Where I’m From

07 Thursday Mar 2019

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in writingdownthestory in Blog, writingdownthestory in Photograph

Tags

Christina Baldwin, George Ella Lyon, legacy writing, letters from World War 2, Marty's Place at Strawbridge Farm, Peer Spirit, Saratoga Passage, Self as Source of the Story, she writes press, Staebler Farm County Park, the great depression, the greatest generation, Where I'm From poem

I’ve spent the past week in a gorgeous historic house on the south Whidbey Island banks of the Saratoga Passage of Puget Sound. I first attended Christina Baldwin’s Self as Source of the Story writing retreat in 2012, five months after I moved back to this corner of the country. I’ve returned to the alumni retreat four times. It’s a gift I’ve given myself.

I’m writing, reading, and listening to the powerful stories of my writing sisters, eating delicious healthy food, watching eagles carrying sticks into a nearby copse for nest building and two coyote pups trotting about. The first four days the cerulean sky reflected on the calm waters and the white mountain range sparkled on the horizon. Yesterday we cocooned in front of the fire, as the world disappeared in gently falling snow.

I am honored and humbled to sit in communion with the natural world and in community with these beautiful women and bear witness to their sacred words and experiences. Although each year some of them begin as strangers, they are my tribe.

It’s different to be here this year, not escaping the lonely claustrophobic years of caring for my mother; and not writing about those years, that manuscript complete for now. Yesterday, on the first day of Lent and the new moon, in the midst of this gathering of women, some of whom first heard the beginnings of my story more than six years ago, I pushed the manuscript out of the nest. I sent it to a small press/editorial company (that auspiciously had its beginnings the same year I began my journey of mother care) for an assessment. Later this month I am going to submit the first 26 pages to a contest. It’s time to see if it can fly.

And now it’s time to move on to a new project. This week I’ve immersed myself in the letters written by my elders during WWII, when they were younger than my children are now, and the stories of their lives on the Michigan farm when they were the ages of my grandchildren. It’s hard to put down an old familiar project and pick up a new one. I feel a little lost. But I look toward spinning the threads of my ancestors’ story into yarn, that it might then be woven into a blanket to wrap around those who will never know them: my children’s children’s children’s children, and their cousins.

The Seventh Generation Principle is based on an ancient Iroquois philosophy that the decisions we make today should result in a sustainable world seven generations into the future. The decisions my grandparents made in the way they raised their children in love and strong values, and saw that all six of them got a college education—inconceivable for the 1930s and on a farmer’s income during the Great Depression—can be seen one, two, and three generations later (my lifetime) and will continue, I trust, to the seventh generation and beyond.

This is where I’m from. This is where the seventh generation of my family will be from.

These are the legacy years, when we of a certain age look back at where we have been and ahead to what we will one day leave behind. In the legacy writing circle I facilitate, we wrote “Where I’m From” poems last week, in the style of George Ella Lyon. (How serendipitous that my father’s name is George and his mother’s name is Ella.) I invite you to write your own poem—it’s so much fun. (Google “where I’m from template” for help writing it, apologies that I can’t get a direct link.) Here is mine.

Where I’m From

I am from the slamming wooden screen door and Mr. Bear’s house in the woods,
from Breck shampoo and Ipana toothpaste, iodine and oleum percomorphum.

I am from the house on the bay and the home on the hill,
from stinky sulphur mud at low tide and fresh perfume of evergreens after rain.
I am from the big leaf maple whose arms hide me from parental view.

I am from the bookmobile and the green canoe,
from Stellajoe and George
and Ella and Jessie.
I am from “go help your mother,” “don’t sass me,” and my southern grandmother’s “well ahl swanee.”

I’m from staying put and cross-country moves,
from independence and courage.
I’m from crossing the ocean on a sailing ship and the country on the Empire Builder.
I am from my parents’ Great Depression,
and from my man on the moon.

I am from “This Is My Father’s World,” Girl Scout badges, and piano lessons in the pink house.
From Boston baked beans and chocolate “stir over low heat until thick” Jell-o pudding.
I’m from homemade 2×4 building blocks and dish gardens,
from heart disease and dementia.

I am from eight decades of antiquity stuffed onto basement shelves.
From a thousand letters and shoe boxes of photographs
snapped on cameras that line my window sill
where I sit at my father’s desk to put stories of days and people long gone between the covers of a book.

In Search of My Mother’s Garden

28 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in writingdownthestory in Blog, writingdownthestory in Essay

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

farming in the 1900s, gardening in the Pacific Northwest, legacy writing, letters from World War 2, living in my childhood home, living without my mother, Mary Alice Arthur, my mother's garden, restoring a garden, searching for my mother, Story the Future, winter garden

The house is not the only place that needs to be cleaned out, or where I search for my mother. The hillside garden—that was grass I sometimes mowed, before I left home in 1970, with the Toro Flymo hover mower to avoid having to be on raking detail—is the only outdoor area my mother really tended to in the past couple decades. It was a glorious riot of colorful perennials and flowering shrubs all spring and summer: heather, rhododendron, Shasta daisies, lavender, yarrow, iris, allium, dianthus, sweet woodruff, my grandmother’s lemon lilies.

Emma and Wynne’s 2012 wedding; the last time the garden looked good.

I’ve been here seven years this summer, and have paid it only cursory attention, pulling blackberry vines and cutting down dead stems—nearly wiping out the Canterbury bells in my zealous outrage at having to do the task at all after my mother stopped hiring people to care for it, and stopped caring about it herself. I don’t like working in other people’s gardens, and even my own interest me much more in the creation than the maintenance. It lost all its variety under my watch, only the most hardy survived.

One day last week, though, I walked past it on my way to somewhere else and realized that in the barrenness of winter, before the weeds take hold, it doesn’t look as daunting. I could just rake out the moss, I thought, kicking it up easily with the toe of my rubber boot; bring in some top soil.

Nothing seems as daunting to me in winter, when all is stripped down to its bones. I see more clearly when there are neither flowers nor weeds; potential rather than obstacles. I’m embarking on a new writing project, diving into the lives of my father and his siblings before I knew them through 1200 letters written during WWII and boxes of photographs, hoping to record their legacy and put it between book covers. It’s easier to attend that project at the desk by the electric fireplace while the rain splats against the window and patters on the roof, occasionally thickening with fat snow flakes, than when sun and warmth beckon. But where to start? How to move forward on this epic idea that right now is hair thin?

Last Sunday, as the wintry mix came down outside the window, covering the moss and weed garden, I dozed in my father’s recliner with my sister’s cat—on loan while she was away—while half listening to a rebroadcast of interviews on “Story the Future.”

Mary Alice Arthur said something that woke me from my snooze: “Start with the crack, not with boulder. You know,” she said, “that’s where the light is.” Oh, I thought, kind of like don’t look too far ahead.

What can I do toward getting the letters and the stories my father and his siblings have written of their childhood braided together? How can I bring my mother’s garden to new life as I am doing inside the house, moving out unloved possessions to spotlight those that mean something to me? Where is the crack?

My dad on the left. Donald at right. The sixth child not yet born.

I can read the letters and the stories, study the photographs. (Thank you to my cousin David for scanning and sending 50 photos I’ve never seen before from albums rescued from the farm after our Uncle Donald died at 106.) I can figure out what I want to have learned about this American mid-west farm family at the end of the book. That’s all I need to focus on right now. What comes in the middle can be left for later discovery.

And I can strip the garden down to dirt. Those cracks are all I need to focus on right now.

When February’s snow and rain took a one day hiatus last Thursday, I skipped my weekly yoga and Olympia day and got outside while the ice was still formed on the puddles and fog still filled the valley as the sun rose promisingly above it.

I cut down the dead stems of last year’s daisies and rudbeckia, raked out the moss, dug up clumps of grassy weeds, pulled out rogue blackberry vines, and finished extracting the dead branches from the rhododendron thicket. (And, as always, tried to avoid getting sucked down the rabbit hole of all the other tasks that need to be done. One crack at a time.) For the first time in these years here, I started getting curious about what the garden could be. It will always be my mother’s garden, but it’s time to put my own touch on it.

Before.

Headed toward cleaned out and ready for what comes next.

As I sat at the dining room table eating my lunch during a brief break, I wondered if my mother is pleased that I’ve finally taken an interest in her favorite flower bed. Just then a bald eagle glided down the valley and swooped over the house and back into view, making several passes. A few minutes after it disappeared, a red-tailed hawk took its place. I only rarely see these birds of prey here, up close enough to see the white head, the red feathers. When I do, I imagine they are my mother and father checking in and, hopefully, approving what I’m doing on this property they loved and nourished for most of my life. I took their appearance as a sign that all is well; though I suppose it could as easily have been a warning to back off.

My body aching, I was grateful for the return to rain, snow, sleet, and wind the next day. I buried myself again in my aunt’s letters to her parents from a dirt-floored tent in Italy in 1944 with the 36th General Hospital, where she washed her clothes in her helmet. When favorable weather returns, I’ll give my mother’s garden one more pass with hoe and shovel, then bring in topsoil and fertilizer. I will let it sit this summer to see what was deep enough in the ground to escape my decluttering. The daisies and rudbeckia, the heather, a clump of daffodils remain above ground. Hopefully the Canterbury bells, alium, and lilies will come back and I can mark their positions. Next spring I will plant around the enduring presence of my mother’s hands.

These are the cracks. This is what I can do right now to find my mother’s garden and to make my own mark. I will be with my writing tribe on Whidbey Island for the next week, diving into whatever opening I can find on my ambitious writing project; striving not to run into the boulder of self-doubt and the magnitude of that adventure.

Honoring the Past…and Cursing the Remains

21 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in Notes from Three of Earth Farm, writingdownthestory in Blog, writingdownthestory in Memories, writingdownthestory in Photograph

≈ 4 Comments

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#ThreeofEarthFarm, award plaques, cleaning out my parents' home, letters from World War 2, living in my childhood home, memoir, memories of my father, nostalgia, this old house, William N. Williford, writing memoir, WWII marriages

I’m immersed in the past living in this house, even as I continue to update it. I’ve moved more stuff to the storage room permanently as I empty rooms temporarily for the installation of new flooring. I hold in my hands a pink and white crocheted hot pad, that perhaps my grandmother made, from the dining room buffet drawer and wonder what I’m to do with it.

I find three small plates in the back corner of the buffet cupboard and read the note my mother wrote eight years and eleven days before she died in her strong script that held no hint of what was to come. Of course she included instructions. The plates don’t bring me joy, but they are heirlooms. Sigh. Three plates, three daughters. At least I only need put one back in the cupboard.

Knowing they would eventually come down to paint the wall, I removed the award plaques and certificates from my father’s study several weeks ago and crammed them into a cupboard in the basement. I talk to my friend Elizabeth who has been my caregiving pen pal for years as we cared for our mothers on opposite coasts and tried to stay in touch with our sanity. Her mother just died. Finally. She’s cleaning out her mother’s apartment, bringing boxes to her house. She also cleaned out her childhood home when she moved her parents closer to her a few years back, and took boxes to her house.

“Think of all the wood and metal award plaques in this country,” she says. “What are children to do with them in the end times? They mean nothing to anyone but the recipient. [Even that, only at the moment of the handshake.] We’re filling up landfills with things that will last thousands of years!” I hadn’t thought of that. The cheap trophies every child who plays t-ball gets at the end of the season… “They should be banned,” Elizabeth says.

I am proud to say I haven’t a single plaque or trophy to my name. My children can thank me later for being so unremarkable. The tiny plaster of Paris busts of dead musicians I got as a piano student were long ago sent to the landfill, before I knew to worry about that. I did not inherit the Depression era saver gene—or my parents unknowingly drove it from me.

The margarine containers our mothers didn’t throw out so as not to fill landfills are left to us to discard. (Hopefully when they are put in recycling bins, they actually do turn into something new.) The military uniforms. (The local museum has all they need.) Eleven 3-inch binders of letters written between 1942 and 1946. (I’m told there is a national museum in Louisiana that might take them when I’m finished with them.) All! This! Stuff! Multiplied by hundreds of thousands of parents who came of age at the confluence of the Great Depression and the beginning of WWII who have or are leaving it all behind at the speed of light.

This is sounding remarkably similar to my post at the beginning of the month. (Read it here if you missed it.) It’s my life right now, and some day my sisters and I really will have to figure out what to do with the pink hot pad and all the rest. But that is not today.

I spent a rare full day Sunday working on my new writing project. Not actually writing, mind you, but preparing. I’m still revising my memoir of years of elder care and accompaniment too. 138,000 words is down to 113,000. It needs to be fewer than 100,000 before I can even hire an editor.

I’m itching to move on to my epic undertaking involving the 11 binders of letters and a collection of stories my father and his siblings wrote about their childhood on the farm if I have any hope of finishing it before I die. And I need full days to immerse myself. But there’s this old house and its stuff and the roof needs to be cleaned off again and there is a blocked trail and at least three large branches down to saw into firewood and spring weeds and blackberry vines are coming soon to the overgrown property and someone needs to be hired to rebuild rotting steps and paint the deck.

I’m reading my aunt’s letters now, and it’s throwing me back in time to the departed generation of my family long before I knew them. She’s in Africa, Italy, and France in 1943 and 1944, washing clothes in cold water in an army helmet, trying to breathe on frigid days when the wind blows through the pipe of the coal stove and fills the room with smoke and soot, and the hospital unit has moved again and she’s back in a tent with dirt floors. She falls in love, twice. I’m wondering with her what happened to her navy man Roy when letters are returned “whereabouts unknown.”

I unfold a letter to her little brother and a photograph of Bill, her second love, falls out. “The next addition to the Staebler family” is written on the back. I read that they applied for a wedding license, but she doesn’t know if they will still be in the same country when, or if, it comes—or if he will even be alive. I know there is drama to come; he was not my uncle.

I’m there with my grandmother as she provides shelter for my mother while my father provides weather forecasts for bombardiers in England; imagining her writing hundreds of letters and reading those from her far away children, making notes on envelopes to remind her of what they have asked her to send them: film (if she can find it), popcorn, chocolate, pajamas.

I have a lively communication with two of my cousins who accompany me on this journey through the Staebler archives. David, bless his heart, is executor of our uncle’s estate, which included cleaning out the farm house the family lived in for a century. At least there are no 30-year-old jars of canned tomatoes in my house. His sister Linda sorted through my aunt’s and uncle’s letters to their mother and put them in five of the binders to go with those my father wrote to his young wife and his mother. She’s downsizing her living space soon and is sending me our aunt’s scrapbooks, photographs, and account of her service. (Insert wide-eyed emoticon.) David has found photographs our grandmother took of life on the farm and is scanning them for me. I’m thrilled to receive it all; and…more stuff.

I sit here at my desk now and wonder how I’m going to pull all this together and get it between book covers. And will anybody care? Which reminds me, I still have my mother’s tapes of her life story to transcribe. I care. Maybe all that matters is to know that I honored their living. And that I remember them.

Love Letters from the Footlocker

14 Thursday Feb 2019

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in writingdownthestory in Memories

≈ 4 Comments

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#loveletters, courting in 1905, letters from World War 2, love letters, valentines day

Back in the olden days, when lovers were apart—a few miles or thousands—they explored love on paper. There were few telephone calls filled with words that would fall into the void after they were spoken and heard once; no email that generations to follow will never see. Of course, only the savers will pass on old letters. For better or worse, I come from a family of savers.

My paternal grandfather, Albert, died the year before I was born. I have photo copies of two letters he wrote to my grandmother before they were married in September 1905. Yes, that first one is six sentences of creative spelling in beautiful penmanship.

…your true and loving boy, Albert

I have hundreds of letters written by my father to my mother during WWII, in which he poured out his longing for her. The first one here was written while he was in officer training a year before they were married in November 1943; the second is from Europe a few months before the end of the war. Most of their developing relationship, from the time they met until he came home in April 1946 and they finally began their life together, was poured out in letters.

I miss you, and for the first time I know what it is to miss someone I love.

Ypsilanti [Michigan]
May 10-1905

Dear Ella:

I thought I would write you a few lines to let you know that I am still liveing, it is rather late to write a letter as it is eleven P.M. so dont look for a long one this time. I thought I must write to night in order to get an ans. this week I have been looking for a letter from you every day this week but havent recieved one yet if you remember you said you would write no doubt it is my place to write first but you didnt give me your adress so I am going to guess at it so perhaps you will not get this but I will chance it this time as I am anxious to hear from you, you dont know how lonesome I have been since you have been gone, last Sun. in pertucelar I didnt know what to do with my self I was not home all day of course that helped some it was seven P.M. when I got back, I didn’t know of any things else to do so I went to bed at nine oclock now isnt that pretty good for Sun. evening?

Well Ella how are you enjoying your self any way supose you are haveing such a good time that you don’t even think of me leting alone finding time to write, I am going to Detroit next Sat. and if you are going to be there and care to have me call on you Sun. you will have to let me know where you live now I trust you will do this as it seems a month since I saw you last.

I dont know of any news in pertucelar to write as every thing is about the same as useal it has been very cold this week and rained all the forenoon. If it hadent looked so much like rain this evening I should have went out to call on Lou seeing you dont write to me you surely have writen to her perhaps I could have found out how you are geting along ha: ha; no doubt you have got another fellow by this time.

Well Ella it is bed time so I will draw this to a close hopeing you will excuse this poor writing as I am in a hurry so I will say good night with a sweet kiss I remain as ever your loving friend

Albert Staebler

(write at once)

November 26, 1942—Thanksgiving
New York, N.Y. to Knoxville, Tenn. 

Dearest Stellajoe –

I’ve been in a quandary the past few days whether to write you & pour out my black mood, whether to try & cover it up or maybe not write at all. I wrote a letter Sunday night that I didn’t mail. I had the satisfaction of telling you how badly I felt but didn’t get any comfort from what you might have said. I guess it was better that way since it didn’t bother you. Anyway, I thought I’d snap out of it in a day or two.

But I didn’t. I can’t remember when I’ve been any unhappier…

Why the blues? Mainly I suppose because I’m too dumb to adapt myself to a new situation. But I miss you so much. After 6 years of college & working around here & there I land in exactly the spot & situation I’d always wanted. That includes a job I liked in a country I liked but mainly it means the girl I love. It’s tough to head off from that all of a sudden, at least for me…

What a Thanksgiving! Never had so much to be thankful for & never felt so little like being thankful. I thought it would be better not to mail this letter either, but found I couldn’t write anything else and I know you’ll be expecting something. Anyway if I could see you it would help me so much to tell it to you. It would be one of the times when I’d call you up at 8:00 o’clock to find out if I couldn’t come see you.

We went down town with the intention of eating at the “Cafe Francais” in Rockefeller Center, the place I told you about beside the skating rink. We decided that the $2.75 was a bit steep for a couple of $75 per month soldiers so we went to a “Child’s” restaurant. For $1.35 we got an imitation turkey dinner. Then we went to see “For Me & My Gal” with Judy Garland. And that’s not exactly a picture that a guy in my mood should see.

New York’s dimout seems to have worked fine on the city but not at all on the moon which is big & round tonight and makes me miss you even more.

I tried to convince myself how foolish I was to feel this way. I could be so much worse off but I’m always thinking how better off I was before I came here. When I learn to look at it the first way I’ll see how lucky I am & feel better.

The rumor is “no Christmas furlough.” When I think of being here 10 months without seeing you I actually shake right in my shoes.

Gee, Stellajoe I miss you, and for the first time I know what it is to miss someone I love. And I read & reread your letters just to satisfy that longing – and then look at your picture, then close my eyes & recall all the good times we had together. I’d hate to have the term “lovesick” applied to me because I don’t like the word. There must be a more descriptive name for the way I miss you. Do you know what I mean?

I guess I’d better shut this stuff off. Next time I write I’ll try and answer that nice long letter you wrote. And when you write remember I love you & when I read you letters I like nothing better than to find something that makes me think you know that & maybe (?) feel the same way.

Love
George

September 12, 1905
Ypsilanti

My dear Ella

I will now full fill my promise and write you a few lines, it will be short but sweet so I will start with a kiss or two to let you know that love you more then ever. I hope that you arrived at Sister Minnie’s all safe and found them all O.K no doubt you enjoyed your trip as there was probely lots of nice boys on the car ha: ha:

I was glad that I came home when I did Sun. evening as it rained quite hard before I got here, but it has worried me quite a bit sinse to think that you was so down hearted because I came away so early but my dear girl it isnet very plesent to walk two miles in the rain, but never mind my dear it wont be long before I will be with you always just think how happy we will be.

Now if you will excuse me for a few min. I will eat one of thoughes nice apples you gave me.

Well Ella I dont know of any news so I will close with many good wishes and kisses to you from your true and loving boy

Albert
P.S. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
thoughes are all yours from your old Goose ha: ha:

June 13, 1945
France to Florida

Dearest Stellajoe —

Gee honey, I’ve been putting this letter off and off. I just haven’t felt like writing. And I’m forcing myself to tonight. Capt French, the 21st weather pilot, brought us mail day before yesterday. I got eight letters, three from my darling wife, so I have letters to answer. That is no excuse. There is no excuse. There are just times when I can’t do anything. Except search my mind for something that can give peace, put me at ease, cure my restlessness, my longings, my desires. When I can’t find it, I can’t write letters. There is very little I can do.

How I wish I could be with you on this June evening! My mind just runs from one thing to another. Little details of things we’d do. Sometimes it’s a pattern – a day dream of how we’d spend a whole day. But more often it’s just a vision of holding you in my arms. Then perhaps strolling thru the woods, or climbing a mountain. Or sitting before the fire in our own home. Or around the dinner table at home with everyone there. Driving thru the country with you. Of undressing you.

It ain’t good, honey. They’re pleasant thoughts, but they’re overshadowed, absorbed in an atmosphere of frustration generated from a knowledge that it just can’t be, and I don’t know how long it will be before it can.

I’m going to leave this till morning, sweetheart. If I still don’t feel like adding to it, I’ll mail it anyway. So even if it ain’t much, you’ll have a letter anyhow.

All my love

George

Happy Valentines Day! 💜

Of Apple Trees and Books, and Missing a Generation

31 Thursday Jan 2019

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in Notes from Three of Earth Farm, writingdownthestory in Essay, writingdownthestory in Photograph

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

"Becoming", book list, Carol Decker, childhood memories, Delia Owens, Educated, letters from World War 2, living in my childhood home, Marie Condo, Michelle Obama, moon and venus, Mt. St. Helens, picking apples, setting intentions, sunrises, Tara Westover, the greatest generation, Three of Earth Farm, Unshattered, Where the Crawdads Sing

The two old apple trees on my property are difficult to harvest—growing on the side of a lumpy hill. Six fall off the tree and bounce down into the underbrush for every one that lands in my apple picker basket. They need to be pruned, but the same lumpy hillside makes that task difficult too.

I don’t know when they were planted. I only know the family lore, that they weren’t planted years sooner because, my father said, “if I’d done it ten years ago there would be apples now.” But finally he planted them anyway and they provided applesauce to my mother for decades.

When I started keeping a list of books I have read or listened to, I almost took a page from the apple tree playbook. I had read so many books in my life—going back to the Boxcar Children and Island of the Blue Dolphins, and the other many pages of words that filled my childhood—and didn’t keep a list, what was the point in starting so late in the game? It will never be complete, I reasoned. But choosing not to get sucked into the apple tree vortex, start I did. Nineteen years later, there are 905 books on my list; evidence that I am a reader. It’s never too late to start a thing.

Four of the last few books on my list are color-coded “favorites.” It’s been a bumper couple of months. For the record, the four are Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover of growing up with hard-scrabble fundamentalist parents who didn’t want her to become anything, but she did in spite of them; Becoming, Michelle Obama’s memoir of growing up poor with parents who taught her to reach for the stars, and she did because of them; Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel by Delia Owens about a girl abandoned by her parents who raises and educates herself; and an inspiring memoir, Unshattered: Overcoming Tragedy and Choosing a Beautiful Life by Carol Decker, who left the hospital months after giving birth to her second child, blind and with three amputated limbs due to sepsis, and learns to appreciate what she has rather than grieve what she lost.

It was sheer coincidence that the last books of 2018 and the first ones of 2019 have been about resilience and strength to do a new thing. Now I’m left to figure out what I’m to take from that.

I’ve been reading my aunt’s letters home from her years as a nurse in the European theater during WWII. As I was when I read those my parents wrote to each other, I’m anguished that I never knew to engage in conversation with her about her life before I knew her. I am knowing her now, through the letters, and I’m grateful they exist. Like my mother during those years when she was making a life on her own, my aunt’s independence and sense of adventure back then doesn’t match the person I knew and loved. It’s like reading about someone else. Who were these fierce women?

I want all of them back. I have questions. I want the stories I wasn’t told. I want to know the mother—known only to me as an old woman—who inspired my aunt and father and lived so deeply in their hearts, the love and admiration and concern and gratitude flowing from their pens onto paper that took weeks to reach her. I want to know my mother’s mother, whom my mother came to appreciate only in hindsight. Two daughters raised so differently, yet—like Tara and Michelle—with much the same outcome.

I want back the years when they were here. But we don’t get years back.

I went for a frosty morning drive this week and stopped at the cemetery for my first visit since the date of my mother’s death was added to the marker. I miss them so much.

I made a list on the last day of the old year of my accomplishments in 2018. In the face of all that begs to be done in a year’s time, of intentions set and not realized, it feels important to dwell on what did happen. I keep it in my desk drawer and pull it out when I feel overwhelmed by the present to remind myself that much is accomplished, even when much stays on the to-do list.

On my current list, before the winter cold and wet turns to sun and warmth, is preparing the upper floor of the house my parents built for new floors. It’s more than just moving furniture out and finding a place to put it for a week (I’ve not yet figured out how I’m going to manage those tasks), but painting rooms and closets and cleaning out the last vestiges of my parents’ 55-year occupation.

I will hold things in my hands and, if I don’t love them, thank them for their service, acknowledge the beloveds who left them languishing in the top shelves of closets, and send them to a new home. (In most cases, the new home is the bloated, constipated storage room downstairs. Cleaning out that room is another task, when my sisters want to give up some of their lives to help me. Right now I just keep the door firmly closed.)

One (small) closet down, five (large ones) to go.

Yesterday I filled two boxes with items from the shelves of the kitchen broom closet so I could put clean color to the marred formerly white walls and shelves. I think I will not add the three yard sticks to the box of yard sticks in the storage room, printed with the names of hardware stores and flooring businesses; they feel like kindling to me. I will hold each of the other items in my hands and carefully choose what goes back in. I will return to the broom closet the tiny cabinet I loved in my childhood that was relegated to the basement at some point—still full of odd tiny things.

When I feel snowed under by the tasks—clearing trails, finding someone to prune the apple trees, cleaning out a closet, reading wartime letters, revising my memoir, starting a new writing project, planning for my upcoming writing circle, moving toward the next phase of my business venture, a new website, picking up my ukulele, going on an adventure, or sitting still and reading a book—I will remember not to look too far ahead. The sunrise over the valley reminds me that every dawn is the beginning of a new day, the one day I have. Whatever I do in it is enough.

When I get to longing for the missing generation of my family, I look at these letters; hold the stuff in this house in my hands; feel my parents’ love for me, my sisters, and each other; offer gratitude; and write about all of it. They are here with me and in me. Their time is past—a long time in the case of the four women and two of my other aunts, with a median age of 97 years—but mine is right here, right now.

The First Christmas without My Mother

25 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in writingdownthestory in Blog

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Christmas, death of a parent, grandchildren, holidays are hard, Hood Canal, letters from World War 2, nostalgia, seattle, Washington State Ferries

I’m spending Christmas at a friend’s wee place on the edge of Hood Canal on the Olympic Peninsula. The Olympics are hidden today, but were sparkling when I arrived yesterday after crossing Puget Sound on the ferry from the Emerald City with the Cascades as backdrop.

After dropping my family off at the airport the night before, with dinner at Chuck’s before that. (Word today has it that Adrian did take off the cape to sleep, but not the cuffs, and donned it again up awakening.)

Today, Christmas, I reluctantly got dressed at noon and went for a two and a half mile hike at Twanoh State Park next door.

As I walked through the deep damp wood, I realized this is probably the first Christmas of my life I haven’t at least talked to my mother by phone. It feels strange. My mind drifted back to the letters my father wrote to her during the war. So long ago. My children are older than they were then.

When I got back to the couch, I looked them up. Christmas is such a time of nostalgia. It’s what makes it special and, for so many whose present doesn’t measure up to the past, sad. My next writing project is to do something with these letters and the story of a family separated by a war. All of them missing each other. They are all gone now, and I miss them.

December 25, 1942
Ann Arbor, Michigan

(My father was home in Ann Arbor from NYC where he was in officer training; his love was at her home in Tennessee.)

Merry Christmas, Stellajoe. I tried to call you this afternoon but the operator said that it wouldn’t go through for 3 hours because of over crowded lines so I waxed patriotic & cancelled it. I would liked to have talked to you & wished you a Merry Christmas. I wish I could celebrate it with you. I hope that I can the next one. I hope that the war will be over. I hope that you’ll love me as much as I do you. For if you do your name won’t be English.

Sincerely,  George

Christmas 1943 they had been married for nearly a month and were living in Texas together. They did not yet know that in two weeks he would get overseas orders, something they didn’t think was going to happen at all. But his sister, a nurse already stationed in Italy, wrote to them. And they wrote to his parents.

December 26, 1943
Dallas, Texas

Dear George and Stellajoe,

Another Christmas has come and gone. May we not be separated for another! Everything possible was done to make the day pleasant but nothing could quite eliminate that feeling of loneliness.

Love and best wishes to you both, Helen

Christmas Day 1943

Dear Folks,

We have had a very nice Christmas. Can’t say that I don’t miss being home, because I do. But if we have to be away, me and wife couldn’t have done better than to be married.

Sincerely, George

Dear Folks,

I hope you are all enjoying the Christmas season. It would be nice if we could all be together in one place place, but it is good that a few of us at least could be together.

How much we’ve enjoyed your fruit cake, cookies and jam. We’ve been rationing them so they wouldn’t be all eaten at one meal. Thanks so much for sending them.

Thanks too for the wedding gift. Do you mind if we save it for a while until we can buy something we’ll need? It’s too hard to know what to buy now – when we think we might have to be moving around.

Love, Stellajoe

Christmas night, 1944
Near Paris, France

In a way it’s a shame that the weather was arranged as it was. Yesterday the Air Forces were every way hammering the jerry. And I presume the same was true today. The war reached a peak of fury right on Christmas. Not a pleasant Christmas for those doing the fighting. And even less so for the jerrys. But I’m not wasting any sympathy on them, even on Christmas day.

This abnormal life – such as being away on Christmas – sometimes gets me down. And it’s then that I thank God that I have the love of my wife, of my family, and family background to fall back on. I suppose it’s sort of like a religion. I feel so sorry for those who can’t have memories and visions of a future to live on. Homesickness, and an inability to tell right from wrong, is the inevitable result. That has taught me to be more tolerant of waywardness than I ever was before. War is a terrible thing, and that is one of its worst features.

I was hoping to write you a long and interesting letter, but I just am not in the proper mood. But I can tell you this: I love you, dear wife. My Christmas was much happier because I have you to love. I love you wherever you are and wherever I am! Next Christmas I hope we’ll be together, and every Christmas thereafter.

Goodnight, sweetheart
George

December 25, 1945
Ansbach, Germany

Well, Christmas is almost over. Like I wrote mom, we haven’t had it half bad here. Christmas was a very welcome and happy holiday. But even so, I’ve spent most of my time thinking about and remembering Christmases past. I can almost see what’s going on each hour at home. And the rest of the time I’ve been dreaming of Christmas next year and the years after that. That’s a bit different because you’re in those dreams and Christmas will be our own.

Sincerely, George

Merry Christmas, Mama and Daddy. I hope you are together again forever and with the family you loved so well.

Bonus Adventure Log: Lakes and High Lakes Trail

29 Saturday Sep 2018

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in Adventure Log, writingdownthestory in Photograph

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

#adventurelog, Adventure Log, grandchildren, letters from World War 2, Louise Lake, meeting the spirit of dead loved ones, Reflection Lake, Stevens Canyon

My adventure season is officially over for 2018, which in no way means adventuring is over! But it’s time to differently prioritize. And really, it’s all adventure. I have returned to weekly 24-hour visits to my second home in Seattle for a one-on-one day with the littlest Little. This week’s day was so much fun.

My women’s writing circle begins on Wednesday (legacy writing) and I’m going to a writing workshop on Lummi Island next weekend (legacy writing). When the rain begins (and it had better), I will return in earnest to slashing 50,000 words from my memoir as well as begin my next project: reading and transcribing three 3-inch binders of letters my aunt wrote to her folks during her years as an overseas nurse during WWII. Then figure out what to do with them and the hundreds of letters from my father. When my sister finishes transcribing my mother’s taped life stories, I will finish her book too. All of this is legacy work, the task of the phase of life I am in. Putting it all together, honoring my ancestors, may be mine.

Meanwhile, oh my, the outdoor work that needs to happen to get ready for winter. So, you see, adventure of the traveling variety must play second fiddle for a few months. But not before I go to North Carolina in a week and a half to visit the Bigs and travel some familiar byways to see old friends.

It was an epic adventure season. In the past 26 weeks, I took 24 explores of my vast little corner of the country, including 13 hikes—11 of them new to me. I am pretty pleased with the achievement. Thank you for traveling with me; it wouldn’t have been the same without you. Next year, with a freedom I hadn’t been expecting this summer, I plan to begin expanding into a larger corner. Another winter project…making lists! Camping in the Redwoods is already on it.

I took a last unplanned hike after my trip with Mama to Paradise this week: I drove out the Stevens Canyon Road to Reflection Lakes and hiked the Lakes and High Lakes trail. I was only going to the Louise Lake overlook (it was my second hike of the day, after all), but when I got to that high spot, I realized I had done the hard part of the trail, and—what with my 4:30am start—the day was young. What the hey, I did the whole loop.

It wasn’t a top ten trail, but it was lovely, with Herself peeking in and out, small meadows and ponds. I startled a doe and two babes. I watched them a bit then moved on. One little one cut solo through the woods and met me around the corner. Like the chipmunk at Paradise, we stood silently heart-to-heart for several moments. The spirits of our loved ones are everywhere, when we are paying attention.

Au revoir extrovert summer, welcome introvert winter.

Louise Lake

Stevens Canyon

Unnamed pond

Adventure Log: Camping 2018

28 Saturday Jul 2018

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in Adventure Log, writingdownthestory in Photograph

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

#adventurelog, #ilovewhereilive, Adventure Log, Endgame, gratitude, Lake Quinault, Lake Quinault Lodge, legacy letters, letters from World War 2, May Sarton, Olympic National Park, Olympic Peninsula, Pony Bridge, Rialto Beach, solo camping, thanking our parents, Willaby Campground, world's largest trees

Dateline: July 23-16, 2018
Willaby Campground, Lake Quinault, Site 19

It’s an alternate plan after discovering the place I reserved in a timely manner in the Gifford Pinchot NF was not where I wanted to go. I’ve camped at Willaby three times now. The first was the only week it rained that summer, and was also an alternate plan. I had a reservation at Takhlakh Lake, but I didn’t want to camp in that remote place in the rain with no amenities other than a pit toilet. I don’t like camping in the rain, but my sister was coming from Virginia to stay with my mother so I could get away and I wasn’t about to cancel.

Now I think I will make it an annual camping spot; I do love it here. It’s 45 minutes from the ONP beaches, half a mile from the lodge (cold beer/dry and warm if it rains) and merchantile/cafe so I don’t have to prepare all my meals if I don’t want to. Also flush toilets, a light in the bathroom (also, unfortunately, a mirror), and potable water. Takhlakh Lake, where I’m going in September for maximum beauty and solitude with the fishing eagles and osprey, has none of those.

Departure day begins with killing some 50 yellow jackets in my house after I sprayed their nest the night before and drove them inside. I duct tape their access hole into the magic kingdom and leave a key for the exterminator.

I set up camp in a record one-hour, even with the 37 steps down to the secluded site with a view of the lake through the trees. Not bad for a site at the back of the campground, which I usually eschew. As for the 37 steps: I like walk-in sites, usually choosing them because they are closer to the lake or river and farther from the campground road. This one is a little much however, especially when food and toothpaste have to be returned to the car in the evening and retrieved each morning. The tent pad is a balcony, just barely big enough for my tent with a long step out the door, because I insist that the door, which has the only window, face the lake and the hills beyond. Still, I feel lucky to have scored it in the full campground.

I go to the lodge for a beer after I set up camp—late because of the yellow jacket invasion and needing to clean the Airbnb after the wait-until-the-last minute guests leave. I’m in bed early and watch the sun set over the water from my air bed. When the glow fades, I go to sleep with no idea what time it is. “Day is done, gone the sun, from the lake, from the hills, from the sky.”

When I awake with the early light, the lake is shrouded in fog, mist rising from the water. I get up, put my sweatshirt on over my pajamas and make coffee. I take it and my journal down to the lake and sit on a stump. The sun will come soon and burn away the fog as the day slips into another hot one.

My thoughts turn to my mother. She and I stayed at the historic lodge here—where, with great foresight, Franklin Roosevelt signed the Olympic National Park into being in 1938—a couple of times when I came home for a visit after my father died. Sad to say, I saw those visits as duty rather than days to be lived. When she finally lost her vision, those opportunities were lost. I still took her to Mt. Rainier, but she couldn’t really enjoy it. Yes, I do have regrets.

I sit hoping for eagles or osprey to fly over looking for fish, but there are none. A pair of herons come toward me, but I thought they were gulls until they were right overhead. They were flapping, so they weren’t raptors and I didn’t pay attention, so focused on what I wanted to happen that I missed what was happening. Pretty much like living with my mother and missing her essence while wanting her to be a different mother.

I do half sun salutations at the edge of the water then return to my campsite to build a fire and cook eggs with goat cheese and bacon. (Not over the fire; I’m not that ambitious.)

I struggled with what project to bring with me. I’d grown accustomed over the past few years to use my time away from mother care to work on my memoir…about mother care. But now it’s out there looking for an editor and I’m a little lost without it as I struggle to discern the next project. I brought a variety of possibilities.

I pick up the first of two bulky notebooks of letters my father wrote to his folks during his World War 2 service. As soon as I read the first letter, I’m hooked. I was bereft some time back when I finished the 500 letters he wrote to my mother. It was like he died all over. And now here he is again, my funny daddy, long before I knew him.

I sit by my small fire and begin to read. The letters begin after college. He’s working for the WPA in Ohio and doesn’t like it. He’s irked when he files his first income tax returns. After “penny pinching for a whole year,” he owes $19.45. He supposes since he’s “better off than many people, [he] should pay for the privilege. But on the other hand,” he writes, “I owe that to my parents, not Uncle Sam. Taxes would never pay them for what they’ve done though. In fact, I have no idea how they could be adequately repaid.” He thinks he can get a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority (where he will meet my mother). It pays $2000 a year. This is new information, before the letters to my mother begin. I’m elated.

When the fire goes out, I dress, make a sandwich for lunch, and head to the edge of the Pacific: Rialto Beach. I drive through Mora campground, where my family camped, remembering rising early with my father—the breakfast cook, at least the coffee. You can read about and view my beautiful foggy day here.

I sit by the fire again in the evening reading letters. I turn a page and am startled to see my mother’s straight-lined perfect penmanship; the hand that never changed, except, perhaps, for the cocky slant in the cross of her ts, in all the years I knew her. Until the last two years when she lost her vision. She had gone with my father to visit his folks before his induction into the Army. It would also be the last time she sees him for a very long time. She is embarrassed at letting a week go by without writing to thank them for having her.

I go to bed early. For the second night, I’m not staying up for the stars. I love bed. I’ll be up at day break with my father, just like I was when we camped at Mora.

I return to the lake the next morning. I’m later than the day before, it’s cold and the warm cocoon of my bed holds on to me. The fog is already dissipating when I reach my stump.

I’m going to hang around “home” today, on the lawn at the lodge with a book. But I finished the one I was reading last night. I brought three more and reject two of them, settling on May Sarton’s journal “Endgame,” about her 79th year that I found on my mother’s bookshelf. I read most of her journals years ago, then quit when they begin to detail May’s failing health, beginning with a stroke, then—in this one—irritable bowel syndrome. Rebecca gave it to my mother, according to the inscription, for her 79th birthday, 10 days before my father died. I wonder if she read it. Maybe I should have, in preparation for moving in with her.

On page 45, there are underlined passages:

“…doing the daily chores is all I can manage. I am living, I sense, against the tide of life itself. I don’t know how to wake up and get going…” “here I am wading around in oceans of time and wasting it!”

Wasting time was a theme of my mother’s when she wasn’t able to do what she did in stronger years. She never learned to value time at rest in daylight.

I thumb through the rest of the book looking for underlinings. There are a few over the next six pages about Nelson Mandela being released from prison, and Martin Luther King and their beliefs about when non-violent protest can and cannot work. And, finally, this one:

“Eating is hard for me still, and more often than not I settle for dry cereal for dinner.”

Then there are no more underlined passages. I weep for how hard life was for her, how alone she was, how much I didn’t care, and how courageously she kept going.

I have dinner on the deck at the lodge then go for a drive. I’ve never been on the other side of the lake. It’s far longer than I anticipated, but beautiful with the sun slanting across the sword fern through the rain forest that gets 10-15 feet of rain a year. And I just read this: “The largest specimens of Western Red Cedar, Sitka Spruce, Western Hemlock, Alaskan Cedar, and Mountain Hemlock are found in these forests, as well as five of the ten largest Douglas firs. It has the largest trees in the world outside of California and New Zealand.” Many of those largest trees have signage directing visitors to them. I remember going by horseback with my family for an official measuring of a Douglas fir around here, young enough to ride behind one of the researchers on his horse.

Tree on the back of a long-since fallen mother log.

Wild growing hydrangeas.

North shore road.

The temperate zone rain forest.

On the last morning, I build another fire and finish reading the letters. I’m glad there’s another notebook at home; I’m not ready for them to be over. This notebook ends just before he proposes to my mother. Having my father back through these letters is both beautiful and sad. All of the people he talks about, family and friends that I met over the years, are gone. All except my two cousins who were born to his eldest brother during the war years.

It occurs to me that these are my father’s legacy letters: a record of his values and who he was. I’m shocked by the depth of his mysogeny and racism. Was it the times in which he lived and I should just let it go? Did he overcome them? The racism, yes, I think so. Perhaps less so the mysogeny. But I don’t think my mother would have used words like “nigger” and “scrub woman.” I’m also blown away by his outspoken admiration for his mother and his upbringing, which he credits to her and tells her so. My children do not tell me they admire me, or thank me for what I taught them. And I did not tell my mother until the last weeks of her life. Yes, I have regrets. Not the ones she feared I would have, because she did, but my own.

I break camp. I’m ready. Three nights is just right. My reservation at Takhlakh is for four nights. I may leave early. Nice to have the option though. The last time I was there I wanted never to leave. I drive to the end of the road for a hike to Pony Bridge before I go home. You can read about that adventure here.

Back home in my own bed, the almost full moon is slipping down the valley. I bask in the glow that lights my room like day. I love where I live. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Rare double moon. 🙂 An odd reflection through the window pane.

Writing Down the Story

Tag Archives: letters from World War 2

Where I’m From

In Search of My Mother’s Garden

Honoring the Past…and Cursing the Remains

Love Letters from the Footlocker

Happy Valentines Day! 💜

Of Apple Trees and Books, and Missing a Generation

The First Christmas without My Mother

Bonus Adventure Log: Lakes and High Lakes Trail

Adventure Log: Camping 2018