And there is one stop light blinking on and off
Everyone knows when the neighbors cough
They roll up the streets when the sun goes down
Harmon is smaller than that. No stop light. Blink your eyes and you'll miss the whole town. When my cousin sent me the information about the service I asked which church it would be in - there's only one church in Harmon. I believe it is now considered an unincorporated community. Grandpa Homer once owned a mechanic shop in Harmon and his brother, Daniel, owned a boot shop in the area. Many of my family are buried in the local cemetery or one of the cemeteries in nearby towns. Sometimes, it seems like cemeteries are all that's left of some small towns. It's sad that so many small towns seem to be dying, literally and figuratively, right before our eyes, as the young people leave for other opportunities. Bright lights, big city, here I come! As the Sweethearts said,
It never even entered their minds
I might not want to stay
But I'm young, I've still got time
I've got to get away
I love to travel through small towns and see the remnants of their heydays and imagine how it looked in its prime. I often imagine having endless wealth and using it to rejuvenate small towns. I used to always drive on road trips, but I've learned over the years that if I ride and let someone else drive, I can take pictures along the way! Here's a few pics from our travels today:
This is a corner store, or what's left of it, in Canton, OK. Newspapers cover the windows and doors, and the mural is fading.
This is a store front in Vici, OK - it is pronounced Vie-sie, not Vicky. No k, see? It's a grammatical difference in Oklahoma. I am sure it's in an Okie dictionary or an encyclopedia of how to pronounce the names of towns in Oklahoma. I love these painted patchwork squares; it's so quaint and makes me imagine a bunch of grandmas and great-aunts sitting around stitching and talking and laughing. There was also an American Flag patchwork painted on the side of a building on the east side of town. Speaking of quilts, have you ever read any of the Quilter's Series by Jennifer Chiaverini? I highly recommend them.
Look at the detail on this hot plate! Cross stitch and weaving! What?!
Check out these handmade hotplates! I love these because they are unique and I know that someone put in a lot of time to make them. Sometimes, when you are in a larger community, small details like this can get lost. Instead of handmade hotplates, someone buys some generic ones at Walmart. Grandma Lois had some similar to these. If you have never made a piece of art by hand, let me assure you that a lot of time and hard work goes into each piece. It's also a good way to slow yourself down and focus on one thing that you can control and not worry about everything that you can't. I started doing cross stitch to help relieve stress and it works! A lot of love goes into those stitches!
And this is the food that a group of small town ladies fixed for the very large group of family! And I didn't even get a picture of all the desserts! Someone made an angel food cake with a maple frosting that was good enough to make you pass out from sheer bliss. This plate of food was probably only about half of what they made - I simply ran out of room on my plate.
P.S. See the bowl of BBQ sausage links and beans? It made me think about pork-n-beans and every time I think about pork-n-beans I think about Steel Magnolias and I imagine Miss Clairee shopping with Ouiser and as she loads numerous cans of pork-n-beans into the shopping cart she says, "Drum loves poke-n-beans. He eats 'em with everaythang." Use your best southern drawl as you read that; it will make more sense, and ignore the fact that I just used an excruciatingly long run-on sentence.
Also, over the course of lunch we discovered that one of the ladies is a relative from the other side of the family! Her great-grandfather and mine were brothers! These are the things you learn when you love genealogy and history! It is a small world, at least it is around Harmon, OK.
On our way out of town, we decided to stop and try to find Grandma and Grandpa's original homestead. We turned north off the highway onto an old dirt road and drove a little more than half a mile, and as we drove past a brick home Mom said she thought that was the property. We pulled up to the gate of a pasture and could see a small, dilapidated square building with a pyramid style roof and thought that might be it. I walked up to the front door of the brick house and rang the doorbell. The older woman who answered the door invited me right in and I told her who I was and what I was looking for. She wasn't sure if that building was it or not, but her husband came in and sure enough, we had found it. His name was Flakey Wilson and he said they bought the property from Guy Douglas who bought it from Homer Hixson, my grandpa. He said the house originally sat across the road and up the hill, but he had moved it a few years after they bought the property. Their oldest son was also born in that tiny house. He offered to drive me around to the house, so I climbed into his Towncar and off we went, with Mom and Tom following. Flakey told me they owned about 1,000 acres and that his health had not allowed him to keep up with it the way he wanted. Five years ago he had an experimental heart procedure that had been amazing, but he is getting older and keeping up with the property like he had in the past is getting harder. We drove across a cattle guard and past farm equipment and around a barn and found the small structure.
Looking at it now, it's hard to believe that someone ever lived in it. On the left side of the house are what's left of the red shingles Grandma and Grandpa put on the house. They lived in it from 1943 - 1947. I traipsed around, trying to avoid the cow patties, and took as many pictures as I could. You should also know that there had been a skunk in there and when I got to the south side of the house, I dang near threw up from the smell. You should also know that I did not avoid all of the cow patties and ended up with a nice smashed patty and a decent amount of grass on my left boot. Then Flakey drove me up the road to the top of the hill to show me where the house originally sat.
This was the view Grandma and Grandpa had every day when they woke up - minus the windmills, of course. And there were probably fewer trees. Dang those cedar trees! But, wow. Just wow. Oklahoma is an absolutely breathtaking sight to see! God did good when He made Oklahoma!
Flakey said you could see for 13 miles from where the house sat on the top of the hill. It's too small to see in the picture, but the Vici, not Vicky, (we're all going to know that Vicky is incorrect before I'm finished here) grain elevator could be seen in the distance.
This is the well where they pumped water; it sat on the east side of the house.
This is what is left of a tank that held carbide gas. Flakey said you could buy the gas in Vici (remember Vie-sie, not Vicky) and it was used as a heating fuel. Tom and I had never heard of carbide gas before, and I was sure that Tom knew of pretty much everything farm related. I guess we can all still learn something new every day.
I absolutely love to see elevators like this! For the non-rural folks, this is a storage facility for grain or other crops before it gets sent to a processing plant to become the bread that you eat. This one is in Canton, OK and is small compared to others I've seen. There are some monster elevators east of Enid, OK on US412, if you ever want to see some.
This elevator in Vici (not Vicky) is a little bit bigger. They are just beautiful and amazing to look at.
This last one is in Okeene and it's the largest of the three. The top photo gives a little perspective of how large the facility is; all three of the large structures are part of the site. These elevators are just majestic! I cannot tell you how much I LOVE looking at them!
And now, here I am at the end of the day thinking about my family and the days they have before them as they pick up the pieces and move forward. My own dad has been gone for 33 years now, and there are still tough days. I am all too familiar with the road they will have to walk. Our loved ones are now memories, just like the heydays of little towns along a loud, bumpy old highway in Oklahoma. But, we can share those memories proudly like the painted patchworks on an old store front, hold on to them even as time fades the colors, trust that they are woven into our lives with strong, loving stitches, move them with us from one place to the next, and rise up majestically against the elements like an old grain elevator in the middle of nowhere and we will stand the test of time. We will carry on and be here for the next generation to look to and someday, they will say the same about us.
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