The wind had a bite to it. The sky, off to the north, was the color of the banged-up metal milk can that was sitting on the front porch of the old white 1850s farmhouse.
But none of that, the chill wind, the gray sky, slowed 89-year-old Melita Tupuritis.
She’d come just 58 miles to get to this soybean field, but really it was the final leg of a journey that began some 4,500 miles away.
She’d waited decades to tread, one last time, through the rise and fall of a harvested field, an undulating terrain like the one she knew from her girlhood in the countryside of Latvia.
In the dark of a July night in 1944, she was forced to leave that countryside, to escape through the woods, because the Russians were coming. Already they were burning the city just over the ridge from the farm that had been in her family for generations, where she thought she would live out all of her days.
So, here, under a burr oak that hardly blocked the wind, she zipped up her windbreaker as high as it would go, slipped out her hearing aid, lest she lose it, and made her one unshakable wish come true.
Stopping to flirt with black-and-white calves cavorting and sticking their long, pink tongues through the split-rail fence, she turned and walked straight into the wind. She wanted to be alone out in the field, to see, one more time, where heaven meets earth.
“That’s what she misses the most,” said her daughter Dace (pronounced “dot-seh”) Kins, who had resisted the impulse to escort her mother into the field. Instead, she stood, arms wrapped tight trying to keep warm, looking on, one of those moments where daughter mothers her mother.
“She misses the land. She misses breathing freely,” said Kins, who last took her mother home to Latvia in 1993, once the communists were gone and she was free to travel back to the farm with the three oaks at a bend in the Lielupe River. “I’m sure she’s just loving having her feet on the earth and being out there where it’s just her and the wind.”
Tupuritis has never stopped missing her farm. During the World War II escape, she was separated from her new husband for five months, before finding him, through a scrap of paper with a scribbled address, in a little village in Germany. They lived for six years in a displaced-persons camp before coming to America. It would be 43 years before she got back to Latvia and then only a hurried car ride past the farm. There were two more trips after that, but now, in her 90th year, a transatlantic journey is no longer on the itinerary.
Thus, her gray curls tossing in the southern Wisconsin wind, Tupuritis walked a big square, way out into the just-plowed field, so far she seemed doll-sized against the horizon.
Only she knows her thoughts out there; no one wanted to intrude. But whatever they were, the more she breathed in the pungent bovine air at Crane Farm, a 600-acre family-owned dairy farm just outside Burlington, the more she dropped the hindrances of old age: Her hearing seemed sharper than it has been in months, said her daughter, and her English too.
Soon bubbled the stories.
She talked about how her brothers and sisters teased her when she was little for what seemed to be her magic powers over the animals, and how the horses and cows and baby goats always followed her wherever she went. She talked of wheat and barley and red clover. And flax, how it bent in the wind, its blossoms turning the fields a radiant shade of blue.
She remembered the clip-clop of the horse’s hooves and the creaking of the wheels during a buggy ride that took her, her son, Arnie, 55, and Kins, 57, out to the northern edge of the farm. She told her children that this is how it was when she rode to school in a buggy, with big fur blankets thrown over her legs in the harsh Baltic winters.
“Like home,” she kept saying. Over and over and over.
For the two women who had made this farm trip happen, those were the sweetest two words they could have heard. Loryn Kogan of Wilmette and Nancy Segal of Glencoe are in the business of making dreams come true for seniors no longer living on their own.
Their enterprise, Second Wind Dreams, is a not-for-profit organization, with headquarters outside Atlanta. Founded by a geriatric psychologist in 1997, Second Wind Dreams has at its core a belief that making dreams come true for seniors is one sure way to give them a second wind.
So far, Kogan and Segal have made wishes come true at a spa, a drag-race track and, now, a 200-milking-cow farm not too far north of the Wisconsin border.
Tupuritis is a widow who lives in a retirement community in Evanston, where she moved three years ago to be near her daughter. The Sunday afternoon trip to the farm came as a surprise, one announced at a champagne gathering just the Friday before.
Kins and her brother had been in on what Tupuritis called “the conspiracy.” Segal had interviewed Tupuritis months ago, then got to work searching for a dairy farm in southern Wisconsin, researching on the Internet and then talking to someone at a farm co-op, who directed her to the Cranes. Kins, whose husband owns an executive-search and mergers-and-acquisitions firm in Chicago, arranged for the company car and driver to get her mother there in style.
As the black Cadillac pulled onto the gravel drive of Crane Farm, out from the farmhouse dashed Susan Crane, who would be the guide for the afternoon. Crane had just pulled a tray of the butteriest oatmeal-raisin cookies out of the oven, and, true to farm-wife form, balanced a heaping plate as she reached for Tupuritis’ well-weathered hand.
From the first bite of one of Crane’s cookies, Tupuritis spoke the same farm language. Despite the Latvian-English language barrier, the Wisconsin farm wife and the Latvian farm girl had heads together all afternoon, one wiping away tears, then the other.
Riding home in the black of a midautumn evening, after a day out in the fields, Tupuritis leaned into her daughter and whispered: “In my dreams, I will see little spotted cows.”
Then, breaking the silence a good half-hour later, she said, in Latvian, to no one in particular: “I feel wonderful. I’m tired. My arthritic elbow hurts. But I feel wonderful.”
Indeed, that’s what happens when you walk out to where heaven and earth come together.
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For information on Second Wind Dreams, call 678-624-0500 or go to www.secondwind.org.
bmahany@tribune.com
