October 17th

October 17^th

By John W. Vander Velden

The relationship between parent and child is always complex. There are so many facets that influence how the generations mesh...or not. I believe that each person is unique. Even siblings, though they may share genetics are not the same in every way. Life itself and all the challenges and setbacks that each face shape us. So though the same clay might be tossed on the potter’s wheel, the master artist forms each lump a bit differently.

So unique individuals build unique relationships in unique ways. Again it is life, isn’t it? So the relationship I had with my mother and father was very different than the relationship that my siblings had built over the years, not better, just different.

Perhaps it was the vast number of hours I shared with my parents. The unplanned twist of my life that in the end resulted in my lifelong profession led to my working side by side with my father for more than thirty years. But even that does not explain it all. For the profession we shared demanded long hours, early rising and working often till the sky held out its stars for our pleasure. The sheer mass of hours, the countless shared meals, the seven days a week surely made my connection different than others. And over those years, faults and blemishes cannot be hidden, and that came into the mix as well.

Yet it was in the understanding, as best as I was able, these complex imperfect people, and accepting them with their strengths and weakness while doing my best to manage my own life within the few hours left. So looking back I wonder, once again, exactly what was the relationship we shared. I wonder if I met their approval. My father did not understand me...not really. And I am certain, even now, I did not fully understand him. But how could I? I did not live through the depression, survive as a teenager in an occupied country, or leave family and EVERYTHING behind at twenty three.

Yet we must have understood enough to tolerate, even appreciate each other year after year. A partnership, if not financially, in the task. And we did not carry that task alone for mom had her part, a large part in the success of a business that seemed bound for failure at its onset. So the three of us worked together side by side, each with an important contribution as we faced together the steps forward and back as well to at long last arrive in creating a profitable endeavor.

So you can see the life I shared with those who reared me shaped the relationship. And now as I approach October 17^th I am reminded of the years we worked side by side, and I think about my mother and father, for this October 17th would have been mom’s 94^th birthday.  

Of Sweat and Soil Part 2

Of Sweat and Soil

Part 2 

By John W. Vander Velden

 

It was not family problems that drove my parents to cross the sea.  Both had very good relations with their individual large families.  Mom had eight brothers and sisters, and dad had six.  Maybe it was because they loved and admired their parents that they were impatient to prove themselves.  Their whole lives had been denied.  Born in 1925 the depression hit Holland as hard as anywhere.  Simply put there was nothing.  But just when things might have begun to improve, World War II sent the low countries and much of the rest of Europe into a turmoil that none could have expected, and fortunately a turmoil that we, the next generation, have been spared.  The Netherlands became an occupied country.  And when you hear your parents speak of hardships in the United States during that time…well yes, it was tough, but nothing in comparison to what those that lived beneath the gun had faced. 

So dad found himself in the “doughnut hole” when he was ready to begin his life.  Opportunities were promised in the future.  Opportunities existed for those that had started before the war, but in the late forties there were nothing but promises.  Dad was not a patient man, and promises were, in his mind for those that would wait.  He had little faith in promises.

My parents went to meeting about foreign possibilities.  They considered Brazil and Peru, but the best future seemed to be found in the land of “Possibilities” the United States.  So with plans made and years of procedures to follow dad’s sister and her family went to LaPorte County, Indiana.  And with Frank Scholl, the brother of Dr. Scholl of foot fame, as their sponsor, my newlywed parents followed a few months later.  So in October of 1948 Jacob and Nel Vander Velden began the difficult task of fulfilling their dream.  

(311 Words)

Of Sweat and Soil Part 1

Of Sweat and Soil

Part 1

By John W. Vander Velden 

When I wander the “place”, the farmstead, there are times when I let my mind go back to what we found here.  Though some might have called it a working dairy farm, I am not certain that would be my description of this farm in 1972.  I remember the piles of metal, mostly over worn farm equipment.  A crumpled corn picker, the manufacturer unrecognizable, a corn planter that sat rotting away fertilizer still in its deteriorating hoppers, stacks of old fence, tangled, and just about everywhere bits and pieces of discarded “stuff”.  Behind the only structure that one could imagine as a machine storage shed we found the crumpled remains of a silo roof. 

We spent a Sunday afternoon, the whole family together, gathering wagon after wagon of junk to add to the existing piles.  Old fences lay tumbled down, the cow barn hadn’t been scraped out in months, a mess of its own.  All the manure, whenever the former man had spread it, had covered the lot next to the house with such a thick layer that nothing grew there for a year.  A chemical spill had killed all the grass in about half the yard.  The lot in front of the milking parlor looked like a war zone, with the twisted pipes, of an abandoned cattle crossing, sticking out the mounds of reddish earth between open holes revealing severed sewer pipes. 

The milking equipment did not work.  Period!  Nor did the feeder and silo unloader.  The conveyor for loading bales in the barn was mis-installed.  There weren’t three operating light switches on the place.  Not to mention that any light bulb within reach had been stolen.  

So what did dad and mom see, when they bought this place?  Possibilities…  I have to think of my parents in a bigger context.  They were descendants of farmers.  Though the farms on which they grew up had little in common with a dairy farm in Indiana.  But my grandparent earned their keep from the soil…soil they owned.  My parents left everything behind when they emigrated from the Netherlands in 1948. Everything except a dream.  They knew that one day…somehow…they would have their own place.  That a day would come and they could point to a corner of the world and say…this is ours… 

This broken down wreck of a place must have been to them, a seed.  A seed they believed when attended with enough effort and sacrifice could grow to become…their farm.

I worked with them, I witnessed the whole story of “Sunrise Acres”, and I will share a bit of that story with you.  This is but the first installment.  It is enough to say they did succeed when others had failed.  But the story starts before the papers were signed in February 1972.  And the next part will tell the story of a young couple’s beginnings.

4-1-2017  (483 Words)

Mom

Mom

By John W. Vander Velden

 

Born one of nine children, in Holland, born in 1925.  By the time she became aware of anything her family was in the depression.  Fortunate to be a family of Taunders, that is truck farmers, they had food though little else.  When at last the depression ended they found their country occupied, and again they had so very little.  Even when the war ended their country ravaged by the war…there was nothing…absolutely nothing.

Though I would remember Mom and her life we must also remember dad, for their lives are so intertwined, as two strands of one fabric, so bound together.  It is not really possible to speak of one without the other.  They did not attend the same school, though they grew up in the same neighborhood.  They were in families that knew each other.  Both families were truck farmers.  They would marry in 1948, young, too young their pastor told them.  They were twenty-three. 

But they were driven by dreams, filled with ambitions and a lack of patients.  For they found themselves in a time, a time when there was no opportunity.  Their older brothers and sisters had begun their lives.  Later their younger siblings would have their chance.  But mom and dad found themselves, in the donut hole, so ready to begin their lives and denied.  So they came to United States.  They came with dreams, hopes, ambitions, and incredible pent up energy.  They left their home and the only life they knew,  coming to this country with two card board suitcases, a hundred dollars and little else.  But they brought with them a faith.  A faith that with hard work they would succeed.  A faith in themselves, a faith in this country, a land which they knew so very little.  A faith in God, cornerstone of their lives.  And later faith in the new family which they built. 

Crossing in a steamship, imagine people that had never been a hundred miles from home, crossing the ocean.  Mom became so ill.  The room felt so hot to the newlyweds.  Dad opened the window, that is the port hole, only to be balled out by the room steward.  I really doubt dad knew what the steward said but he never opened the porthole again.   Imagine the situation, nearly alone in a strange land.  For though dad’s sister and her husband had arrived a few months earlier they knew no others.  Though they had taken English lessons in Holland they soon found out what they had been taught was not quite English.  Actually it was not English at all.   Yet young, perhaps naïve, bold with incredible courage the newlyweds began a new life in a new world. 

That was the beginning of the great adventure that was their lives together, and like all great adventures it was not always pleasant or joyous.  There were many disappointments and setbacks.  Working for others, moving to Florida, and coming back to start all over again.   Yet with years of hard work and sacrifice they achieved their dream.  They at last had a place of their own… Their farm here in Walkerton. 

And all the while they raised their family, the five of us.  We’re all tall perhaps but each very different with lives and dreams of our own. Lives and dreams they did not always understand.  Two that with boldness and daring came to this country, five children, ten grandchildren and five great grandchildren…and so it goes on…

Just when they should have begun to enjoy the fruits of years of hard work and sacrifice, dad’s illness changed all their plans.  He was only fifty-seven when he was diagnosed with MS, only fifty-seven.  Mom worked hard all her life. She knew nothing else.  She understood nothing else.  She cared as best as she was able for her children, and then she cared as best she was able for dad.  Twenty-three years dealing with his MS, with all its ups and downs until at last it took him in 2005.  Suddenly she was alone for the first time in her life she was alone.  Living with her family, going directly from her father’s house to her husband’s, then after nearly fifty-seven years of marriage…alone.  Focusing on others she never realized that she too had become old.  She was strong, always strong, yet suddenly without purpose, the purpose that had so long been her life, she was to deal with the most difficult years of her life. 

I could spend all day speaking of memories, of how mom with her thick Dutch accent taught a brother how to correctly say chimney…the word has no “L”.  Of New Year’s Eve parties at my Aunt and Uncle’s, of trips to the beach at St. Augustine, and I remember when Mom received the phone call that broke her heart; when word came of her father’s death.  There are so many memories.  Are all my memories happy ones…no!  But all my memories are important ones, and I will cherish them always!  

 

We were taught respect for others, respect for our parents, and respect for God.  If I would speak of the home we as children were given.  It would be best said.  There were always clean sheets on the beds…food on the table…cloths on our backs…and love in the home.  In reality…is there anything more !!! 

(902 Words)  8-2015

 

Together

Together

7-1-2013

 

by John W. Vander Velden

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Together facing new hope,

Behind only devastation and vague promises, unacceptable!

Youth’s optimism…pent up desires…fuel.

 

Yet leaving everything…friends…country…family…home,

A decision not easily taken.

 

They came lightly…

For little possessed…and less allowed.

To a place distant…foreign…unseen…

With no guarantees…only possibilities.

 

Surely they faced difficulties.

Surely dealt great setbacks,

Surely feared defeat.

Yet courageously facing future’s unknown.

 

Over the years, their own family formed…

New country honored…

New friends loved…

Weaving a new tapestry out of past’s cord,

S t r e t c h e d    b u t    n o t    b r o k e n.

 

All the challenges…

All the disappointments…

All the victories…

Hope never lost.

Dreams long awaited…nurtured…arriving at last.

A new world built, upon toil and sweat…

 

Where had the years flown…?

Many moves…

Successes and failings…

Sunshine and illness…

 

When age’s darkest clouds filled the horizon,

When mortality’s due evident,

When muscles failed and joints screamed,

Even those days unable to overcome…

For they had faced it all…together!

 

(159 Word)