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Three great bears come to me
Building shelter from the storm
White as snow and tall as trees
They have come to keep me warm

Then four white horses with manes ablaze
Carry my body along
To seven lovely women
Who’ll take my hands
And lead me
And lead me
Home

Standing on the road at night
I am not afraid
Four watchers beside me
With maps to show the way
And at the end of the road there lay
A track I must step o’er
With stars to reckon along the way
I’ll find my way
Find my way
Home

And I will be kissed upon the forehead
And I’ll have all I could ever possibly need
And I will lay down this tired, old body
And I follow
Yes, I will follow
Love home

(Deb’s note: Dad passed away March 3, 2010)

Once again Mike Connors and his family are graciously opening our favorite venue for all to enjoy. We have some exciting new songs to share as well as some old favorites to snuggle up with for winter.

Back by popular demand this year is the Christmas Cookie Contest. So dig out your grandma’s favorite cookie recipe and bring a plate to share with everyone. There will be tasting and voting and some liquid refreshment to wash down those delicious cookies.

In light of the current economic situation, we are only asking a $10 donation per person. Time to hunker down with your friends and neighbors and be thankful for the true joy of the season – the chance to share good feelings with good folks in a good space.

Big Bug Station is located in historic downtown Mayer, Arizona at the corner of Central and Main, catty-corner from the post office (at the only stop sign on Central). Call 928.925.5172 for further information.

For those of you coming from out of town or wanting to extend your stay in the “Comfort Corridor”, we have two commercial lodging options nearby. The Creekside Preserve Lodge, one mile east of Mayer on Highway 69, offers individual cabins with hot tubs along Big Bug Creek in the $100 range (928.632.0777). The Charcoal Pit Motel right in town is a refurbished motor hotel in the $40 range (928.632.9696). Both are dog-friendly.

We hope you can find time in your busy holiday schedule to join us

if I could move real slow
I could hear the rocks talkin

I confess, having grown up amidst citrus orchards in Phoenix, Arizona, that the scent of orange and grapefruit trees in bloom make me horny. It is the smell of love to me. I don’t recall ever actually having made love in an orchard but I did a lot of early, hopeful exploring there and that’s almost more potent.

I was tutored in love by amazing women. I realize that we were often learning the mysteries together but they taught me to see in the dark. I have no idea what they learned from me, you’d have to ask them.

Man offers the seed of creation, woman nurtures seedlings that produce fruit and this is the magic that turns the world. It’s also what most songs are about.

God spoke to Adam
And God spoke to Eve
God spoke to the Virgin Mary
He said, y’know girl you just gotta believe
God must’ve talked a lot back then
But he don’t say boo to me
I still lie waiting
But love speaks softly
When it calls you by your name
It’s so easy to miss the meaning
Or pretend it’s just a game
But if you refuse to listen
You’ve got only yourself to blame
Love still lies waiting
While Spring turns over in her sleep
Her dreams are fairy green
But it’s only a dream

I am lucky that my wife grew up in the same town, had some of the same experiences, and responds similarly to the olfactory cues of citrus blossoms. I am even luckier that, when the women of my past show up, my wife shows them love and respect for their contributions to the man I became. Of course, she also knows I have great taste in women.

Twice this March, women who have been exceedingly important in my life reappeared. One at the Desert Botanical Garden’s Chihuly exhibit, the most astounding union of art and nature I have ever personally witnessed. I thought the same thing the first time I ever saw her. The other one showed up at the Glendale Folk Festival where I sang this song, Spring, the best song I have ever written. The blossoms were just opening and the smell nearly knocked me down. So did she.

Down by the hard road
Where the wildflowers grow
I look at them in wonder
Even though I know
Someone planted them here
Not so long ago
They still lie waiting
Waiting for a footprint
Waiting for a sign
Waiting for a raindrop
Or a little ray of sweet sunshine
Or maybe a bee will fly by
At just the right time
They still lie waiting
Spring yawns and peaks out of her hole
Looking for her shadow
Did she see it?
I don’t know

I am the groundhog’s shadow who learned to sing and I owe debts I cannot repay. I am a lucky little rodent.

I heard it first not from Leonard nor even Rex Harrison’s son, Noel, who had an AM hit with the song. The mention of Jesus or any religious figure would have been death to an AM song of that era. Sure Brian Wilson wrote “God Only Knows”, one of the best pop songs ever, but that was just a figure of speech. So when Harrison recorded it he only sang verses one and three which referred to Suzanne and just made it seem enigmatic. He is better remembered for his version of “Windmills of Your Mind” which appeared during Steve McQueen’s glider scene in the first “Thomas Crown Affair”.

No, I heard it played live in a lounge in Snowmass by a guy fresh out of the Chad Mitchell Trio, John Denver. He was booked as an apres ski act in the lounge for several weeks and that night he was playing to my parents and I, one other couple and the bartender. This is the pre-Rocky Mountain High Denver, primarily playing covers although I might have heard “Leaving On a Jet Plane” for the first time that night. But he introduced “Suzanne” and talked about the writer and then he sang that second verse. The top of my head blew off.

When we got back to Phoenix, I spent hours in record stores looking for Leonard Cohen. I couldn’t find his record but I found a singer who covered several of his songs and bought her record, “Wildflowers”. Judy Collins covered another writer, Joni Mitchell, and that led me to her first record, “Song to a Seagull”. When eventually I found “Songs of Leonard Cohen”, I felt like a total folk insider, possessed of a secret that no one else knew and I wore that sucker out. It had a dangerous painting of Joan of Arc awash in flames on the back.

As a budding acoustic guitarist I learned most of those songs but when I tried to play them for others, they were deemed too depressing and dark. I thought they were mysteriously meaningful and kind of funny (I lit a thin green candle to make you jealous of me/But the room just filled up with mosquitoes, they heard that my body was free). My girlfriend asked, what does that mean? If you don`t get it, it`s not that funny.

Over the years though I met others who did get it. My high school friend Doug got it and a banjo playing buddy I met at college was a fan. I recall our gleeful discovery of a used copy of “The Favorite Game” in a book store in Greenwich Village. That same friend just sent me the first draft of his first novel whose protagonist bears some resemblance, at least in spirit, to the Breavman character of Cohen’s novel.

I once had a girlfriend named Jane who was treated to endless spinnings of “Famous Blue Raincoat” (And Jane came by with a lock of your hair/She said that you gave it to her that night that you planned to go clear/Did you ever go clear?). Bob Ward, fellow brother in song, and I bonded the night we first met over our shared enthusiasm for Leonard’s use of language and wicked sense of humor.

In 1993, Deb and I played a set for John Denver’s 50th birthday party, in Santa Fe at Georgia O’Keefe’s old house under the same ficus tree where the Dalai Lama had sat and taught …. it was a moment. John and my cousin, Cheryl Charles, were dear friends and collaborators and that’s how we came to be there. John also claimed that he was going to record “Mama Start the Fire” but he didn’t live long enough. I did get a chance to tell him the story of how that one night and that one song had set me on an irreversible path and I think he appreciated hearing that.

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And just when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

Now Leonard Cohen, the man his own self, comes to Phoenix, driven to perform in the states by having been bilked out of his modest fortune by his manager (I’m just about over the management class). April 5, Dodge Theater and I’m gonna be there with my baby, Bob Ward, and one of the dancing cigars from his band. Just trying to do our part to stimulate the economy by soakin’ in the culture and paying homage to a hero in the seaweed.

This is exciting for us! Our friend and webmistress, Cheryl Colan, went on a camping trip with us to the desert and video taped our newest song, “Little Iraq”. The song was inspired by a camping experience several weeks prior to the filming, when we embarked on an impromptu Birthday Camp in the desert just north of Phoenix.

It started out innocently enough – hiking among the saguaros, throwing the frisbee for Yippy and a gourmet campfire meal. But from dusk to noon the next day we witnessed an assault on the desert unlike anything we had ever experienced. Drunken fishermen drove throughout the night around Lake Pleasant in their diesel trucks (one right through our camp); the moon kicked up a small arms barrage that lasted until 3AM; and the next morning, after the sheriff had tried to ticket us for an unrestrained dog, a horde of off-road vehicle enthusiasts descended upon the river bottom we were camped in. When we were finally driven out, we passed hundreds of people with all manner of armaments from pistols to shotguns to AK47s, standing upon mounds of spent shell casings firing into the desert – a most impressive display.

At one point we climbed a small mountain only to command a 180 degree view several miles deep of churning dust accompanied by a soundtrack that bore a striking resemblance to Apocalypse Now. It was then that we dubbed the place Little Iraq. And it pissed Don off enough to go home and write this song.

To vote for “Little Iraq” on YouTube go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWJbQ0KJTus

The Magic Path

You wander on luminaria-lined paths through a veritable museum of Sonoran desert flora discovering intimate little venues subtly lit by twinkly lights and staffed by more than a dozen talented local music acts to entertain the throng. Mariachi Loco greets you outside the front gate and a solo harpist graces the entrance plaza. Then the paths dictate that you begin to make choices: take the first left to the Amphitheater and you find folk music (that’s us), continue forward and there’s a barbershop group singing holiday standards and then another plaza featuring wine tasting, fine food and a hot Nuevo Spanish band called Del Sol. If you make a right back there instead of a left you encounter a bonfire and Meadowlark, a flute and guitar duo. Proceed on to a handbell choir and a Latin band called Cascabel. Now there are more choices: up the hill on the Nature trail for a view of the city and garden below with singer and guitarist, James Linton, or down the People and Plants of the Sonoran Desert trail to hear Native American flute (Wolfs Robe or Jesse Kalu), fiddler Ron Privett, and the beautiful classical guitar and violin duo, Lyra. (Those familiar with our “Big Sky Full O’ Dumb Stars” CD will know Allen Ames’ work – he played the stunning violin and violira solos on “Ice Crystals” and “Luna.”) My advice as you travel through this wonderland is the same as Yogi Berra’s: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it!”. I have heard or know all of the acts and there’s not a clinker in the bunch. Take your time and hear them all. Explore the intimate nooks and crannies of the garden – eat something, drink something, and enjoy the fact that even with 2000 other hominids the garden is large enough to provide the sort of solitude that turns the desert night luminous.

If you have a date, this is one of the world’s great make-out spots. It is tres romantique. If you’re with your mom, maybe not so much. But remember that your mom knows a little something about romance too or you wouldn’t be here.

Photo by Randy Arneson

Old Friends

Now perhaps I would not have thought of the angle of romance had we not been visited last night by three girls (and they will always be girls to me) that I went to high school with: Judy, Linda and Kristin. Judy and I dated back then, Linda and I didn’t, and I’ve known Kristin since she was Christy in grade school. In fact, the most vicious fight of my life was in the playground at Ingleside Elementary with Billy Albright over who got to dance with her. It took two teachers to pull us off each other. We were in 3rd Grade.

The girls were there for the second set – an hour and a half of sitting on cold masonry benches, no small feat. Their presence made it even more fun for us. The nature of this event and the weather dictate that audiences are constantly on the move so we often only get them for a song or two and then they go on. Add to that the fact that we can’t see them very well and it makes it difficult to spin the thread of a show. But they got to see us at our best, telling stupid stories and playing with good energy.

When our carriage turned back into a pumpkin at 9:30, the girls stuck around and we had a chance to catch up. It doesn’t disconcert me at all that I always play better when there are girls I like in the audience. That’s why I got out from behind the drum kit years ago and took up guitar, I wanted to get in front of the band so the girls would notice. We caught up for so long that they turned the lights out and we had to pack up in the dark. But a friendly ranger came by and saved us with the headlights on her golf cart.

Christmas Spirit

Everyone we have had dealings with at the garden has been invariably gracious and helpful. This is a large undertaking and the employees and volunteers do a fabulous job for 19 nights. From Katie & Courtney who booked us; to the staff at the shop selling CDs; to the luminaria lighters, snuffers and guides; to the guys who come around to light our little heaters; to the night watchman: they embody precisely the spirit of the season. Each night I am struck but what a cool event this is and how lucky we are to be a part of it. We have our friend, singer and storyteller Tony Norris of Flagstaff, to thank for that. DBG pays fair too, we like for you to know that because it takes a little juice to make culture.

Having our first steady gig in years fills me with Christmas spirit and we will miss it when it’s over. I hope your holiday season contains some magic; if it does, spread it around because we need it. And to restate Yogi a la Carlos Casteneda: when you come to a fork in the road, choose the path with heart. I leave you with a little song I wrote around a campfire on New Year’s Eve, 2000:

We’re countin’ down the days and the hours before Christmas
We’re countin’ on the promise of the phases of the moon
We bless the faithful arrows and the ones that have missed us
Still the next thousand years comes a little too soon
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
We gather ’round the home fire with our friends and good relations
To talk about our hopes and the presents we received
The bubbles of our future are uncorked in jubilation
But the best present of all is this very New Year’s Eve
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Gods Bless Us, Every One.

Don

Hittin’ the Road

We left Mayer July 25^th headed for the midwest to attend the wedding of a dear friend and hang out with old buddies in Ohio for the month of August. We have a couple of ‘gas money’ gigs at the front and back end but basically this is a vacation and we’re ready. Deb is particularly ready to see things that are green.

The first night we stayed with Jerry & Karen Page in their cool new place outside of Albuquerque. They ran the Prescott Folklore Center for many years and are old friends from “May in the Mountains” days on the ranch. We played some tunes, bought a banjo case and Karen fed us up good for the road.

We would need it. Let me say that neither one of us is overly fond of the I-40 drive twixt Albuquerque and Oklahoma City. It is stupidly hot, we have no AC and we get absolutely no relief until we hit the Arkansas line. Not that much there either.

The good news is that after 15 hours of driving (something we try hard not to do much of anymore), we’re staying in Fayetteville with Kelly Mulhollan & Donna Stjerna of Still on the Hill. These are two of our favorite people and favorite musicians. They are powerful artists with a marvelous vision and their enthusiasm is infectious. They were just releasing their new Toucan Jam kid’s CD, “A World of Music”. This is just a beautiful record; they are producing the kind of music you can raise healthy children on and their adult work is killer too. Kelly’s “Never Ending Conversation” has been in regular rotation at our house for about a year.

The next night we spent at my cousin Sarah’s in Bowling Green. She and her wacko Kentucky husband Harvey have built the world’s greatest pool house, the inside of it smells like a cedar forest and is one of the most comfortable places we have ever stayed.

On Friday evening we played the Eden Song Concert Series in Cincinnati. Eden Park has this beautiful outdoor bandshell that we got to share with Wishing Chair, guitarist Brian Henke and some great local talent. We stayed with our good friends, Pamela Temple and Spencer Funk. Pam DJs for WNKU out of Newport and she and Spencer make up a very fun band called Wild Carrot.

Did I mention yet that all this time it has been stupidly hot! We’ve simply traded our 100+ degree dry heat for the sweltering discomfort of 95 degrees & 90% humidity. The kind of heat that keeps you just moist enough so that your skin starts to turn to soil and grow stuff.

The Hunsicker Affair

Now the whole excuse for this vacation has been to attend the wedding of one Oscar Aaron Hunsicker III, late of Cuyahoga Falls. Oscar is one of the first people I met in 1970 when I went away to college at Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware, Ohio. We’ve been friends ever since.

So Osk is marrying his high school sweetheart, Barbara, on the 40^th anniversary of his having told her that he loved her. How sweet is that? Sweet enough to get written up in the Akron News as a feature story. This was THE most anticipated mid-life wedding the world has ever seen, people came from all over the country to attend. Oscar had a grin that just wouldn’t stop while the rest of us just leaked.

Sally Godfrey of the Winchester Godfreys, another one of my oldest friends, was in attendance as was Oscar’s old roommate Gene Ward. We had many adventures together as young hippie wannabes and it was cool to get to see them both.

One adventure included going down to the Southern Ohio Folk Festival in the spring of 1971 where we saw Pete Seeger play to a coliseum full of folks that would have done ANYTHING he asked them to do that night. I had never seen such charisma and, come to think of it, haven’t seen it since.

It was on that same trip that I bonded with southern Ohio in general – hilly, backwoods country. Athens is home to Ohio University and has always attracted the artsy/craftsy crowd; it was hip back then and it’s still hip. There is also a deeply rooted hillfolk contingent, many of them ancestors of the first pioneers in that country. It’s just the right mix of hippies and bubbas for my taste.

Athens, Center of the Known Universe

We spent the bulk of our time just outside of Athens with our friends Ron Hosenfeld and Betsy Beebe. They live off the grid in much the same manner as we did on the ranch so this place always feels right to us and has the advantage of being inhabited by some of our dearest friends. Ron has done all our promotional pictures for years, he’s now ‘retired’ (whatever that means). Betsy kept us in good health by feeding us the best fresh produce from her wonderful garden.

Their house sits on the edge of a cliff so that when you exit to the rear deck, you are suspended in the trees. It’s a magical setting. We spent the bulk of our time messing around in Ron’s new shop. Deb made things out of wood and discovered her inner cartoonist while painting the shop doors in bright, whimsical images. I played around with mangling iron in the forge and recalled that I really do love that work.

All during this trip we are in contact with communities of folks doing things they love to do and do well. Enjoying good music, good art, good homemade food. This rubs off on you and that’s just another reason I love to go back there.

We leave Ron & Betsy’s at the end of August, much to our dog Yippy’s dismay. She loves their place, has the run of the woods, and can earn valuable wildlife credits at what she refers to as ‘Southcamp’. The night before we left she was honored at a solemn awards ceremony where she received her Squirrel, Wren, Deer and Turtle badges.

Hunting Buckeyes

We headed north to Charm, Ohio in the heart of Amish country and a house concert at the Hazlett’s. Toby & Denise are a pair of back-to-the-land-ers homeschooling their kids on an ‘english’ island surrounded by the Dutch. Their kids are quite talented and shared a song they had written and it’s still in our heads. We sing it to Yippy.

The Hazletts put us up in a wonderful cabin on the property with an outdoor shower and an outhouse (we love this stuff!) and, after the show, I was decompressing on the porch around 1AM when I heard a horse and buggy come trotting hard down the road. Them Dutchmen can party some too.

The show was great fun and some old friends, Mark & Janet Bokenkamp and Jim & Mindy Ingalls, were in attendance along with their families. Jim is an old horseshoeing buddy and Mark is one of this country’s finest blacksmiths. He made the rings for my first marriage and I have always blamed him personally for its failure. He takes it pretty good.

We stayed with Mark & Janet and their two girls the next night then went to visit an old music buddy, Bob Bellamy, at his farm and studio in Bucyrus. Bob and I were in several bands together in the old days and he remains one of my favorite playing partners. He and Wendy Barlow are a wonderful hammered dulcimer and harp duo, they have a number of great instrumental CDs out featuring American standards that are worth checking out. Bob and his son Ben regaled us with some duets that they have worked out, passing the tradition on.

Hoosierland

Now we head for Crawfordsville, Indiana to spend several days with my brother, Steve, his wife, C.J., and daughter, Caity. Steve is the editor of the Wabash College Alumni magazine and an extremely talented writer, musician and photographer. We do a lot of giggling when we’re together. They are currently being completely consumed by their horse herd.

Deb had booked us a gig at Coffee Grounds in Terre Haute. C.J. and Steve came and took pictures while our friend, Ashley Drake, who has just moved from Prescott to Indianapolis, surprised us by showing up. One of Ashley’s earliest memories is being bounced on her dad’s knee to “Mama Start the Fire”; train `em early I say. Proprietor Pete Wilson and his wife Jackie provided us with a good night’s sleep in their OWN bed, a biscuits and gravy breakfast, some great stories and a couple of new traveling mugs full of good coffee.

Getting from Terre Haute to Fairfield, Iowa was the only time we took the interstate on the whole trip back home. The rest of the time we took the ‘blue highways’. The pace is more relaxed and you get to skip the whole interstate culture.

Coffee in Paradise

Fairfield, Iowa was a surprise to us. Such a small town with so many choices of good food and culture. We played at the Café Paradiso in front of a stunning mural depicting the Oracle at Delphi on a great sound system to a wonderful listening crowd. It’s a tough life. Steve, the proprietor/coffeemaster, and I talked late into the night and Meret, foodmistress, kept us plied with all the necessities for life.

We awoke early Sunday morning to a dropped-sky rain and the best cup of coffee ever and that includes Kona coffee in Kona. Fairfield is the home of the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi’s (he of Beatles fame) University of Management, it’s a magnificent arts town with a great community that all seemed to be gathering around Steve’s coffee at the Paradiso that morning. Lots of interesting folks to talk to, many of whom look 10 years younger than their chronological age. Perhaps it’s the Ayurvedic diets.

When the crush at the Cafe got to be too much we motored westward on US highways through Iowa, stopping in Fairbury, Nebraska for the night. Our goal was to travel home avoiding the interstates for Labor Day weekend, we’re not too concerned with time at this point. The next morning we went looking for breakfast in a town too busy rebuilding its downtown to have anything open on Labor Day. So we headed west hungry and missing Steve’s coffee with the vague notion of going by Republic, Kansas – the town my great grandfather left in a covered wagon in 1907 to seek his fortune in New Mexico.

I’ve had pieces of a song in my head for many years that includes a line about my grandpa’s mother being “…buried back home by the Republican River/In the country that she loved the best.” Grandpa used to tell the story of going back to Kansas as a boy to attend his mother’s funeral and having to ride with his brother in the hog car because they couldn’t afford seats on the train. He said he had never cared much for pork since.

Kansas

We took the northern route through Kansas. Driving through Kansas is not normally Deb’s idea of a good time. Our last crossing occurred a decade earlier to the south – endless miles of granaries sailing the horizon like ships on a vast sea of devolving agriculture. It involved the unsuccessful dodging of Prairie Chickens that would hurl themselves at our bumper, leaving a wake of feathers drifting behind. Their suicidal tendencies caused us to look them up in our fieldguide, where it says “uncommon and very local”. Go figure. But this time Kansas showed us a hilly, sometimes treed country with rivers and tidy towns nestled along their banks.

We stopped in Belleville first. Nice little country town with a square, a closed eatery, and a siren going off for no particular reason we could discern. Then we drive on a series of dirt roads to Republic – one church, one feedmill, closed cafe, and the smell of folks at home cooking meat. We visit the Pawnee Village on a butte west of town then back-track through town to hunt for a cemetery. We stop to ask the only person we have seen, an older gentleman who describes himself as “retarded, I mean, retired”, if there is a cemetery in town. He allows as how there is not, I ask then where do you bury your dead people and he says they’re scattered around here in the country, who ya lookin’ for? I said Charleses. He said well you just passed Mike Charles’ house back there on the corner and the old Charles place is out on the highway a couple miles and Mrs. Charles still lives there and come to think of it Mike and the rest of the family are probably out there right now. You can’t miss it.

The Homestead

So we drive by the old homestead and we know it’s the old homestead ’cause it says Valley Point Farm – Charles Homestead – 1868 in stone. There’s a tall guy about my age in the woods beside the house burning brush and he waves as we do the slow drive-by. Deb says we oughta stop, I say these people are Charleses and we might be there for awhile. But we’re here now says Deb. Yeah and I’m thinkin’ they’ve probably got food!

We pull in the driveway, I get out and the tall guy in the woods comes toward me as I advance toward him. “Are you Mike?” I ask. “No, I’m John” says John. “My name is Don Charles” says I and John’s eyes get big and he says “That was my Dad’s name” and I might have said “Mine too” before he said “We sort of look alike, don’t we?”

And we do. I can’t recall the pleasantries exchanged next because I was busy hunting and finding the parts of him that seemed to match up with parts of me. I think he was doing the same thing. Then his brother Mike comes out, shorter but with similar features and sporting the same goat-like growth I have on my chin. I recite my patriarchal lineage, John & Mike go through theirs, and it turns out our great-grandfathers were brothers.

Now I swear we did our best not to invite ourselves to Labor Day lunch but we ate good anyway. Ostensibly we went inside to view family pictures normally housed in the attic but brought out earlier that day. There we see pictures of people we know – Grandpa in his dress hat & Grandma, Great Grandmother Charles, Uncle Kamp, Aunt Louise and Aunt Lucille – all taken at the farm years ago. We meet Jean, Don’s widow, John’s biologist wife, Mandy, and their eldest son, Hayes, who’s at Kansas State in Manhattan studying cerealogy.

The farm occupies the V between two rivers east of Republic. The country rolls gently and the soil looks fertile – mostly corn, beans and alfalfa in small family farms. Nothing much else going on in the area and it particularly lacks that voracious sense of growth that we know and so love in the West. This is truly rural country.

The old house is beautiful with big trees around it and a barn and outbuildings in the back. John said it was traditionally the uncles’ job to keep the grounds clean and that was what he was doing when we drove by. He and Mike and a sister, who died several years ago of leukemia, all grew up there and deeply loved the place. If work is love made visible (and it is), it shows.

There are some other things showing as well. I was struck by their obvious love of the land but also their love of family history. They were proud to be part of a Welsh pioneer family, one that had stayed on the land. They love telling stories, have a great sense of humor, an obvious love of learning and they all sing in the choir. They also have good table manners. And in the manner of good country folk they ’scraped’ together an 8 or 10-course meal featuring Mike’s meatloaf and finishing with Mandy’s Friendship bread – there wasn’t a thing on the table that wasn’t outstanding. We oughta eat like this all the time.

They also don’t show their age. I would have guessed both John & Mike as the same age or younger than me. Later in the afternoon, after we had taken a couple of pictures standing in front of the house and the homestead sign, Mike took us to the cemetery where our great great grandparents, the original Welsh immigrants, are buried. It’s on a lovely little rise looking down the valley.

We Gotta Go Now

We left them with CDs and the promise to return. When he learned we were musicians, Mike told us about an old opera house in Concordia that does shows and he knows the woman that used to book it and wouldn’t it be fun for us to play there. These are my kind of people. They seemed legitimately pleased to have met us and to know that the Tom Charles line is alive and well.

Now perhaps it’s the fact that this occurred on the way home from a six-week vacation where I got to visit a number of seminal friend and family communities as well as get introduced into vibrant new ones. Or maybe I was listening to the voices of the ancestors I carry around in my head or just listening to my wife for a change. But I did a good thing, reached out a little and got paid back in a currency of great value to me. And I feel where I come from a bit more deeply.

We crossed the Republican River drainages all the way out of Kansas and camped at Prairie Dog State Park on a lake whose fish jumped and slapped the water with moonlight. The geese honked their way through the mist the next morning and so did we.