Pomp and Circumstance
Recently I had the opportunity to watch a live-streamed graduation ceremony. My daughter, a college English professor, was asked to assist with commencement proceedings at the university where she is a faculty member and I was excited to see her in this new role. Although I will admit to a moment of pride as I watched her walk onto the stage in her regalia, it wasn’t this that made my eyes well up unexpectedly.
The videographer’s camera zeroed in on individual graduates as they entered the event center one by one. These same young people that I’d seen on my computer screen laughing out in the hallway minutes earlier were suddenly laser-focused and serious. Student after student filed in, each one immediately doing the same thing. They searched the crowded stands for a familiar face. The exact moment when each student found their family and friends amid a sea of strangers felt almost sacred. In an instant, emotion raced from depth to height and it was a privilege to witness that transformation on their faces when each one saw the people who had shown up to celebrate their accomplishments. This ceremony represented years of work and dedication for these students, but more importantly, it represented the limitless possibilities that exist in the world because of education.
My own relationship with education has slowly evolved over the course of more than 60 years. As a farmer’s daughter, a high school diploma was the highest expectation for me and I knew it without anyone actually having to say it. My education from grades one through six at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic School did not include anything outside of the standard math, writing, spelling, and reading curriculums of the time. The earliest stories that we read involved Dick, Jane, Spot, and Puff. Later, stories with bigger words were introduced but the illustrations bore an odd likeness to Dick and Jane, only now they were older and had made a few friends. I remember walking into our junior high public-school library for the first time as a 7th grader, saucer-eyed in this room filled with shelves that were overflowing with hundreds of books. I didn’t know at that age that public libraries even existed, and the books in our home consisted of a dictionary, a set of dark brown encyclopedias, and three books that I had received as Christmas gifts over the course of several years.
My parents’ view of education leaned more toward the practical side, and books did not play a part in the things that they believed were important for us to learn. My siblings and I were taught how to stack bales of hay on a wagon so that you could stack it six rows high without the entire load shifting and falling off. We were taught how to milk cows, drive a tractor, hoe weeds between rows of soybeans, and chop thistles out of the pasture. My sisters and I learned how to grow vegetables and put them up for the winter, hang clothes on the wash line, and mow the lawn. Home Economics class taught us how to cook, bake, and set a table correctly. We belonged to the local 4-H club and along with various other life skills, learned how to sew. Despite the devoted 4-H leaders best attempts, I can still barely sew on a button. I could never get the hang of operating the foot pedal on our sewing machine at home, and my mother told me years later that she would about come unglued listening to me trying to regulate the speed, repeatedly going from zero to sixty with no stops in between. I am grateful for every bit of practical knowledge I acquired during my childhood, but there are times when I can’t help but feel that I missed out on so much. When I listen to others talk about the books they read in elementary school that influenced them, I have nothing to add to the conversation other than Heidi, which I read over and over until the pages eventually fell away from the binding.
While working as a paraprofessional at an elementary school in my 50s, gaps in education were frequently referenced as we discussed the best ways to help students succeed. It made perfect sense to me that a child who has never seen coins or an analog clock would not understand these things regardless what grade they were in. Learning gaps are frequently about a lack of exposure and seldom about a deficit in intelligence. It wasn’t until then that I stopped being ashamed for not knowing about things that others seemed to regard as common knowledge. It wasn’t until then that I realized how many gaps existed in my own education. It wasn’t until then that I began to appreciate all of the different types of intelligences that exist and how they quietly evolve when we are otherwise occupied. In my early 20s, my employer offered a tuition reimbursement program that would have covered most of the expense of a college education. He repeatedly suggested that I enroll and I declined each time, giving him every excuse I could think of but never telling him the truth as I saw it. I was not smart enough. I was not college material.
Now, as a senior citizen with decades of life experience, I know better. My attitude about academics was set in place by someone else, and it has taken the better part of a lifetime to unlearn. Although a formal degree will not be something I achieve in my lifetime, that fact has not kept me from wanting to learn about all the things in this world about which I am curious. Native plants, literature, psychology, religion – the list is long and continually changing, and I am so glad. Watching caterpillars devour your Pearly Everlasting Anaphalis margaritacea is disheartening until you learn that by the end of the summer your yard will be teeming with American Painted Lady Butterflies.
Children who grow up hungry never take food for granted, and I think growing up without an abundance of books is probably the reason I buy far more books now than I will ever have time to read. I’m still hungry and the books taking up space in my home are security for me – insurance that I will always have a full belly. Time has created an appreciation and reverence within me for education that seems to have summed itself up in the notes of “Pomp and Circumstance”. The song never fails to elicit overwhelming emotions that are impossible to fast-blink away. It is the insatiable longing for knowledge and achievement that I have felt my entire life, set to music. So it doesn’t matter whether the person walking across the stage for their diploma is someone I know or not. It doesn’t even matter if I’m celebrating their success virtually over a live stream.
Whoever you are, congratulations. I see you, and I am so proud of you.
Memories From Another Place and Time
Memories From Another Place and Time
There will never be a spring when I do not remember all of the gardeners who have left their imprint on the flower beds that surround my farmhouse. Those first green shoots begin pushing their way through the half-frozen soil in early April, the last arriving around the middle of May. For six weeks I am reminded of the connection shared by all of us who tend the earth and the plants that are so much more than just green growing things taking up space in our gardens. I take inventory of everything that has survived the bleak winter months, marveling at the tenacity of tiny bulbs and rhizomes. I wonder if they are just as impressed to see that I, too, have lived to see another spring. Some were acquired in person, a shovel and plastic grocery store bags the only things necessary to obtain a new treasure. Others found their way to me when home computers made it possible for gardeners to connect with each other through online gardening forums. All of them represent people who happily shared their plants with beginners who had just begun their journey into the fascination that is gardening.
The patches of lemon-yellow daffodils were all from my mother-in-law. Over the course of 30 years she gifted me with more flowers and herbs than I can begin to recall, stopping me in mid-sentence every time I opened my mouth to thank her. Apparently the thank you would keep the plants from growing in their new locations and she was quick to keep that from happening. No more information was ever supplied on this belief, and she spoke with such conviction that I never inquired. Still, I found it impossible to keep my gratitude to myself, and she never failed to shush me with every gift from her garden. I have never met a more generous woman in my life. I think that was part of the reason that her gardens were so beautiful. She was always digging up plants and giving them away, leaving room for new roots to grow and space for the sun to reach the soil.
The allium, with its purple-edged leaves, were a gift from someone I have been corresponding with via the internet for over 20 years. The fact that our friendship began in an organic gardening forum as Gardenz and Buffalogal still makes me smile. Linda and I have never met or even spoken, our friendship blossoming through letters, emails, cards and gift boxes. The fact that we both landed in the same cyberspace at the same time has always felt arranged by the Divine. We share an uncanny ability to truly understand each other in the written word as well as in the silence that exists at times. What began with us bonding over our commitment to organic practices has continued because of our mutual affection for the chipmunks, squirrels, and birds that have made our gardens their home.
Several varieties of iris are here because of another internet friendship. Marlys has since passed away, but she and I were able to meet in person at her home in South Dakota during our family vacation to Mt. Rushmore. Leaving my husband and kids back at the hotel, I drove the 45 minutes to her home. I hadn’t realized that she was an iris collector of monumental proportions until I walked into her back yard. Within minutes of my arrival, her spade was in the ground and her black ink pen was gliding over the smooth foliage as she wrote down the names, height, and colors of each plant. An hour and a half later I closed the lid of my now overflowing trunk, wondering where on earth we would put our luggage. I waved goodbye to this sweet lady who was homebound due to her husband’s failing health. Her generosity and her ability to find joy in her gardens despite the hardships in her life inspire me still.
A third internet friend, after several months of corresponding about every plant imaginable, confided in me that he was dying. His wife did not share his love of gardening, and he knew that his beloved plants would not be taken care of after he was gone. Would I be willing to take some of his plants was his simple request from several states away. The large cardboard box arrived two weeks later, roots wrapped carefully in damp newspaper. These plants that Bill called perennial sunflowers are rogue wanderers that threaten to take over every inch of unoccupied space on the west side of my house. I threaten to dig them up each spring and move them to a wilder area, but I have yet to actually do it. The truth is that I need the reminder that even though our time here is limited, our influence is not.
Seed exchange forums were a thing back then, too. Maybe they still are. For a beginning gardener, trading seeds was an inexpensive way to acquire new flowers and it felt a bit like playing the lottery. For the price of a postage stamp, you could acquire seeds for dozens of vegetables, flowers and herbs. It was addictive and I gathered seeds of my own each fall so I would have something to barter with during January and February. One particular gardening friend sent me several kinds of flower seeds all neatly labeled, with one small Ziploc baggie labeled ‘mystery seed’. She asked me to let her know what the seeds grew into, and I assured her that I would. I was positive that I had hit the jackpot and that they would turn out to be something beautiful and rare. The seeds were sown in a special area of my garden so I could monitor them and keep track of their growth. To my delight, they germinated quickly, and I waited patiently for them to grow, bloom, and eventually reveal their identity. I watered them with sun-warmed well water whenever we didn’t receive adequate rainfall and fertilized them with rabbit manure tea, making sure any undesirable plants did not encroach and impede their progress. All of this was pre-smart phone and before plant ID apps existed. As the seedlings grew, they began to look familiar. I enlisted my husband, a farmer from birth, to help identify my mystery plants. “That’s ragweed”, he said unceremoniously. I refused to believe it and continued to pamper the seedlings until they were two feet tall and there was no question about it. Ragweed. I sent an email to my gardening friend, informing her of my discovery. She was unnecessarily apologetic, explaining that the day she had gathered the seeds had been her last day at her mother’s home. Her mom had passed months earlier, and having recently sold her home, this had been my friend’s last day to take any plants that had belonged to her mother. She described a harried scene, digging and bagging up everything she hoped to save that had been in her mom’s garden. We both laughed about the unexpected turn of events, both of us knowing that the laugh was so much better than any plant that might have grown.
I thought I understood at the time how she must have felt, but I know now that you have to be in the middle of that kind of moment to fully realize how it feels to know that there is an actual date on the calendar and that a clock is ticking down on a time when the door that connects you to the last living things that belonged to your mother will close forever. It throws you into a desperate space of grasping at everything and anything, knowing you can sort it all later. Even dry, unidentifiable seed heads have their place in this frenetic race to salvage the only things left to save. It’s what we gardeners do to keep the spirits of the people we’ve loved alive and still within our reach.
The floral teacups that belonged to my mother are special, but they will never be cherished in the same way as the poppies and peonies. The yellow iris growing next to her house will be coming home with me one of these days. And the purple iris that line the ditch will be, too. A neighbor had stopped by a year before my mom passed away, asking if she might move them to a location closer to the house where my mom could see them better. At 94, my mother had stopped caring what anyone thought of her. “I wish you wouldn’t!” she snapped, scowling at the woman from behind her screen door. She was certain that the woman was only offering so that she could take some for herself, and there was no convincing her that this woman had only wanted to do a good deed. How do you leave that sort of memory behind?
The Gift of Seeing and Being Seen
There are so many points in my life when I have felt seen in the very best sense of the word. Strangely though, it was never because of a dramatic gesture on anyone’s part. Although I can recall many moments of being seen during my lifetime, none of those gestures had a bigger impact on my life than those that I experienced during my childhood. Some instances were recognized immediately. Others took years of reflection before I was able to see how they had shaped the person I would eventually become.
The very first was Mary Watson, a woman I called Grandma Mary even though she was not my biological grandmother. My mother’s first husband was killed in a farm accident at the age of 26 and Grandma Mary was my older sister’s grandmother. She was a part of my life from birth, but I was 13 before I realized that we were not blood relatives. She, along with my older sister’s aunts, treated all of my siblings with true kindness and generosity. Despite my Grandma Mary’s limited financial resources, she gave all of her grandchildren and us 5 add-ons a Christmas gift every year - a dozen pencils with our names printed on them in metallic gold lettering. On each of our birthdays, she would come over with a beautiful homemade cake and a Tupperware container filled with pineapple and lemon-filled pastries that were unmatched in taste and presentation - then as well as now. Her devotion to us, especially on our birthdays, was an affirming treasure that had nothing to do with obligation and everything to do genuine tenderness.
My 4th grade teacher, Sister Loretta Rose, came into my life after a year of being seen in the very worst ways. The strict German nun who had taught 3rd grade was cheerless and proficient in the art of humiliation. Conversations about behaviors and better choices were not something that happened in the 60s, and Sister Antillia dealt with attention seekers at the blackboard, long division being her preferred weapon. Sister Loretta Rose was the antidote to the poison meted out by Sister Antillia. She looked past my attention-seeking shenanigans and saw a gangly, awkward kid who just wanted to fit in and be liked. Her intelligent, bespeckled eyes and gentle voice were a godsend. She restored my faith in who I was, and more importantly, who I had the potential to become.
Elsie Moeggenberg was my best friend’s mother. I only spent the night at their house a handful of times before their family moved to the other side of the country between 7th and 8th grades, but when I did, she packed a lunch for me that made me feel as if I’d won the lottery. My mother hated making our lunches and it showed. There are ways to say ‘I hate this job’ without using any words. Cold clumps of butter and thick slices of Velveeta on white bread. One small apple. Two overbaked cookies with a maximum of two fake chocolate chips per cookie. The only variation was peanut butter in place of the Velveeta. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year. Mrs. Moeggenberg, however, stuffed my plaid vinyl lunch pail full of every goody imaginable. When you’re ten years old, finding a Little Debbie Swiss Cake Roll, a bag filled to bursting with Cheetos, and a full-sized Slo-Poke sucker in your lunch pail, all on the same day, is not something that you forget. Ever.
Mrs. Borland was my 9th grade drama teacher. I still have the one act play that I wrote in her class, her remarks and the A at the top of the paper a shimmering memory from my high school years. Well done. Fast paced, interesting, good tension and suspense! My original outline had earned a C+ and a suggestion to choose a different idea for my play. It also earned an “I told you it was a stupid idea” from the girl who sat next to me. Now they call my style of writing ‘discovery writing’. Despite her misgivings, Mrs. Borland allowed me the latitude to see it through. It was the first time I remember trusting myself to know where I was going even if my route for getting there was different from what was expected.
Mrs. Carr was my 10th grade English teacher. She wore bold red lipstick, and her mascara was everywhere but on her eyelashes. When she spoke, her raspy voice filled the air around her, pulling our attention away from the overpowering cologne that she wore to hide the smell of cigarettes. She was like no one else I had ever met and a stark contrast to the identically clothed, Ivory soap-scented nuns from the Catholic elementary school I’d attended through the 6th grade. Upon meeting her for the first time, Mrs. Carr told me in all seriousness that she knew we would get along famously. She used so many words that year that I had never heard before, and she opened up my world to all the possibilities that exist because of language and its power to turn the mundane into something unforgettable.
Mr. Albrecht was my high school choir teacher, and the four years I spent in his choir room kept me from hating those four years. Outside of his classroom I was mostly invisible, but standing on those choir risers I was invincible. He indulged my creative energy like no one else ever had, allowing me to sing a song I’d written, solo, at our school’s spring concert. As a freshman, it was a rare honor. The song was mediocre at best. I suppose the rhymes were decent and the melody passable. What I remember with such clarity is his face, beaming from the shadows off stage as the spotlight came up and the person accompanying me played those first notes. He saw me, and all that I was capable of.
Many decades removed from those years, I can see all the times when gestures both big and small played a part in my ability to not only survive, but thrive. In the moment as well as in the long term. It’s made me aware of my own capacity to bring that same kind of light and positivity to others who are in the early years of their journey and just starting to figure out who they are and what they are meant to bring to the world.
Recently while working on a crafting project that made good use of a tattered dictionary from 1910, I happened on an idea for a bookmark. This particular dictionary also included biblical names, and I spotted the name of a friend among them. I looked through the dictionary for words that described them and their best traits. As I cut out the tiny words and glued them to the paper, I felt like it was one of the best crafting ideas I’d had in a long time.
For weeks I held on to the finished bookmark, despite seeing them frequently. The crafting high I’d felt while I was constructing the bookmark had since worn off and my excitement at having come up with some fantastic, original idea had fizzled. It was a small gift that I’d hoped they would find meaningful, but maybe they wouldn’t. Would they think it was juvenile? Amateurish? Somehow I had managed to attach my own sense of self-worth to a bookmark.
Finally, after deciding that the bookmark had spent enough time in my purse, I handed it to them during a lull at the busy coffee shop where they work. Their response was heartfelt, letting me know that this bookmark was definitely more than something to keep their place in whatever they were currently reading. They looked at the words that I had chosen for the bookmark, eyes shining with relatable sentiment. One simple sentence, spoken in gratitude, will stay with me always.
“I have never felt more seen.”
Lessons in Stillness
The southwest corner of my basement sits empty from the end of May until the middle of September. Aside from the bags of rabbit food and cardboard chew toys that are stashed in that area, it’s a dreary, vacant space during the summer months. From October through April, however, the deep, waist-high concrete ledge in that corner has proven itself to be the perfect location to overwinter plants. Two windows let in enough light to keep most growing things happy, and other than the seasonal influx of field mice, it’s a comfortable space to wait out the winter months. It’s a good place to learn how to slow down.
There have been Octobers when a killing frost that I didn’t see coming left me with nothing to fill this area of the basement. Some years I haven’t cared. Truthfully, I was grateful and welcomed the reprieve from feeling like I was wholly responsible for keeping the world alive. Months of repeatedly dragging a hose around to the very end of its length tends to give a person a skewed sense of significance.
From May to September, slowing down never registers as an option. Bags of worm castings and Dairy Doo potting soil are hauled home with irrepressible joy before Memorial Day. Hanging baskets overflowing with ivy leaf geraniums are wedged into the back of my car along with flats of jewel-toned pansies and pots of sweet basil and orange thyme. The self-imposed routine of potting, fertilizing, watering, planting, and weeding begins with an all-in rush of energy. The sunlight feels as if it’s being filtered through gauze and humidity is non-existent. Temperatures hover in the perfection range of 72 degrees. Mosquitoes and no-see-ums have yet to begin their seasonal blood drive. I have forgotten that it does not stay this way. Several weeks later as the thermometer climbs skyward and the rain gauge fills with dust, the decline in enthusiasm begins. When hundreds of Japanese Beetles descend on my cutting garden, slowing down to appreciate the honeysuckle vines bursting with new blossoms doesn’t feel like a luxury I can afford at the moment. The idyllic lemonade afternoons that I envisioned while the ground was covered in snow just never seem to materialize.
October usually finds me exhausted and spent, staring at too many still-thriving plants in heavy pots and dreading the work that lies ahead. I mentally calculate the number of trips required to get everyone to the safety of the basement and whisper to no one, “I’m sorry, but there aren’t nearly enough lifeboats.” A culling process that should be based on the limitations of aging bones is rarely considered. Halfway down a flight of stairs is never the place to be when you realize you’ve overestimated how far you can carry an odd-shaped 40 lb. planter with foliage that completely obscures your vision. Hyper focusing on each step instead of the distance remaining between me and my destination keeps me from focusing on every muscle in my body that is screaming at my brain. Who’s in charge here? Is anyone in charge?!!! Subsequent trips and decisions about who gets a seat on the imaginary lifeboats leave me feeling a bit like Cal on the Titanic when he uttered his smug words about there being enough room for the better half. Best to get it over with, I think, as I haul tubs of unsuspecting, viable plants to their eternal resting place under a nearby oak tree. I reason that the oak tree is equivalent shelter to what they’re used to under a covered porch, and it’s supposed to rain any day. I turn away quickly and mumble my no-eye-contact goodbyes, knowing that the ice and snow of November will finish what I began.
* * * * *
By the end of February, the shoulder and back pain from lugging all these plants down a flight of stairs have become a distant memory. I am thankful for these winter warriors that have survived sporadic watering and minimal sunlight in this basement corner. The first day of spring might be three weeks away, but the hands in dirt date will take a couple more flips of the calendar. The landscape vacillates between various hues of brown and gray and were it not for these summer-rich shades of green hidden away from the harsh elements, it would be easy to despair. These are the moments when October’s risky choices begin to seem reasonable. No longer overwhelmed by too many plants needing resources that belonged to a younger version of myself, every leaf, stem, and miniature blossom seem like an intricate work of art. Probably because they are. When I gather up the piles of curled, crisp leaves beneath the lemon verbena stick plants, I am instantly back in the days of summer. That something so dusty and lifeless can still hold such incredible fragrance astounds me. The book Bulbs in the Basement, Geraniums on the Windowsill: How to Grow and Overwinter 165 Tender Plants, by Alice and Brian McGowan, says that in another month or so after sparse waterings throughout the winter, I can cut the dry branches back and the lemon verbena will grow again. I have no idea if the plants know this or not. A succulent that had turned deep plum under a blistering August sun has reverted back to a glossy lime in the softer light of winter. Rosemary plants that rarely bloom here because of the too-short growing season are suddenly engulfed in tiny, delicate periwinkle flowers.
In the mid-winter quiet of a basement, these plants are teaching me how much I miss throughout the summer. With every plant shopping excursion of summer, the intricate details of petals and leaf veining are overlooked the same way that English muffins get passed over at brunch when they are set beside glazed raspberry pastries and Belgian waffles. I stuff my nursery cart happily, gluttonous after enduring months of below freezing temperatures. Starved for color beyond our two-crayon Michigan winters, it’s no surprise that self-control gets tossed to the four winds on an annual basis. But in February, with the snow piled up just beyond ground-level windows, I have nowhere to go. There is nothing pulling my attention from the intricate details and wonderous simplicity that I was too distracted to see in July.
At 64, I’m still hopeful that these winter days spent marveling over these enchantments of texture, color, and fragrance might immunize me against the over-zealous buying binges that cloud my better judgment every spring. I’m not so old that I can’t learn from past experience. A sketchy memory, however, is less promising. On the hottest, most bug-bitten and sunburnt days of summer, I wonder how gardeners who live in more temperate zones find the wherewithal to continue without the long break between growing seasons. How do they survive walking past beds that are overrun with weeds without the comfort of knowing a hard frost will eventually right the ship? Hard frosts are my saving grace and the one thing I can rely on to stop the madness for which I am fully responsible, every single year.
It has never been my nature to approach life slowly. Enthusiasm overrides sensibility every time, often with steep consequences. As a child, my mother began calling me Calamity Jane after the umpteenth time of repairing my stubbed big toe with that horrid, stinging red mercurochrome. I can still hear the exasperation in her voice even now. Could you just slow down? During my first visit to a psychic in my 40s, I was told that someone on the other side was warning me to slow down. In fact, they said it four times during my half-hour reading. I assumed some benevolent relative was trying to keep me from getting an expensive speeding ticket. I watched my speed for months. A year later when I took the tip of my thumb off on one of those guillotine paper cutting devices as I rushed to finish a project before the students came in from recess, the psychic’s words followed me all the way to the emergency room. I’m sure that whoever was trying to send a warning decided I was a hopeless case that day, throwing up their hands and requesting that they be reassigned to someone else. You think about these things when you live in the same house that your great grandparents lived in. You wonder about the universe and its vast possibilities with every creaking board and peripheral shadow. You question the odd coincidences and the robin that keeps landing on your porch railing at the same time every morning, peering at you like it has something to say. Slow down. The following winter, two hard falls on ice - both due to running on ice - were finally enough to make the message stick. Slow down.
* * * * *
As I wait to see if March comes in like a lion or a lamb, these overwintering plants are teaching me how to appreciate the small wonders that exist in every season. It’s good practice for when I eventually reach the point of having to let go of all the outdoor spaces that I’m tending. Thankfully, I’m not there yet which means I still have a few years to work on the fine art of slowing down. Even in the dead of winter, I’m keenly aware that May and her come-hither temptations of fiery coral blossoms and lacy foliage are not to be underestimated. I start downsizing my coffeehouse habits in preparation for indulging my most recent fascination – native plants and the endangered insects that incredibly find their way to them. Maybe you have to get to the other side before you are finally rescued from the notion that more means happier. Maybe you have to leave this world before you realize that you’ve always had enough. In the meantime, I’m learning to appreciate winter and its forced lessons in stillness. I’m learning. Slowly.
The Storyteller
My mother was a storyteller, although not in the way that most people think of storytellers. She wasn’t dramatic or prone to embellished descriptions. She was an observer and relished sharing her opinions on everything and everyone she saw. What’s the point of being an observer if you can’t share your observations?
As the wife of a dairy farmer, my mom did not have the opportunity to travel. Her observations came from the simple things that were part of her rural life. They began in childhood, and she frequently told us stories about her country school days in a one-room schoolhouse, the jobs she held before getting married, and the ordinary lives of three generations of family members that included her great aunts and uncles and her great grandparents on both sides of her family. You only needed to listen, and I was a listener.
People of The Silent Generation were savers of everything. Growing up on the heels of The Great Depression left an imprint on young lives, and being wasteful was apparently seen as a fast track to Hell. Her home was filled with evidence that she had no intention of ending up anywhere but Heaven. Cool Whip tubs, dime store wicker baskets, empty pickle jars, sewing notions – entire rooms filled with hundreds of things that in her eyes still had value and purpose. Her freezer was filled with dozens of identical bright yellow plastic containers that held anything and everything but the margarine that claimed you wouldn’t believe it’s not butter.
As my siblings and I have taken on the task of cleaning out her home, I’ve discovered a single truth. People who think it’s important to save egg cartons are the same people who leave behind three generations worth of family history randomly packed into enormous metal lard tubs. With the pop of every lid, the lives of ancestors come spilling out like puzzle pieces, the caveat being that none of the pieces belong to the same puzzle. I thought I had learned everything there was to know about our family, but clearly there will be more bleary-eyed, middle-of-the-night rendezvous with Ancestry.com. Newly discovered boxes of curled, black and white photographs flood my brain with questions, and the reality that I have lost my connection to the one person who could answer them stings more than I thought possible. I still have her stories, though, and they are anchored in my being like DNA. One story in particular has kept me wondering for decades, and I don’t think either of us could have ever imagined that the answer we thought had been lost to time had been right here in her house all along.
As the story goes, my Great Grandmother Effie had to be carried onto the train in Jackson, Michigan, kicking and screaming. She was in love with a young man named Charlie Kipp and she did not want to leave him. As a teenager in the late 1890s, moving 79 miles away from him had to feel like moving to the other side of the world. Hearing this story as a newly lovestruck teenager in the 1970s, I felt a deep kinship with her immediately. I was outraged over the injustice of it all, and knowing the entirety of her story seemed like the next best thing to a crystal ball as I gazed into my own future.
Effie eventually met and married my Great Grandfather and had seven children, but the story doesn’t end there. In 1941, she and Charlie both now widowed at ages 69 and 70 respectively, reconnected and married. They spent three years together at his Grass Lake home before Charlie passed away, but I’ve always wondered about the details of their reunion and which of them had contacted the other. My mother wasn’t sure.
A single photo found in the attic, or rather the back of the photo, had held the answer all this time. The photo is one of Effie standing next to her car in front of her Gratiot County home in 1941. His exact words, written in faded pencil, fill the back of the photograph:
Out in front of the bride’s home. I caught her just as she was leaving with the car and if I had of been a moment later I probably would of never seen her again.
So, it was him. Charlie had been the one who came looking for her. He wasted no time as is evidenced by death records of his late wife. She passed away in January and he and my Great Grandmother were married in April of the same year. His face in their wedding day photos is filled with so much joy. So is hers. I don’t believe either of them ever took this second chance at love for granted or saw it as anything short of Divine providence. There are no pictures of her daughter from that day, who was mortified about this late-in-life marriage that she saw as an embarrassment that bordered on the scandalous. I’m sure the article written in the local newspaper about their reunion and marriage only added fuel to the decorum fire. This was the sort of thing that was the subject of neighborhood whispering, and she knew the smoke would be smoldering in the background at every social event and club meeting for months to come.
As we sort through all of the things my mother accumulated during her lifetime, we are finding that there are few takers for aluminum pie pans, pressure cookers, and full sets of china and silverware. Millennials are more interested in collecting experiences than stuff, and Generation Z thinks all of these things are cool, but space is limited in the apartment they’ll be living in for the foreseeable future. All of us Baby Boomers are caught between the guilt we’ve inherited and the logistics of finding room in our basements for all the things that belonged to The Lost Generation and every generation that came after.
My mother knew exactly where all her plastic margarine tubs would eventually end up, but I know she hoped that the things she treasured would eventually find a place in one of her children’s homes. As I wrangle with decisions about what to keep, my heartstrings are clearly influenced by the stories she left behind. I’m slowly understanding that maybe her stories were more than just stories from her life. I think they were cleverly disguised insurance that her cherished possessions would not meet the same fate as the margarine tubs.
So fair warning, Millennials and GenZers. The stories are the gateway. They are the things that conjure up people and places from another time. They are the reason we answer with an enthusiastic yes when asked if we want a wooden rocking chair with our Great-Great-Grandmother’s name carved into the armrest. They are responsible for that unnamable force that keeps us up at night, pouring over documents from another century just to prove that our connections to the past are real, and that they exist like flesh and bone. Most importantly, in those moments of hardship when the world seems to be crumbling around us, they are the roadmap that tells us where we go from here.
My mother was a storyteller, although not in the way that most people think of storytellers. She wasn’t dramatic or prone to embellished descriptions. She was an observer and relished sharing her opinions on everything and everyone she saw. What’s the point of being an observer if you can’t share your observations?
As the wife of a dairy farmer, my mom did not have the opportunity to travel. Her observations came from the simple things that were part of her rural life. They began in childhood, and she frequently told us stories about her country school days in a one-room schoolhouse, the jobs she held before getting married, and the ordinary lives of three generations of family members that included her great aunts and uncles and her great grandparents on both sides of her family. You only needed to listen, and I was a listener.
People of The Silent Generation were savers of everything. Growing up on the heels of The Great Depression left an imprint on young lives, and being wasteful was apparently seen as a fast track to Hell. Her home was filled with evidence that she had no intention of ending up anywhere but Heaven. Cool Whip tubs, dime store wicker baskets, empty pickle jars, sewing notions – entire rooms filled with hundreds of things that in her eyes still had value and purpose. Her freezer was filled with dozens of identical bright yellow plastic containers that held anything and everything but the margarine that claimed you wouldn’t believe it’s not butter.
As my siblings and I have taken on the task of cleaning out her home, I’ve discovered a single truth. People who think it’s important to save egg cartons are the same people who leave behind three generations worth of family history randomly packed into enormous metal lard tubs. With the pop of every lid, the lives of ancestors come spilling out like puzzle pieces, the caveat being that none of the pieces belong to the same puzzle. I thought I had learned everything there was to know about our family, but clearly there will be more bleary-eyed, middle-of-the-night rendezvous with Ancestry.com. Newly discovered boxes of curled, black and white photographs flood my brain with questions, and the reality that I have lost my connection to the one person who could answer them stings more than I thought possible. I still have her stories, though, and they are anchored in my being like DNA. One story in particular has kept me wondering for decades, and I don’t think either of us could have ever imagined that the answer we thought had been lost to time had been right here in her house all along.
As the story goes, my Great Grandmother Effie had to be carried onto the train in Jackson, Michigan, kicking and screaming. She was in love with a young man named Charlie Kipp and she did not want to leave him. As a teenager in the late 1890s, moving 79 miles away from him had to feel like moving to the other side of the world. Hearing this story as a newly lovestruck teenager in the 1970s, I felt a deep kinship with her immediately. I was outraged over the injustice of it all, and knowing the entirety of her story seemed like the next best thing to a crystal ball as I gazed into my own future.
Effie eventually met and married my Great Grandfather and had seven children, but the story doesn’t end there. In 1941, she and Charlie both now widowed at ages 69 and 70 respectively, reconnected and married. They spent three years together at his Grass Lake home before Charlie passed away, but I’ve always wondered about the details of their reunion and which of them had contacted the other. My mother wasn’t sure.
A single photo found in the attic, or rather the back of the photo, had held the answer all this time. The photo is one of Effie standing next to her car in front of her Gratiot County home in 1941. His exact words, written in faded pencil, fill the back of the photograph:
Out in front of the bride’s home. I caught her just as she was leaving with the car and if I had of been a moment later I probably would of never seen her again.
So, it was him. Charlie had been the one who came looking for her. He wasted no time as is evidenced by death records of his late wife. She passed away in January and he and my Great Grandmother were married in April of the same year. His face in their wedding day photos is filled with so much joy. So is hers. I don’t believe either of them ever took this second chance at love for granted or saw it as anything short of Divine providence. There are no pictures of her daughter from that day, who was mortified about this late-in-life marriage that she saw as an embarrassment that bordered on the scandalous. I’m sure the article written in the local newspaper about their reunion and marriage only added fuel to the decorum fire. This was the sort of thing that was the subject of neighborhood whispering, and she knew the smoke would be smoldering in the background at every social event and club meeting for months to come.
As we sort through all of the things my mother accumulated during her lifetime, we are finding that there are few takers for aluminum pie pans, pressure cookers, and full sets of china and silverware. Millennials are more interested in collecting experiences than stuff, and Generation Z thinks all of these things are cool, but space is limited in the apartment they’ll be living in for the foreseeable future. All of us Baby Boomers are caught between the guilt we’ve inherited and the logistics of finding room in our basements for all the things that belonged to The Lost Generation and every generation that came after.
My mother knew exactly where all her plastic margarine tubs would eventually end up, but I know she hoped that the things she treasured would eventually find a place in one of her children’s homes. As I wrangle with decisions about what to keep, my heartstrings are clearly influenced by the stories she left behind. I’m slowly understanding that maybe her stories were more than just stories from her life. I think they were cleverly disguised insurance that her cherished possessions would not meet the same fate as the margarine tubs.
So fair warning, Millennials and GenZers. The stories are the gateway. They are the things that conjure up people and places from another time. They are the reason we answer with an enthusiastic yes when asked if we want a wooden rocking chair with our Great-Great-Grandmother’s name carved into the armrest. They are responsible for that unnamable force that keeps us up at night, pouring over documents from another century just to prove that our connections to the past are real, and that they exist like flesh and bone. Most importantly, in those moments of hardship when the world seems to be crumbling around us, they are the roadmap that tells us where we go from here.
January Revisited
January should officially be declared the month of the minimalist. If the queue of cars in the donation line at Goodwill is any indication, I’m not the only one who feels an overwhelming need to rid myself of all things unnecessary. Every year, the shiny trappings of the Christmas season turn on us like that third over-frosted sugar cookie, leaving us aware that no matter how beautiful or delicious, excess has an expiration date. A single candle on an oak library table becomes the stuff that contentment is made of. The over-perfumed spaces that felt welcoming in November and December now seem to be devoid of oxygen. The rare sunny mid-winter day has us scurrying to open windows if only for a few minutes, filling our lungs with air that makes us feel as if we are the first to have ever breathed anything so cold and perfect.
January seems to prompt us to become realists. In a face-off with overflowing closets, we become brutally honest with ourselves. The puffy, lipstick-red vest, the mustard-yellow sweater, the lilac spring jacket – gone. Favorite, thread-bare t-shirts get repurposed with a scissor send-off as they land in the almost depleted dust rag tub. It’s unthinkable that these mementos of the best concerts should ever be worn by anyone else. Better they should continue to exist in an altered state. Realism, after all, has its limits.
January gives us time to ponder the relics that whisper to us from attics and basements. Long-forgotten journals from a different century give us the push we need to document our own days in their most basic form. Somehow, the passage of time can make the most mundane details of our lives shimmer like pearls. Reading old words on now-yellowed pages gives us faith that perhaps one day, someone might stumble across diaries filled with the minutia of our lives and find them worthy of reflection.
January is the bold red stop sign after too many weeks of nothing but green lights. It is absolute permission to dawdle. It is a nudge to wander in whatever spaces bring us comfort. It gives us license to measure productivity by some other means than what we have to show for our days.
January is the book we’ve been wanting to spend time with. It is the craft project for which we’ve put off gathering supplies. It is seed catalogs and bird feeders. It is skeins of yarn and spools of thread in every shade of green. It is sharp pencils and blank canvases. It is sourdough starter and raspberry cordial. It is the gift of time wrapped in unapologetic gray skies and early sunsets that push us indoors where we are free to follow our brightest instincts. January is the antidote to a world that insists we run faster and farther, a world that keeps insisting that we should compare our hardest days to the best days of everyone else.
January gives us 31 opportunities to listen to the callings of our own hearts, and 31 chances to answer with the conviction of our own voices. Clocks and calendars be damned for a little while. These January days belong to the dreamers and inventers. The creatives and the visionaries. They belong to anyone with enough grit and bravado to see these dreary, dismal days for the possibilities they hold. They are freedom to chase everything that inspires and enchants us. They are kindling seeking the spark that is only found in the deepest patches of darkness. They are wonder, captured and suspended, waiting for us to finally arrive.