My father was in the Army in the late ’60s. I grew up in the olive drab world of military bases in what was then West Germany.  After being wounded in Vietnam and sent stateside, the Army offered him a tour of duty in the European theater. I was six-years old when we arrived in theater, 21 when I finally left.

After he recovered, my father was stationed in Bavaria. My family lived in military quarters in Kitzingen. Children of military personnel went to school at Larson Barracks, a twenty-minute ride on the Army-issued school bus (painted olive drab, of course). The school was in an old WWII-era block building, painted the same shade of gray as all the other block structures that housed the day-to-day operations of the military. It was in that dull place that my imagination began to glow, and I first knew I was a writer. Okay, Mrs. Ford, my third-grade teacher, had to point it out to me, but once I understood what she was trying to tell me, I ran with it.

One Monday morning, after a weekend filled with kick ball and a trip to the commissary, I remembered homework that Mrs. Ford had assigned as the school bus lumbered down the autobahn. We were supposed to write a one-page story about a family in the future. I had a healthy respect for Mrs. Ford. She was a stern woman, but fair. Still, back in the day, the teacher could paddle you, and the last thing I wanted to imagine was a paddling administered by her. I pulled out my pencil and borrowed a piece of paper from another kid and frantically started writing my short story that Mrs. Ford would no doubt demand be passed to the front of the row so she could collect it  immediately after the Pledge.

Writing on an Army-issued bus traveling down the autobahn is hard enough, but the metal Bugs Bunny lunchbox I was writing on made things much worse. The pencil slipped with every bump in the road.  Because the metal lunchboxes of yore had beveled and stamped impressions of cartoon characters, some holes were small and others were quite large. My paper was a mess. By the time we got to Larson Barracks, I had finished my story about a robot dog and its family. Mrs. Ford and two other teachers waited outside for us to arrive every morning, watching as we dutifully paraded past them into the gray building.

I took my seat and was ready when Mrs. Ford asked everyone to pass their papers to the front of their row for collection. Mine wasn’t pretty, but it was there. A couple of other forgetful kids weren’t so lucky. They had to go see the principal, Mr. Ford.

The next day, we got our papers back. A silence descended on me. I could hear myself breathing in slow-motion as my body tried to adjust to what my eyes were looking at—an A+!

I was brought back to reality by the shrill pleadings of the girl next to me, Michelle Smiley, the kid I had borrowed the piece of paper from on the bus the day before. The gig was up. There was a paddle in my immediate future. “Mrs. Ford, Mrs. Ford,” she was waving her hand wildly in the air.

This irritated the teacher who gruffly told Michelle to quiet down, or she would have to stand in the hallway. For a split second, I thought I was saved, at least for the time being. Not so. “But Mrs. Ford,” protested Michelle with the all the angst of an eight-year-old who only got a C on her very neat paper, “I saw Jerri do hers on the bus!” Doom.

But at that dark moment, Mrs. Ford did something that changed my life. It was a profound moment, and even as an eight-year old, I understood that Mrs. Ford had given me a wonderful gift. Without acknowledging the protests of my classmate, she went to the front of the room and began talking in quite grown-up language about intelligence, imagination, and talent. Maybe she was talking to the whole class, but somehow, I felt she meant the dialogue for me alone. When she was finished, she looked straight at me (I was still frozen in the same position, staring at the big red A+). “Always write what you see in your head,” and 41-years later, I still think she was talking just to me.

After that, Mrs. Ford arranged for me to go to a special group in the library. We read short-stories and talked about them, and once a week we got to go to another building with the older kids for an English class. Sometimes, we even got to go to the mess hall for lunch (no school cafeteria on Larson Barracks back in the day).

I started writing in 1969. True, I was only in the third grade, but Mrs. Ford assured me that I was a writer, so write I did. I grew up writing short stories, lyrics, and poems. As I grew, I lost interest in many things, mini-skirts, Donny Osmond, and roller skating to name a few, but I never lost interest in writing; it grew with me, keeping pace as I spurted, then stalled, and finally stumbled into maturity. I started writing about gardening back in the early nineties, inspired by a wayward thunder shower, an anonymous neighbor and a naked scarecrow.

Earlier that pastoral spring day, the kids and I had stripped off all of the clothes it had been wearing the year before. As simple as this task may seem, it was made considerably more difficult by the family of garter snakes that had taken up residence in the scarecrow’s stuffing. Before the undressing could begin, the beating had to commence.

Armed with a barn broom and a couple of pitchforks, the kids took turns whacking and poking the scarecrow. I stood by with a flat, rusty shovel, ready to wallop any garter snake that tried to wriggle its way up anyone’s pant leg. My 14-year-old son and my 12-year-old daughter poked and prodded cautiously at first, slowly working up the courage to plunge the pitchforks into the belly of the scarecrow. My youngest daughter, a fearless 7-year-old, delivered the first ferocious whack to the scarecrow’s midsection with the barn broom. The beating had begun in earnest. After a couple of good, hard wallops and sharp pokes, the snakes began their alarmed escape. At the first sight of the slithering refugees, the hootin’ and hollerin’ began. It’s the hootin’ and hollerin’ that wears a body out.

Once we were sure the snakes were gone, we stripped the remaining rags from the scarecrow, leaving only a feed-sack head and wooden cross. The kids abandoned their implements of extermination at the foot of the defrocked scarecrow and headed into the house for a late-afternoon snack. After all the stomping and screaming, I needed some serious quiet time, so I headed down the driveway to watch a rambling spring storm that was rolling in from the south. After all the afternoon commotion, the low rumblings of the distant storm seemed somehow soft and soothing.

I was standing there, lost in the storm clouds, when I noticed a green minivan coming up the hill. It was the neighbor who lived at the bottom of our dead-end road. I had seen them move in a few years earlier, but we had never formally met. Rural communities being what they are, I knew all about the newcomers before the ink was dry on their mortgage papers. Our neighbor, a retired farmer with a pocket full of when-I-was-farming stories, told me they were members of the Pentecostal church in town. Her father was the pastor, and her husband was preparing to enter the ministry. He couldn’t quite remember their names, and I didn’t inquire further.

I always waved when I saw them drive by—a nameless neighbor wave. For a couple of years, the lady in the minivan waved back, and that was the sum or our interaction; but this time it was different. I was in mid- anonymous wave when the van stopped right in front of me. The thick dust from the gravel road hung in the growing humidity of the approaching storm, surrounding the minivan in a pale cloud. The driver’s side door opened, and out stepped a young, reserved woman smiling tentatively. Her long, deep-brown hair was pulled into a heavy, tight braid that fell over her right shoulder, coming to rest at her waist. She wore a simple denim frock, no doubt hand-made.

“Hi,” she hesitated and her shy smile faltered. “I’m Marta.”

Two young girls, both pre-schoolers, waved at me from their car seats. I waved back briefly, trying not to look too dumbfounded by the sudden visit. I could taste the gravel dust and the humidity through my still gaping mouth. I tried to shift the gape into some sort of smile while managing what I hoped sounded like a less-than-bewildered, “Hi, there. I’m Jerri.”

“We were wondering what your scarecrow is going to be this time,” she said. “The girls look forward to seeing what it is each year.”

I glanced towards the minivan, where the oldest girl, whose hair was also in a long braid, had wriggled out of her car seat. She had the back window half-way down, and with her little face pressed into the opening she yelled, “Your scarecrow is naked,” then collapsed back into her car seat in a fit of giggles.

Over the years, our scarecrow has stood watch in the garden as a country maiden, an angel, a farmer and countless other personae. One year my friend’s son joined the Army. My parents, who live near a military base, sent me an army uniform for the scarecrow, and it became an enlistee. When my oldest daughter graduated from high school my mother-in-law made a fabulous purple robe, and our scarecrow matriculated all summer long.

People who know me would tell you that there couldn’t be two more different people on the planet than this woman and myself. We were from different social and economic backgrounds. We were at different stages in our lives. We had different philosophies and agendas. Yet there we were smiling and talking like age-old friends on the side of a gravel road, the impending summer storm completely forgotten. It was as if my anonymous neighbor had given me a gift—a gift in a big beautiful box with a fancy bow. We were connected, familiar, even though we were completely different, and I was overjoyed.

We talked about things we had grown and gardens we had seen. In between giggles, the girls told me about some seeds their grandma had given them to grow in their own little garden. There, on the side of a dead-end dirt road, it wasn’t about our many differences. It was about sweet corn, sunflowers and a very naked scarecrow who was about to get a shower.

When the approaching storm broke into our conversation we said goodbye and ran for cover. As I was heading for the house, I decided I would write in my journal about my neighbor and the scarecrow that brought us together. I’ve been writing about life in rural America ever since.

My experience as a Master Gardener and Master Food preserver helped me to craft articles about country living that soon landed me the position as garden columnist for a Midwestern weekly newspaper called The Country Today. For three years, I shared the tales and travails of life in the garden in my popular column “The Scarecrow Chronicles.”

After contributing articles to Countryside on a regular basis for a couple of years, I was invited to join the editorial staff at Countryside Publications, publisher of 4 rural-themed magazines (Countryside, Backyard Poultry, Dairy Goat and Journal Sheep!). I jumped at the opportunity to work with the staff of such a well-respected publisher.

As I became familiar with the content and contributors at Countryside, I discovered a distinction between those contributors who wrote from experience and those who wrote from book knowledge: the articles from experience tended to be more interesting, more to the point, and more entertaining, but the articles from the book-learners were almost always better written. This observation inspired me to reach out to my fellow country authors. You can get published. People do want to read what you know about life in rural America, but first, you have to understand how to create and edit your work and how Internet publishing and the freelance markets work. It’s not that difficult, and the rewards of a successful freelance writing career are both financial and personal.

I think about Mrs. Ford and Marta often, especially in those low moments when I doubt myself and the words won’t come. I think about the two women who passed quickly from my life, disappearing down their own paths. If it weren’t for their inspiration, I would not be who I am today. Thank you Mrs. Ford and Marta, wherever you are.