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.
Spinning Yarns
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.
VIP Tour
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 Putting Down Roots: Gardening Insights from Wisconsin’s Early Settler’s includes historical references, tools and plot layouts, produce recipes from each ethnic area, and a lot of other wonderful information and sumptuous photographs of the meticulously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.
In the sauna at the Finnish Ketola farm
One of the friendly faces on the tour
Midsummer Magic
We’re closing the museum early tonight. Bands with modern sound equipment, street vendors with FOOD, and other period inappropriate shenanigans will materialize in the Village for a midsummer festival (and fund-raiser). Staff members get to mingle, eat, drink, and dance for free! Guess where I’m going to be after hours! Here’s a link to show you more.
Spacious Skies
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.
Alice Through My Lens
Blue eyes. That was one thing that made her unique among 4 sisters. She had our father’s eyes. She was the shortest among us; I believe I grew to have at least a half an inch over her. But that took a while. Since she was 3 years older, I trailed behind her most of my life. I definitely didn’t mind following in her footsteps. I adored her. She was the sweet sister, the kind one, the one who loved children and animals and had friends. She somehow spanned the gap between being a nerd and being popular. Not that she wasn’t picked on early in grade school. We all were, and she was very sensitive to it. When she was 10, she ran away from a boy who was chasing her down the sidewalk. He caught up to her and managed to grab the back of her coat hood. He yanked her down hard, and she fell backwards onto the sidewalk, hitting her head and fracturing her skull. The boy was sent to military school, and Alice recovered amid cards and gifts and angels surrounding her bed.
She started dating first among us, though she wasn’t the oldest. I wanted to learn how this “boyfriend” business worked, so I watched her very closely, sometimes through the living room drapery while she was on the porch kissing her date goodnight. She modeled how to be affectionate in the midst of a distinctly cerebral family, shy about demonstrating emotion. She gave me my first pet name: Golden Girl or Goldie, and then the one that stuck in my family, PG or sometimes Peej. By the time I was 16, we were very close friends as well as sisters. She invited me to spend Spring Break with her at college, and enjoyed “showing me off”. She told me that the boys were noticing me and that she’d need to protect me. I was thrilled!
Alice and Mike in Los Gatos, summer 1979
We spent that summer at home together in California. I introduced her to my new boyfriend, who eventually became my husband. She begged our parents to allow me to be her passenger on a road trip back to campus at the end of the summer. She had just bought a car, and although I couldn’t drive, I could keep her company, sing with her along the way, and be her companion. The road trip was a travel adventure flavored with freedom, sisterly love, and the sense of confidence and brand new responsibility. We flopped the first night in a fleabag motel in the same bed. She woke earlier than I and told me as I roused and stretched how sweet I looked cuddling the stuffed bunny my boyfriend had bought me. Then we stayed with her friends in Colorado. Our next day’s journey was to go through the heartland of the country and hopefully, if we made good time, get to Chicago for the night. We never made it.
Nebraska is flat and boring. We’d been driving for 6 hours. I was reclined and dozing when we began to drift off the fast lane, going 80 mph. Alice over-corrected, and we flipped. She had disconnected her shoulder strap, and flopped around, hitting her head on pavement through the open window. Her fragile, gentle head, with two blue eyes. She was dead by the time we came to rest in the ditch.
Life is an experience, a journey of unexpected and unimagined happening, a verb in motion, not a noun. Alice was in motion, at 20, and may be even now…somewhere, in some form. I still taste her sweetness floating near me from time to time.
Three of four sisters, Christmas 1978
You Know It’s Summer When…
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You go to punch out at the time clock after work and there’s a bowl of freezer pops and a scissors beside the machine.
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You’re too hot to cook, so you end up at the local Mexican restaurant drinking a frozen margarita in your Indian print drawstring skirt and sandals.
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It’s a race to see who can get down to wearing next to nothing as soon as you get inside the house.
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You’ve got all the windows open after the sun goes down, and you can hear dog-walkers chatting together on the sidewalk every 5 minutes.
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The squeaky ceiling fan becomes your bedtime lullaby.
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The thunderstorm that’s predicted for 2 a.m. gives you that secret thrill that you look forward to in your dreams.
Sweet summer night, my friends. Tomorrow when it’s cooler, I’ll tell you a story about my sister.
Be Cool!
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!!
I Promised My Mother-in-law
I promised to dedicate a post to my mother-in-law for her birthday, which was the 16th. The last time I saw her alive was on her birthday in the year 2001. She died sometime the following week, alone in her apartment, while we were traveling. That fact is consistent with the mystique I associate with remembering her. I’ll never be certain who she really was, although I have many theories. I have been told that she was a concert pianist as a young woman and that she played for Rachmaninoff when she was 16. I have seen the signed program portrait that he gave her. I did hear her play as an accompanist for our community theater. She was definitely capable, even with arthritis. I wish I had known the passion of her younger years. I saw in her such a mixture of joy and anxiety as a mature woman. She had a playfulness and sense of humor that I found completely amusing, so much more casual than my own mother’s. She was a grade school teacher with the ability to relate to people in a very natural way. She was sentimental about cats and dogs and friendship and children. As I learned more about her relationship with her mother, though, a very painful history emerged, steeped in shame and punishment. I’m sure that was the root of the depression that lingered throughout her life. She carried scars and secrets with her to the grave. We only learned about them when her sister-in-law spoke up after the funeral. I imagine, though, that she would have liked to allow the sunniest parts of her personality to shine through unclouded. It was her ability to laugh in the face of fear that I illustrated at her memorial service when I told this story:
In June of 1992, she came out to visit us from California. We had only been living in Illinois since August, and Jim had been through an emergency cardiac procedure that January. She came out eager to see him recovering and to bask in the hugs of her four grandchildren. He had a scheduled check-up during her stay, and learned that his arteries were even more clogged than in January. He was advised to undergo double bypass surgery as soon as possible. He was 31. She decided to extend her stay indefinitely and see what happened next. Her anxiety was tremendous, and so was mine. Her sense of humor, however, surfaced much more readily. It was her coping strategy, and it matched his perfectly. The day of the surgery was stormy and dangerous. A tornado touched down in the vicinity of the hospital and cut out power just as he was coming out of surgery and off the breathing machine. A frantic nurse grabbed a mouth tube and bag to squeeze air into his lungs. Marni and I were shaking all over and clutching hands as we watched. Moments later, the generators kicked in and a calmer air prevailed. Jim was breathing unassisted, and he was motioning me to come closer to tell me something. I leaned in to hear him say in a hoarse whisper, “They found out what was wrong with my heart.” “Yes, dear…” “When they opened me up, they found this!” His hand moved under the bedsheets by his side. I looked down and discovered that he was clutching the broken figure off of one of his bowling trophies. “The Bowler” was a running gag we had started the first year of our marriage. He surfaced in Christmas stockings, random drawers, and even in the bouquet of roses Jim brought onstage after my senior voice recital. How in the world did Jim manage to stage another practical joke on the day of his heart surgery?!! Well, he had an accomplice, of course. His mother, who smiled mildly and innocently at the end of the bed while I looked around in utter amazement. Then we all tried to keep from laughing too hard, only because it was so painful for Jim when he tried to join in.
Recovering from heart surgery, smiles intact.
So, whatever troubles lay at the core of my mother-in-law’s psyche, I appreciate that she had the desire to live happily and tried to do that as much as possible. She truly loved her children and grandchildren and enjoyed so many pleasures with them. She shared what joy she found with a lot of kids during her lifetime as a teacher, and I’m sure many are grateful and remember her to this day.
The Kreativ Blogger Award
I have been nominated for The Kreativ Blogger Award by Naomi Baltuck of Writing Between the Lines. I learned more about her life in her latest post and recognized more places of resonance between us. Receiving this honor from a published writer and professional storyteller gives me a bit of a thrill, to tell the truth. Thank you, Naomi!
The rubric of the award suggests that I publish 7 facts about myself and then nominate 7 other bloggers for this award. I never consider these customs obligatory or binding, so we are all free to do with it what we will. Think of it as a collection of beads on a string, something to fiddle with if you are so inclined. Here goes:
1) My work life as of now includes hours when I am engulfed by a corset, bustle, petticoats, and a prairie bonnet. I sew pin cushions and crochet rag rugs and play the pump organ. It also includes time when I sit in my underwear at my grandmother’s cherry table in the dining room, listening to Big Band music from the 30s, bantering with my partner Steve, and cleaning up used books for shipment to new readers. And at times it includes working one-on-one with an individual who wants to learn more about vocal technique, singing, performing, and discovering the bag of sonic tricks they carry around in their bodies. I am never going back to work in a cubicle again!
2) I find looking at the sky a life-changing event.
