Category Archives: Literature

Little House in Old World Wisconsin

by

Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in Wisconsin in 1867, in a Little House in the Big Woods (near Pepin, WI, close to the border of Minnesota).  Mary Hafford, the Irish immigrant who lived in the house where I work as an interpreter for the living history museum, Old World Wisconsin, was widowed in the year 1868 with 3 small children and lived as a renter in a small village near Watertown, WI.   The Ingalls family continued to move west and eventually set up a homestead in South Dakota, but Mary Hafford worked away at her home laundry business and eventually achieved social and economic prominence in her little village.  In 1885, she had a new house constructed on the property that she had bought.  She never learned to read or write, but her children did.  Her youngest daughter, Ellen, studied dressmaking, a skilled trade, and became a live-in dressmaker.  Ellen was married in 1891 (six years after Laura Ingalls married Almanzo Wilder), and her mother hosted a reception and dinner for 75 guests.  Three months later, Mary Hafford died of dropsy.  I imagine Ellen Hafford Thompson and wonder what stories she might have written about her life in the Little House where she lived.  I have a burning question: what happened to her older sister, Ann, who is conspicuously absent from all records from the mid-1880s on?  Did she die?  If so, why isn’t she buried next to her father & mother?  Did she go into a convent?  Did she elope with a Lutheran?  The mystery remains unsolved!

The neighbors’ backyard

Trusty “Rapid Washer”

A shadow box memorial to a young woman who had taken religious vows. The braid that was cut off is all the family would ever see of this loved one after she went into the convent.

 

Friday Adventure

by

Steve & I went on a driving excursion today through rural Wisconsin.   Today’s post will just be a teaser; I promise there will be more substance when I have more time.  We began the day by re-reading W. H. Auden’s poem“In Praise of Limestone”.  Little did we know that we would chance upon a cave by a river later that afternoon….

I hope everyone can make some stunning discoveries this weekend!  Go out and enjoy the world!

Fascination

by

I’ve always believed that I have a great capacity for fascination…until a few days ago when I began to read Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood.  She has it in spades, and has always had it, in a way that makes me feel distracted and dull by comparison.  Here’s an excerpt from that memoir:

“Our parents and grandparents, and all their friends, seemed insensible to their own prominent defect, their limp, coarse skin.

“We children had, for instance, proper hands; our fluid, pliant fingers joined their skin.  Adults had misshapen, knuckly hands loose in their skin like bones in bags; it was a wonder they could open jars.  There were loose in their skins all over, except at the wrists and ankles, like rabbits.

“We were whole, we were pleasing to ourselves.  Our crystalline eyes shone from firm, smooth sockets; we spoke in pure, piping voices through dark, tidy lips.  Adults were coming apart, but they neither noticed nor minded.  My revulsion was rude, so I hid it.  Besides, we could never rise to the absolute figural splendor they alone could on occasion achieve.  Our beauty was a mere absence of decrepitude; their beauty, when they had it, was not passive but earned; it was grandeur; it was a party to power, and to artifice, even, and to knowledge.  Our beauty was, in the long run, merely elfin.  We could not, finally, discount the fact that in some sense they owned us, and they owned the world.

“Mother let me play with one of her hands.  She laid it flat on a living-room end table beside her chair.  I picked up a transverse pinch of skin over the knuckle of her index finger and let it drop.  The pinch didn’t snap back; it lay dead across her knuckle in a yellowish ridge.  I poked it; it slid over intact.  I left it there as an experiment and shifted to another finger.  Mother was reading Time magazine.

“Carefully, lifting it by the tip, I raised her middle finger an inch and released it.  It snapped back to the tabletop.  Her insides, at least, were alive.  I tried all the fingers.  They all worked.  Some I could lift higher that others.

“That’s getting boring.”  “Sorry, Mama.”

“I refashioned the ridge on her index-finger knuckle; I made the ridge as long as I could, using both my hands.  Moving quickly, I made parallel ridges on her other fingers — a real mountain chain, the Alleghenies; Indians crept along just below the ridgetops, eyeing the frozen lakes below them through the trees.”

What rare child in this century, surrounded by electronic stimulators of all descriptions, would spend a half an hour fascinated by her mother’s hand, I wonder?  I had the chance to meet 56 kindergarteners at the Wehr Nature Center this morning.   This is what we brought out to fascinate them:

Boxy

Now that’s an ancient face I could stare at for hours!  Meet Boxy, the ornate box turtle.  Her species is found primarily in southwestern Wisconsin, where there are sandy prairies and is currently endangered and protected.  She came to the nature center about 25 years ago; she may be about 10 years older than that.  How do I know to call Boxy ‘she’?  Brown eyes.  Male box turtles have red eyes.  Also, Boxy laid some eggs a few years after she came to the center (not that she had been with a male while she was there).  Occasionally, Boxy has her beak trimmed.  It can get overgrown because she’s not in the wild digging and wearing it down.  I wonder if the vet has ‘styled’ her expression…she looks sad to me.  She was quite chipper this morning, though.  It’s noticeably warm for this time of year.  She and the other reptiles were moving rapidly and eagerly in their cages.  We put Boxy down in the middle of the circle of children, and she set out at a brisk pace to examine the perimeter, craning her neck up at the faces around her.  She is a bit of a celebrity, as she meets about 10,000 kids every year.  She may live to be as many as 70 years old.  I wonder if the Nature Center will still be around or if she’ll live out her last days somewhere else.

Boxy has her own beauty, her own fascinating skin.  ” The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood….Standing on the bare ground, –my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eye-ball.  I am nothing.  I see all.  The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God…I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.”  (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

What uncontained and immortal beauty will you discover to love today?

 

Muck and Muddle

by

I hate hormones.  Why anyone would want to replace estrogen once she’s finally lost it is beyond me.  The moods and emotions it produces are so murky.

I feel like I haven’t learned a damn thing about who I am, and I’m almost 50 years old.  Aren’t I supposed to get this right, eventually?

Annie Dillard writes about awakening to her consciousness when she was about 10 years old.  How do you do that at ten?  And remember what it felt like decades later?  The woman must have a brain six times the size of mine.  Here’s a passage I read this morning, from An American Childhood:

“I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years.  I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again.  I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not.  I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.

“Consciousness converges with the child as a landing tern touches the outspread feet of its shadow on the sand: precisely, toe hits toe.  The tern folds its wings to sit; its shadow dips and spreads over the sand to meet and cup its breast.

“Like any child, I slid into myself perfectly fitted, as a diver meets her reflection in a pool.  Her fingertips enter the fingertips on the water, her wrists slide up her arms.  The diver wraps herself in her reflection wholly, sealing it at the toes, and wears it as she climbs rising from the pool, and ever after.”

Why do I feel like I never achieved this perfect fit, this awakened consciousness, not as a child and that I’m struggling to find it still?   The idea of ancient grace that began this blog seems as ethereal and unattainable as ever.  The clumsy truce I’ve maintained with myself wears thin.

Time to cocoon under the blankets and let the snow fall.  Perhaps I’ll emerge as from a chrysalis and feel differently by supper.

 

27 years ago today – My Greatest Adventure began

by

I crossed a threshold.  My life was completely altered, impacted, and enhanced by a single event: I gave birth.  What that has taught me about myself, from biology to personal philosophy, and about the rest of the world by extension, might fill a future book.  Today, I’ll just touch on a few categories.

Biology – I was 21 when I got pregnant, 22 when I gave birth.  I weighed about 105 lbs. starting out and 128 lbs. at delivery.  Baby Sooz weighed 7 lbs. 4 oz.  I had never experienced so much physical change in so short a time, and each new symptom and sign astonished me.   I remember looking at myself in a full length mirror and thinking that I looked like a road map, every vein in bright blue following the landscape of my pregnant body.  Weird!  I read every bit of literature the doctor handed me with utter fascination, and photographs of babies in utero by Lennart Nilsson kept me spellbound for hours.

Family – My mother had given birth just 11 years before me, and that had been the most exciting thing in my life at the time.  I would rush home from school every day to play with the baby.  I read all the baby magazines that came in the weekly diaper service delivery.  At 22, I wanted to be as confident, as devoted, as blissful a mother as I found my own mother to be.   My father helped me pick a name.  I had originally intended to name my first daughter after my sister who had died at 20, but then, the thought of using that name all the time for another person began to seem odd.  Then my father told me that he dreamed about a little girl named Susan, and that name sounded just right with my sister’s name following.  And, of course, she got my husband’s Italian last name to add the exotic touch.  First grandchild on both sides.  Three generations assembled for her baptism.  A whole lot of expectation going on.

Personality – Just after delivery, I was wheeled to the recovery room with the baby in my arms.  The baby.  Susan.  Not my baby, not my daughter, not my family’s latest addition.  Susan.  A person I had just met.  She had a bunch of dark hair on the top of her head.  My husband and I were blonde.  I looked into her completely alert brown eyes and told her, “I love you.”  It was a conscious act of will.  She hadn’t done anything, yet.  I didn’t feel anything, yet.  I was stating my intent for our relationship, for my own benefit.  I don’t think anyone else was paying attention.  I wanted to start things off with a pledge to her, and I wanted to leave room for her to be herself.  I remember being conscious of that position when I spoke to her for the first time.  I love that she has been teaching me about who she is ever since.

As Tenebrous at The Faerie Festival

Education – Showing a young person the world for the first time is an absolute joy – a shared joy, too.  I’ve always loved teaching.  I’ve always loved learning.  To have the opportunity to engage enthusiastically with new experiences day after day is the greatest part of parenting, I think.  Language acquisition, scientific experiment, art, music, dance, games, literature….oh, wow!  The truth is, I was afraid to take her out into the world outside much.  We lived in a rather nasty section of Southern California.  I didn’t feel safe in the neighborhood, so we spent a lot of time indoors, truthfully.  I did take her to my college town a few miles away for outdoor exploration pretty regularly, though.  What I remember is a lot of time together looking at books and that when a friend asked to test her IQ just out of curiosity, her gross motor skill were the only ones that weren’t advanced for her age.  So, she’s not an athlete.  But, man, does she read!

Literature – My father delighted in bringing literature into her life.  When she was able to sound out words of three letters just before her third birthday, he wrote her little stories containing only words of three letters or less.   He sent her cassette tapes of family readings of Dr. Seuss books and various musical selections.  We visited the children’s library every week and took home as much as we could carry.  Very early, it was Richard Scarry for vocabulary, Peter Spier for detailed illustrations to talk about, A.A. Milne for poetry and stories.  Later, I remember going through all of Dr. Seuss and Bill Peet and Chris Van Allsburg and Steven Kellogg and Robert McCloskey because it was quicker to just find their stuff all at once and check out…this was when I had younger kids in tow.  Then the day I knew would come finally did.  She surpassed me.  Her reading speed and voracity and curiosity outstripped mine.  She read Stephen King’s It at the age of 9.  I hadn’t read it, and I didn’t want to read it.  She was on her own.  (Not that she didn’t do that earlier; she probably did.  But this was the one I remembered.)

Psychology – This section would require her approval and collaboration.  Suffice it to say that we have learned a lot together about who we are, who others are, and how to be in relationship.  We have always “gotten along”, though, and shared a remarkable honesty.  As adults, we really enjoy each other’s company and we genuinely like each other.  We stimulate each other in all sorts of ways…like sharing a history that enables us to reference entire concepts and discussions with one or two words.

I think that our first conversation was prophetic:

“I love you.”

*brown eyes alert, gazing back, positive*

Stay tuned for Sunday’s blog, where I’ll probably write about how we celebrated her birthday in Madison the night before….

one of those arm's-length self-portraits she took of us on our road trip to Massachusetts

Amusements

by

It’s bitter cold and sunny outside today.  A crisp, bright world, intensely interesting.  Here are some things that have captured my attention:

frost on my bedroom window

I doctored these shots a bit, which I rarely do.  There’s so much to explore in photography, even when you don’t have the latest equipment.

My mother sent me this last night.  It evoked those happy tears I told you about.

Steve brought a book to breakfast that my mother and father would love.  It’s called The Superior Person’s Book of Words by Peter Bowler and includes such delightful entries as:

“CALEFACIENT — a.  A medicinal agent producing a feeling of warmth.  ‘Calefacient, anyone?’ you inquire as you pass around the cognac.”

I am creating, with Steve, an Art Trivia Game to be debuted at a dinner party at Steve’s sister’s house celebrating Chinese New Year.  I will also be baking almond cookies to bring to the affair.  The first effort is challenging me to be humorous and inventive.  The second will require that I follow instructions precisely.  I’ll let you know if I succeed at either of those.  I do know that I’m succeeding in keeping myself entertained!

Be warmed and be well, my friends.  It’s a wonderful world we live in!

Winter in the Neighborhood

by

“Now is the winter of our discontent/ made glorious summer by this sun of York…”   – first line of Shakespeare’s play Richard III

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

Why is winter associated with Macchiavellian plots?  (I have no answer.)

What do you call an icicle with two prongs?  A bicicle.

What do you get when you photograph a bicicle from inside a screened window?

Can you tell my mind is unfocused today?  Wander with me, if you like…

I’m not the type to rush outdoors and start shoveling in a snowfall.  I stay inside until it stops, and then I wait to see how much will melt off the driveway and sidewalks all by itself.  Often, someone else has already shoveled by the time I get out.  Not very Macchiavellian of me at all.

Squirrel tracks on the garage roof

Stone-faced, pondering, feeling the weight drip slowly down the back of my neck, one cold drop at a time. I’m moody today.

 

Friday the 13th – Rats!

by

My daughter added a tidbit of info to my post a few days ago, stating that rats giggle and tickle each other.  I had to check that out and share it with you.  I found that the video at the bottom of that article didn’t work for me, so here’s a youtube clip of Dr. Jaak Panksepp playing with rats.  This is quite a happy little video of some well-behaved rates having a frolic in a nice, clean glass cage lined with AstroTurf.  I had quite a different picture of rats in my head this week.  I grabbed a book to bring to the laundromat on Monday; it happened to be a volume of selected short fiction by Charles Dickens.  I flipped to an entry called “Nurse’s Stories”.  These are not hospital accounts or memorials to field workers bringing medical aid, as I had imagined.  These are the nightmare-inducing tales that young Charles’ nanny told him!  He writes:

“The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember–as a sort of introductory overture–by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But, she never spared me one word of it, and indeed commanded the awful chalice to my lips as the only preservative known to science against ‘The Black Cat’–a weird and glaring-eyed supernatural Tom, who was reputed to prowl about the world by night, sucking the breath of infancy, and who was endowed with a special thirst (as I was given to understand) for mine.

This female bard–may she have been repaid my debt of obligation to her in the matter of nightmares and perspirations!–reappears in my memory as the daughter of a shipwright. Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me.”

He then relates the tale of a family of shipwrights, all named Chips, who sold their souls to the Devil “for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of copper and a rat that could speak”.   This speaking rat, and a cohort of his friends, bedevils poor Chips, at last sinking the ship he crews.  In the end,

“And what the rats–being water-rats– left of Chips, at last floated to shore, and sitting on him was an immense overgrown rat, laughing, that dived when the corpse touched the beach and never came up. And there was a deal of seaweed on the remains. And if you get thirteen bits of seaweed, and dry them and burn them in the fire, they will go off like in these thirteen words as plain as plain can be:

‘A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I‘ve got Chips!’

So that’s what I was thinking of when I heard about giggling rats.  And then Steve played a selection from a Schubert CD that’s made my blood run cold since I first heard it in college: Der Erlkönig.  The combination of narrative song and piano accompaniment is genius, as you’d expect with Schubert (who is Steve’s absolute favorite composer).  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is a master at putting this German ghost story across.  You’ve gotta see this.

So, if you’re not creeped out by now and looking over your shoulder for rats and elves, then enjoy the rest of your Friday the 13th in blissful peace!

New Year, new goals, new reads

by

Monday morning, back to work.  Orders for Scholar & Poet Books piled up on our dining room table over the weekend.  We’ll be taking more than 35 packages to the Post Office to be mailed today.  Some are self-help books on diet, procrastination, and clutter management.  Some are theology books, some poetry, some fiction, some children’s books, some history.  Words to buttress a new year of aspirations.  Which words will I apply to my year?

I’m not one for making New Year’s resolutions, really.  The sense of obligation and failure tweaks too much of what I’m trying to outgrow.  It struck me as I was flipping through a book of poetry by a Korean writer that we have our cultural and familial flavors stamped on us pretty early.  Guilt, shame, obligation, work ethic, judgment.  If we are aware and astute, we grow to recognize it.  If we are brave, we engage with it and come to a deeper understanding.  My Anglican family leaned toward perfectionism, rationalism, judgment.  There was always a “right” way to do something.  I want to push myself to get past that kind of assessment  and look more kindly at what is in the world.  I’ve noticed a few things that are: I’m getting older and putting on weight more easily.  Without judging myself too much, I want to be aware of my health and support it.  I’m aware of my desire to write my memoirs.  I want to turn that desire into an artifact.   I’m also aware of my desire to live lightly and gently on the planet.  Without nailing goals to the doors of my consciousness, can I make efforts and decisions that will guide me closer to the life I envision?  We’ll see.

Steve & I finished reading D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, so we set up another book selection.  This is kind of a game for us.  Steve picks a box full of likely candidates and numbers them.  I pick two numbers, look at the books, and choose one.  The reject is then out of the running.  I keep doing this until I’ve gotten down to one book.  This is sometimes an agonizing process because I want to read them all!  This is where I have to tell myself that I can’t make a “wrong” choice.  If we get stuck with something we don’t enjoy, we can always abandon it and choose something else.  If we pass up something intriguing, we can always go back to it.  So, out of 24 books, I came away with Italo Calvino’s The Road to San Giovanni.  I feel bad about putting Rilke’s Letters on Cezanne on the reject stack, but I’ve been dipping into it anyway.  No, I’m not “cheating”.  I am living.  No, I’m not “undisciplined”.  I am feeding myself.  I think of Anne Lamott in Traveling Mercies describing the epiphany she had when she broke through her habits and learned to eat.  It’s not about setting up rules so that you can get neurotic about them.  It’s about feeling a hunger and responding to it.  Choosing what to read, choosing what to eat, choosing how to live.  It can be a simple, graceful process.  Why do we often make it torture?

Joyful possibilities set before us. Happy choosing!

A New Year – 2012

by

I really enjoy my No TV New Year’s celebrations.  My late husband was a habitual TV user.  He grew up that way, so New Year’s Eve with him always included some televised ball drop with interviews and pop music.  My parents stored the TV in the den closet and brought it out on for certain occasions like National Geographic specials and episodes of Masterpiece Theater and Monty Python.  Steve and I don’t even own a TV, so once more I am back on my original footing.  What do we do instead?  I’m so glad you asked.

Yesterday afternoon, after some homemade lentil soup, we snuggled up in bed with the laptop on the breakfast tray to watch another installment of the DVD we borrowed from the library: Simon Schama’s “The Power of Art”.  The featured artist this time was JMW Turner.  Epic skies, light, emotion, chaos, romanticism.  The photography in the film paralleled the visual of the oil paintings quite effectively.  It was a scenic feast.  The sun was setting while we watched and cast its last rays across the bed as it ended.  We discussed the experience for a while, and then I excused myself to nod off for a nap.  My brain was over-stimulated, I think, and I needed to close my eyes to let the images settle.

I awoke about an hour later.  I was thinking about a book on photography that my son had been browsing on Christmas.  I went downstairs to find it and fix drinks and appetizers.  Steve joined me and brought a book on Turner that he had found in his stack.  So we nibbled brie and Gorgonzola on crackers and sipped vodka martinis while looking at pictures and discussing art.  The attempt to point to something beyond ourselves, to depict holistically the experience of living in body, mind and soul…how do we do that?  Reality isn’t all realistic…impressionism, expressionism & romanticism try to get at something more, something beyond, some movement and change that is hidden but implied.  As we talked, the salmon fillet was baking and the brown rice simmering.  We moved on to dinner and talked about memories.  I was recalling the last heart surgery my late husband had and how I tried to manage my anxiety as I looked out the window in the atrium of the cardiac wing.   Consciousness and fear, peace and presence.  What is reality, anyway?  I drained my glass of the last drops of Chardonnay and cleared the dishes.  We then settled on the couch with James Joyce’s Dubliners to read our favorite story, “The Dead”.  I first read this aloud to Steve our first Christmas together.  We had gone to a bed & breakfast place in Whitewater, Wisconsin called The Hamilton House.  We had “The Pisarro” room in this 1861 mansion, and I read to him from the satin-covered four poster that night.  I remembered enjoying a chance to use my theatrical British accent and reveling in the details of the text that reminded me of my family’s Christmas celebrations.  I had absorbed the atmosphere and the dialogue, but didn’t really catch the arc of the piece that first time.  I had been curiously surprised to find Steve in tears as I finished.  So, last night, I paid particular attention to the end of the story, the widening of scope in the main character’s vision.  The story is brilliantly crafted.  “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”  I read the final line and looked up to see Steve wiping his eyes.  He spoke a while about the expansive feeling of love that story illustrates for him.

Subdued but happy, I rose to check the time.  It was already NYC midnight, so I brought out the bottle of champagne and the fruitcake my eldest sister had sent.   Now, I know what you’re thinking.  “You had me up to the fruitcake!”  But listen, this recipe has been in my family for as long as I can remember.  It’s Julia Child’s version, I think.  It’s dark and rich with fruit and nuts and brandy and rum.  I topped our slices off with a little hard sauce, too.  (You know, brandy and sugar and butter…like frosting.)  Forget your prejudices and work with me, people!  So we ate fruitcake, sipped champagne and talked about our year together.  I moved in with him last January 10; he’d been living alone almost his entire adult life.  We had my daughter’s cat for the first 8 months of the year.  We took a 4 week road trip to the West Coast in April.  We entertained family and friends for dinner and “sleep overs”.  We have changed, danced, been with each other in all of our facets and moods.  It’s been a beautiful year.  The digital clock on the stove shone out 12:00 and we kissed.  We finally put on some music to accompany the new year.  Steve selected the movie soundtrack from “2001: A Space Odyssey”. We skipped the Richard Strauss and listened to the atonal and dissonant Ligeti pieces and then the Blue Danube waltz.  Mysterious, elegant, spacious.  Our world is huge.  I don’t like to imagine it being shut up in a box on TV.  I am looking forward to sampling it all year in different ways, through all of my senses.