Minnesota Prairie Roots

Writing and photography by Audrey Kletscher Helbling

Snapshots of a small-town wedding day May 10, 2011

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 6:57 AM
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TWENTY-NINE YEARS ago this coming Sunday, my husband and I were married in my hometown of Vesta, a place marked, like so many other prairie towns, by grain elevators and the water tower and a one-block-long main street.

Our wedding reception was held at the community hall, an unassuming, nothing-fancy brick building with a stage, wood floors and military uniforms encased in glass. HyVee in Marshall, 20 miles away, catered a chicken dinner as wedding guests pulled up metal folding chairs to rectangular tables angled under crepe paper streamers and white tissue paper wedding bells.

Thoughts of our small-town wedding lingered this past weekend as our nephew Matt married Amber at Gustavus Adolphus Lutheran Church in Foley. The reception was held in Duelm, a cluster of homes, a church and a restaurant attached to a new event center, smack dab in the middle of the country about 10 miles to the south and west.

There were no crepe paper streamers here or folding chairs or military uniforms. We dined at round tables draped in white cloths and decorated with centerpieces of swimming goldfish and floating candles. (One fish, I should mention here, wiggled between the candle and the vase rim and leaped onto a table.)

While weddings and receptions have gotten much fancier than the simple rural weddings of decades past, some traditions remain unchanged.

Members of the wedding party and guests still decorate the bridal vehicle. That is where I focused my attention Saturday after the wedding service and before the bridal couple emerged from the church.

First I watched the attendants and others decorate the vehicle with words and balloons and beer cans.

Then I watched the kids check out the Durango from afar…

move in close for a peek inside…

eye the Michelob Golden Draft Light beer cans tied to the vehicle rear…

and, finally, enthusiastically, engage in a pick-up game of Kick the (beer) Can.

They had no idea I was photographing them in a perfect moment of childhood play and wedding tradition in a small, central Minnesota town.

© Copyright 2011 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

Honoring the memory of my dad April 4, 2011

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 11:19 AM
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Elvern Kletscher's 1950s military photo

HIS OBITUARY READS IN PART: From 1952-1953, he served in the U.S. Army during the Korean Conflict. He served on the front lines, receiving the Purple Heart after being wounded…He enjoyed his weekly visits with his veterans support group. He enjoyed bird watching, making horseradish and tomato juice with his family.

Elvern Kletscher passed away Thursday, April 3, 2003, at the Sunwood Good Samaritan Center in Redwood Falls, Minnesota at the age of 72 years and 29 days.

Yesterday, on the eight-year anniversary of my father’s death, I failed to remember. How could I? How could I forget the day he died, the day I lost my dad? How could I?

It breaks my heart that I would forget. This failure to remember the date of his death seems like a dishonor to the father I loved. He was a man who worked hard tending the earth, who loved his family and God. He was a soldier who served his country and, because of his time on the killing fields of Korea, suffered from a lifetime of demons that at times robbed me of my father.

But in the end, in his last days, I came to terms with the issues that sometimes made life with him difficult and challenging. I saw only the goodness as I stood at his bedside in the Veterans Administration Hospital where he lay dying of cancer and congestive heart failure.

As I held his hand, stroked his thick white hair, held a straw to his lips, I tried to be brave, to cheer him, to comfort him.

But when I couldn’t keep my emotions in check any more, I fled his room, stood outside his hospital room and wept.

Once I pulled myself back together, I returned to his bedside, listened to him tell me he was going to a better place, that he wanted all of us to take care of Mom. And then I cried, right there, holding nothing back because I couldn’t no matter how hard I tried.

Two days later, after being transported back to his home county, into a nursing home, my dad died.

And on April 7 we buried him, deep in the soil, in the hillside cemetery that overlooks his beloved prairie, the place where, except for his time in the military, he lived his entire life.

On that gloomy April day of biting cold wind, I held my mom close, my arm wrapped around her shoulders as she shivered uncontrollably. Together with my siblings we huddled inside a tent, next to the coffin.

As the guns fired in a military salute, as taps sounded their mournful wail, as my mom accepted a carefully folded American flag, I wept.

Today I weep, too, as I remember the father I loved.

© Copyright 2011 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

Remembering my soldier-father and Elizabeth Taylor March 24, 2011

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 10:21 AM
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WHEN I HEARD the news on Wednesday of Elizabeth Taylor’s death, I didn’t think of the Hollywood star or the two-time Oscar winner, the stunning beauty with the violet eyes or the woman who married eight times, or even the starlet who struggled with addiction and was a crusader in the fight against AIDS.

Rather, I thought of my dad.

He was smitten with Liz.

He never met the Hollywood actress. But he had seen her on a United Service Organizations stage while serving during the Korean Conflict. That was enough for my Minnesota farmer turned-soldier dad to fall for her. Hard. I don’t recall him ever, in his life-time, talking about another actress. He had eyes only for Elizabeth.

His wasn’t an obsession. Nothing like that. It’s just that he seldom talked about his time on the front lines as a foot solider during the Korean War. He told us about the orphans begging for food across barbed wire fences, the sniper (he eventually killed) picking off members of his platoon, watching his buddy blown up the day before he was to return home to the States, the cold and lack of food, the digging into foxholes for protection…and then Elizabeth Taylor, dear, dear Liz.

I expect that the movie star offered a welcome and pleasant diversion for soldiers who faced death on a daily basis.

My father, Elvern Kletscher, on the left with two of his soldier buddies in Korea.

If my dad was still alive—he died eight years ago at the age of 72—I would ask him about the woman who enamored him with her beauty when she stepped onto Korean soil to entertain the troops. I don’t know details about her USO appearance. I wish I had cared enough to ask him.

I tried to find more information online, but Taylor’s USO tours don’t exactly pop up all over the Internet. She once received the USO Woman of the Year Award and won a USO Merit Award. Otherwise I didn’t find much out there.

And that is dismaying to me. Her time entertaining our servicemen, soldiers like my dad, seems as notable as her roles in Cleopatra or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

For me, Elizabeth Taylor will always be more than just another actress. She will be a reminder of my father, of the young Minnesota soldier who was struck by shrapnel at Heartbreak Ridge in Korea and was awarded the Purple Heart 47 years later. It is his memories of Liz that define her to me, not her beauty, not her accolades, not her anything except the temporary escape she gave my soldier-father nearly 60 years ago from the battlefields of Korea, from the horrors of war.

© Copyright 2011 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

Thanksgiving family memories November 26, 2010

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 12:50 PM
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I CAN’T IMAGINE Thanksgiving without family. They make the day memorable and fun and cherished.

This year 14 of us sat down to a turkey dinner at our house. That’s really a small number given if everyone from my side of the family attended, 26 of us would gather around the tables. Seldom, though, are we all together on Thanksgiving or Easter; that usually happens only at Christmas and never in my small, cramped house.

Anyway, Thursday’s get together provided plenty of memorable moments and laughter, some of which I’ll share. Others are best kept within the family. Here, for your entertainment, are some of those publishable moments:

  • My mom arrived with two cans of corn, soda crackers, cheddar cheese and other ingredients for a scalloped corn dish which she insisted I requested for my eldest. I kept insisting that I had not requested the corn and my daughter, who was called upon to help prepare the dish, kept insisting this was not her favorite corn. No matter how loudly my daughter and I protested, we could not convince my mom that we had not asked for the vegetable. Later, when my sister, L, arrived, we learned that she had requested the corn and that our niece, H, loves it.
  • The corn-requesting sister failed to bring the prune-filled fruit stuffing that is our mother’s favorite and which a certain sister-in-law detests. My youngest brother then shared that the first time he had Thanksgiving dinner with his in-laws, he told them he didn’t like fruit stuffing. They looked at him like he was crazy and told him they didn’t have fruit in their dressing.
  • That same brother wore jeans to Thanksgiving dinner. This is significant because, as his wife revealed, he has not worn jeans in some 25 years. They went jean shopping on her recent birthday and my brother bought not one, but two pair, of jeans.  I don’t know whether the fact that my brother is an attorney has anything to do with his two-plus decades of boycotting blue jeans or not. But I do know that he’s missed out on many years of comfort.

 

At 11:33 a.m. on November 25, 2010, my sister, L, had nothing to say.

  • At exactly 11:33 a.m., my sister, L, stated that she had nothing to say/was speechless. I was in the other room and did not hear why she said this. But, we all made a very big deal of this statement given my sister has never been at a loss for words. She always speaks her mind. A roomful of witnesses duly noted the time and I declared it a monumental moment in family history. (This same sister later threatened to light my vintage Thanksgiving candles.)

 

The vintage Thanksgiving candles that will never be touched by fire.

  • During an interrogation about any men in her life, my second daughter rolled her eyes. This did not go unnoticed and a brief discussion ensued on this inherited family trait. I roll my eyes, my kids all roll their eyes and my sister and her daughter roll their eyes. My sister-in-law says her kids are not allowed to roll their eyes. Uh, huh.
  • My husband failed to remove the foil cover from the turkey during baking. A pale white turkey is not a pleasant sight.
  • When I started whipping cream for the pumpkin dessert, my sister-in-law called her son to “watch Aunt Audrey make real whipped cream.”
  • My eldest brought a to-die-for cheesecake, which she whipped up by hand because she could not find the beaters for her hand-mixer.
  • Two of my nieces, a nephew and my son washed and dried the dishes. My 16-year-old, who towers at six-foot-one (or is it two), complained about the low sink.

 

My tall, tall son declares our sink "too low." That's as good a reason as any for purchasing a replacement for my vintage brown sink, don't you think? I would really like to win a kitchen make-over.

  • I made my sister and my middle brother and his significant other tromp outside in the cold and snow to look at siding samples for the front of our house.
  • My sister-in-law commented on the brown shirts my son and eldest were wearing and said brown was the color to wear for Thanksgiving. She was dressed in a button-up red sweater and a shirt she would have to button over if she was in church. She told me I was wearing an Easter shirt. I told her I didn’t care.

 

I have never pretended to be fashionable. I wore this "Easter shirt" for Thanksgiving because I wanted to be cool (I'm a woman over 50) and comfortable while working in the kitchen.

  • My brother offered $1,500 for a painting I purchased for $7 at a recycled art sale at the Paradise Center for the Arts in Faribault. I quickly accepted the offer for the Jose Maria de Servin painting, which is worth considerably more than $7. He quickly withdrew his offer, saying he was “just kidding.”

My bargain Jose Maria de Servin painting

  • Family members gathered around the dining room table after dinner poring over newspaper ads. None of us, except the momentarily speechless sister (see above), shops on Black Friday. She informed us that she enjoys the thrill of the hunt while regaling us with stories about shoving shoppers and angry shoppers in the parking lot. She successfully convinced all of us to stay home on Black Friday.

 

My brother and sister-in-law brought a stack of newspaper ads for us to peruse after dinner.

WHAT ARE YOUR THANKSGIVING stories? If you have a publishable story to share, send it my way via a comment to Minnesota Prairie Roots.

© Copyright 2010 Audrey Kletscher Helbling

 

A birthday treasure September 26, 2010

Filed under: Uncategorized — Audrey Kletscher Helbling @ 10:42 AM
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TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY. I need to think for a minute exactly how old I am. Take 2010 minus 1956 and you get 54. Yeah, that would be right.

Funny how the years pass and you lose count after 40, or 50. Where did time go?

I bet my mom wonders that, too, today. How could her second-born of six already be “that old?” Yeah, how?

Birthdays back when I was growing up aren’t like birthday celebrations today. Years ago, we gathered with extended family—grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins—a whole houseful crammed into a farmhouse. Pans of bars. Red Jell-O. Summer sausage sandwiches. Homemade dill pickles. Coffee brewing in the kitchen. Bottled pop and Schell’s beer.

And when we left for home around midnight, we wished the birthday girl, or boy, “many more birthdays!” Tradition. Sweet words, sweet wishes.

Because my birthday fell the day after my parents’ wedding anniversary, I seldom “had company” on my birthday. The relatives would come the night before to celebrate the anniversary, then forget all about my special day.

But my mom made my birthday memorable by baking an animal-shaped cake, chosen from a slim book of cake designs. There was no present from my parents—they didn’t have the money for a gift—and I didn’t really know I should expect one. My animal-shaped cake was enough, although my godmother always sewed an outfit for me. She knew I needed new clothes more than anything.

One year my Aunt Rachel gave me a greeting card with an adjustable green-stone ring tucked into a treasure chest. An emerald in my eyes. I slipped the ring onto my skinny girl finger. I wore the ring every day, all the time, until one day I lost it.

Of all the birthday cards I’ve received in my life, I remember that one and how I cried when the mock emerald became buried treasure in our farmyard.

© Copyright 2010 Audrey Kletscher Helbling