I had just finished breakfast, and following my usual routine with a cup of coffee in hand, picked up my guitar to play a few tunes while looking out the window for birds. The words to the song Evening Primrose came easily:
Evening primrose in August, bee balm in July,
Fireflies flying where fireflies fly,
Catbirds are calling and walnuts are falling,
From big branches up high in the sky.
Tomatoes in the garden,
Grapes ripe on the vine,
About ready for picking, just give me a sign.
Butterfly milkweed, a big bag of bird seed,
Let’s slow down these old hands of time.
The song is about a home and property a few miles outside of Havana, Illinois, where I lived for twenty years. And I realized once again, as I sometimes do while playing the song, that if I had not moved from that property, singer/songwriter Edward David Anderson would never have written it.
My wife Julie and I both loved our Havana country home, but we needed to move closer to our aged mothers; we thought a university town setting would be interesting. So just before COVID began appearing on news reports, we bought a home in Macomb, Illinois, about 50 miles west of Havana, quickly moved, and put our old home on the market.
That house and property (3.5 acres) was the first I had ever owned, well before I knew Julie. Most of the land was mowed grass when I first bought it, but there were woods around part of the west and north boundaries, essentially scrubby trees grown over abandoned farm operations that had been cleared years before. My first act as a landowner was to plant a bur oak seedling that I brought from the Illinois River bluffs, about four miles away. My second act was to stop mowing. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, but I knew that I didn’t wish to become a slave to a lawnmower.
The following spring I dug up a ten-foot by twenty-foot section of lawn grass and scattered the bare soil with prairie wildflower and grass seeds. I eventually expanded the area to about 1.5 acres, scattered acorns, and also planted a few. Over the years I planted hazelnut, dogwood, and sumac shrubs, and more prairie seeds; and I set everything on fire every couple of years to keep the woody vegetation and ticks in check and to encourage grasses like big and little bluestem, Canada wild rye, Indiangrass, and sand love grass. At some point, I named it “Sand Hill Savanna.” Meanwhile, I began a FeederWatch study through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which I would complete yearly for twenty winter seasons. I became connected to this property like no other: our wedding photo was in front of the bur oak tree that I had planted the day I moved in seven years before; a butterfly milkweed plant, which was an anniversary gift from Julie, was getting bigger each year; and we started a raised-bed garden, grew tomatoes and cucumbers, and planted a row of grape vines for making wine. I thought I would live there until the end.
Sand Hill Savanna after thirteen years (2013).
Cucumbers in the garden,
And they’re ripe on the vine.
Got a river up the road,
And it flows just like wine.
Cardinals are calling and the acorns are falling,
From that old oak tree high in the sky.
Butterfly milkweed at Sand Hill Savanna, 2015.
Life, though, has a way of changing, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, no matter what a person might say or do or how much you wish it to remain the same. I was never enthusiastic about moving from our country home, especially into town on a small lot directly next to other small lots. But we were a block from a manicured city park with a meandering creek. I went for walks and watched birds without binoculars (I could not imagine standing in the middle of the street with my binoculars trying to find a small bird within a dense shrub in front of someone’s living room window). And on many days I missed our country home—its prairie, woods, and trails—even as I felt our new home was the best house I had ever lived in, especially after Julie worked her skillful decorating magic. But it was the right thing to do at the time, and it made our lives easier as Julie’s mother quickly declined and soon passed away and my mother fell, broke her hip, and then moved to an assisted-living facility five minutes from our new home.
A walk in the woods,
A stroll down the road,
Where sunsets are golden and never grow old.
Wherever I go, the roads that I roam,
Bring me back to my old country home.
Monarchs and honeybees on showy goldenrod at Sand Hill Savanna, 2018.
We worried about selling our old home because of the COVID crisis. But unknown to us, Ed and Kim Anderson saw the pandemic as an opportunity to move (Ed, being a full-time musician, had all of his gigs cancelled due to pandemic restrictions), and they were searching for a country home with acreage. They later told me that after pulling up to the property as prospective buyers, the first thing they did, before looking at the house, was to walk the trails through the woods and prairie. I earlier provided the realtor with an essay I had written about the property (“The Acorn Year”), which they had read before their visit; my thinking was that anyone with interests similar to mine would see the prairie for what it was, rather than as an overgrown yard of weeds unmaintained by a lazy, hungover landowner. After the house closing, we became friends, and I became an admirer of Ed’s music.
One day about a year later, one of Ed’s posts came up on my Facebook News Feed. It read like a poem, but it turned out to be the first part of a new song, Evening Primrose, and I instantly recognized its subject matter. Later, at one of his shows, I would hear the rest of the lyrics. Eventually the full song, with accompanying instrumentation, became the opening tune for his new album Still the River. The album’s back cover states that it was recorded at “The Homestead, Havana, IL.”
Whenever I play Evening Primrose on my guitar, I feel as if a circle of some kind has been completed. And as chance would have it, after four and a half years in our Macomb neighborhood, Julie and I stumbled upon a “For Sale” sign in front of a country home with acreage a few miles west of town; about a month later we were almost completely moved in and our home in town was on the market. As it turned out, earlier in the same year, Ed, Kim, and daughter Ella also moved onward; for them, it was Wisconsin. But for a short time, circumstances aligned, resulting in some great music and friendships that otherwise never would have formed.
Related Links:
Listen to Evening Primrose here.
Visit Edward David Anderson’s official website here.
“Town Walking” is an essay about adjusting to life in town after living nearly three decades in rural settings.
“The Acorn Year” is an essay about the author buying his first house and property and what he decides to do with it.
"Twenty Years at a Mason County, Illinois, FeederWatch Station."
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