Author: faithanncolburn@gmail.com

The Story About Love and Hate

My most recent book review

During the War that broke apart Yugoslavia, I saw on TV a boy, twelve-years-old I think, carrying a Kalashnikov and vowing revenge for the murder of his brother. I don’t remember which combatant group he claimed. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the endless cycle of revenge that began with that war.

It tell this story, because Branislav Bojcic’s book, I hate my brother: the story about love and hate, reveals the traumas that can cause that thirst for revenge and the devastation that follows. In this individual story about one man, his family, and his friend, he has encapsulated a cycle of love and hatred that plays itself out all over the world every day. He says he had to leave his country because of the book, and I believe him. The people of the resulting divided countries, especially the leadership that precipitated the savagery, don’t want the details broadcast.

I draw readers’ attention, however, to the book’s subtitle: “The Story About Love and Hate.” It brings up yet again the vital connection between love and hate and the possibility of redemption.

Categories: Communities Families Fiction

Tags:

Grandma’s Last Rodeo

I know, I know, it’s been a while. Good to see you again. It’s been a depressing year, but I’m back maybe not regularly. I’m working on it. What follows is another of those Girlie On the Edge six-sentence blog challenge posts. The challenge word is Rodeo.

My youngest son and I took Grandma to her last rodeo; she must have been 97 or 98.

Life had been tough, one baby had died at two weeks, her son had died young and her daughter was dying an inch at a time—so she didn’t laugh much; didn’t cry either.

You know, a rodeo’s a rodeo and she’d seen many, but then they trotted out the wild cow race.

For those of you who don’t know, a wild cow race involves organizing a few teams of racers, letting a bunch of cows loose, and then chasing them down with saddles and bridles, saddling them, bridling them, and riding them (one team member) back to the starting point.

You can imagine the potential for mayhem with a bunch of old range cows—the stubborn refusal to be caught, the foot-setting refusal to lead, the running up and down the arena, the bucking, the spills, and so on.

Half-way through the race, I looked over at Grandma, a woman I hadn’t seen laugh in years, and tears were running down her cheeks, she was holding her sides, laughing like it was the last day of her life and she was going to get the most out of it.

15 Comments

Categories: Families Fiction

Tags:

Leaving Bosnia

Civility Matters

Last week, I wrote about my friend Majda coming here to the U.S. As I’ve thought about her, I’ve wondered how our lack of civility here in America must frighten her. She saw this kind of tribalism tear her country apart. Her husband, who died during the war, reported on Yugoslavia’s breakup. She reported on the refugees. She knows about the death camps and the rape camps and the depths of human brutality.

How must she have cringed during the 2016 election when she heard the chants, “Lock her up! Lock her up!” She must be terrified by armed people on statehouse steps screaming, “Liberate Minnesota! Liberate Michigan! Liberate Virginia!” while people die.

Majda did something she was sure she’d never do. She met a man she loves and she’s remarried. Moved halfway across the continent and we’ve lost touch, but I can’t help thinking about her and her daughters.

Her youngest daughter—after the war—went back to Bosnia during summer breaks from college and gathered up the children. She taught them mediation, how to get along even if you have different beliefs. I wonder if she’s working in America now along with the other mediators I know.

How weary she must be.

1 Comment

Categories: Communities

Tags:

Bridges

This week’s GirlieOnTheEdge challenge prompt is bridge—six sentences, no more, no less.

Sometimes bridges lead to nowhere
  1. Hanging in her living room, my friend Majda had a picture of the Stari Most bridge in her hometown, Mostar, Bosnia–before its destruction.
  2. She had left her torn country with her two beautiful daughters and what she (and they) could carry.
  3. In the U.S. she was learning her fifth language and trying to find a bridge between this unknown inexplicable country and the one she’d left.
  4. She saw no bridges in this country
  5. “I don’t even know my neighbors’ names,” she lamented. “They leave their apartments in the morning, jump in their cars , and go to work.”
  6. “In the evenings, they shut themselves in with their TVs and their air conditioners.”
Majda’s print was much darker than this
4 Comments

Categories: Communities

Tags:

Brutal Craziness

The Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog prompt this week asks for something crazy in ninety-nine words, no more, no less.

Beauty and Insanity

Majda Obradovic thought she had left the craziness behind when she escaped Bosnia with only her daughters and her life—and some engraved shell casings. I’d realized before how people make beautiful things out of horrors—my dad had a coffee table made of military brass from the Korean Conflict. I don’t know the calibers of Majda’s shell casings, but I’m in awe of the engravings. Around the base of each casing were fleur de leis, and on the largest, central Sarajevo with its mosque, its synagogue, and its temple, and all the people on the promenade walking together.

1 Comment

Categories: Communities

Tags:

Pizza in a Box

I’m afraid my recording this time is a bit on the weird side, sound-wise. It’s allergy season, my grandson loves to play outside (as does his grandmother), and this one seems especially virulent. Here’s my Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word story.

Pizza came to Nebraska in the early 60s. It arrived in a box. Back then, a pizza party did not involve take out or delivery, or even popping a frozen treat in the oven. We mixed the dough, according to directions, inhaling the yeasty aroma. We tried tossing it on our fingers, then we gathered up the mess and pressed it into a pan, crimped the edges and spread the tomato sauce around. Then we scattered cheese over the top. Sometimes I make pizza, but not the bare bones concoctions we giggled over. Nor is it as much fun.

This was our box of choice.
1 Comment

Categories: Communities

Tags:

this is getting old

review Susan Moon’s book this is getting old
I have no idea what the hat was about.

I’ve been reading this is getting old: Zen thoughts on Aging with Humor and Dignity by Susan Moon. Let me start by saying that I found it a great read for people like me who have passed sixty years of age. I’d also recommend it to people whose mothers and grandmothers have reached that age—or older of course.

I experienced jolts of familiarity throughout the book, especially in Moon’s chapter entitled “The Tomboy Returns.” I grew up on my grandfather’s farm where my sister and I climbed trees, waded mud puddles, rescued naked baby mice, and played horse and rider. (I was the horse.)

Then we grew breasts and got periods. Unlike Ms. Moon, we operated ‘business as usual” and our families treated us the same, although we had to wear dresses to school. At school, I did pay for my rough curiosity, though, when I myself wanted to be seen as feminine—and the tree climbing had nothing to do with it. Back then, girls weren’t supposed to be smart, to raise their hands and answer questions in class. No dates for me.

At work the rule was that we had to wear skirts and nylon stockings. When challenged once, coming back in from the field, I remarked that I would wear them in the field when the challenger allowed me to watch him clamber through native prairie grasses or change a tire in a dress and stockings.

But back to Ms. Moon’s book and the tomboy. Her point was to recommend we return to some of our tomboy ways as we retire and have more time. She suggested that we can resurrect the spirit of those children although our bodies may not do all our younger ones could.

Most of her book counseled acceptance of our limitations while taking care of ourselves in order to reduce our limitations and lengthen the time we don’t have them.

Again, I recommend this book, not only to those of us who are aging, but also to the people who love us. Often those loved ones’ assumptions about aging hurt the worst.

1 Comment

Categories: Families Non-fiction

Tags:

Is it really noise?

A day late. this is my contribution to the GitlieOnTheEdge blog challenge: six sentences, no more no less, about noise.

Grass wind makes its own noice
  1. Noise
  2. I’m not sure that’s quite the word.
  3. I live on the high plains in western Nebraska and even though my house is in a small city in a river valley. The wind howls around that house, picking at window frames and vibrating anything that’s not tight—like blowing across waxed paper on a comb.
  4. Sometimes I wake up thinking I hear ocean waves, then realize I hear prairie waves—wind in the gigantic American elm tree that shades my home.
  5. With the valley serving as a wind tunnel, grass wind swishes the cattails and rushes along the river where redwinged blackbirds sing a swelling chorus in greening trees.
  6. And then the sun rises.
I’m not sure where I found this guy.
5 Comments

Categories: Our Prairie Habitat

Tags:

Takin’ Charge

Late again, but here’s my attempt to meet this week’s Carrot Ranch Literary Community’s blog challenge. It involved writing about someone taking charge. As usual, I was to do it in 99 words, no more, no less.

Sometimes it’s just the little things people remember

You wouldn’t call her meek, but Hazel avoided confrontation when she could. Standing on the doorstep of the home place, though, an old neighbor told of a time when she didn’t.

“I was helpin’ out at your place at dinnertime. Dad had said I wasn’t to eat there, but she sat me down at the table. Well, here comes Pop, rarin’ mad. Hazel met him on the step. Told him, ‘On this place, if he works, he eats.’

“Now Pop was used to getting’ his way, but he shut up and waited for me to finish Hazel’s apple pie.”

Here’s Hazel in 1995, not too long before her 99th birthday.

Categories: Communities Families Non-fiction

Tags:

Aunt Anna

Sunday blog. Well, I wrote it on Sunday–late. So I’m posting today. Life’s crazy these days.

In 1918, Hazel was pregnant. The family had just moved to Webster County; and she got Spanish flu. Then George got sick—and their children, Cecil, two-years-and-a-few-months, and Nina, just one. Both sets of grandparents had it too. The only person who could breathe clearly was George’s sister, my Aunt Anna. She nursed the sick with cold compresses on foreheads, teas and broths to drink, and maybe some chicken soup as they recovered, gathering cobs from the hog lots, then heating and cooking on a cob-burning cookstove. She took care of the babies—changed diapers, rocked them to sleep, and comforted them when they cried—and washed the laundry on a washboard in the washhouse out by the well. And managed the livestock—gathering eggs, milking, and separating cream, not to mention feeding and watering, the pigs and chickens by hand in buckets. Fortunately, the cows had a tank fed directly from the well by a windmill. Anna was just 16 that year.

As our hospitals become overwhelmed, we will probably need more Annas, because there simply aren’t enough beds or enough medical professionals. We’ll have to “shelter in place.” And with global warming continuing to worsen, this isn’t the only crisis we’re likely to face.

So do any of you have stories from the last global pandemic. Please share. We might need them now.

1 Comment

Categories: Families Non-fiction

Tags: