Guest Column

''Mart'' Flahive had two rules on Good Friday: Go to church & burn off the garden stubble

The author writes from Des Moines and a cabin in the woods in southern Iowa. The following column, which we first published four years ago and re-published two years ago, is one of our favorite pieces of springtime reading. —Chuck Offenburger

By SANDRA FLAHIVE
March 21, 2008
DES MOINES, IOWA

Though my father Martin “Mart” Flahive was born on a farm, raised on a farm, and began his married life on a farm, he was a farmer in only one sense of the word – he liked to plant things and watch them grow. However, because he simply wasn’t cut out for the follow-through of farming, he and my mother Marcella eventually moved to a small acreage on the outskirts of Albia, a county seat town in southern Iowa.

There they raised my 11 siblings and me. And there Dad, to satisfy his soul and be logical at the same time, planted a garden every year – a really big garden.

It was Dad and the garden that provided me with the most terror-filled moments of my childhood. Throw the words “Good Friday” into the mix, and the whole kit and caboodle is a recipe for a panic attack.

The garden was such an unnerving entity for me because Dad held to some crazed notion that each spring it had to be “burned off” on Good Friday. Not the day before, not the day after. Good Friday was the only day he would fire up the dried remains of the previous fall and winter’s impenetrable cocoon of tangled vines, twigs and branches, mountains of brittle leaves, and sundry bits of rubbish from yellowed papers to cardboard containers – whatever the wind might have deposited in its six-month-long dervish dance.

It would have helped if Dad had taken the time to rake the garden a little to get the piles of flammable miscellany out of it before he torched it. Humph! His belief was if he were going to burn it anyway, why in the name of God would he bother cleaning it up first?

It also would have helped if Dad paid attention – any attention – to the wind on those Good Fridays from hell. But he refused to give wind the slightest consideration. He happily ignored the reality that early spring in Iowa, when Good Friday falls, is a feisty, fickle, unpredictable interlude – with one constant. It is windy. It may be a mere whisper of a breeze or a lollapalooza of a tornado, but it is wind – and spring’s wind and Dad’s Good Friday Burning were a troublesome twosome. As a kid, I used to pray fervently for a devil of a spring snowstorm, so that just maybe, Dad could be waylaid from his traditional Good Friday pursuit. It never happened.

“We burn her off on Good Friday!” That was his commandment.

And so it came to pass that year after year, I would awaken before dawn every Good Friday, throw up the bedroom window to check on the wind and begin a 10 to 12 hour stretch of non-stop worry.

With good reason! Twice we had to call the fire department when Dad lost control of the Good Friday Burning.

Dad’s Good Friday M.O. never varied. First of all, he didn’t work that day because it was Good Friday. Even so, he was up early. I could hear him start to futz around in the kitchen about the time I started my worry marathon on the floor above him. After a hearty breakfast, he’d grab a big box of farmer’s matches, wander out to the garden and go to it. The wind could be blowing so hard it ripped the cap right off his bald head. No matter! He’d strike up the matches and start throwing one into the rubble about every 10 feet – all around the perimeter of the acre and a half garden plot. Before he ever flipped the last match, the garden was shooting flames to high heaven.

Hoo-ah! Conflagration!

With rapt attention from the upstairs window, I monitored The Burning, and when the flames over the acre and a half reached 20 feet into the sky, I retreated, planning evacuation procedures for when the fire got to the house. Despite my near-hysteria, though, The Burning usually went smoothly, so that by noon, when we all went to Good Friday services, the fire was pretty much snuffed out.

“Pretty much” was not enough in a couple of cases.

One windy Good Friday, we returned from church in mid afternoon to find a small outbuilding smoldering. Fortunately the building housed nothing of importance, but even at my tender age I was utterly bewildered to hear Dad say to Mom, “Now, how do you s’pose that happened, Marcella?” I wanted to pop off, “Well, you know, Dad, if you have a raging inferno going on for three hours in a 30-mile-per-hour wind, there just could be the possibility that a spark or two might shake loose!” Of course we didn’t talk to Dad that way, for fear of being biffed on the fanny for impudence.

Another time, wind blew The Burning out of control while Dad ran an errand in town.
The fire had spread beyond the garden area and was heading for the neighbor’s house to the south. The whirling smoke caught the attention of Dr. Bay, our family doctor, who happened to be driving past our place. Before any of us knew what was happening, the good man had pulled up to an outdoor pump, doused water on some old burlap sacks he had in the trunk of his boat-sized Plymouth, somehow attached them to his back bumper, and foolishly began driving his car over the blazing landscape, assuming the wet gunny sacks would quench the flames hungrily licking the sides of his car.

Dad arrived home as the dauntless doctor was barreling back and forth over the burning garden. Loony as Dad himself was when it came to the Good Friday Burnings, he watched as speechless as the rest of us while we stood transfixed by both the doctor’s ingenuity and stupidity.

Fortunately, not to mention miraculously, the gas tank of the car didn’t blow to smithereens, and, indeed, the fire was somewhat squelched. Dr. Bay didn’t even stop after his part was played out. He simply gave a big wave out the window as his big Plymouth shot past us like a bullet and out onto the highway.

Dad died in 1990 at the age of 93.

But the Burnings have left their impact. Old, ingrained habits die hard. Every Good Friday, before dawn breaks, I wake up like clockwork, stick my head out the window and check to see how hard the wind is blowing.

Sandra Flahive, a favorite Guest Columnist among readers of Offenburger.com, writes full-time now on Iowa topics. Earlier in her career, she worked 25 years in communications, media relations and as an assistant to the president of Grand View College in Des Moines. While continuing to write essays regularly, she is also at work on a book about life in and around her get-away cabin in the woods of southern Iowa. This Guest Column is used with her permission from her first book of essays, “Jesus in the Underwear Drawer and other tales of holiday hysteria,” which was published in 2005. That book, now in its second printing, is available on the major book sales sites on the Internet, as well as in Iowa bookstores. You can contact Flahive by e-mail at flahives@msn.com.

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