A fragile link
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
When we came back to Ramona all those years ago, purchased the little rundown, dilapidated house on Main Street, and started fixing it up, we met Jim. He pulled up in his pickup truck leaned out the window and said, "I wanna thank you girls for what you've done."
"Thank us?" we wondered. "What did we do?"
"You came back and cleaned up an eye-sore on Main Street. It means a lot to us. Thank you," he said.
That was a good beginning for a friendship.
The first summer that we spent more than two weeks in residence, the phone rang one morning. "So how much rain did you get?" the caller asked. It was our neighbor, Jim.
"I haven't the foggiest notion," I confessed. "We don't have a rain gauge."
"Well, how in tarnation do you expect to live in the country if you don't have a rain gauge so you can talk about the weather?" he hollered.
I was dumfounded.
"I guess I'll have to get you one," he sighed. This cemented our friendship.
Through the years, our friend Jim warmed our stay in Ramona with his wit, wisdom, and willingness to help. We called him "the sidewalk superintendent." He called us "girls." We took him kraut bierrocks and he took us asparagus-hunting in the spring.
Jim died last week in Ramona. A vital link in our history with Ramona is broken.
There were things we wondered about when we contemplated returning to the country. "Would we really like living in a small town? What would happen once we actually lived there instead of just visiting? Would there still be charm? What would it be like when our aunts and uncles were gone? Would the town change so much, the flavor suddenly be obnoxious? Would we still want to stay?"
We're still discovering the answers to our questions. Every time we lose another stalwart, and we've lost quite a few in the five years since we moved here, there's a huge hole in the fabric of the community. With their passing, a legacy of knowledge is lost, the stories are silenced, the transfer of history is over. And we have somehow become the keeper of Ramona's history, so we feel the loss intensely.
There are only a handful of people in Ramona to begin with and there's an even smaller handful of the old tried-and-true stalwarts still represented. Thankfully, there still are two or three families who can trace their history back several generations in Ramona and ironically, we are in the mix even though we're move-ins. My sister and I are fourth generation, Jim's grandkids are the fifth generation, and Tooltime Tim's nephew and niece also are fifth generation kids living in Ramona.
This is our challenge, on another day in the country — to keep our small community vital — maybe even growing, a good place to live, so that, whether their family name has been on the town roster forever or just for a few months, we do not lose a generation who've called this home.
