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.

Near Death

I’ve read about near death experiences several times, including an article I saved from Discover Magazine.  These experiences really fascinate me—not that I want to have one.

There seem to be some consistencies among the near deaths of many people. Most seem to “see” their dying bodies as if they’re outside themselves. Many see a bright light—or a shadow. They report them as the most powerful,  intense, and important experiences of their lives. The scientists seem particularly confused about how those NDEs could leave such memorable and intense impressions.

I have a theory.

It seems to me that dying, even for only a few seconds or minutes, would be about as intense as it gets. It is, after all, the end, or at least a reminder that the person experiencing it could end. Period. No more chances.

Many people change their personalioties as a result, becoming friendlier, kinder, more tolerant. I can’t help thinking that’s the Ebenezer Scrooge effect. Once you’re faced smack against your ending, wouldn’t you have more perspective about what’s important and what’s not worth worrying about? Wouldn’t you think about how you’ll be remembered—because, after all, our lives do go on in some ways in other people’s memories.

I know there are probably scientific explanations for the NDE effect, but I’m thinking I’ll go with what seems obvious and not try to explain it out of existence—and that from a lover of science.

Categories: Curiosities 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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Let’s Hear It For The Rats!

I’ve been rereading a National Geographic article about rats that I clipped some time ago. Entitled “In The City’s Shadow” and written by Emma Marris, it begins with this sentence. “Rats are our shadow selves.”

Mostly the article focuses on why we hate rats and how we try to exterminate them, but rats have redeeming social value.One of those redeeming qualities got my attention right away. Marris quotes a study showing that rats will free other rats from cages—instead of gorging on chocolate. Now that’s some sacrifice for a brother!

Marris also quotes New York City rodentologist Bobby Corrigan, who says that rats clean up after us, surviving and thriving on our garbage. Like maggots now being used to debreed dead flesh around burns and wounds, rats eat garbage we leave in our streets and alleyways.

In Tribeca Park, Corrigan says, rats hunt and kill pigeons, another of our least-favored forms of urban wildlife. “They leap on [the pigeons’] backs like a leopard on the Serengeti.” On the other hand, they provide food for urban hawks and owls, like that peregrin falcon that nests somewhere on a ledge in Chicago.

Rats provide high-protein food that might be important in our predicted food-starved future. Polynesian explorers took Pacific rats along for food when they settled various islands in the Pacific. The CEO of a trust in New Zealand that guards the rats they call kiore says that they’re half the size of New York rats and they’re “all nice and fluffy and tasty looking.” They even maintain a rat sanctuary on the North Island.

So let’s hear it for the rats, while most of us hope for a population collapse—except for those tasty Pacific rats and kangaroo rats that stay out everybody’s way.

Here’s a podcast that aired on radio station KZUM a couple of years ago.

The Animal I Slept With

Categories: Non-fiction

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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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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.

Here they are. Hazel at high school graduation and George just arriving from a hunting trip.

Categories: Families Non-fiction

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Apple Pie

Here’s to the opposable thumb! I sliced my left one along with the apples. Amazing isn’t it how much you need both of them?

The apples in question came off my very own baby tree. I’m still not sure if it (the tree) will make it in the long run, but I want to give it e very chance. I planted it three years ago and the leader broke almost immediately. (We’ve been having some unbelievable wind storms.) I’ve been coaxing the next limb into a more upright position. We’ll see how that goes.

But I digress. I got a couple dozen apples, some of them very nice. I only found two worms, but the skins and the outer layers sustained a lot of bug damage. So apparently spraying in blossom stage is good for worms, but I’ll have to learn more about managing for other pests. I’ve heard that spraying with ordinary dish soap works. Research required.

I’ve also got some problems with fungi. Only one of the three trees I’ve planted in recent years is cedar/apple rust resistant. I did spray for that early in the season and the trees did quite well until recently. Again, more research on timing and organic alternatives.

So anyway, I have two pies in the oven. Wish you could all come and have a slice.

Here’s the baby apple tree, straps working to gradually bring the secondary limb more upright. Don’t know if it will work.
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Categories: Non-fiction Our Prairie Habitat

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Refused

The six-sentence, GirlieOnTheEdge blog challenge prompt this week is refuse. After a lot of stumbling around thinking of something to refuse, I settled upon a nation’s scar that still hurts.

People called them cowards; the government put them in prison if they stayed in country; they lost homes and families if they didn’t.

Men who refused the draft during the Vietnam Conflict paid a price for their disbelief, as did those who believed differently, and those who went anyway—and the whole country paid right along with them. I think we’re still paying.

A friend admitted he didn’t believe. “But,” he told me, “I didn’t have the courage to disappoint my dad.”

I wonder how those believers and disbelievers felt when Robert McNamara finally said, the U.S. “could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam” as early as late 1963—I know how I felt.

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Categories: Non-fiction

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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.

Here’s my horseman son. Doesn’t he look relaxed and competent here?

Categories: Curiosities Families Non-fiction

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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.

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Categories: Families Non-fiction Our Prairie Habitat

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Bobbi Bowen

This week, the Carrot Ranch Literary Community 99-word challenge prompt phrase is true grit. For many reasons, my mother’s life provides an example of true grit. Here is one:

In 1937, at fifteen, my mother quit school and went to work singing in a nightclub—to support herself and her parents. For the next seven years, she dodged pinching fingers and groping hands. She traveled the Great Lakes and Eastern Seaboard and got stranded, alone, without a job. For three days, without food or shelter, she hit the streets until she found another, but as soon as the Army started signing women, she joined, then she got an offer for her own radio show that she couldn’t take because she already had a contract with her Uncle Sam.

My mother’s stage name was Bobbi Bowen. At least in uniform, she was guaranteed three squares a day and a roof.
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Categories: Non-fiction

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