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.
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.
Million Letters Campaign
For thirty years, Andrew Carroll has collected letters, spanning 225 years of American war history. “These letters are America’s great undiscovered literature,” Carroll says. “They give insight into war and human nature.”
What great timing for me that this article by April White about Carroll’s letter-gathering campaign appeared in the November issue of Smithsonian—just as I’m releasing my book set in the World War II era and focusing on families and staying connected. Letters play a central role in my story, keeping Connor Conroy and his sister Nora connected to each other and their family on the home front.
Nora’s in Paris at the U.S. Embassy at the beginning of the narrative with the Nazis poised to overrun the city. Connor feels responsible for her circumstances because he goaded her into seeking a career. How could he have dreamed she’d take a job in a war zone? Now he has to decide whether to enlist and maybe get to Europe where he can protect her.
Back to Carroll’s hundreds of thousands of letters (so far).Twice he’s asked Dear Abby to promote his Legacy Project and twice she’s complied. Within four days, thousands of letters had overrun the local post office station. The letters are now housed in the Center for American War Letters at Chapman University in California.
These are not celebrity letters. Soldiers wrote their own stories in these letters, intimate details of their lives at war and reassurances that “no Jap bullet has my name on it.” Back home, their friends and families wrote about the price of wheat and pork bellies, rationing, collecting rubber, and producing food, uniforms, blankets, socks, and bandages—materiel for the war effort.
Interlude
The Carrot Ranch Literary Community‘s word prompt this time is Interlude. Since my last six sentences was about war, it was still on my mind.
My grandparents met in an interlude, peacetime between our nation’s many wars. Yet, turbulence attended their meeting.
My grandfather arrived from Ohio with Uncle Johnny Bivens, my grandmother’s grandmother’s brother. The men spent a night in the Douglas Nebraska, train depot, held by the first horizontal snow Grandpa George had ever seen—a plains blizzard.
Later, the town cop, drawn by light in the station, came to make sure the escaped murders from the state penitentiary hadn’t holed up there.
Once the excitement ended, though, Hazel and George had two peaceful years to assemble a grubstake and get acquainted.
The Greatest Gift
Here is my contribution to the Carrot Ranch Literary Community blog challenge. The prompt was the greatest gift. I think the question I’m answering here is what does it cost when a son gives up on his father.
My son and his father don’t get along and that means Ben is losing half of himself. My former husband gave us scary times and he wanted to make up for it, so when he got his life under control, he gave Ben the greatest gift he knew how to give—a horse. That’s because when he was going through the worst of his own adolescence, his horse provided him solace. During summers Ben spent in Colorado with him, they rode horses and took packing trips. Those were good times for Ben, but somehow he’s lost whatever they had.
Hurting for Home
I’ve been reading about regenerative agriculture and it makes me hurt for home.
For several generations now, farms have become more and more industrial, more and more unsustainable, bigger and bigger. Look at monocultures and the millions of gallons of chemicals that make them possible, and I remember the farm where I grew up.
The knowledge necessary to farm regeneratively has been disappearing, but I know how to do it. I was there helping my family with a diversified farming operation back when that was still possible. Mostly the genetically-modified seeds and agro-chemicals weren’t even available then, so we used alternatives.
We rotated crops like alfalfa that fix nitrogen with cash crops like wheat that require it. We were a small family on a small farm, but we mostly kept ahead of weeds by chopping them with machetes—early in the mornings when it was cool. Pests and fungi had less chance of getting a foothold in the before-mentioned rotating fields. In spring, we scooped out the chicken coop, the barn, and corrals so we could spread the animal droppings on the fields with our honey wagon (manure spreader).
We didn’t need much cash because we grew most of our own food—cattle on the rough lands, pigs, chickens, eggs, milk, butter. We had gardens and orchards. We canned and froze a lot of food. We had farm ponds and game preserves where we fished and hunted, and invited the townsfolk to join us.
Sound like a lot of work? Maybe, it was but we did it together—when it rained and we couldn’t get to the fields, we went fishing. It wasn’t always idyllic. Sometimes it was really hard, like when a storm wiped out an entire year’s crop. But when the wheat got hailed, there was still corn and cattle and pigs. Farm economics demanded we get bigger—and bigger—or die and that broke my father’s heart. Literally. I’ll never forget all the farm equipment lined up in the yard for the farm sale.
Mom’s Cardinal Rule(s)
This six-sentence blog challenge prompt from GirlieOnTheEdge is the word cardinal. I’ve been thinking about my mother this week, I guess, so here’s another bit of Ella Mae-ism.
Cardinal: the color of a tufted red bird that sings “pret- ty, pret-ty, pret-ty” to his mate; the color of garments in the Catholic hierarchy; the color of the handmaid, Offred’s cloak; and a rule of primary importance.
My mother’s cardinal rule for her female children (that’s all she had) was, “You can do anything you want if you work hard enough for it.”
That translated into things like, “Can’t never done nothing, he died a long time ago,” and “Ignore it (your little aches and pains) and it’ll go away,” and my favorite, “Stand up, speak up, and pick up your feet.”
So, like the queen whose husband was off fighting a war when his enemy surrounded the castle, I stood up straight and tall and pretended I feared nothing, I spoke up for myself (the employee’s union didn’t hurt) so that I could advance with my male colleagues, I ignored a lot of “stuff,” and NEVER, EVER accepted can’t.
Now I’m revising my sixth book, even though I didn’t get started with this kind of writing until I’d retired.
And as for picking up my feet, I still work out barefoot (do almost everything barefoot) because the toe I drag always trips me when I wear shoes—sorry Mom.
I Double Dog Dare You
This week for the Carrot Ranch Literary Community flash fiction challenge, we were to write something about the safe cracker’s daughter. I thought for a while about the stereotypical safe cracker, then I wondered what would happen with a little gender bending and maybe a dare instead of a crime. So here’s my contribution.
I was thirteen when Mom went to prison for cracking a safe. I’m actually pretty proud of her because she never took anything. It was just a dare.
She’d been raggin’ on my dad for not giving her jewelry—like her friends got.
“I ain’t got that kind of dough,” Pop said, “so when you rob a bank, I’ll get your diamonds.”
We knew she had the skills and what she didn’t know, she’d learn. But it was just idle conversation.
“Maybe I will.”
“I double dog dare you,” Dad said. “You ain’t got the nerve.”
But she did.
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.”
Code Blue
This is a six-sentence challenge story in response to the GirlieOnTheEdge blog. The prompt word is code and you should go see how others have met the challenge. In this context, to be coded is to be resuscitated when your heart stops.
She’s somebody’s grandmother and he visits every day. Mostly she knows him, but sometimes she calls him by his grandfather’s name. He smiles and shows me the pictures, side by side, one blond and one dark. “I don’t mind,” he says. “We look just alike and she loves us both.
“I’ll miss her,” he says, “but she doesn’t want to be coded—says there’s nobody left knows what she knows. She attended all their funerals.”
Water Finds Its Own Level
This quote from Toni Morrison keeps dancing around in my head this morning: “Water has a perfect memory and it is forever trying to get back where it was. Writers are like that, remembering where we were . . .”
The waters in my life run back to the home place, the place I sold a couple of years ago. I still feel an acute sense of loss in its absence—even as I’ve visited and found the new owners repairing and upgrading what I couldn’t.
I understand why my sister was furious with me. All I have to do is close my eyes and I’m back there decades ago. Daddy’s still alive. So are Grandma and Mom. Jo Ann and I would ride our bikes up that devastatingly tall hill, listening to wind humming in the fence wires. Heat would rise from the hard-packed roadbed in waves you could sometimes see. We’d stand on the pedals, inhaling a thin aroma of dust, probably using up all the calories we were about to consume. We’d tramp, hot and sweaty, across Grandma’s entry porch into the kitchen and open the ‘fridge off to the right inside the door. We’d make sandwiches—two slices of white bread, a slice of bologna, a slice of American cheese, a slice of tomato fresh from the garden, and maybe some cucumber slices, all cemented together with Miracle Whip™. We’d never ask.
In the cool interior of that house, we found Grandma and our Aunt Nina. They always seemed glad to see us—even when I stormed in the back door and pounded on the piano before I even said hello. Grandma said she knew then that I’d had a fight with my mother, so she let me pound it out. I find myself doing the same when my one-year-old grandson has his kicking, screaming, arm flapping melt-downs. (He’s usually mad at me.) I lay him on the floor where he can’t hurt himself and let him sort himself out, it usually only takes a few minutes.