Category: Communities

I believe families work best in supportive communities, I like to write about people and places that comprise them.

Let’s Hope

keeping on keeping on

Hope. I’ve written and thought about resilience and about people who keep showing up. I’ve wondered how they do that, over and over. In my just-released book, I’ve written about the Great Depression and World War II—two of the most hopeless times in history. My characters, like the real people in those times, did what needed doing, often at the cost of their health, their peace of mind, and sometimes their lives.

We act now like those people are all gone and there are no such people left, but I beg to differ. As I reread an article from a year ago (October, 2018, National Geographic) I wonder about the role hope played in those real people’s lives. The article, entitled “Despite Perils, Decide to Hope” lists our current era as a good time to hope. “Our planet is beset by conflict, climate change, pollution, disease, and other hazards, what better time to be hopeful?” reads the title.

Indeed.

The author, Anne Lamott, says we should look to the helpers. Aren’t they the same people who keep showing up and doing what needs doing? Lamott writes that they represent our hope these days. They’re the ones who vaccinate babies and care for ebola patients. They plant trees and study glaciers. They recycle; they develop new drugs; they protect our civil rights; they petition the government; and report on its activities. They keep doing what needs doing—what’s possible. I believe there’s reason to hope, and that all those people doing stuff are driven by hope. Sometimes that’s a radical act.

How about it? Are there any radicals out there?

Categories: Communities Non-fiction

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Who won?

I’ve been out of the loop for a while, but here’s my contribution to this week’s Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog challenge about winners and losers.

I’d been graduated for twenty-five years when an old classmate climbed up the bleachers to my family’s perch near the top.

“Do you remember me?” he demanded.

Of course, I remembered. My graduating class was only thirty-one.

“I’m the guy you embarrassed in advanced algebra class.”

I shook my head. I hadn’t been competing. I just enjoyed advanced math. I loved solving puzzles and math was an especially complex series of puzzles.

Since then, I’ve been asking myself who’s the winner. If he was the only one competing, then was he the winner? He didn’t seem to feel victorious.

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Categories: Communities Non-fiction

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Day of the Dead

We played their music—Moonlight Serenade, In the Mood, Begin the Beguine, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie. Dad liked roses, so we bought some and poked them behind our ears, pinned them in our hair. We sprayed the room with Mom’s favorite, White Shoulders. I broiled big T-bones, shucked oysters, baked lemon meringue pie. We ate by candlelight. Sis made Manhattans and we sipped them between dancing the Latin Walk, and jitterbugging, swinging around the living room like we knew what we were doing. By midnight when we played Sentimental Journey, it almost felt like they were dancing with us.

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Categories: Communities Families

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Lou Ell: Master Photosnappishooter

I’ve been  missing in action this week online, but I did format my ebook, download a previously purchased ISBN for it, apply for a Library of Congress Control Number, send out an advance copy of the soon-to-be-released book for review, and find enough proofreading errors that I’ve been reading paperback galleys (again). So late, here’s my Carrot Ranch 99-words on unforgetting . . . I should mention, I stole Lou’s story about the bear.

No chance of unremembering Lou Ell. He was the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission wildlife photographer. A bachelor, he spent most of his time outdoors somewhere fulfilling his role as “photosnappishooter.”

On vacation, he shot a film on the Alaska brown bear. In one spectacular sequence, he got between a sow and her cub. The momma attacked. Backed against a cliff, Lou kept shooting. “Somebody will find the camera,” he thought. Since he survived, he intended to make wildlife movies.

I visited him once years later. He lived alone in the dark. You see, Lou had lost his sight.

Categories: Communities Non-fiction

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Mama Tree

She’s three times as tall as my two-story house.

My gigantic American elm tree is dying. My best guess, going by her size and location, is that somebody planted her at about the time he built my house in 1906. That would make her 113 years old.

I’ve noticed for several years that she acted stressed. She kept growng epicormic branches—the twiggy branches that grow along the trunk. Those extra leaves gave her additional food-producing capacity.

Over and over, I noticed a stain on the front sidewalk. It looked like blood and I wondered why some small predator always killed its meals in the same spot. Then I realized the tree was shedding “blood” from a big wound.

It’s hard to tell how long she’s got—maybe a few years, maybe not. My tree survived repeated epidemics of Dutch elm disease, but whatever started her decline, I don’t think she’s going to make it. Because of her apparent immunity, I’ve saved one of her daughters. The baby’s planted where she will one day take over her mother’s job of shading this house.

I’ve been reading that trees communicate and share nutrients, even after death, through complex ecosystems of root fungi. I know that everywhere in my huge double corner lot I find her roots whenever I dig. I’m sure she’s in touch with her daughter. I hope she’s giving the little one a solid start toward a long life.

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Categories: Communities Non-fiction

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Saving Babies

We often think of culture as arts, but some cultural practices are so basic as to be essential to life. I haven’t used the prompt words “old world” from the Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog prompt in my text, but the meaning is there.

“It’s because we were midwives—from Scotland,” Grandma said.

“What’s that got to do with a family that doesn’t touch each other?”

“They didn’t want anybody slobbering over their babies.”

“Slobbering!”

“Germs.”

“They didn’t know about germs back then.”

“The experts didn’t know.” She gave me one of her now-think-about-this looks. “Women who took care of mommas and babies didn’t have microscopes, but they knew that boiling water and washing everything within an inch of its life resulted in more live babies.  The fewer people handling babies, the more they lived.” She gave me another look. “Generations of observation.”

This is Grandma Hazel. She was descended from Scots and German midwives.
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Categories: Communities Families

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Attending Church

For my grandfather, prairie was church.

(Audio podcast here.)

Sundays he would wander his 480 acres, checking its health. He might walk the fences with a bucket of staples, fencing pliers, and a fence stretcher, or hitch the horses to a wagon with a roll of barbed wire and the other fencing materials.  Later, I can remember him going out with the tractor and wagon on the same errand.

George on right and another man in baseball uniform with gloves.
On Sundays, George also played baseball sometimes. His tight community was also a kind of church.

As he drove around the fenceline, he could hear the rhythm of the tractor engine and the jingle of stapes and tools bouncing in the wagon bed. When he found a breach, he’d turn off the tractor so he could hear grass wind, the smooth legato call of a meadowlark, and the gentle clank of the windmill pumping water at the top of the hill. A breeze might ruffle his hair and sing in the tightly-strung fence wires. He might be semi-conscious of pinpricks of wildflowers, blue verbena like tiny candelabras, purple poppy mallow hiding in the grass, and the persistent sunflowers. He probably carried a machete to cut them when he found them, releasing their strong, acrid scent. He would smell cool sweet-grass crushed by the tractor wheels, like sliced cucumbers.  

He could see the patterns of his mind on the land—terraces and waterways to hold the soil against tillage; a passage for cattle, from pasture to pasture, under the bridge; dams across the seasonal creeks to hold spring run-off; habitat areas set aside for wild creatures; osage orange posts and barbed wire confining cattle to the least productive acres.

I removed the last hedge post in 1992, remembering that it had been there for three generations—the very last of a carload he’d bought when he moved his family onto the home quarter in 1926. I imagined him digging the hole that post sat in for seventy years—by hand through concrete-hard yellow clay.

I found something spiritual about digging out the remains of that broken post, something composed of family and land and abiding mystery.

Categories: Communities Families Non-fiction

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Sharp Chisels

Here is another Carrot Ranch 99-word prompt story. The word is Chisel.

Set of three chisels
Interesting how the light turns the steel blue.

I have a set of chisels. They are very sharp. I use them occasionally, but I don’t have the skill or training to use them elegantly. When I use tools, though, I think of my mother who could look at mechanical devices and understand them. She had the patience and natural talent to use tools effectively, but in the mid-Twentieth Century, she was never allowed the pride she deserved in her skills. My dad’s embarrassment (because the man’s supposed to fix things) gave him no ability to appreciate my mom’s solutions to farm problems—in the house and out.

Categories: Communities Families

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No Party for Me

I must have been five, maybe six. My classmate had a Valentine’s Day party. She distributed invitations at school and my parents decided I should go. I had spent almost no time with children before starting kindergarten. Then I spent the year bringing home all the childhood diseases—measles, mumps, chicken pox, measles, and finally, bronchial pneumonia. I needed socialization. Dad took me to the house, but the girl’s parents wouldn’t let me in. I don’t remember my rejection, but my dad never forgot. I only know because I asked Mom years later why Dad so hated that family.

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Five Thirty-Two

Uncle George had had a few beers that night. Quite a few actually. Somehow, the topic of duck hunting came up and my son’s ears perked. He was ten or eleven at the time. He asked a bunch of questions and, before you know it, George had invited him on a duck hunt the next day.

“Now, you have to get up really early to hunt ducks,” George told him. “It’s not like pheasants that you can hunt in the afternoon. So I’ll meet you here at the bottom of the stairs at five thirty-two tomorrow morning. Do you think you can make it?”

Sean nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes. I can.” My boy’s eyes shone. He’d never before been invited to hunt with the men.

“Well, you’d better turn in,” George suggested. “Five thirty-two comes pretty early.”

Sean agreed and disappeared to one of the bedrooms. I don’t know if he slept that night. I know he had no alarm clock, but at five thirty-two he was sitting on the bottom step. Aunt Walleen nearly stumbled on him on the way to the bathroom that morning.

“What’re you doing here?”

“Uncle George said he’d take me duck hunting at five thirty-two.”

I wasn’t there, but I can imagine that Walleen grinned a wicked grin as she returned to the bedroom. She’d have shaken George’s shoulder none too gently.

“What? What’s the matter? Is the house on fire?”

“No fire, George, but you promised a kid you’d take him hunting.”

George rolled over. “Okay. Okay. I’ll take him hunting this afternoon.”

“He’s waiting on the steps, George. You told him you would take the dog and go duck hunting at five thirty-two this morning.”

“But I don’t have a duck dog.”

“Don’t matter, George.”

“Five thirty-two,” he mumbled. “Why would I say such a thing?”

“You were drunk, George.”

“Had to be.”

“Well, he’s waiting and you’d better pry that old body of yours out of this bed and take that boy hunting.”

So Uncle George pried his eyes open and lifted himself out of his nice, warm, comfortable bed and braved the ice on the lake to take my boy duck hunting. They did not bag a single duck. I’m not sure they even saw one.

But an old guy kept his word to a young one, even though he was a little late.

And that means something.

Categories: Communities Families Non-fiction

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