From the Back Porch

For as long as I can remember, a year’s calendar has been both a necessity and a pleasure. Late December or early January a new calendar would appear, picked up in town or mailed to the post box. 

Hanson’s Hardware, Moody’s Grocery, First National Bank, Skogen’s Farm Supply, calendars needed in every household: a picture, twelve removable months, business name, town, address, phone number.

Every household had one: birthdays, appointments, social events, football games, crop planting, school opening, vacations. Without a calendar there would be family chaos. At year’s end, with twelve sheets stored in the pocket built into the back, the entirety would be archived into a drawer should there be future questions.

A brilliant piece of advertisement. Pictures of tractors, stolid bank buildings from years ago, fresh grocery fronts, major equipment brands, business information including phone number. Month after month, examined by household eyes, stored for later reference, these are the first businesses called. And the next year the same information would be on the same wall because once again, the calendar would be free and needed.

Somewhere in the rush to technology these calendars began to disappear: I’ve seen none for a decade. The need, wish, for this wall hanging has not disappeared, only changed: word-a-day, trivial pursuit questions, photographic scenes and themes.  We now buy them or give them as gifts, but we use them just as we always have. Calendars join our lives.

            We live with a picture for a month, flip the page to another month, another related picture. Those pictures  enter memory more thoroughly than anything else in the room. I love and rely on calendars, real calendars that hang on the wall with their monthly change and the memory of the person who gave it. 

Sometime in the last decades a friend gifted me a calendar titled “Women Who Read” –twelve pictures from different times and cultures, some when women weren’t allowed to read but did anyway. I kept those pictures, now in memory only, to remind me how wonderful it is to read freely, openly; and not have to wear a tightly laced corset.

During the recent snow-ice days I’ve been reacquainted with every detail surrounding me, including my 2026 calendar. I don’t know where it came from but the subject is mountains, a subject I love. January’s picture was mountain tops breaking through clouds, fog: only the tops brilliant in sunlight. For four weeks I walked by that picture, conferred with it,  wrote information on it, obeyed appointments it listed, dreamed memories of mountains I’ve known. And turned the page the morning of February first. 

I find I’m not done with those mountaintops. They accompanied me through hours of newscasts, information about political and politicians, all the grime and lies and misuse of money and power. Where are the political mountaintops bright with sunshine? Who rises above with dignity and honesty?

With morning coffee, I close my eyes and search nine decades looking for the peaks.

The exhilarating John Kennedy challenge, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” Millions of young people listened and acted for their country.

 The current fascist-in-chief works to dismantle these structures of international humanity but they can’t remove the reality of a shiny mountain peak.

John McCain, a thrill in memory as he took up the courage of truth. I didn’t like much of what he said or stood for but one night, faced with a constituent who gave him the perfect question for a deadly swipe at Obama, he spoke the truth and gained worldly acclaim: “No, he is not a Muslim. He is an American, just as you and I are.” Courage could not have been more  beautiful.

The cold November night in Chicago when the tall slender black man with his family stepped onto the stage as the next President of the United States.

Liz Cheney, a Republican who put her career on the line to speak the truth about the mob that attacked the White House at the behest of the outgoing fascist-in-chief. She is the standard for honesty, for courage, in the ranks with Rosa Parks.

In late January of this year Ilhan Omar had the courage to hold an open town hall for her constituents. A man, large in his heavy winter jacket, stood up to protest and pulled out a large syringe to spray her.  A small slender woman, she did not cower. Rather, right hand curled into a fist, she went at him, ready to physically take him on. Others intervened, of course, but she did not waver, did not show any fear. Monumental!

These are my mountain peaks, these are what I see above the clouds, shining in their moments, providing patterns for the rest of us who may forget some of the strength we need to return our country to “We, The People.” Air is pure on the mountain peaks. Take strength.