Visit to Vachel Lindsay’s House on a Snowy Friday

On the way to work about 11:15 a on a chilly Friday the 13th, driving streets that were still patchy with snow remaining from yesterday’s icy apocalypse, I stopped at Vachel Lindsay Home State Historic Site at 603 S. Fifth Street in Springfield to deliver a special edition of my latest book, Confluence of Legends ($5 plus postage, available from the author). The new edition has a specially printed cover that includes the name and address of the Lindsay home. To own one of those you must have visited that beautiful home and purchased it there.  Another special edition is for sale at the Johnny Appleseed Museum in Urbana, Ohio with the name and address of that fine institution on the cover.  Every Appleseed edition sold in Ohio includes a brochure about the Vachel Lindsay Home, and every edition sold at Vachel’s house includes a brochure about the Appleseed Museum.
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I was delighted to find the sidewalks and steps leading to the front door recently shoveled clean of the icy white which had visited our fair city Thursday and left behind a three-inches-deep calling card, a memento  of the occasion. One can imagine my surprise, soon after being greeted by site director Jennie Battles and giving her the books, that she had shoveled every inch of it herself. For a woman in her 70s, I consider her devotion to visitors and her taking the snow shovel and ice melt to arms an act of service above and beyond the call of duty.
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When I took the books upstairs to the visitor education room with its ever-present, ever-playing CD about the life of Vachel Lindsay, his family, his poetry and the house, I encountered the vacuum cleaner at the top of the stairs. It was obvious Jennie had been preparing for a special gathering of a genealogy organization that’s gathering for a special public event at the home tomorrow (Saturday, the 14th).  Anyone interested in an un-hurried visit to the Lindsay home, without being interrupted by other tourists passing through and the hustle and bustle of an audience parading in for a special event is well advised to visit the home the day after a snowfall before lunch. I should have brought my camera, and I usually do, but I had to boogie off to work and hadn’t thought to bring it. Some touches of the Christmas season remain in the house, including a table-top Christmas tree on Vachel’s childhood-bedroom desk, next to his typewriter. What a picture, what a statement of a poet and the season it was!/is!
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As I prepared to leave, after a terrific but brief encounter with the Maestra of the concert that is the house and the story, I promised Jennie that as long as she is site director there, I will shovel the snow from the steps and sidewalks. She will never have to do that again. She has demonstrated conspicuous dedication to Illinois history in her duties at Vachel’s house and at the Old State Capitol and Lincoln Tomb before arriving at 603 South.  She deserves a better hand of cards than the one she holds, the day after significant snow on a cold and dreary Friday, in the great state of Springfield, Illinois.
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Live long . . . . . . . and proper.

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