Front Street and Dinner

I remember sitting in this place on Flaxton’s Front Street - this very place - so many times. A dear friend, recently transplanted to our village, wondered that no one called the street by its street-sign name: “Davis”.

Truly, I have no recollection of who this Davis person may be. In fact, though a native of Burke County, I have never heard who Davis may have been. I knew only that at some point within the last few decades it became essential for purposes of emergency calls that the streets and county roads have both names and numbers.

As Shakespeare asked, “What’s in a name?” The essence of the street was about everything from Saturday night dances and movies to a reason to bathe and become at least a weekly part of the community that thrived on connections at the Farmer’s Union and Schultz’s and Swennes’s stores.

Particular events make vivid pictures from my memory: A birthday party Leora Rawn gave for Mother and me, and some years later, Mother’s memorial service dinner. Yes, dinner. A noon-time meal with friends and family gathered as we would for celebration, but more likely a working day’s meal. The family shared “dinner” in this North Prairie homestead country usually before resuming a hard day’s work.

The whole idea of a mid-day dinner, not lunch, is foreign or at least different from most Americans’ idea of an evening meal. Maybe not even a meal just a coming together of the busy modern family finally stopping their day with food: The hungry kids after sports, the parents exhausted completion of a work day, probably culminated by television and the teens or younger children doing homework, talking to friends on the phone or sitting at the computer with school assignments or games.

And so, I remember my school days and social connections starting here: This building on a street I probably drove through in my parents’ 46 Chrysler on the way home from being birthed in Crosby and cared for in St. Luke’s Hospital. The same street I crossed still in my mother’s womb en route to that hospital only days before.

Returning to the farm by way of Front Street where one hundred and seven years of Flaxton had gathered, traversed and noted the enjoyment and the diminishing of dreams, the lunches and dinners of survival in a harsh climate where every person and every meal was on the front line of life.

Connie Transue