Jill's Journal: Lucan 13 revisited

On my drive to my uncle Maynard’s funeral last week, I passed an all-too-familiar sign: Lucan 13. I once wrote about the significance of that sign. It was after the passing of my 91-year-old grandmother, who lived 13 miles down the road in the quaint southern Minnesota town of Lucan. That sign always signified the final 13 miles of my journey to grandma’s house. 

This time, though, instead of heading straight down the road to Lucan, I took a right toward Wabasso to St. Matthew Lutheran Church, where Aunt Doris and Uncle Maynard worshipped for as long as I can remember. 

It’s where I watched my cousins Kelly and Tiffany marry their husbands and attended a funeral or two there, including Aunt Doris’ nine years ago.

Last week, as I said, I was driving to uncle Maynard’s funeral. Although he died a week prior – Dec. 19 – and was cremated, my cousins made the decision to delay his funeral a week. They knew Uncle Maynard wouldn’t want to interrupt anyone’s Christmas. And so, two days after we’d all gathered with our families to celebrate Christmas, our extended family came together to say our good-byes.

Aunt Doris and Uncle Maynard were lively people, social butterflies and proud Wabasso Rabbit fans through and through.

Uncle Maynard was a dairy farmer. He got out of that business when farming got tough and milk prices were low. When the farming operation proved they wouldn’t be able to make ends meet, uncle Maynard found work off of the farm at a nearby sugar beet plant, later as a custodian and bus driver for Wabasso Public Schools and spraying road ditch for Redwood County. 

It was Uncle Maynard’s dairy-farming years that I identify best with. You see, the Martensen clan was always the last to arrive at our family gatherings, and back then, we celebrated all the major holidays together: Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas. And we celebrated everyone’s birthday, no matter if you were two, 12, 22, 42 or 62. Everybody had a birthday and we made sure to celebrate it. Those celebrations always ended the same way: a pot of egg coffee brewing on the stove and the ladies making sandwiches, slicing home-canned pickles, cutting bars or cake, all in preparation for our end-of-the-gathering ritual.

I remember summer vacation stays at their farm. As dairy farmers, they didn’t go to the store for a gallon of milk. They went straight to the barn, dunked a pitcher in the shiny stainless0steel milk tank and from there, it came to the table, and I surely didn’t care much for the taste. As a city kid, it surely wasn’t the milk I was accustomed to that the milkman left on the front porch.

Our family lived about 50 miles down the road from Aunt Doris and Uncle Maynard’s farm. As a kid, I remember the excitement I felt as dad steered the family car off of the tar road onto a short gravel section, then a quick jaunt to the right, followed by a left turn and the short a mile and a half trek to their farm. On the right side of the road, it was easy to spy their place by the magical grove of trees that surrounded the farm site. The grove was a place our imaginations could run wild in. There were old Studebakers and a camper to play in. They’d made a store and even an outdoor shower, that yes, we’d clean up in. The shower, unfortunately, was a two-person operation: while one showers, it required the other to dump water through a pail, nailed to a tree, with holes in the bottom, for the uncomfortably cool temp water to flow through. 

An assortment of old cars had also been hauled out to the grove over the years, and we’d load them up with as many of the farm cats that were up for taking an imaginary trip down the highway of life.

As for Maynard, oh, how he loved to visit. Whether he was standing next to you in the supermarket line or talking to you on the phone, he’d talk your ear off. I remember many a time when mom would say that Maynard called yesterday and they talked for well over an hour.

It’s sad that our extended family only gets together these days for weddings, sad occasions such as Uncle Maynard’s funeral, and when Aunt Karen and cousins Todd, Troy and Michael and families who live in Colorado, schedule a visit to Minnesota. 

I don’t get many opportunities to pass the familiar Lucan 13 sign these days. But on the chance occasion that I do – a wedding, a funeral or a visit from Aunt Karen – I’m always glad to take a trip down memory lane.