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.

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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Wild Sweet Jam

This week’s Carrot Ranch Challenge word is Sweet Jam. Boy does that bring back the country.

Today it’s wild plums. You step in the back door and the smell of sweet jam overwhelms your senses. On the stove, pulp boils with sugar. You hear thick, red bubbles spatter like hot lava.

Another bucket of fresh fruit rests on the floor. You pick up a few. You rub them between your fingers. The frosty coating rubs off, leaving shiny, bright skins—deep red, pink, and gold. A colander holds dry husks of bitter skins for the compost.

Sparkling jars line the counter tops, waiting to seal the taste of summer for mid-winter

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The Poisoned Apple

On Tuesdays, I like to post my contribution to the week’s 99-word Carrot Ranch Literary Community. I like it especially because, although it’s not poetry, it encourages me to condense my narrative line. Perhaps those of you who write might want to try it here.

We used to have a row of mulberry trees on one side of our driveway. In midsummer, when the skies shone cerulean and ships of clouds sailed the prairie, the trees turned green and shiny as holly and began producing the first sweet purple fruit.

My sister and I climbed those trees, but like Snow White’s sweet apple, they exacted a price.  We’d climb out of the trees with scratches and rips on our bare legs and arms, even our faces, twigs in our tousled hair. Our purple mouths, fingers, and purple-stained playsuits testified to our willingness to pay.

I find that I don’t have a single mulberry tree in my photo archives and I can’t swear the linked image is a mulberry tree, but I see similar density.

The linked image shows what we were after–the only thing I can think of that’s better is blackberries and they don’t grow well here.

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Water Finds Its Own Level

This is an early photo. Grandpa later closed in the porch and added a woven-wire fence.

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.

Categories: Families Non-fiction

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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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The Home Place

At least I have Sylvia’s watercolor
  1. Two summers ago, I sold my share of the home place—the oldest part.
  2. My sister is furious with me.
  3. I did a land exchange for a place with no buildings and no well; only fences to maintain and volunteer cedars to remove.
  4. It’s closer to where I intend to live.
  5. I don’t have to watch the farmstead my grandparents built fall into ruin because I have no means to maintain it.
  6. The loss still hurts, but not as much as the ruins.

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Buried in Snow

The winter of ’88 started late with an ice storm that took out tens of miles of power lines, snapping poles at the ground. Later, snow filled the windbreak between the corral, with its water lines, and the horses. My husband and sons dug a tunnel through the windbreak, but bits of drift persisted into spring. I was working the garden when my baby wandered off. I followed his cries and found him sitting in a puddle of snow melt. Normally, Ben didn’t like his bath, but that day he was really pleased to have a dunking in warm water.

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Clear

  1. I  run through my preflight checklist.
  2. Leaning out the window, I yell “clear” and start the engine, remembering for an instant the scene in MASH, the movie, when a prop runs through one of the characters—I don’t remember who.
  3. I head down the taxiway, still adjusting to steering with my feet.
  4. Since I’m rated as a VFR (visual flight reference, rather than instrument) pilot, I lift off into clear blue skies.
  5. I’m flying Nebraska skies so I turn my nose into a steep “crab angle” against a stiff cross wind.
  6. Oh, how I miss those clear, blue skies, even when I had to fight the wind.
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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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July Flurries

Sitting in my platform rocker, looking out at the street with Bruce, my grandson. in my lap, I’m reminded of my grandmother, Hazel. She would also sit in her recliner watching the street from her own little house in town—two doors up from the Methodist Church. By the time she moved to town, her great-grandchildren were in middle and high school and they spent lots of nights in her back bedroom, especially those nights when blizzards tore through the plains.

My lawn, green just a couple of weeks ago, looks like a dirty rag.

Here in North Platte, in late July, I notice snow driven vertically across the window—big wet flakes of early, warmer-weather snow. Actually, it’s not the result of climate change I’m seeing. The snow is cottonwood seeds spreading throughout town. The man across the street told me my tree is the scourge of the neighborhood. I’m inclined to agree. All that cotton chokes the flower beds and whitens the lawn like a yard of dotted Swiss fabric. Even mild winds bring down twigs and clusters of leaves. I mow baby cottonwood trees every time I mow the lawn. I suppose my neighbors do too.

When I was a kid on the farm, though, I knew that cotton from trees volunteered in the windbreak would drift to the pond. It would float for the fish to suck off the surface. We didn’t have carp in our pond, but on those days we could get away and go to the lake we could watch carp vacuuming cottonwood cotton from the water in the bays.

I’ve tipi-camped in the Missouri Basin during February where the ancient cottonwood trees protect the campground. No cotton that time of year, but a thick, wool, Hudson Bay blanket  kept our beds warm, even when fifty-below winds scoured the bluff tops above us.

Here in summer, despite the annoyance of cotton and twigs, the gigantic tree provides shade from morning sun. A spreading American elm takes over throughout the middle of the day. I frequently look at the tree and consider having it removed, especially now when I’m watching flurries of cotton. But I would miss the shade and the cost of cooling the unshaded house.

 

Categories: Communities Non-fiction

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