on the long country road that is part and parcel of our land.

I was the only one of seven children still at home that summer because my first up-the-line brother was working for a man over in North Dakota as a farm hand.  That man farmed twenty-one quarters which is, of course, completely impossible unless you have six or seven farm hands who can get the summer work done. He had hired two.
When I came back from that morning, it was still about twenty minutes before Dad and Mom would be getting up and I had an exaggerated sense of well-being that called for some John Philip Sousa. Again–one of those things that just needed doing.
I went to the piano, shuffled through the sheet music, found what I had been working on and, with no notice,  shattered the silence with a grand rendition.
You don’t play Sousa at 5:30 a.m. in the old farm house with hesitancy or a sense of experimentation. You do not work your way into it. Rendering an unannounced Sousa march on the piano at 5:30 in the morning when the farmer and his wife are still quietly in bed really had never been done in our house, but I just knew there was no looking back once the first chord was struck.

All Sousa marches have that framing of the thing in the opening bars before they launch into what, in band music, was designated as the trio (if it were vocal music, it would be called the chorus).  The trio is always the most fun to play, whether on clarinet or piano. So, in full commitment mode by the time I got to the trio and past the shock of actually doing this to my parents, I made the most of it.
I wrapped it up with a flourish (which is also necessary when you play Sousa unannounced at 5:30 in the morning — finish with flourish and confidence) and then, having no other numbers clamoring to be played, I went upstairs and went back to bed because it was still quite early.
Mom told me later how they had been chuckling and enjoying the event. I don’t recall being encouraged to do it again.
It was near the end of the summer when we began to learn in some detail what the early mornings and the eighteen hour days of my brother were like. He was working under what might be described as miserably-close-to forced labor conditions, being driven to accomplish the impossible from sun up until midnight.
The farmer’s desperate effort to hang on to this hardworking farm boy through the summer was motivated by the fact that he had been blacklisted by the employment services in the area: they refused to send anyone to work for him because of the insane demands he made of his farm hands.
He was one of those stern religious men who make God look like a jerk.  Because of his determination to observe Sunday as a day of rest, all of the machinery was shut down at midnight on Saturday, and then it was all fired up shortly after midnight, early Monday morning, to make up for the time they had lost in observing a day of rest.
No profanity ever crossed his lips, but he demanded 18 hours of work for 18 hours of pay — every day.  His farm hands were well fed and had good rooms to bunk in.  He was a cruel, cruel man, working people to the point of breaking them.
When he had learned that brother was about to walk off the job and drive away in midsummer, he doubled his pay and gave his wife instructions to bake and cook all of brother’s favorites, feeding him whatever he wanted during all the wretched days of summer that remained, so that he wouldn’t quit.
Near the end of August, brother had completed his servitude and collected his pay, and we were expecting him home on a certain day. What we did not expect was his manner of arrival.
When this very reserved young man made the final turn toward home at the mailbox, 3/4 mile up the road, he laid on the horn of his old car. And never let up.
I hear the distant sound, hear it swell, suddenly realize it’s him…the quietest and youngest of four older brothers is declaring victory in a most uncharacteristic way.

I’m coming home!

I made it!

The nonstop blare continued as he came around the last curve into the yard, until he pulled up next to the house.  

I don’t know if he had shed some tears of relief as he drove across western North Dakota and eastern Montana to get home that day, washing the exhaustion of getting away out of his system. If he had, that was long since over.

Being alone on country roads and shedding tears that are sometimes for others and sometimes for ourselves, laying on the horn as we bring ourselves home or just playing some Sousa — it’s all good.

These weekly MBOBs are snapshots from the back roads of my memories.

Mailboxes along the roads and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds often served as landmarks that told us where we were and how far we had to go in the prairie country where I grew up in northeastern Montana. 

Sometimes they signaled “home” and the end of the road.  At other times, barely visible through swirling snow they told us we had miles to go.  When I started compiling these word pictures I realized they were like those mailboxes and old barns—still identifying important places along the road, still signaling where I am and how far I have to go.