Category: Families

Since most of us are not raised by wolves, we mostly start our lives in families. I like to think about how they can work better.

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

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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.

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Categories: Families Fiction

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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.

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Categories: Families Non-fiction

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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

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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.

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Categories: Families Non-fiction

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The Carried Wife–Working Hogs

Another Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word challenge. Something about a carried wife. As usual, 99 words, no more, no less.

Sometimes it’s not about being carried across the threshold.

Moving hogs across a small open space. She feinted right. I followed. She ran left around me. My husband, already distraught, started screaming at me. For once. I stood my ground, stared at him. He took the few steps that divided us, picked me up, and started carrying me somewhere. I had no idea what he intended. Startled and scared, I bit his ear. He put me down, as I’d hoped, took a couple of steps back, wound up, and punched me in the face, a glancing blow since I was turning away. We never worked hogs together again.

Hogs are really clever, especially when they’re thwarding our wishes. These are actually my grandfather’s Hampshire piglets. We had long, white Landrace sows.
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Great-grandma Carpenter’s Sherbet Dishes

Here is this week’s version of the Carrot Ranch Literary Community prompt response, two days late and a dollar short. The prompt required something found in a hutch.

Those sibling fights can cause lots of damage.

Grandma Hazel and her younger sister, Edna, used to have knock-down drag-out fights. One night it centered on who would wash the dishes. After a bunch of yelling and snarling, it degenerated into hair pulling. To keep from falling, Grandma grabbed her mother’s hutch where Great-grandma Frank displayed her fancy sherbet dishes. The hutch went down, breaking all but two of the dishes.

“That’s the only time I ever saw my mother cry,” Hazel said. Grandma Frank made the girls dig a hole in the back yard and bury the broken glassware.

Sis and I have the two survivors.

I never thought to ask. The dishes may have come west with Grandma Frank’s grandmother Sicily.
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Categories: Families Non-fiction

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Interchangeable?

This is an episode within my memoir about families, resilience, and how we made our lives work—or not. It’s my contribution to the GirlieOnTheEdge blog prompt for this week. The prompt word is exchange.

Cecil’s wife had left him and he didn’t know how he’d get along without her and their baby daughter.

His mother, fearing for his sanity—and his life—insisted that he go to a psychiatrist for help dealing with his multiple losses and his combat fatigue.

Unable to figure out what to do, Cecil did what she demanded.

The shrink had a simple answer—find another wife, he said, handing Connor a lonely hearts newsletter.

Cecil took his advice, exchanging one woman for another who also left him.

Cecil was left, devastated and out of control, trying to save a marriage—either one of them.

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Categories: Families Non-fiction

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Absent

I’m taken by the presence of absence in WWII survivors

What follows is my response to the new GirlieOnTheEdge word prompt for this week. The word is absent and the instructions are to write six sentences, no more no less. So here are my six sentences.

Since I published a novel set during World War II a month ago, the first thing that came to my mind when challenged to think about absence was “absent without leave.”

To me, though, the outstanding characteristic of that period was people’s unyielding presence.

I wrote about a family, an ordinary family, who just kept showing up—not just to fight the war, but also to support the warriors who did.

I know mostly about farm families because I came from one, and one of my favorite photos depicts my aunt, in a dress she made herself out of flour sacks, sitting next to a pile of worn-out tires saved for the war effort.

I have a newspaper clipping, accompanied by a photo of my grandfather with some of his hogs, that reports on stepped-up farm production, with much of the labor force gone, to feed the troops—and some left-over ration books with icons of commodities punched out.

In the end, the survivors’ faces held the presence of absence—the sons who never returned, the lost peace of mind in the faces of the ones who did, and the years torn from lives that never quite recovered.

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Categories: Families Non-fiction

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Nests of Rabbits

The gist of this story appears in my novel, See Willy See, to be released tomorrow, November 8, 2019. It will take a while to get to the bookstores and libraries, but it’s available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Smashwords.

Stationed in Panama, training for combat, Connor dreaded his sister’s letters from Paris where she served in the U.S. Consulate and where they Nazis were poised to take over the city.

“I was just telling Daniel about the time Freckles got to snooping under the woodpile and found that nest of baby rabbits,” she wrote, “remember how we took them out of the dog’s very mouth?”

“I look in the woods here and imagine all the baby rabbits hidden in them.”

Connor smiled, remembering all their rescue missions—until he realized she was writing in code.

“Jesus!” he exploded, scrubbing his hands through already rumpled hair, glancing around at his tent mates, watching him.

“My sister’s French Resistance boyfriend is going to get her killed rescuing little Jewish bunny rabbits.”

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Categories: Families Fiction

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