Notes from Three of Earth Farm: Lighter Than Air

14 Thursday Mar 2019

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

Tags

#ilovewhereilive, #michiganfolkschool, #notesfromthreeofearthfarm, #staeblerfarmcountypark, #ThreeofEarthFarm, farming in the 1900s, gratitude, hummingbirds, living in my childhood home, Michigan Folk School, spring, Staebler Farm County Park, Sunrise, this old house

Despite last week’s surprise snow, things seem well on the way toward a season change now. Other people have crocuses and daffodils. I don’t know where mine are; maybe the moles ate the bulbs. My Lenten rose is MIA too. Weather Underground boasts 71º next Monday and Tuesday and I will have to decide if one of them is an adventure day or if they are both work days.

All the spring flowers I have. The deck pot of narcissus my mother always asked about is oddly empty.

Monday is definitely a work day. My far away sister will be in town and it’s my in-town sister’s day off (this month anyway) and I’m putting them to work on the “farm,” pre-installation painting of 450 feet of trim for baseboard and door frames. But there’s still Tuesday. Perhaps next week’s blog will be an Adventure Log.

After the Friday snow, Sunday was a spectacular day and I pulled on my boots and headed outside while my cute floor installer and his weekends-only side-kick finished putting in the beautiful hardwood floors that didn’t quite get finished while I was away.

(Paneling removed, to be drywalled and painted. Stay tuned.)

There were maaaaannnnny tasks to choose from and there is no point in prioritizing them because they all have to be done. Maybe I should have chosen preparation of the raised beds in my vegetable garden, but I haven’t even ordered seeds yet, so pffft. I could have repaired the fence and gates, or pulled out the bricks in the walkway the moles destroyed last autumn. (I’m considering inhumane measures for those fiends this year.)

I could have picked up winter blowdown in the woodlot that used to be meadow that I didn’t pick up the last two springs, which was a big mistake. Or maybe the fir branches in the meadow that have to be gone before the first mowing. Or cleared trails from overgrowth and downed limbs. Or returned to my mother’s garden (read that story here), or any of the other flower beds that need to be weeded and mulched. I could have cut up the small tree that collapsed into the far corner of the meadow and is in the way of the mower, and is where this year I hope finally to follow through with my idea to mow a labyrinth.

But I arbitrarily chose to scrape the fir needles and silt from the edges of the driveway before it started growing. It was a task I knew I could finish and that wouldn’t take all day. I gained a foot of pavement on each side and hauled three wheelbarrow loads of the rich loam down to a long abandoned strip of vegetation where the soil washes down the hill. I will probably never try to make it beautiful, but I will show it what love I can. Maybe the daisies and euphorbia will be happier. I can hear my mother saying, “Nothing will grow there. It’s not worth your money.” It’s almost enough to make me want to try.

As I continue to read stories my father and his siblings wrote about life on the Michigan farm where they grew up, I ran across one about how my grandfather eased the plow-pulling horses into spring work after the relative ease of their winter workload—mostly just pulling the wagon of milk to market or the sleigh for Sunday family excursions. He took care of his horses so they could take care of the farm, and hence the family.

My grandfather and my father. c. 1918

I’m taking a page out of his playbook and easing my aging body into the work of spring. There was much more to do, the weather was perfect for more, I still had energy, and there was an extra hour of late day light. But I stopped. I had done three hours of heavy work, it was enough for early season.

As I put away the wheelbarrow, shovel, and blower, and straightened my spine, I was both pleased with having finished the task and overcome with the heaviness of all there is to do. For one thing, I had ignored the blackberry vines along the driveway that need to be pulled out before they cross to the other side. I shook it off. I did one good task, there will be other days.

Before I went inside, I sent a message to a local Facebook friend who works with the local Girl Scout council, asking her if she knew of a troop earning money for opportunities. She responded immediately that she does. Many hands make light work. I will hire out the winter blow down…and maybe the blackberry vines too.

I returned to the house as Chris and Corey were loading their tools. Corey, who had been there alone on the weekend, told me a story. He had left the sliding glass deck door open and a hummingbird flitted inside. He followed it around with a broom trying to coax it toward the door. The hummer was having nothing of it. Finally, exhausted, it lit on the corner of a windowsill and sat trembling with fear. Corey scooped it up and held the tiny quivering being in his cupped hands as he went outside to release it. “It was so soft,” he said in wonder, “but it was lighter than air.”

It reminded me that I have a choice as I care for my family’s beautiful property. I can choose to see it as a burden that has been dumped on me and weighs me down. Or I can choose to see it as a privilege lighter than air. Either way, I am the guardian for now, and I reap both the responsibility and the good fortune.

This morning.

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

Tags

#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.

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 Twelve Days of Christmas: My mother saved everything, or my life in crafts

05 Saturday Jan 2019

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in writingdownthestory in Memories

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

childhood crafts, crafts through the years, crafts with popsicle sticks, death of a parent, fabric art, fabric memory box, knitting, living in my childhood home, memoir, memories of my mother, my mother kept everything, needlecrafts, paper crafts, photo transfer to fabric, plaster hand prints, The 12 days of Christmas

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas

The last gift I gave to my mother. You may recall, if you regularly read my Daughter on Duty blog, that my mother was obsessed with writing her mother’s story. Though she had written stories on scraps of paper, in notebooks and on paper pads for decades, they were scattered throughout the house in drawers, boxes, and on shelves and countertops. Each time, she had to begin again.

In the last years of her life she started over again, this time on a tape recorder. “I thought you would help me with it, Gretchen,” she said to me once. That was news to me; and I couldn’t do it and keep my sanity. She got patient Dan, her handyman, to help with the business of recording. I recruited Jo Ann to transcribe them and told Mama I would edit them.

Jo Ann transcribed a few of the tapes—highly tedious work, particularly without benefit of modern technology—and I began the equally tedious work of editing the verbatim transcriptions. It was not chronological, though she intended it to be, as she would remember some often inconsequential bit she may or may not have already told. Then forgetting where she left off, would pick up in the wrong place. There were details I knew were inaccurate, because I have heard much of the story before—and read those bits found around the house.

I think the need to finish this project she claims she promised her mother she would do (my grandmother died in 1988 at the age of 99), was keeping her alive, both in the sense of giving her purpose and in not allowing her to leave when she very much wanted to.

Last Christmas, I decided to put the part that was transcribed into a book for her, hoping she would feel—literally holding it in her hands—that her project was being taken seriously, and that she would know I intended to help her get it done after all.

Rebecca read it to her, and she wasn’t happy with it. She said I made stuff up. Maybe I did, in the way memoirs from time before memory does, to make the narrative more interesting. I was a little shocked at her anger about it, but she moved on in the end and thanked me for doing it.

And now I am want to finish it—at least to the point she left off, I don’t think she completed what she wanted to say before her mind became too jumbled. Jo Ann brought me the rest of the tapes last month to transcribe myself, as she doesn’t have time. It’s daunting, and I have my own new epic project—now that my own memoir is approaching last steps to get into the world—telling my father’s story of growing up in a family very different from my mother’s, and then being scattered during the war years, communicated via hundreds of letters from three of the siblings that have been kept for eighty years.

Do I have enough time before my end comes? I need a tower and someone to bring meals.

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas

And representing the reprise of the knitting years (scarves, fingerless mittens, baby hats, all sold at Hubbub), I made her a second infinity scarf. They fit the needs: lightweight, not scratchy, not hanging down, not bulky, covered the neck she hated, and kept her warm–or at least gave the illusion of warmth. Another favorite. Until she got hung up on wheather or not they matched her outfit. Or they got lost in her drawer.

On the Tenth Day of Christmas

More printing on fabric. My parents and things they loved through the years. Funny thing was, it turned out she had been making (with help) a full size quilt for me of me and the things I loved through the years (photos on fabric). She gave it to me maybe for my birthday or Christmas the following year. Or was it the same Christmas and I hadn’t opened it yet? I can’t remember now. I felt bad then, that maybe she felt bad when I she opened this that Christmas; that I’d stolen her brilliant idea or something. I feel bad again just looking at this photo. Monkey mind.

On the Ninth Day of Christmas

The year I made bags and sold them at North Carolina craft fairs and Hubbub. My mother bought this one and was still using it the last days of her life. “It was perfect,” she said.

On the Eighth Day of Christmas

The beginning of the fabric art years and printing photos on fabric experimentation. This gift may have been my crowning achievement. A box covered with and full of how I saw my mother, and of all she had done in her life. Why I was proud to be her daughter. It’s covered with things I found around the house on a visit home: silver thimbles for feet, pins, old jewelry, a leaf from the yard, shells. I’m pretty proud of this one.

On the Seventh Day of Christmas

The paper years: A little book with pockets holding inspirational words. Hmm. Well, they were fun to make, anyway, and she actually bought some from me to give as gifts; except she wanted to tell me what colors and words to use, and to fix what she saw as flaws. It was in keeping with her philosophy: “If I’m paying for something, shouldn’t it be like I want it?” Took the fun right out of it for me, a dabbling non-perfectionist.

On the Sixth Day of Christmas

Putting nature to work. I believe young children helped me with this gift. There were two of them; maybe I will find the other one someday, or maybe it broke. (I think this one cracked in the creating.) I took it off the wall a year or so ago.

On the Fifth Day of Christmas

The cross-stitch years, a craft I stuck with longer than any other. The note cards were meant to be used, of course, but 35 some years later the collection remains unbroken in her stuffed-full greeting card drawer. (She bought multiples each time she needed one, and seldom, it seems, used one from her drawer, even after I organized them for her.)

On the Fourth Day of Christmas

Fast forward to my wheel pottery class. Either there wasn’t much crafting between elementary school and marriage, or my mother didn’t keep anything. Or I didn’t give her anything. Or I just haven’t dug deeply enough into the backs of cupboards and to the bottom of boxes. I took some painting classes from a neighbor, but the cupboards are full only of my older sister’s flat art. Clearly mine didn’t measure up.

On the Third Day of Christmas

She wore the earrings made in third grade every Christmas until, apparently, one broke. They are still in her jewelry box.

The paperweight, made in fourth grade, with its crumbled pink foam backing, still holds paperclips in the kitchen desk drawer. Finding it empty three years ago, Mama bought a box of paperclips (with her caregiver’s help), not asking me if there were more somewhere. Uh, yeah. In the back of the same drawer. In the desk in the study. In the desk downstairs. In the cabinet downstairs.

On the Second Day of Christmas

Popsicle stick art. I think this was made in Girl Scouts, or maybe fourth grade with an arts and crafts enthusiast teacher. The center elastic is broken now, but it still lives in the dining room buffet.

On the First Day of Christmas

Every child made some version of this in preschool or kindergarten back in the day. I have two of them. This one is pretty classy with its glaze. The other one is simple unfinished plaster of Paris. This one hung in my mother’s bedroom until I took it down to paint the wall. I put it back up. Some things are just classics.

Notes from Three of Earth Farm: Stopping by the Woods

29 Thursday Nov 2018

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

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

#ilovewhereilive, #ThreeofEarthFarm, big leaf maple, living in my childhood home, neighbors, Notes from Three of Earth Farm, remembering mother, reminiscing, Seminary Hill Natural Area, Three of Earth Farm, walking in the woods

I’ve been thinking for some time it’s been too long since I saw my neighbor and one of these days I needed to go knock on his door with muffins or homemade soup. At 91, he has had some heart health issues this fall. I’ve been concerned, I check in with his daughter now and then, but I’ve not rung his doorbell for a while. You know how it is, best intentions.

I’ve been thinking for some time it’s been too long since I walked in the woods. How many times have I promised myself to get in there at least once a week? You know how it is, best intentions.

After Thanksgiving weekend with the Littles and their moms here at Three of Earth Farm, I didn’t go to Seattle for my weekly 30 hour gig away from home―including five hours driving time―and by Tuesday it already felt like I had an expanse of time not usually available. When the rain stopped and the sun unexpectedly came out, I went out in my orange rain boots to check on the supply of firewood left to lie in the woods near the house when the man I hired to cut and split a fallen tree just stopped working on it.

After seeing there is indeed still a lot of wood scattered about that’s small enough for burning if I pull it out from under branches and blackberry vines and wheelbarrow it down the trail to the rack where the supply is rapidly diminishing, I spontaneously head across the meadow to the trail by the barn to walk in my mother’s playground. She didn’t hike in the mountains like I do, but hour for hour, she spent far more time on the trail than I.

Reaching the main trail, I see Robert coming toward me. He has walked the trails most every day for years, but for the past several months I was thinking he wasn’t able to. I’m ecstatic to see him out and about again. His dog Gracie trots down the trail toward me. I’m not a dog lover, but I am very fond of Gracie. I put my arms around her broad neck and pull her in close; then give Robert a hug when he reaches us.

We stand on the trail and talk. I have no where else to be and nothing else I need to be doing that is more important than this. Robert had emailed me a month or two ago that he had discovered an apple tree on the trail he’d never noticed before; spotted it because it bore a single apple. I haven’t figured out where it is and I ask him now. Turns out we are standing under it. It’s spindly and unformed, imitating the miles of vine maple in these woods. No wonder no one noticed it. It’s near where there were remnants of a rotting ancient puncheon road when I was a child, the boards that kept the wagon wheels from sinking into mud on alleged cattle drives through here, returned to soil now.

Robert muses that a wagon driver—or maybe a child sitting on the back, legs dangling—threw an apple core out and a seed took hold. The single apple was good, he says, maybe a Gravenstein.

We go on to reminisce about our former neighbors. The Holits were a German couple, still with thick accents even after decades in the States. I told Robert I remembered making fudge with Margaret at Christmas, standing on a stool in front of her stove stirring the bubbling chocolate. When their house was cleaned out, after they moved to California to live near their son, I happened to be home and acquired the spoon we used to stir the fudge, it’s end worn down from years of scraping the bottom of the hot pot. He tells me, when the home sat empty for a time, he found a box of silverware overlooked on top of a beam in the basement; and later a box of sample awards ribbons from, presumably, Gene’s father’s family business in Germany before WWI in a dark corner, and something (I’ve forgotten what) with the Kaiser’s picture on it.

Robert remembers helping Gene cross the steeply sloping road to get his mail out of the box. Paying it forward, as it turns out, he says, as now the Holit’s niece, who raised her children in her aunt and uncle’s house, brings Robert his mail. (I really need to get my newly purchased mailbox painted and back in its rightful place between theirs.) We’re silent for a moment then, remembering times and people who are gone.

He tells me another maple tree fell recently behind his house. These damp woods that were my childhood playground are so old. The big leaf maples are nearing the end of their long lives, their grey crowns broken and leafless. They are host to mosses and licorice fern, adding to the rain forest feel of these woods. Lichen clings to everything, making the forest look like a host of hoary old men.

Centralia from Staebler Point, named for my parents for their conservation work here.

I go on to Staebler Point, and Robert and Gracie continue their trek home. I turn back toward the house as the clouds drop into the trees, rendering the forest mysterious and a little spooky in the mist. As I walk back through the now empty arching vine maples where we had stood talking, I realize that, like my mother and father and the Holits and Robert’s wife Sandy, someday Robert will no longer grace these woods with his presence. Like the maples, we all come to the end.

I’m hanging up my coat as the earlier rains return, pouring onto the roof I need to clean off again. Just a pocket of time, snatched for a rendezvous in the woods with a neighbor. I vow—again—to stop by more often, and hope I run into Robert and Gracie.

I found this poem when I Googled big leaf maple (acer macrophyllum). Overlooking the exclusive language, it seems a serendipitous find.

A tree is known by its fruit; a man by his deeds.
A good deed is never lost; he who sows courtesy
reaps friendship, and he who plants kindness gathers love.
– Basil

All Souls’ Day: Remembering My Mother

01 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by Gretchen Staebler in Daughter Off Duty, writingdownthestory in Photograph

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

All Souls' Day, At Blackwater Pond, childhood memories, Daughter Off Duty, Daughter on Duty, grief, living in my childhood home, Mary Oliver, memories of my mother, mothers and daughters, nostalgia, remembering mother, when a parent dies

She’s been gone six months and eleven days. It seems like forever. It feels like she was never here, that I was never buried in caregiving, that she was never driving me to the brink. That I didn’t lie in my bed at night crying, promising myself that this was not my forever and not believing it.

But I’m revising my memoir again, attempting to reduce it by 40,000 words before I pay an editor to read the rest of them, and I remember. She was here. She was driving me to the brink. And I miss her.

Yesterday I finally cleaned out the rest of her dresser drawers in preparation for giving away the bedroom furniture she and my father got when I was in junior high or maybe before that. That’s when I got the dresser they bought used when they started living married, three years after the wedding when my father returned from the war; but maybe it had been stashed in the basement until I got my own bedroom. I still have that dresser and I want to use it again.

My mother was quite the collector of jewelry, very little of which I remember her wearing. Some pieces still have the price tag attached. Some that people, including me, made for her. Some of it may be her mother’s. Sometime, while she could still see and write, perhaps with the help of her favorite paid companion, she went through it all and wrote notes on many pieces, so my sisters and I would know its origins. She never got rid of any of it.

I didn’t know she had a “love” of horses (or what it means in quotation marks). I think there is much I didn’t know about her. And I wish I had known the questions to ask.

Along with dozens of scarves and piles of my father’s plain white handkerchiefs, it fills the four dresser drawers I crammed it in when I cleaned out the other seven drawers for my own use. I touch each piece, most still in original boxes, as I put them in bigger boxes.

This is what I miss: her being young and acquiring this jewelry. When she went to church and concerts and her favorite restaurants and traveled with my father. When she wore necklaces around her neck rather than her dark glasses to cover her regular glasses outside; instead of her hearing aid remote; rather than the pendant to call for an aide to help her in the bathroom.

This is what bring tears: when my father bought jewelry for his love and sent it across the ocean to her, longing to be there himself.

This piece of jewelry was in the box with this note, but since she is wearing it in the photo above–taken, I believe, before he went overseas–it does not go with the note. Unless the story I thought I knew is inaccurate. I wish I could clarify it with her. I wish she would have remembered if I had asked.

This is the mother I miss: the one who every year at Christmas wore the clip-on holly leaf earrings I made in fourth grade art until she lost one, or it broke. Insisting she loved them, until I finally understood one year that it was me she loved.

I put the two stuffed boxes in the basement, then go back and get out her multi-strand pearl necklace. I don’t know if the pearls are even real, and I can’t picture myself wearing them. I just need her close by.

“…To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.” —Mary Oliver

Writing Down the Story

Tag Archives: living in my childhood home

Notes from Three of Earth Farm: Lighter Than Air

In Search of My Mother’s Garden

Honoring the Past…and Cursing the Remains

Of Apple Trees and Books, and Missing a Generation

The Twelve Days of Christmas: My mother saved everything, or my life in crafts

Notes from Three of Earth Farm: Stopping by the Woods

All Souls’ Day: Remembering My Mother