Good morning, Orion Samuelson
This Saturday morning, I find myself sitting in the living room, half-watching the farm report on the local TV station.
And, there he is--after all these years--Orion Samuelson, sitting at the announcer's desk. I google his name and find out that he's 80 years old and has been doing this report for 53 years.
How long has it been since my late husband and I began our Saturdays with Orion Samuelson's agri-business report?
I figure it up. Dale DeJournett died on April 26, 1997, so it's been at least 40 years, since I began my Saturday mornings with Samuelson.
Back then, we had little choice, as Samuelson was the only game in town that early in the morning.
I look outside this Saturday morning at several inches of snow on the ground and remember how hard farm life was, but how much my husband loved it.
I remember those cold, icy nights, when a freezing wind whipped around the barn, and the cattle huddled together for warmth, their hot breath rising into the air.
In the winter, ice was an enemy. In the summer, a blazing sun beat down.
Around and around the field he would go on a tractor with no protection from the sun, our border collie Nicki following him on every round, while the male, Sparky, found a shady spot to lie down and watch.
Dale would come in for lunch at noon, practically black with dirt and sunburn, telling stories of how a coyote would lie and watch him or chase the mice in the newly-dug earth.
He was a rough sight in those days. He never took the time to go to the barber shop, and he would rarely even stop long enough to let me trim his hair, so he grew shaggier by the day.
One day, after he had to go to a nearby town for some part for the tractor, he came in, chuckling at how the woman at the counter backed away from him, as if he were a terrorist. She waited on him fast, to get him out of the store.
Sometime later, he got it in his head to shave his long, shaggy beard off. He soon discovered his mistake and let it grow back.
"I got no respect," he said, simply.
He was a man of few words.
He never took vacations. Back in the years when he worked off the farm, his idea of a vacation was to take off work two weeks and build a deck or a greenhouse.
Two years before he died, we took our son Matthew to Oklahoma for an AAU tournament. If there was anything Dale loved as much as farming, it was watching our son play basketball. He loved that vacation.
Nobody knows for sure what causes pancreatic cancer, though smoking is a big factor.
Dale DeJournett could do anything, but he could not quit smoking.
These days, the old barn that he loved belongs to someone else. It sits on the hill, dark and overgrown with brush. Sometimes, a flock of vultures sit on the roof, like dark gargoyles, watching over the farm.
The house still stands, and thanks to Dale's ingenuity, it's still mine.
It doesn't seem fair that Orion Samuelson is still alive and kicking at eighty, while Dale died at 56, but that's the way it goes. We never know when our time will come.
In the summertime, the grandchildren play ball on the lawn with my border collie, and they fish in the pond.
Their grandfather would be pleased.
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