The Coonridge Digest: “All depends how you butter your toast”

Greetings from the Ridge.

Mom wouldn’t let us go near Abe Lyle’s house. He was the town grouch and his salty language would singe the hair on the back of your neck.

Abe was probably the most creative cusser I’d ever heard. He could string a list of words together that had never been joined before and to youngsters’ ears they seemed almost like some sort of obscene poetry.

Trouble was, the quickest way to downtown from our house was a path that lead directly by Abe’s little two-story frame house on the corner.

The main source of Abe Lyle’s profanity was the weather. Every morning he’d walk out onto his porch in his overalls and shirtless to fetch his paper. He’d bend down, pick up the news, then take a sniff of the morning air… and it was always too hot, too cold, too humid, or if it was too nice then the birds would be chirping too loudly.

Abe would take a take a look at the sky, raise a single callused fist in the air and then hurl a string of cusswords into the sky making even the birds pause to consider the calamity. He always referred to the weather as "You!"

Personally, I felt as if he was talking to God but my mother assured me that even the most wretched man would never address the Almighty that way so Abe must be talking about the weather. "You @#$% of @#$%, this @#$% weather is just about the @#$%-est derned @#$% that I ever seen!"

Then he’d go inside, undoubtedly to cuss God or the temperature in private.

Drought brought out the worst in Abe. Sure, he hated the cold and he hated the wind, and he had a special grudge against excessive heat, but Abe was a farmer and of all the weather conditions, drought hurt his pocketbook the hardest.

I was walking by his house one summer morning in the midst of one of the worst dry spells our area had ever experienced. I don’t think he saw me, but if he did, it would have made little difference to Abe. I saw him walk onto the porch, pick up the paper, then let loose with his usual string of profanity. I stopped to observe the ceremony, not so much out of respect, but to let the words settle on his yard before I dared continue. I had this strange feeling that if a person walked through freshly cussed air then he’d somehow become contaminated.

Abe finished his tirade and then turned to go inside. When he got to the door he stopped, turned around, and threw another bushel of blaspheme into the air. Then another. This drought was really getting to him and he allowed as how the weather need an especially profound cussing on this particular morning.

I could hear him continuing to mutter as he went inside.

The rumor in town was that Abe had shot two television sets during the weather report. There were two busted TVs in his garage and both had the glass smashed, but there was never enough proof to convict him for assault on a set.

And of course the trouble was, Abe was only giving words and sound to what many others were also feeling. They just didn’t have the audacity or the nerve to stand on the front porch and yell it to the world.

Abe died about fifteen years ago, frustrated I’m sure that it was a hot day.

But the strangest thing about Abe wasn’t Abe at all but his brother Henry. Henry Lyle farmed the same ground, he used the same equipment, and on most days you’d find him working at the same particular task as Abe. The only difference in the two brothers is that while Abe cussed the world, Henry accepted it. More than that, he embraced it.

We once drove by Henry as he was trying vainly to pull his Ford 8N out of a particularly deep mud hole during a wet autumn that would have fretted even Noah. When we stopped to see if we could help, Henry peered at us from beneath his Burrus Seed hat, flashed a gold-capped smile and said, "Boy ain’t that rain fine?" We didn’t see Abe that day but I’m sure he was in the tool shed cussing the excessive moisture.

When his soybeans stood pod-deep in floodwater, Henry would muse that the glut of moisture would come in handy next season. When the August heat withered his corn crop he knew it was a sure sign of a bumper crop in the following year. And even when Henry’s oldest boy was killed in Vietnam, Henry stood up and gave the eulogy. With tears in his eyes he proclaimed that few of us could say we died for a cause.

As Grandpa Gebhardt used to say, "It all depends how you butter your toast. You can’t control the world, but you can choose your own reaction to it."

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip… rain, snow, or drought.