Category: Non-fiction

Real families and their communities (including the critters in them) are endlessly fascinating and I started with stories from ten generations of mine before I branched out.

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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Epic Visions

Another GirlieOnTheEdge six sentence blog prompt response.

If you watch the news, you see epic fire in flaring, high resolution, yellow and orange, with edges of black smoke.

If you watch the news, you see epic floods in raging, muddy currents, high resolution images showing people’s roofs and belongings floating downstream.

If you watch the news, you hear epic numbers—millions of acres burned, thousands of people’s homes flooded or burned, people drowned or burned.

Watching the news, you see whole landscapes covered in black sticks—the remains of whole forests and grasslands.

You’ll see seared animals, some of them in clinics wrapped in bandages; you see people visiting devastated homes; you see people weeping or keeping a stiff upper lip with glazed eyes; you see people trying to help with grossly inadequate resources.

Are you overwhelmed yet?

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Categories: Non-fiction

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Frogs and Toads

See Two Photos Below

Frogs. We didn’t see many on our farm. The ponds were just too muddy, so I can’t personally attest to the precarious existence of frogs, or amphibians in general.

Though we rarely saw a frog on our farm, my sister and I captured many tadpoles (with a rusty old flour sifter our mom gave us). We watched them develop legs and eventually released them. If we let them go too near the house, our dog would try to eat them. The attack never resulted in a toad sandwich, but rather in a dog spitting and frothing at the mouth. I always thought that the toad peed in the dog’s mouth, but I’ve learned that those little bumps behind its ears secrete a nasty poison.

I’ve rarely thought of toads as predators, but they like cutworms and all manner of insects. Unfortunately for them, snakes (in the case of my photo) particularly bull snakes like toads.

Couldn’t even wait to get inside. Had to eat his dinner in the parking lot.

According to the conservation Website, Save the Frogs, one third of amphibian species world-wide are endangered. Now maybe you don’t care about those slimy little creatures. I ran across a photo and a paragraph about frog-spotting in Costa Rica, though, and that reminded me of the bright-colored little guy I got to photograph there. Take a look at the little guy below. Don’t you think he deserves a fighting chance?

Those Costa Rican frogs dress in bright colors.

Categories: Non-fiction Our Prairie Habitat

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Crystal Lake

I knd of miss the old place as it was

I remember Crystal Lake as a summer destination for our Girl Scout troop’s adventures.

By then, it had silted in and about all we could see there were frogs, toads, tadpoles, water striders and maybe a bird or two.

In my Dad’s high school days, however, it had a dance pavilion with bands like Lawrence Welk, ice skating on the pond, as well as picnics, fishing, and boating in summer.

That was after mechanical refrigeration ended the lake’s ice business that filled a large ice house in Hastings and hundreds of train cars with twenty-two by twenty-two-inch blocks.

Today, the lake has been dredged and turned over to the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission and provides picnic and camping facilities next to the site of the Little Blue River dam.

I sort of miss the muddy old place I visited, as well as the bygone gathering place I never saw.

loggerhead shrike
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Categories: Non-fiction Our Prairie Habitat

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Pines

Another GirlieOnTheEdge challenge. Prompt word: Pine

Who can think of pines without the pine trees lining Jim Croce’s winding road in his song “I’ve Got a Name?”

I first heard it on an eight-track album recorded by Helen Reddy.

Or how about Pine Sol, that cleaner we poured in buckets and washtubs to scrub our floors or scour our sinks and toilets?

I think of the row of pines my dad and grandfather planted at the edge of a little game preserve at the foot of the dam where the overflow from the spillway could keep them wet.

I can see my dad, lying in the pasture grass chewing on a stem, hands behind his head, listening to the breeze shushing through the trees.

My dad and granddad both died when I was just a kid, but those trees have become giants, edging gnarled Russian olives, broken down floribunda roses, and a variety of volunteer native trees and shrubs.

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Categories: Non-fiction

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Horse Lips

I know I have photos of Chip, but I don’t know where I’ve put them.

Animals are marvelous and surprising creatures, aren’t they? I could cite dozens of examples, but I submit horse lips to plead my case.

They look big and rubbery, not at all subtle, yet they function almost like hands—with fingers. Have you ever fed a horse a ration that includes something she doesn’t like? When you next enter the barn, you’ll find those tiny bits in the feed trough, while the rest of the rations have disappeared. You’ll never see her make the sort.

Hold out your hand with a carrot or an apple. Your horse will hold hands with you. Those lips are warm and comforting as a handshake. (That’s assuming you don’t have an angry horse that bites.)

I’ve never quite “got” horse humor, but once upon a time my then-husband and I stood a racing quarter horse named Flying Chip Nine at stud. Sometimes he would “laugh” at us—or jeer at us, I’ve never quite decided which—with his long upper lip turned up showing his teeth.

My grandson sometimes effects that expression. In his case, I know what he’s communicating.

Categories: Curiosities 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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Polio and Politics

My friend Roger

I had a friend—a gnome-like fellow who said he’d thought, when he was a child, that every six-year-old spent a year in an iron lung. He was a canny bulldog in local politics, supporting rights for people with disabilities. There’s the time he argued for wheelchair ramps at the courthouse.

“We’ll help them up the stairs,” said the councilmen.

“Look,” said Roger, “someday you may have an accident. Maybe you’ll need a wheelchair. Then, how would you like to sit at the bottom of those stairs out there waiting for someone to notice you?”

The courthouse has ramps.

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Categories: Communities Non-fiction

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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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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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