Spending winter ‘Closer to Home’

I neither know nor care about big pickup trucks. However, a couple of days ago I paid rapt attention to a Chevrolet Silverado truck commercial on television, and here’s why. More than 50 years ago I was the lead singer in a pretty decent rock ’n’ roll cover band. We were on the road most weekends, performing at festivals, homecoming dances, proms, fraternity dances, etc. and our longest, most intense song was one by a group called Grand Funk Railroad, one now being used as background music in a Silverado commercial, “Closer to Home.” Many songs from the 1970s lie conspicuously in the background of today’s commercial television.

I try to leave the distant past exactly there, but sometimes the smell of a woman’s perfume, the taste of someone’s homemade cooking, or the sound of an old rock ’n’ roll song places you somewhere long ago, somewhere specific in the trajectory of your life, and it comes as a surprise, and sometimes it comes when you need it most, when you need to fully comprehend that the young person that was you is not the old person you are now. Men are particularly bad at such comprehension. I’m perhaps more guilty than most.

Anyway, it’s been a rough few weeks for the deer population out here. A foot or so of snow, beautiful amid a hushing silence, and extraordinarily cold air caused deer to be unable to dig to the grass beneath and they’ve been spending a lot of time on two back legs, stretching upward to eat from low-hanging branches on cedar trees. As an avowed old softy, I poured 130 pounds of alfalfa/timothy grass onto an area just off my drive. As long as there is no Chronic Wasting Disease afoot I’m going to take care of the wild creatures that call my property home.

It’s also my home, my homeland, ‘meine Heimat,’ 60 acres of woodlands, bluffs, and memories. I don’t plan to ever leave this place and if I do I’ve no doubt it means my remaining time on earth is short. I try to be careful writing about the country, making no claims to any sort of expertise, as I am neither farmer nor woodsman, not an ornithologist, a geologist, a historian, a botanist, nothing, just an old guy who looks around and tries to connect what he sees to the human heart, with varying degrees of success. Throw in a bit of life and death and there you have it.

Kurt Ullrich lives in rural Jackson County. The Dubuque Telegraph Herald recently published a 60-page magazine of Kurt’s columns. The magazine can be purchased here.