It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon. It was cloudy most of the week, and a cold wind blew in off the lake and picked up some dust off the street and blew it right in your face. You walk around in dim light carrying ten pounds of wool and look down a cold gray street lined with miserable yards and taste dust in your mouth and then get some dirt in your eyes, it brings your life to a halt. You’ve got to find your mother, your teacher, Sister Arvonne, to wipe your eyes, but you can barely see, standing helpless, weeping, cold; it’s no wonder at that moment you think, “Albuquerque. Why didn’t I think of Albuquerque? Why didn’t my parents think about Albuquerque before I was born? I’d be a native Albuquerquian, or Albuquerquer. I’d be an Albuquerquite.” It never gets cold and you don’t grow old because you just stay young lying in the sun, oh the sky is never murky in Albuquerque.
Do Albuquerquians ever long for Minnesota? I imagine they do. I imagine they would envy us even more than they do if they knew more about us. I imagine that atheists like it fine in Albuquerque, but the ones who know God and talk to God have asked God, “God, what is your country?” And God told them, “Well, I don’t like to single out one place over another, because of course there are good people everywhere, but if I had to pick one place, based on what I know, which is everything, I guess I’d have to say Minnesota.” Those Albuquerquians (and God knows there must be a few of them) must want to live here in the worst way. And March is a month when you can do that.
It was a quiet week. Josh, a salesman for Inspirational Systems, visited Pastor Ingqvist’s tiny office in the Lutheran annex on Wednesday, selling a worship program for Advent called “Actualizing the Child in Ourselves.” Bud took the snowplow off the truck Wednesday evening, being tired of driving around with it banging up and down. He said, “It’s sure to snow now, but it’ll just have to melt, I’m through thinking about it.”
My attitude exactly. I put away my parka in April and put on a jacket. If it turns cold, that’s not my problem, I refuse to accept winter anymore. If we get a blizzard, let someone else worry about it, I won’t. There comes a point where you have to stand up to reality and deny it. Rain, rain, go away, come again another day. O-U-T spells Out. When I got fed up with weeding the garden, I’d look at the weeds and say, “That’s not weeds. I say that’s spinach, and I say let it stay where it is.”
When Ruthie had her baby out of wedlock (actually not “out” of wedlock, just not quite far enough into wedlock, about six and a half months), as the wedding approached people said, “Oh, I don’t think she’s heavier. She always was big-boned, you know.” As if we had bones in our bellies. When the baby came, people fussed over it and said, “My, I can’t believe how big it is.” At eight pounds, four ounces, it was the most gigantic baby ever born two and a half months premature.
Aunt Mary Thorvaldson, the sister-in-law of Senator K., ventured downtown on Thursday, seeing the ice is gone. Senator went to Johnsville, Florida, in January to pick up seashells and suck on oranges, and he offered to take her, but she said it wouldn’t look right, a widow on a trip with her brother-in-law, what would people think? For one thing, they would think she was seventy-nine and it was awfully nice of him to take her. But she stayed home.
She gets around in most weather, but she keeps off ice. When it’s icy, Ralph sends one of his boys up to her little house with her groceries, but she looks forward to when the sidewalks are clear and she comes down to shop, which she likes to do every day. She brings her five or six things to the counter and Ralph rings them up and says, “Nine dollars and eighty-four cents, Mary.” She looks down at the little group of things and says, “Nine eighty-four? Are you sure?”
“You got $1.19, 1.59, 2.79 twice, 1.25, and 13 cents: $9.84.”
She can see all the numbers of the prices on the labels. But $9.84? For these few things? Two jars of Taster’s Choice, a can of tuna, a can of pears, a can of corn, and a packet of marigold seeds. It’s impossible for this to cost $9.84. She looks at Ralph. She surveys the labels. He counts the items on the register slip, and the items on the counter. But $9.84? How can that be?
Ralph has acted in this play for years. He knows his part. He waits as she goes down the list again, adding it up slowly in her head. Then Ralph says, “Ah! That should be $1.49. That’s $9.74.” Well. That’s more like it. “I’m sorry. This is one of those days.” She gets a quarter and a penny change. She puts the goods in her shopping bag. She walks home, feeling a little better.
Down the block, at the Feed ’N Seed, Harold has set up the old wooden bins to put seed packets in that’ve arrived from the Milton Seed Co. in Northrop, South Dakota. Big corn and bean packets, plain yellow envelopes, and this year he’s ordered more of the packets with color pictures on them and is even hanging up green and yellow crepe paper that the Milton salesman gave him and signs saying “Festival of Gardens” and “Top Quality, Best Value.” The salesman, Ritche, says this could almost double seed sales, he’s seen it happen. He says to Harold, “You got to build excitement, make a visual appeal to the passer-by, and your walk-ins, you got to make them think seeds the minute they come through the door. Did you know that one-third of all seed sales is pure impulse? People walk in—BAM—they gotta have some seeds right now!” Mass displays, more color, and these new seed packets with the Scratch ’N Sniff pictures: they were a big hit in the test markets last year.
But seeds are all the Feed ’N Seed sells—that and feeds—so if you weren’t already thinking seeds you probably wouldn’t come in unless it was to hang around with Harold and talk about the basketball tournament. Anoka won, and Harold won twenty-four dollars when they did. It’s spring itself that builds excitement and makes a visual appeal for the passer-by, and if prospects of spring don’t excite you, probably crepe paper won’t have a big effect. But Ritche believes this is going to be it, the big year, the great garden boom, when Milton triples tomato-seed sales—big growth in the carrot-and-beet sector, cucumbers up this year, beans up, pole beans way up, gross national kohlrabi, eggplant, everything up this year. Ritche is twenty-five. Already he is one of Milton’s best. Richard is his name but he uses Ritche because it gets noticed. People see it, they remember you. Name recognition is important in sales.
He lives in Marshall: he and Cindy bought a town house on the edge of town; they’re expecting a baby in July, and he believes that in seed sales and in his own life, things are starting to turn around. Driving on to the next call, ten, twenty, thirty miles away, he gets excited when he sees the town, its big grain elevator on the horizon. He says, “Come on. Let’s go. Let’s go, big team. Let’s go, sales!” He’s on the road for Milton six days a week, criss-crossing the district in his ’78 Rambler wagon. It’s full of crepe paper, Styrofoam cups, and burger cartons. The carpet is ripped and the floorboards are mulched with dirt from a hundred little towns. Old seed samples take root there. The Rambler has almost a quarter-million miles on it, and soon it’ll go to a junkyard and sit. Corn and beans will grow up in it and muskmelon vines come out of the seats. All the seeds he spilled in there will blossom into a little forest of flowers on wheels, vines trailing out of it. The plants will reproduce for years. All the old seed salesmen’s cars become pots for plants. And the most luxuriant ones grow on the seat where he sat. It’s all waiting for spring to happen.