The Ketola family were Finnish immigrants who settled in Wisconsin just before the turn of the 20th century. Their daughter had scoliosis and was mostly bedridden from the age of 20 until her death at age 40. When her parents died (in their 90s!), her brothers took care of her. They bought her a parlor piano and set it up in her bedroom so that they could keep up a public appearance of humble simplicity by closing the door when visitors came. It wouldn’t do to have the neighbors think they’d squandered their earnings on such a luxury! The brothers never married and lived in the house without electricity or plumbing well into the 1960s. They had electricity in the barn, though, for milking.
Your family, your bed, and your music. That sounds like a nice retreat to me! Healing wishes to all….
I love this fence. It’s made from the roots of trees that were cleared to make farms. It’s in the Finnish area of Old World Wisconsin. I wish I had photographed it earlier in the season before the roadside weeds grew so tall.
Tomorrow, I have a day off, and I’m looking forward to being able to spend some time with some issues that have surfaced (again) in my inner life. Grief is always there; I had another dream with Jim in it that made me wake in tears. Existential angst is there; today, I found myself embroidering “Alle Menschen ist der Grasse” on my sample cloth. And the differences between me and my partner Steve are always there. I had a vision of this a few days ago where I saw him as an archaeologist in a deep quest for something, sweeping away at an artifact to remove bits of dust and reveal some very important discovery. I saw myself as a widow who had lost everything, sitting among shards of broken glass, saying, “Oooh, sparkly!” to whichever bit caught her attention. To be honest, I attribute some of this mood to the hormonal cycle that still influences every month. However, cycles are natural, and to be brought back to a place of regular introspection is a good thing, I think. Anyway, I may have something more poetic and cohesive to say about the meaning of life….later.
I took this picture yesterday at Old World Wisconsin. This is Rachel, one of my colleagues, at the spinning wheel in the Kvaale house. Rachel is over 6 feet tall, and it’s a wonder she hasn’t given herself a concussion every day as she passes from this room into the kitchen. The doorway is probably only 5 and a half feet tall.
The Norwegian immigrants knew how to stay warm – a very useful skill in Wisconsin winters, too.
Late in the afternoon yesterday, some VIPs came to tour Old World Wisconsin. Unfortunately, they arrived only an hour before closing and didn’t have ample opportunity to view the 575 acres and 50 buildings that comprise this living history museum. So today, my day off, I took them back to the site and gave them a personal tour. I also secured for them a copy of the historical gardening book that our expert, Marcia Carmichael, published last year. Putting Down Roots: Gardening Insights from Wisconsin’s Early Settler’s includes historical references, tools and plot layouts, produce recipes from each ethnic area, and a lot of other wonderful information and sumptuous photographs of the meticulously researched and maintained gardens. I know this couple is beginning to practice organic gardening, and they are eager to learn all they can. In addition to that, the young man is a carpenter, and was thrilled to see the craftsmanship on the original structures. They were able to get some behind-the-scenes photos and detailed descriptions of the building methods of the 19th century.Each of the interpreters in the various houses were in fine form, communicating information and interest in a very friendly and professional manner. The weather was perfect for our visit, and we skipped the tram rides and walked the entire circuit of trails through the site. It was an altogether delightful tour, and I enjoyed seeing parts of the museum that hadn’t been included in my training schedule. I consider it a privilege to have been invited to host this marvelous young couple. Who were they? My daughter, Rebecca, and her boyfriend Joe.
I spent the day in the 19th century, working at Old World Wisconsin, so naturally, I wasn’t allowed to be wandering around with a camera. I have to admit, though, I did square off my fingers to imagine a few frames. The sky today was absolutely breathtaking. Big cumulus clouds with flat, gray bottoms were floating around as if on parade. Looking up outside St. Peter’s church, with its 1839 bell tower and cross silhouetted against these clouds was like looking at a catalog of “INSPIRATIONAL”. I remembered back to the days when I was living in Los Angeles County, CA, feeling as if I would suffocate any minute. To look across the atmosphere to the horizon was like looking into a thick bean soup. Even looking straight up would remind you of watery hot cocoa. I longed to escape the valley and take off for clearer skies. I thought I could simply ascend the mountains and be in a brighter, cleaner, more natural world, but it wasn’t that easy. Everything is Owned in California. There is hardly any open land. We did get an invitation one weekend to house-sit for a retired couple who lived on Mt. Baldy. Their home was beautiful, furnished with antiques, quiet, nestled away from the highway in the pine trees. It was good enough. I took our nine-month old daughter in the baby backpack, my Canon AE-1, and left the smoggy valley behind. There is a photograph from that weekend etched in my mind. I’ve got on my beloved hiking boots, Susan is smiling in the pack on my back, my skinny legs are striding over a boulder. I was in the throes of postpartum depression; I weighed 98 pounds, and I was nursing. My husband’s buddies called me “Tits on a Stick” behind my back. I was struggling for survival. (photo added Jan. 20, 2024, see below)
Some years after that, I was living in suburban Illinois, and the skies opened up over the prairie. I would wander out to open land while the kids were in school and get lost in the clouds. I remember September 11, 2001, as a clear, sunny, perfect sky day. I spent the afternoon out in the prairie after having saturated myself in the news that morning. I look to the sky when I am confused. Back in the heyday of my Christian spiritual journey, I wrote this poem:
The Sky
Did I ever thank you for the sky
spread far around like an open field
piled high with moods and structures,
a playground for my soul?
This space above bids my thoughts expand
to climb the heights of an anvil-cloud
and teeter on the edge of a dazzling glare
or slide down the shafts of the sun,
To swim to the center of its lonely blue
Where I find no mist to hide me,
and lie exposed to the western wind
like a mountain braced for sunrise.
Or clad in the shroud of brooding gray,
it coaxes me to musings
far removed from the minutiae
that chains me to my life.
I search for light and openness
to shadow the bonds of earth,
exploring the vault of heaven
for its meaning and its truth.
Thanks for this cathedral speaking glory through its art.
Thank you for these eyes admitting You into my heart.
Even though the calendar says that summer is still officially 2 days away, I beg to differ. It’s 94 degrees F and humid here in Wisconsin. Let’s just call it summer already! At work, folks are already bringing in treats like ice cream sandwiches, freezer pops and a keg of root beer with a cooler of vanilla ice cream for making floats. People stand around talking about the heat, which, frankly, doesn’t improve anything. We work at an outdoor living history museum; we don’t have air conditioning, just like people for centuries didn’t have air conditioning. I don’t have air conditioning in my 21st century home, either. It’s not that big a deal! Slow down, strip down, get wet, make a breeze, and evaporation will happen eventually. And while you’re waiting, silent and still, be amazed at how much life is thriving around you! Summertime!!
The obvious blog subject of the day here in the U.S. of A. is Father’s Day. I have two stellar examples of fathers prominent in my thoughts and conspicuously absent in the flesh. My husband, the father of my four children, died in 2008. My father, who had 5 children, died in 2010. What they have in common is that they both felt woefully disappointed by their own fathers (at one time) and were determined to do better. I’m glad to say that my husband had the chance to improve his relationship with his dad over the years, whereas my father did not. They both had an internal sense of the kind of father they wanted to be, and were clear in their values. They were incredibly dependable, stable providers of basic things, although in slightly different mixtures. My husband was far more of a “warm fuzzy”, emotional Teddy Bear. My father provided more structure and logic. I’ve come to realize that these are not opposite qualities in parenting, they are important components. There are as many ways of concocting a life-giving balance as there are fathers.
My favorite memories of my dad contain literary and educational aspects: his voice reading aloud from story books, the ballet and opera and museum tickets he treated us to regularly, the vacations and nature walks we went on. My favorite memories of my husband as a father are visceral and physical: how he held them, laughed with them, cried with them, sang to them, praised them and worried over them. When a man is giving the best he has to his children, it’s a beautiful thing. Well worth celebrating, whatever flavor it comes in.
You gotta give Dad a tie on Father’s Day…
(Okay, photographers, clearly the slides taken by my father’s Leica in the 1970s came out better than the prints from my Canon AE-1 that I scanned into a dusty screen. My brother-in-law converted the slides to digital images somehow; I love how sharp they are!)
Today’s date is reserved for a blog about my mother-in-law, who was born on this day. However, I just don’t have time to do Marni justice, since I didn’t get home from work until 6:30, made dinner, walked to the market and am now eagerly anticipating the arrival of my oldest daughter and her First Mate for a sleepover visit and Sunday breakfast, after which I go back to work until 6pm again. I apologize for the disappointment, but promise to do my best to honor her at a later time. Here’s a teaser about this beloved person: she was a concert pianist. She played for Rachmaninoff when she was 16. Yeah. And as a grandma, she was a computer game geek. You’re gonna love her.
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.
scillagrace 