Balloon Man
Things have been a bit up in the air here. In just pre-Spring. We’ve come out of the sub-zero temperatures to experience the mud-lusciousness of the roads, and a rush of air so warm that it has fried the spinach in my cold frame.
It all goes back to Christmastime when the nearby, ironically-named small town of Hills (pop. 863, and on the flood plain) had to wait for the school district to decide what to do with their closed elementary school. No, no, not tear it down. Convert it to a community center? Turn it into a town library? A food pantry? An ESL Center? The Hills folks had a lot of ideas, but no one in the district office was listening.
I took a break from the controversy and stopped over to my Amish neighbors, the Yutzy’s.
“Are you hosting Christmas dinner this year, Martha?”
“Yes, of course, but in the greenhouse.”
In the next few days, Martha power-washed the whole greenhouse until the sun poured through the spotless glass, heating the structure until it was moist and warm inside. With her draft horse, Martha pulled the bench wagon into her yard, stacking the benches into a table, then arranging others for seating.
“How many people are you expecting?”
“Ninety,” Martha said.
“Wow.”
“Not all at once,” Martha said. “Fifty on one day and forty the next.”
Still, that was a big Christmas party. But I knew that each family would bring a side dish and Martha would only have to bake the turkey.
“But wait, how many turkeys will you have to fix for all those people?”
“We decided to do something different this year.”
Sloppy Joes were a much simpler fix. I was glad to hear it. The Amish don’t usually choose the easier path, but 90 is 90.
At home, I spent the days before Christmas wrapping some last-minute gifts and cooking for a few get-togethers I planned to attend. I kept up on the school building issue by reading the paper.
The Hills school had been closed through budget cuts to the Iowa City School district. For a solid year, the community tried to save the school, offering many suggestions, including moving it to another district. Nothing stuck. The Hills school contained a high number of both diverse and homeless students. But overall, the district lost students to private schools supported by the new school voucher program. So something in the district had to be cut.
At the Amish one-room schoolhouse Christmas program, one of the elders got up and explained how the Amish held onto their schools back in the 1960-1970s. I could recognize enough German words that I got the gist of the talk. In those days, the State of Iowa had passed a law that required schools have certified teachers. Amish schools are taught by young Amish adults with only an eighth-grade education. The state wanted to close the Amish schools.
So the elders wrote a letter to then Governor Robert Ray inviting him to come to Buggy Land and observe an Amish school for a day. If he found the school lacking, it and all the others would be closed.
Governor Ray arrived in a big limousine with Secret Service agents riding on the sides. He spent the day observing the teacher and the students. He ate a big lunch with the group at noon and watched a baseball game at afternoon recess. At 4:00 P.M. when all the students had ridden home in their ponies and carts, Governor Ray sat down with the elders and said, “Why, this seems like an excellent school.” And the schools were all saved.
Things are more complicated these days.
After the Amish school program, I ran into Martha downtown. “I was wondering if you could help me,” she said. She had ordered 50 helium balloons from The Dollar General store, and she didn’t think she could get them all home in the buggy.
I have always told my Amish neighbors that I am happy to help them in an emergency, but I don’t want to become a regular taxi driver. Then I paused and thought about all those balloons stuffed into Martha’s buggy.
“I believe this is an emergency,” I said.
Martha and I stood at the counter of the Dollar General, a young man with curly pink hair and purple fingernails waiting on us.
“We only have a couple of Christmas balloons left,” the clerk said.
“We’ll take those,” Martha said.
“And what else do you have?”
“Well, we have Happy Valentine’s Day, Happy Halloween--just about everything. But we’re sold out of Christmas.”
Martha instructed the clerk to start blowing up whatever he had in stock.
Eeeek. The mouth of the first balloon—Happy Birthday!--fit over the spout of the tank, filling with helium. It’s a Boy!—was next.
We tied long ribbons around the foil balloons, tugging on my hand in the crisp air on the way outside to my car. I love my School! Sympathy. Up, Up, and Away!
Quickly, the car filled. Congratulations! Happy Retirement! Thank You!
I relied on my side mirrors to navigate up the highway to the Yutzy’s, and I couldn’t help but laugh when we slid by the house of the “balloon man,” a neighbor who had passed away years before. He flew hot air balloons—the big kind with wicker baskets. He seemed nice enough, but we were never quite sure what he was doing up there. He had the gondola fitted with cameras and liked to float above young women students sunbathing on top of their dorm roofs in the summertime.
But the balloon man always came to the Fourth of July parade and offered rides for free. So, we were sad when he died and everything sold at the auction but his wicker basket. Finally, a volunteer took it over to the Hills elementary school library, the students using it as a reading nook for years to come.
At the greenhouse, I helped Martha bring the balloons in and anchor them down near each place setting. On Christmas Day, one buggy after another rolled down the road in the morning. At the Yutzy’s, they were treated to a breakfast of homemade sausage, cinnamon rolls and scrambled eggs. At noon, they ate the Sloppy Joes, then the sun came out and the weather warmed up enough to play volleyball in the yard before it was time to get back home for chores.
After New Year’s Day, the school district began discussions with Hills about renovating the elementary school to better serve the community, but they finally made an announcement that the building did not meet the town’s needs.
So, by mid-January, the demolition of the Hills school began. Bulldozers moved in and desks, rafters, insulation, shelves, and banned books all ended up in big piles for the dump trucks. We wondered about the wicker basket and what had become of the reading nook, but no one had the will to ask.
An open gap stood in the middle of town, haunted by playground equipment. Hills started debating what they would do with the land. But wait, not so soon, said the school district. Hills was growing as a community, and they might need to build a school down here in the future.
The Hills mayor heard this news and let the “f” word fly.
And there the word hangs over the town, bobbing, floating and drifting, the empty elementary school lot waiting to turn into thick black mud.
Meanwhile, the Yutzys’ balloons are all deflated, their ribbons detached, folded and neatly stacked into a little box to be reused next Christmas when the greenhouse will be a cozy sanctuary, and the Amish one-room school, filled with students, will still be standing solidly in the middle of a cornfield.
Heads Up: Friday, February 28, noon CST. Office Lounge Zoom meeting. Meet the greet and members of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, ask them questions, respond to the week’s events. For Paid Members:
Check out our IWC Sunday Round-Up and Flipside additions. Read and support my colleagues.
Only you could tell a story with such humor, pathos, irony, grace, and a soupcon of outrage. Thank you, Mary!
Loved and needed the balloon ride today, Mary. Thank you.