There’re Two Kinds of People: The Irish and Those Who Want to Be Irish

A childhood friend recently posted the title of this column on her Facebook page as a meme. It made me smile as I thought about the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day celebration. Even those who don’t have a drop of old  Ireland in them enjoy celebrating with corned beef and cabbage, soda bread, green beer, Irish parades, shamrocks, or leprechaun tales. This adoption of Irish customs, even temporarily, is a recent occurrence. In the mid to late 1800s, those of Irish heritage found more heartache than ready acceptance.

Many such immigrants came to this country under harsh conditions. They’d been starved out of Ireland during the potato famine or landowners had evicted croppers from tenant farms that couldn’t feed or clothe a family. According to emerging history, some arrived in the new world as slaves to work Caribbean sugar cane plantations. Examining old military rolls reveals that a number of those fresh-to-the- continent kept their bellies full by joining the U.S. Army, where they ended up as Indian fighters in the West.

For those who find little interest in history, it’s hard to understand that not so many generations ago, newcomers with strong brogues weren’t welcome. Those who wanted to work found it difficult to find employment, even if they had special skills. Walking up a street in developing communities that obviously needed hard workers, fresh arrivals would see signs in windows that said, “No Irish Need Apply.” Discrimination continued after death. Those who visit old cemeteries in mining communities will see graves segregated into sections for different ethnic groups.

Interestingly, a good number of Irish arrived in Kansas during this settlement period. Today, schoolchildren studying American history scan chapters filled with names such as Kennedy, Moynihan, and Keogh. According to one source, over 70 million people living outside Ireland, many of them in the United States, claim roots to that Emerald Isle. For those of Irish ancestry, it’s hard to imagine our forebears not only suffered hunger, poverty, and exploitation in the old country, but the struggle continued after they landed ashore in New York. Fortunately, for those who kept moving west and ended up in Kansas, life got easier.

We find towns like McCracken, named after a railroad employee. These hardy emigrants constructed a Catholic Church almost immediately. In Kansas Memory, we read Irish priest Thomas Butler’s report that Kansas churches of his denomination multiplied from three in 1854 to forty-five by 1871. He attributes this expansion to immigration. In Marshall County, visitors can explore the Irish community of St. Bridget established in 1862. Once there, they can tour a lovely chapel erected by settlers. Visit any old cemetery in the area, particularly a Catholic graveyard, to spot tombstones engraved Donnelly, Connelly, McKee, Keaghy, O’Brien, Sullivan, and so on. These aren’t foreign names here.

This state is a great example of what can happen when people work hard and adapt to a new culture. Most likely, you won’t hear locals speaking with an Irish brogue, but you might see several tipping back a Guinness to celebrate St. Paddy’s Day, even if they don’t have a drop of the blarney in them.

If Walls Could Talk

Some mornings I wake up to imagine I hear car and camera calling me to join them for another Kansas road trip. Coffee mug in its holder and hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, I’m ready to explore dusty roads and fading communities along rural highways designed to knit together regions of our state. These journeys   help me appreciate hardy souls who built homes, businesses, churches, and schools with their hard-earned cash. Early pioneers had no access to federal or state-funding modern residents take for granted. As a retired teacher, I’m drawn to aged academic buildings like iron filings to a magnet.

Lately, I’ve visited a number of dilapidated towns to photograph deteriorating schools before they vanish from the landscape. Local historical societies have pictures of these brick wonders in their glory days, but I want to record the moments before they return to dust. Something about a once elegant structure in crumbling ruins captures my imagination more completely than reading old yearbook essays does.

Certainly, I feel nostalgic as I ramble around foundations to sense the layout of classrooms, auditoriums, and gymnasiums. Even more than a longing for a less complicated, slower-paced existence, I ache for that time when people incorporated handcrafted details to beautify a simple public building. Almost every one of these deteriorating edifices is exactly that—an edifice.  In a region distant from specialty guilds and artisans, who would complain about city leaders assembling unassuming structures with no embellishments? Visit these ruins, and it’s clear that is not what happened.

Many of the red brick establishments that remain were the community’s second or third school. Oftentimes, initial coursework took place in either a local home or dugout. As soon as a settlement developed sufficiently to afford new construction, workers erected out of wood or native stone two or three stories that each contained only one or two classrooms. Photos reveal modest playgrounds and necessary houses either to the side or behind these schools. What you see in these black and white photographs is pure function. Ornament is missing.

By the late teens through the thirties, communities along the Union Pacific and Missouri Pacific Railroads optimistic about continued growth and financial success raised new schools. Many featured then-popular Art Deco details. Those characteristics included angular brick walls with inlaid bands of vertical brick and a flat roof. They often display decorative geometric panels, vertical towers, stepped piers, and casement windows. A few regal antiques have beautiful arched, multi-paned windows above hand-carved entrance doors. One regional building still displays distinctive scroll-shaped lights on either side of its double doors. Just walking through such an entryway to reach class would add intent to a youngster’s studies.

Over decades, trucks and highways replaced railroads, resulting in a declining rural population. Decades later in the 60s, school consolidation forced closure of too many architectural masterpieces. In a few locations, individuals bought old buildings and turned them into homes or businesses. Unfortunately, too often, time and lack of maintenance resulted in unsalvageable eyesores. As bricks crumble , I hope families and museums publish their old school’s stories.

Country Kid Fun

Unseasonably warm weather recently reminded me that country kids know how to have fun. I’d begun thinking about this topic after a visiting eight-year old from the Denver area entertained me with   adventures he enjoyed at a trampoline and arcade business near his home. After he detailed hours of good times performing tricks and challenging friends, I wondered what my grandkids would remember about their country childhoods. Thank goodness, I spied two teens playing a crazy game of either hide-n- seek or paint ball war in between long rows of snow-frosted hay bales along Highway 24. That nudge reminded me boredom wouldn’t affect anyone growing up in our family.

When those first seeds of concern sprouted, I should’ve thought about the farm kid essays I read during decades as a rural English teacher. On many occasions, I burst out laughing either in the middle of class while students read independently and I graded, or I interrupted quiet family evenings with guffaws that made my husband question my sanity. How could wielding a red pen be that much fun?

Nothing beats hay bales for fort building, assault advantages or hiding places in hedge apple wars, or simple jumping exercises. Who needs trampolines when you can leap from one round bale to the next to strengthen your legs and your balance? Add someone chasing you, and the thrill increases. For the less physically inclined youngsters, these objects offer quiet hiding places and comfy posts for cloud watching.

Not only do humans enjoy fragrant bundles of straw, hay, or alfalfa, critters like them too. Rural youngsters often spot red tails or northern harriers perched atop the straw while gnawing at a fresh meal. A favorite story detailed a kid plowing a field and seeing a bobcat snoozing lazily atop giant shredded wheat shapes bordering his work zone. Talk to most folks who grow up on farms or ranches, and even their eyes smile when they tell about about finding a farm cat with a litter of kitten tucked snugly into the hay.

Bales aren’t the only kind of fun country kids enjoy. Hot days lend themselves to unplanned dips in a farm pond or stock tank. Unlike the municipal pool, swimsuits aren’t required and kids can leap in fully clothed if they want. Swimmers might splash and giggle with the family dog or maybe feel stocked fish nibbling at their toes. Mossy bottoms make this a true adventure when soaked humans attempt to exit upright from the water.

Rural escapades don’t end when the sun goes down. Evenings offer opportunities to star gaze or count satellites arcing overhead in dark night skies unlittered by bright fluorescent and neon signs. On warm summer nights, entertainment includes counting and maybe catching flitting fireflies. Who doesn’t love watching a beetle with a blinking tail crawl up an arm or leg? That tickle added to the on/off glow is pure magic.

Hang around country kids for a while, and you realize a word is missing from their vocabulary. It’s the overused modern term—I’m bored. When you live in a landscape that constantly challenges you and allows your imagination to run wild, adventures await 24/7.

Mud’s Blessings

Chinese philosophers are on to something with their Yin and Yang concepts. Light balances dark, silence/noise, joy/sorrow, and in our case, mud offsets dust.

Yes, mud. Icky, gooey, sticky mud. Like cat hair, it latches onto anything it touches, finding its way from roads, yards, and pastures onto shoes and pant legs and into homes. It finds its way into the oddest places—a speckle stuck to a grocery sack, a chunk dropped by the door, a smear on a purse.

Lately, there’s been such an abundance of it that most of us can hardly remember the true color of our vehicles. Next time you drive through a parking lot, look to see if you can identify in-town-only transportation. Country cars and trucks can’t hide. One sported such a coating that chunks finally started calving like ice floes off a glacier. The asphalt beneath that pickup had enough of someone’s former road or field topping it that a gardener could’ve stuck in a couple of potato eyes and carrots and started a nice veggie patch.

Mud doesn’t just coat a car or truck’s paint job. It adds new dimensions to the driving experience. Try being the second or third person to drive down a sloppy road and read the tracks of the vehicle ahead. It’s clear all will proceed smoothly when the tracks follow a straight path in the appropriate lane.

However, tire-wide trails that weave back and forth across the road forming sharp little wedges along the ditch are a heads-up alert. They reveal every minute wheel jerk where the previous driver hoped to level the journey. When you observe those, tighten your seat belt and check for loose items that can fly through the car. Deep ridges formed from ditch to ditch inspire gasps and devout prayers.

I wonder if this is how amusement parks with those tiny cars youngsters love to drive came to invent the track rail that keeps those vehicles on the road. As moisture-laden soils dry, unfortunate country drivers hit tire-grabbing gouges that derail pickups and sedans into the Grand Canyon of ruts.

 

Those trying to escape such bone-rattling caverns on an icy morning may find themselves fender to fence post up the nearest incline or launched into a patch of green wheat. It makes a person think similar conditions had much to do with the formation of the still-present tracks on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails.

Fortunately, farmers and ranchers have a handle on this situation. Not only do they own tractors to pull stuck vehicles out of morasses of waterlogged soil, most have multiple pairs of dandy boots—knee-high, rubberized footwear they can hose down after tromping through deep slime to feed and water livestock.

Mud isn’t only miserable; it multiplies work. Cattle, pig, and horse owners schedule extra time to feed and care for animals. This mire also increases drive time to town. Road crews know their real work begins when it dries. Housekeepers and janitors cringe, thinking about the extra vacuuming and scrubbing. One day of sludge makes it obvious why farmhouses have a mudroom.

But! Yes. But. Lack of mud means lack of moisture. It means blowing dirt. It means watching rooster tails of dust hang forever airborne when someone drives down a country road. It means no green wheat peeking from furrows, no milo, no sorghum, no soybeans, no corn, no rippling creeks, no fish to catch, no wild flowers.

 

Lack of mud suggests no life for many of us who love the prairie. I best buy some muck boots, extra vacuum bags, and start counting my dirty blessings. 

Weather Forecasting: A Miserable Job

Weather forecasters have a miserable job. On one hand, they predict impending catastrophic weather and save lives. Think of residents if Oklahoma who made it to shelter before devastating F5 tornadoes bore down on their neighborhoods and businesses. On the other, these same experts frequently predict impending catastrophic storms and the cell fritzes out, leaving the audience to compare yesterday’s hero to the boy who cried wolf. It’s a dilemma.

Not surprisingly, erratic weather has made Kansas weather announcers gun shy about making firm forecasts. One of my favorites grinned as he explained he was in the business of stating what might happen, not necessarily what would. Recent blizzard reports certainly had viewers wondering whether our favorite storm team was on target or if we had cleared milk, bread, and toilet paper shelves at local markets for no reason. I heard more than one person questioning the forecast when it didn’t arrive as soon as announcers said it might.

When this storm actually hit and blowing snow coated to our windows and doors, I recollected blizzards I’d either read about or lived through myself. As recently as a couple of decades ago, I don’t recall getting much warning about whiteouts that slowed travel to a crawl or shut it down entirely. I remember times I drove twenty miles  to work on clear roads in the morning and found myself unable to tell if I was actually driving on asphalt and not in the ditch during an unannounced, sideways-blowing-snow,  two hour marathon home.

This brought to mind a favorite Mari Sandoz novel 80s and 90s era students read. Each year, I assigned Winter Thunder in January or February so readers could relate to High Plains weather’s ability to change quickly. Every one of my kids paid close attention to this tale of Nebraska Sandhill schoolchildren who got on a bus to leave their one room schoolhouse at beginning of a snowstorm.

During the course of the story, class released early, in hopes kids would beat the storm home. Unfortunately, their bus overturned and caught fire as the whiteout roared to life. The young teacher, a 16-year-old student bus driver, and the rest of the children faced freezing to death as they escaped wearing only standard winter clothing and carrying that day’s lunches.

Sandoz based this weeklong survival tale on her schoolteacher niece’s experience in 1949. The gripping narrative detailed kids and teacher blindly clasping the person in front of them as they followed a fence line into willows where they sheltered until rescuers found them days later. Imagine every edgy child’s survival story you’ve read or watched involving frozen limbs and starvation to consider how frightening this was.

Thinking about this turned my mind down another bunny trail as I recalled a carload of Ellis teens lost in a blizzard in the late 80s. If you weren’t on a search team defying Mother Nature’s nastiest as you tried to find these youngsters, you were praying for children, families, and rescuers. The element this event shared with Mari Sandoz’s Winter Thunder was that before events turned into a life or death matter, no one had an inkling such a powerful storm was moving in.

Now, when my favorite weather team tells me to prepare for the worst, I do, knowing very well that their forecast will probably be wrong. I’d rather re-plan something than begin a trip thinking I had nothing to worry about.

Colorful Mystery

Memory works in funny ways. With passing time, one event blends with another until, eventually, recollections stitch themselves together like an old patchwork quilt assembled from every leftover scrap lying about the house. Snippets of bright color or interesting texture catch the eye and off a mind goes following a bunny trail that may not go anywhere. I started following one of those winding, backtracking thoughts recently and found myself lost in a mystery. I hope someone can help me find answers.

Since I was tiny, I’ve loved stained glass windows. I enjoy the varying hues, the stories each scene tells, and the way sunlight glows through, tinting everything in its path. Magically, words of hymns and sermons seem to float in that radiant light like waltzing dust motes during Sunday services. My first memories link to the sanctuary windows in the Methodist Church in Meade, Kansas. I loved how distant artists depicted Bible stories and characters in vibrant colors that seemed richer than any shade I could create with my crayons and paints.

Not long after these religious panels engaged my toddler attention, a relative moved into an Victorian two story with a gorgeous stained glass window at the stairway landing between the first and second floors. My cousins and I loved sliding down those stairs, which means we had to climb to that midway point to launch our speedy descents. I don’t know that anyone else dawdled on the way up, but I did. Sunlight radiating through that jewel-toned melted silica joined by lead strips dazed my senses enough that I didn’t feel a single bump on the way down.

Even now, my heart starts beating faster when I discover century-old buildings that contain their original stained glass. Apparently, a goodly number of early settlers found a way to put at least one decorative window in their home or business. For those on a strict budget, that might mean four tiny squares of color soldered in each corner of a rectangle or square. Well-to-do families had more options.

Those with fatter wallets might incorporate several ornamental windows throughout their home. Almost every long-established community has several of these two or three storied houses replete with decorative gingerbread, wrought iron fence work, and stunning glass throughout the property. These make me recollect a world with fewer distractions than ours has. What a joy it would be to look up to see sunlight streaming through amber, lavender, cobalt, ruby, and emerald tones while you were dusting, scrubbing, or cooking.

A trip to Cottonwood Ranch in Studley reveals excellent examples of such a home. The Pratt family members were among the first permanent settlers in that region. Mrs. Pratt immigrated from greener landscapes and struggled with the monotony of her new homeland. To help, her husband built a lovely ranch. Modern visitors see the evidence as they travel from room to room, admiring colorful glasswork in nearly every window.

Here’s the mystery. I want to know where early Kansans bought these windows. I did learn factories that produced these arts works weren’t local. So far, I’ve discovered that some of the big Catholic churches ordered their panels from either the East Coast or Europe. I can’t imagine the shipping costs on these breakables. What intrigues me even more is knowing every little town in this area had homes and churches decorated with these lovely works of art. Where did they come from and at what cost?

Kansas Day Dreaming

Windmills pull not only water up from below the earth but they also break a seemingly endless horizon to pull the eye toward heaven and optimism. In a stark, dry landscape, such attractions nurture not only bodies but also spirits. Just the memory of spinning blades drawing thin streams of cool water to spill into a tank is enough to send the mind back in time to recover damp earth scents and the sensation of green buffalo grass curling under bare feet. This ability to reclaim the past explains why so many paintings and photos of isolated windmills hang in Great Plains homes and galleries. This prairie icon means survival to anyone connected to this place for generations.

Wind has powered human life since early civilization. Confining it and making it work isn’t unique to Americans, but it has made homesteading and agriculture in Flyover country possible. Before these skinny towers lured  the eye upward from rolling waves of blue stem, Indian, and grama grasses, the arid nature of the place meant only nomadic people could survive here. Once Nathaniel Halladay invented the self-governing windmill, stickers—people who put down roots to stay through the good times and the bad—could claim homesteads and make dreams come true.

Once hopeful settlers declared the boundaries of their land, they drilled into the ancient underground lake beneath their feet to find water for themselves and their livestock. Those fortunate enough to tap into the aquifer no longer had to depend on live springs or the capture of unpredictable rains in a cistern. Where native occupants packed and moved when a water source vanished, this new technology permitted incoming settlers to create their own oases in what people east of the Mississippi called the Great American Desert.

This newly patented device promised more than it could deliver to many would-be ranchers and farmers who headed west to claim free land. Now days, poets, artists, historians, and the curious cruise dusty country roads to look for crumbling telltale towers silhouetted by collapsed ruins in the distance. Sometimes bullet-riddled vanes still spin in the wind, emitting a haunting banshee cry. Ironically, greenery growing at the base of these relics hints at still present underground treasure.

What these backroad wanderers find are stories written in dreams, sweat, and imported resources. Anyone who stops long enough to let their eyes wander over a former homestead in the middle of a current farmer’s wheat field or pasture has a decision to make. Do these ruins reveal the prelude to the lovely brick home and giant metal sheds up the road a few miles, or do they tell instead the sad tale of a forgotten family who left during hard times? Too often, the second version is the truth, but few of us find that romantic or memorable. We prefer the first, a tale of expectation and success.

Hope is what Halladay and his competitors’ windmills delivered and what makes them iconic prairie images even now. As long as some of us call these isolated plains home and long to remain here, someone will keep photographing or painting bent and tumbling towers that pierce the horizon and tell us dreams can come true.

Plainsong: Unlikely Heroes and Grace

Great Plains writer Ian Frazier invites response when he says, “There’s an idea of the Plains as the middle of nowhere, something to be contemptuous of. But it’s really a heroic place.” In earlier civilizations, poets and writers recorded epics about courage and grace. Author Kent Haruf takes that challenge to heart to produce a novel recounting the understated goodness and resolve of people who gain collective strength from the lonely landscape they consider home. The title fits both structure and setting of this not-so-gentle exploration a rural community in eastern Colorado.

Initially, plainsong meant a simple musical form used in the early western church. Listen to a Gregorian chant to understand this uncomplicated structure relying on melody unaccompanied by harmony. In one form, it functions as a call and response, the technique Haruf uses to develop his character-driven novel.

Who would imagine two crusty bachelor brothers living on a cattle ranch 17 miles from town as the rescuers of an abandoned, pregnant 17-year-old or adolescent boys left by their mother? Characters Maggie Jones and Tom Guthrie are more likely champions, though they require aid to overcome difficulty.

Despite dark and troublesome conflicts, Haruf offers help for every need. None of the sympathetic characters faces hardship alone. Nebraska writer Bess Streeter Aldrich words sum up the convoluted relationships, “For though love has been ridiculed and disgraced, exchanged, and bartered, dragged through the courts, and sold for 30 pieces of silver, the bright steady glow of its fire still shines on the hearth stones of countless homes.” As basic as an early plainsong, love answers need in this hard land.

Writing like a poet, author Haruf plays with his title. Readers, like redtails riding thermals, soar along as theme and structure weave together lives of flawed humans. As readers finish one page after another of his novel, evidence proves Haruf knows this place some dismissively call The Great American Desert or Flyover Country.

Haruf sings a song of The Plains. He knows its landscape, icons, and rhythms. From the first, he establishes mastery of place: “. . . looking out over the back lot where the sun was just coming up. When the sun reached the top of the windmill, for a while he watched what it was doing, the increased reddening of sunrise along the steel blades and the tail vane above the wooden platform.” Who hasn’t watched scarlet rays warm the cold metal of a windmill?

Further into the work, he details a common ranching experience.

 “At last there was only the red-legged cow left to test, the one their father warned them about. . . . She regarded the two boys steadily as if she were some wild range animal that had never seen a human on foot before. . . . They were afraid of her and didn’t want to be kicked. . . . She dropped her head and whirled around, stubby tail up, stiffened, and galloped across to the other side. . . . She faced them, her eyes baleful-looking and her sides heaving. . . . She galloped into Bobby, knocking him back off his feet before he could jump out of the way. He landed on his back and bounced once like a piece of thrown stove wood wood. . . . He lay on the trampled dirt look up at the empty sky, trying to breathe.” Ranch kids across this region have left English teachers gripping red pens as they read essays describing this archetypal struggle between youngster and beast.

Plainsong resonates with details that define place. Haruf never misses the mark describing homes, streets, ranchland, red cedars, and solitude. At the end, he pulls the piece together with a familiar scene.

 “The two women came out onto the steps of the porch in the evening with the light behind them burning in the kitchen, visible through the open door, backlighting them. . . Their dark hair was damp and their quiet faces were flushed from the hot kitchen, from the cooking. . . . The women looked . . . farther out toward the barn lot and work corral where the three men stood at the fence, each with a booted foot crooked on the bottom rail, an elbow slung over the top rail, comfortable, talking. . . . Now the wind started up in the trees, high up, moving the high branches.

This novel is a hymn to place: a vanished inland sea turned expanse of grass and sky broken by occasional signs of human occupation. It’s a story of uncommon grace, the kind about which South Dakotan Kathleen Norris writes, “If grace is so wonderful, why do we have such trouble recognizing and accepting it. Maybe it’s because grace is not gentle or made-to-order. It often comes disguised as loss, or failure, or unwelcome change.”

Haruf’s unlikely heroes have found such grace.

Seeing This Place with New Eyes

By nature, Plains people share what they have with neighbors. It is how we survive and thrive. This opportunity for readers and lovers of ideas to explore and discuss our common landscape and the stories it generates is a gift. Each of us brings original perceptions to a collective experience. Our differences strengthen or weaken bonds necessary to make life good in a hard land. This group offers a venue for us to learn who we are because we value life on the Great Plains.

Over a billion years ago, a collision of tectonic plates in the Precambrian period initiated our current geological status. The Black Hills and the Eastern Wyoming and Central Texas uplifts make evident usually hidden metamorphic and igneous rock deep below us. Following the massive impacts that created the continent we recognize, reoccurring shallow oceans deposited layers of limestone, shale, and sandstone that wind and water carved into the geography we awaken to each morning.

The natural forces-- collision and erosion--that formed this land also shape the people who live here. Throughout time, this region has experienced ethnic, religious, political, economic, intellectual, and social impacts that affected its development every bit as much as that first crash of continental plates did. While two or more independent units melding together create a new form, erosion wears it away bit by bit to unveil hidden realities. Just as nature constructs and deconstructs, our selected texts will examine these pileups between humans and nature, cultures, and ideologies. Working much like sand and wind, authors’ words will shear away layers of confusion to reveal core truths that help us answer Wallace Stegner’s question, “Where do I belong in this country? Where is home?”

 Kiowa/Puebloan author and poet N. Scott Momaday further guides us with his wisdom, “A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning. It gives origin to all things.” Our authors gift uswith tales in which landscape plays an integral role. As readers, we learn how existing on this ancient seabed adds complications to our lives. Stegner states that writing about this arid country west of the 100th meridian requires new insights. “Perceptions trained in another climate have had to be modified. That means we have to learn to quit depending on perceptual habit.  Our first and hardest adaptation was to learn all over again how to see. Our second was to learn to like the new forms and colors and light and scale when we had learned to see them. Our third was to develop new techniques, a new palette, to communicate them. And our fourth, unfortunately out of our control, was to train an audience that would respond to what we wrote or painted.” He’s thrown down a gauntlet, a challenge to this book club to find meaning by looking at our world through others’ words.

Plainsong, Empire of the Summer Moon, and the memoir A Strong West Wind deliver multiple genres through which to view the western third of Kansas, eastern Colorado, western Nebraska, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma. Each writer examines the emotional and physical impacts of place on those who make a life in its dust. Their craft validates Cather’s statement that “There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” While we read, we peel away strata, striving to uncover our common experience.

People who write about the Great Plains and its inhabitants acknowledge that an endless horizon paired with unpredictable weather that can produce howling blizzards to raging tornadoes and moisture sucking droughts possesses as much if not more power than any towering mountain range or surging sea. These bards know the real magic of this place manifests itself in the shade of a porch on a hot afternoon, in watching dusk silhouette rows of red cedar, in discovering a meadowlark nest in an old buffalo wallow on the prairie, or in seeing a community unite to overcome nature or human induced trouble.

 Enjoy this opportunity to steep deeply in words about a place you call home. Relish the collisions and the unpeeling of layers to find our truths. Momaday probably says it best: “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. I believe he ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it.” Inhabit this space and delight in it.

The Times They Are a Changin’

I recently read an article explaining the world has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene. This means future geologists will find human-created residue from radiation, plastics, mining, agriculture, and industry in the earth’s sediments. At this time, scientists haven’t made this official; however, mention in the media indicates the world is evolving. Change unsettles me, so for distraction, I imagined the lives of those who occupied this region I call home. Other than finding bits of worked jasper, chert, and flint in plowed fields and reading stories recounted after the fact in history books, small evidence remains of those who not only survived but also thrived in this arid country west of 98^th meridian.

Despite prospering in this landscape, these cultures weren’t native to this place. They migrated from places like the Black Hills and Wind River Range speaking languages with Algonquin, Shoshonean, and Tanoan roots, which indicates their nations originated from distant parts of this country.

Prior to the arrival of Spaniards who brought horses from Europe, these bands journeyed by foot with the help of domesticated dogs trained to carry small loads. This limited not only their range of movement but also their ability to conquer others. Imagine how swiftly their lives altered when horses introduced faster and more efficient travel and ways to make war.

The grassy Plains provided a perfect setting for this equine culture to flourish. The fleet-footed beasts offered not only transportation and military strength but also wealth nourished by endless acres of sun-fueled grasses. Within a generation, people once limited to foot travel became savvy riders who covered enormous distances while hunting and warring. Historians explain that these adaptable equestrians mastered shooting game and fighting battles while firing up to thirty arrows a minute. Until firearm technology included reliable, repeating rifles and pistols, these archers were what some call “Lords of the Plains.”

Due to their nomadic life style, they adapted to unpredictable weather conditions on the prairie more easily than later arriving immigrants who established permanent residences. Mobility permitted bands to relocate as they exhausted resources or fouled an area. Their expanded ability to harvest native animals and plants generated improved nutrition, better housing, plentiful clothing, and other necessities.

 Buffalo herds numbering in the millions migrated through these grasslands seasonally. Native residents used the entire carcass to produce food, containers, tools, robes, and tipis. If they killed more than they could use, they traded for goods. For early Plains residents, these shaggy beasts functioned as a Walmart on the hoof long before Sam Wall conceived of his big box chain.

Even before the Civil War, Plains tribes saw their world changing. Once railways and roads bisected the prairie, they understood their way of life was under siege. For decades, they fought this transformation, successfully for a time. Once the Great Rebellion ended, new technology and hordes of land-hungry immigrants meant the old order was over. No matter how perfectly adapted these transient cultures were to living on this windy, dry ancient seabed, transformation was inevitable.

When I think of those dark-skinned people camping and hunting in the Smoky Hill, Saline, and Solomon River valleys, I wonder what they’d think of asphalt highways linking little towns that follow their old trails. What would they think of the changes wrought in this new age so heavily influenced by humans?

Join the Club

The calendar just rolled over to 2016, and it’s tradition to make resolutions. If your resolution involved more reading, joining a book club, or learning about the place where you live, then you might want to google http://hppr.org/programs/join-hpprs-radio-readers-book-club, and sign up.

Unbeknownst to many, committed employees of High Plains Public Radio in Garden City devote their days to connecting High Plains occupants with one another and the world. Obviously, they transmit public radio standards, including A Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, All Things Considered, The Thomas Jefferson Hour, and other shows recorded in cities far from our hometown. However, this station continues adding local programming. This creative team appeals to varied interests with     Learning the Birds, Growing on the High Plains, High Plains Outdoors, Ad Astra—Star Gazing on the High Plains, Agland, High Plains History, Prairie Tayles, Amarillo Symphony, Living Room Concerts, and the soon to be introduced Radio Readers Book Club.

After months of volunteer efforts to fine tune details involving webpages, study guides, discussion leaders, funding, book selections, forums, and more, the project launches soon--in January or February. If you enjoy meaty discussions with the likeminded or not-so-likeminded, sign up and order the texts from either your library or bookstore.

This spring’s theme is Sense of Place. Each selection explores landscape’s importance in human development. Anyone with a local address knows that living in the sparsely populated, arid high plains presents unique challenges, so the topic is worth examining. The initial books include the fiction, non-fiction, and memoir titles: Plainsong, Empire of the Summer Moon, and A Strong West Wind. Despite being different genres, each delves into the influence of place.

The first piece is the novel Plainsong by Kent Haruf. He set the interweaving stories in a small town in eastern Colorado. It’s similar to scores of communities bordering blue highways that connect the dots between grain elevators whose verticality breaks our never-ending horizon. Regional readers will recognize the teachers, farmers, adolescents, schools, quick stops, red cedars, dusty roads, and concerns that constitute his tale of small town existence. In simple, lyrical language, Haruf captures the essence of this landscape of waving grass, endless vistas, red cedars, and never neutral weather.

Empire of the Summer Moon takes us into the not so distant past when the southern part of this region was home to the Comanche who thrived in the most difficult parts of this expanse. It offers a sympathetic view of nomadic inhabitants who loved this landscape every bit as much as those who later homesteaded, built towns, and plowed the native grasses in order to farm the land. It peeks into native and white cultures to explore ideological differences that led a no win situation. Though it’s non-fiction, it’s an engaging read that leaves the reader mulling long after finishing the final page.

Gail Caldwell’s A Strong West Wind is memoir—a narrative based on her life in West Texas. A baby boomer, she offers a perspective of the developing agriculture and oil industries during the post war 50s and turbulent 60s. Readers respond positively to her introspective writing that explores the roll of landscape in a youngster’s development.

Through these stories and those coming next fall, High Plains Public Radio connects readers who call this contradictory landscape home. Participants may live a distance from one another, but using technology and airwaves,they can practice a new kind of neighborliness in this creative approach to a book club.

Revisiting Old Friends

Friends enrich our lives in so many ways, and during Christmas, I’m reminded that they’ve improved my baking skills. I’ve written previously about family recipes that link one generation to another. This year, I savored old friends’ and co-workers’ yellowing cards with their fading handwritten instructions to make cookies. As I examined each one, I thought about the hours that woman and I had spent working and sharing our lives. These aging pieces of paper connect us more surely than rope or chain.

Until I met Jeanette when I worked as a teller at Ellis State Bank, I don’t believe I knew what a snickerdoodle was. She included them on her Christmas cookie plate and hooked me forever. Like the woman who shared the recipe with me, these treats comforted whoever ate them. This mixture of sifted flour, eggs, butter, sugar, vanilla, and cinnamon baked into crinkly golden orbs could warm the Grinch’s hard heart. Looking back, I hope I shared some with fellow workers. It would have been easy to nibble on one every time I passed the snack table in our work area. I know that when our daughters see that customary family recipe, they must wonder who Jeanette is. I see her faint script and recall how welcome she made me feel as bride in a new town.

For holiday celebrations, my nuclear family made old –fashioned fudge as well as sugar and chocolate chip cookies. As a result, Nestlé’s chips and powdered cocoa were the only kind of chocolate you’d find our cupboard. Imagine my surprise during my first teaching job when Sue, the home-ec instructor, had students create snow on the mountain cookies that required melting bars of baking chocolate. After I tasted the first bite, I had to have the recipe and discovered how to melt these rich squares in a double boiler before stirring in other ingredients. Learning this skill added a new dimension to my developing kitchen efforts. When I look at Sue’s precise handwriting, I recall a confident woman who mentored my first two years of teaching. She didn’t hesitate to tackle difficult recipes or sewing patterns with teenagers as well as complicated coaching strategies with her ball teams. Her example encouraged me to live as boldly as she.

A few years later, I added another staple to my annual Christmas platter. Sondra, a fellow garage sale aficionado, introduced me to peanut butter kiss cookies. A former elementary teacher, her handwritten recipe is as tidy and precise as this dear woman who systematically mapped out our garage sale trail. Step-by-step, she guided me through the complication of taking ¾-baked dough out of a hot oven and centering chocolate stars in each melting ball to finish up a pretty and irresistible treat. Since I learned to make these, they’ve become my mother’s favorite cookie. To this day, I can’t look at Sondra’s handwriting without thinking of the fun enjoyed by two budget-minded young moms on a mission to score bargains every Saturday morning.

I have about twenty of these deteriorating cards stashed in the recipe drawer in my kitchen. Barring catastrophe, they’ll last as long as I do. Should disaster strike, saving these links to important people from my past will be a priority. I can copy the recipes. I can’t replace those handwritten words that transport me through time.

"The Day the Music Died"

Don McLean sang about Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper Richardson’s deaths when he wrote the lyrics, “The Day the Music Died” in his beloved “American Pie.” Current events make me think of another sad meaning to those memorable words. Anyone who’s worked with teens over the past forty years will relate. 

As a high school ball player and forensic team member, I recall quiet trips to events. Coaches didn’t turn on the bus or van’s single radio because they wanted us focused on our competition. The ride home was another story. Team members honed negotiation skills to select a radio station from the many choices others shouted out. Once noisy teens determined the favorite, they convinced the driver to crank the volume high enough that riders in the back seat could hear the lyrics clearly. Music was a group activity in those golden days.

Over the four decades of my teaching and coaching career, this changed. During my first twenty some years of loading kids in a district vehicle to haul them to distant schools, life continued much as it had when I was a participant. Passengers were expected to be quiet as they would be in a prayer chapel going to our destination. However, trips home began with lively discussions about what music to listen to and raucous sing-alongs to ever-changing tunes. This was karaoke before it became a popular party fun.

My favorite memories of these good old days revolve around December bus trips when girls who loved to carol filled the seats. Headlights guided us homeward over the dark plains while greenish console lights inside set a holiday mood. Sweet voices of tired round-ballers sang about hay-filled mangers, heralding angels, gift-bearing wise men, and silent nights. Following those serious toned old tunes, the vocalists would throw in a crazy version of “Jingle Bells” or “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” I may have been exhausted after a 16-hour day teaching and coaching, but I treasured those after-game songfests.

Technology that I normally loved assassinated these singalongs. Over time, as more teens climbed onto buses with personal devices and earbuds, travel became quiet as a morgue. Eventually, the driver or I  picked the radio station uncontested because the passengers were listening to individual playlists. By the time I retired, I had to wave my hands or tap someone on the shoulder to make contact. 

The positive side of this new reality is that no one has to listen to music he or she hates. Folks who don’t enjoy interacting with others slip into private worlds while sitting shoulder to shoulder and remain there until the vehicle stops. The negative involves the same issue. No one learns to deal with the frustration of other people’s preferences.

The element that makes me saddest is that pre- individual electronic devices, music brought students, coaches, and drivers together. It didn’t isolate them. Those mostly dead after-game soirees taught tolerance for other’s musical tastes, negotiating skills, and an appreciation for noisy camaraderie.

“A Baby Is God’s Opinion That Life Should Go On.”

Anyone reading or listening to news over the past few weeks must, as I do, long for comfort and continuity to counterbalance life’s new normal. What better way than to root ourselves in customs that go back enough generations that they’ve withstood the test of personal and national distress. Our family honored such a tradition recently with a shower to celebrate the birth of our youngest daughter’s first child. As I put away a dish passed from my grandmother to my mom and now to me, I thought about the generations of women who’ve gathered to celebrate an impending birth.

The women who used this dish immigrated from greener landscapes to the arid plains of western Kansas. Some lived through the Civil War, the Plains Indian wars, The Spanish American War, WW I, The Great Depression, WW II, The Korean Conflict, Vietnam, and recent events. My mother who was born in the midst of the Dust Bowl worked only a few blocks from Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and drove past its ruins and later the monuments to those who died that day. When I want to shut my eyes and ignore things that terrify me, I remind myself I come from sturdy stock. We do what is necessary to survive and thrive in a difficult world.

The poet Carl Sandburg states many families’ optimism in the future, explaining why it’s necessary to rejoice when a child is born. He wrote, “A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on.”  As I watched women who love our daughter delight in giving handmade quilts and leatherwork, practical gifts, and books, several thoughts ran through my mind. I appreciated the hours of labor those crafters spent creating heirlooms that will comfort this child and pass to future generations. I’m grateful for the gifts that ensure the safety and wellbeing of our new granddaughter and for the thoughtfulness of mothers who’ve already raised kids and know what a new mom needs to ease that first year. The growing stack of books next to the mom-to-be’s chair told me how this group valued the ties of language and ideas and wanted to pass on their favorites. One Great-Aunt touch all our hearts when she included a favorite book she received as a little girl. Each of these presents warmed my heart and validated Sandburg’s message.

While the adults enjoyed visiting and remembering their own early parenting experiences, toddlers attending helped pass out gifts and make sharp observations. One cousin-to-be wants that baby to come out to play. Others were more interested in the immediate delight of raiding the mint and nut bowl.  Each of these little ones reminded all of the adults of how swiftly infancy passes.

This long practiced custom of giving gifts to prepare new parents for their long awaited child states so clearly that our hearts cherish the hope new babies offer. Those of us who’ve raised our own, enjoy helping expectant moms and dads get off to a good start. It’s also a needed reminder to savor every moment and to work to leave a better world for the next generation.

Frozen in Time

This time of year folks tend to wax nostalgic, and, as a result, share long told family stories, old greeting cards and photos of the good ol’ days. I love hearing the tales, but the pictures are often better. I especially enjoy ones that depict festive clothing and social gatherings. Nothing charms me more than seeing a picture of skaters wrapped in heavy coats, warm mittens and muffs, furry hats, and flowing neck scarfs. Wintry scenes like these occurred wherever water was deep enough and temperatures froze for a long spell in western Kansas.  

These old greetings remind me of my grandfather’s adventures in Ford County, where he grew up along the Arkansas River. Family members taught him and his younger brother to skate as boys. Once they’d mastered their silver blades, the two of them traversed the frozen, winding waterway from their hometown of Ford all the way to old Fort Dodge. According to Grandpa, this was the fastest way to travel. To earn extra money, they ran a trap line along the banks. I don’t recall hearing stories of parties on the ice, but I’m sure if one occurred, the Bisbee boys were there.

Speaking of celebrations, old Ellis Headlights and Reviews are full of Big Creek Skate party stories. Apparently, events involving community members of all ages began in the afternoon and continued after dusk. Merrymakers built bonfires in the middle of the creek to light their way and provide warmth. This seems risky, but I’ve seen photos of Ellis residents harvesting ice to store in a warehouse near the old railroad bridge. It’s clear that the creek held considerably more water than it does now and got cold enough to freeze it several feet thick. That explains why revelers could safely stack logs and burn them right in the middle of the frozen creek bed without landing all of them in frigid waters.

A recent trip to a craft fair in Norton triggered some North Solomon skating stories. A friend and I found a cleverly constructed Christmas door hanger that used an old skate. The crafter had painted holiday designs on the leather uppers, strung the boot with red lacing, and tucked evergreens and bright berries into its opening. Immediately, I mentioned this was a great way to reuse old skates found at auctions and garage sales. My friend remarked that she still had the skates she’d worn down on the Solomon below Logan.

“What? You guys had enough water to ice skate right in Logan?” I asked.

That triggered more memories of skating parties she’d enjoyed as a child and teen in post WW II Kansas.  Sounds like Logan merrymakers had every bit as much fun as those red cheeked, frost nosed revelers in Ellis.

During these droughty years, it’s hard to imagine hosting community skates in our little towns on the prairie. However, when wet years come again, wouldn’t it be fun to start a new round of tales of little ones learning to skate with their parents and friends while young lovers hold hands and cruise up and down frozen tracks?

Immigrant Success Story

For a gal who grew up spending every fall hunting pheasants with family, you’d think I’d have been insanely curious about how these strikingly beautiful Chinese immigrants found their way to the Great Plains. Knowing me, I did look up these pretty birds in a well-used set of World Book encyclopedias. I must’ve settled for the simple answer that someone imported them from Asia. I’m certain the article was short and sweet, with few of the embellishments now found on the World Wide Web.

 

With the power of cyber space at my fingertips, I’ve since learned these ring neck wonders arrived first at Port Townsend in Washington State. An American consul general by the name of Owen Nickerson Denny discovered them during his service in China. There, local farmers netted and marketed these wild birds. This diplomat recognized not only their beauty but also their flavorful meat. According to Historyllink.org, Denny wrote a friend, saying, “These birds are delicious eating and will furnish fine sport.”

During his tenure in Asia, Denny bought enough birds to raise a fattened domestic flock for his own dining delight. As time grew near to return to the American Northwest, he conceived the idea of taking a breeding population home with him. He arranged in 1881to transport aboard the vessel Otago, 60 ring necks along with a few Mongolia sand grouse and chefoo partridges. In the shipment, he included native fruit trees and bamboo cuttings to transplant to his homeland. Only the pheasants and bamboo still exist in the wild.

While the birds survived the ocean voyage, they didn’t do well during the overland transport. Only a few lived long enough to establish homes on an island in the Columbia River. Authorities disagree on how well this population reproduced and expanded.

Still hoping to establish a successful breeding colony of these game birds, Denny imported a second group in 1882 and shipped them directly to Portland, Oregon, which was closer to the family homestead. These new imports quickly went native, and within a year, thriving populations expanded into surrounding counties. By 1892, Oregon established a pheasant-hunting season. If accounts are accurate, hunters harvested 50,000 of Denny’s pheasants on its first day.

In 1884, Denny arranged a third delivery to the original destination in Washington State. This time, the birds proliferated and expanded their territory into Canada. Anytime people see success, they duplicate it. As a result, hopeful sportsmen transported breeding pairs to other regions until you can now find descended stock in at least 19 American states. No longer called Denny’s pheasants, populations did so well in South Dakota that over a million now live there, and legislators named them the state bird.

Despite reduced populations the last few years in Kansas, this is still a great environment for these Asian immigrants. Our many fields of grain offer optimal food and cover for these beautiful and tasty birds. Just as many of our ancestors came to this land as new arrivals  and thrived, so have these creatures. They are as much a part of what makes this state amazing as we are.

Prairie Art Renaissance

Making art is a lonely business. Just as very few high school athletes grow up to sign professional sport contracts, limited numbers of painters, sculptors, photographers, poets,  actors, singers, and song writers achieve fame or financial success as a result of their efforts. Such individuals work in the privacy of homes and garages without anyone but family or close friends knowing they painted a luminous prairie sunrise or captured a reenactment of buffalo soldiers crossing the South Solomon River. Fortunately, for inspired spirits who call the prairie home, more communities are collaborating to share their efforts-- a deal that benefits both parties.

In addition to annual shows in Norton, Hill City, Nicodemus and Phillipsburg sponsored by area art supporters, Stockton business owners have teamed up to host an art walk on Sunday November 22^nd from 2 – 5 p.m. At this time, six downtown stores have invited regional painters and photographers to display work and chat with visitors. Anyone interested is welcome to meet these creators, grab a snack, and appreciate locally produced paintings, mosaics, and photographs.

Cheryl Calvin, owner of Sand Creek Mercantile, shares that this innovative group plans four such events throughout the upcoming year, exposing even more talent to the public. This approach keeps energy and interest high and offers supporters more occasions to appreciate varied styles and techniques.

Personally, I’m thrilled to see grass root support of regional art expanding. Few true creatives have the business acumen or training to promote their own work. As a result, you’ll find it sitting on dusty shelves or hanging on walls that no one sees. When individuals who have such proven ability get involved, it means local artists receive exposure and potential income.

 In addition, well-advertised campaigns attract visitors from surrounding areas, which expands a supporting business’s client base. Such opportunities open doors to consignment fees for gallery space. Even better, the public learns they can afford to hang hometown artists’ works on their walls.

Nature understands the advantage of symbiotic relationships where one creature or plant benefits another. Think of yuccas and the moths that fertilize their blossoms or cattle and the birds that pick irritating insects off these ruminating bovines. Our Great Plains landscape affords many examples of creatures whose lives benefit one another. Local businesses and artists working together provide a perfect pairing to help one another thrive while making the rest of our lives richer through their efforts.

Our region of the sunflower state pulses with the energy of accomplished artists. However, few of us have seen their work. Trade people who understand the benefit of inviting the public into their businesses not only to purchase a product or service but also to appreciate landscapes, still lifes,  portraits, sculpture, photographs and more  function like that all important yucca moth. They germinate  community spirit so our descendants can live the good life on the prairie in another hundred years.

Mining Gold in the Garden

Miners may have headed to the mountains hoping to discover gold nuggets and tiny gilt grains in streams and veins of rock. We’ve stayed home on the prairie and discovered it in our Kansas garden after experimenting with new crops. One such Eureka moment arrived in the form of beta-carotene, vitamin A rich sweet potatoes.

From the time my mother fed me pureed orange spoonfuls from a Gerber jar, I’ve loved the flavor and bright color of this still favorite food. Thanksgiving recipes incorporating butter, brown sugar, and marshmallows or pecans into the mix confirmed my cravings. With the advent of cooking shows and online recipe sites, I’ve discovered sweet potato pie, casseroles, fries, chips, and soups. Those dishes mean I no longer wait for holidays to gobble this favorite goodie. What I didn’t know until recently was that I could grow my own tubers and enjoy them fresh from the garden.

Our family has planted traditional potatoes many times over the decades and enjoyed the fun of digging them. It’s a thrill to stab a potato fork into the soil and turn it to see how many thin-skinned, big and little spuds one seed potato produced. Planting sweet potato slips doubles the fun for anyone who loves to guess what treasure lurks beneath those vibrant green plants and vines.

To grow these holiday favorites requires shoots you can buy at the garden center or start in the kitchen window in February or early March. While you plant a cut up russet or Yukon eye to produce the traditional tater, to harvest these sweeter forms of starch, you tuck a single leafy slip into a mound of soil. This produces a beautiful vine that generates orange-tinged gold underground. As a bonus, sweet potatoes are not in the nightshade family so gardeners can eat tender leaves as well as the tubers multiplying beneath them later in the season.

My husband dug ours recently and struck an unexpected Mother Lode. We planted 12 tiny slips, losing four to frost. Later, another plant succumbed so we were down to 7 plants. Examining  our reduced hopes, I wanted a large enough harvest to supply our family Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners along with  a batch or two of mashed or baked sweet potatoes for the two of us.

Conditions this summer must’ve been perfect for this crop because once my sweetheart turned the soil beneath the drying vines, he discovered various sized orange tubers in a large enough quantity to fill an old-fashioned washtub. One potato nearly the size of a football will feed our extended family! Others grew large enough to serve multiple  mouths per spud. Thank goodness, they aren’t all humongous. A few are small enough to feed a single diner.

It’s as if Midas with his golden touch produced these  grand champion sweet potatoes. If they were actual gold nuggets, we couldn’t find wheelbarrows enough to haul the money they’d be worth to the bank. We’ll let miners slog through the cold, dark, and damp to find wealth deep in the Rockies while our family celebrates our summer harvest of gold this holiday season.

Quilted Treasures

 I’d be the first to tell you I’m not a quilter and unlikely to become one unless catastrophe requires me to recycle old clothing remnants into blankets to warm me or my loved ones in the cold of winter. While I don’t have patience to construct such intricate coverlets, I admire those who do. When our youngest daughter learned to quilt in a high school FACS class, I was thrilled she’d continue a family tradition that has waned since my great-grandmother last sorted through her ragbag to come up with pieces to create a lovely blue and red star heirloom my mother treasures. While much of quilting is traditional and similar, like many other old time crafts, it, too, has changed with new technology and access to specialty stores.

When I examine older quilts, it’s clear the seamstress used up remnants of material or old clothing. Often times the design seems haphazard as the maker found ways to incorporate a prized child’s dress or shirt or a particularly lush piece of velvet or silk into a typically cotton or wool base. I feel like I can read the story of a family’s existence by running my fingers over these antiques at an auction or in a second hand store. 

A simple patchwork quilt I once bid for and won was made of dark colored men’s suits and ties from the early part of the 1900s.What a thrill to move my fingers like they were reading braille from one block to another and feel the differences in the weights and weaves of summer and winter fabric. The quilter had also incorporated skinny and fat ties from different eras into this construction as well. She hadn’t intended to be artful. She’d meant to keep a body warm during a drafty plains winter. After sleeping under my prize, it was clear the seamstress had succeeded. In no time, I was toasty. As dull and plain as this was, I found it well stitched and lovely.

My own ancestor’s quilt is much the same. It is made of practical, fabrics that started as every-day clothing and ended up as a charming bed cover. When I look at the tiny stitches, I feel I know this long  dead woman who had  to have been exhausted from raising a big family and helping to run a livery stable and boarding house in southwest  Kansas.  Somehow, she found time to make something so useful yet pretty out of rags.

Most quilts I see made today are every bit as lovely if not more so than their predecessors’ examples. The difference is that the quilter has visited a specialty shop to buy coordinated yards of fabric that please the eye and match a room’s decor. While the patterns may be intricate, new technology simplifies the cutting and stitching compared to those efforts of a woman working with simple tools by a flickering oil lamp.

A quilt display at the Dane G. Hansen Museum illustrated everything I’ve tried to express in this essay. As I walked from one presentation to another, I could see the differences between those made long ago from saved scraps and those constructed using modern techniques. Each one was beautiful in its own way. And, in case anyone is wondering, I wouldn’t turn down any gift of a quilt.

Girl Scout Memories

“Be prepared.” Since I was a little girl, these words have guided my life. I heard them bouncing through my four-in-the-morning brain as firefighters combatted flames in a large building less than a half block from my home. Between peeks out the front window to see how the battle was going, I busily threw prescription medications, toothbrush, clean undies, extra glasses, dog food, leashes, important paperwork, computer, camera, and other necessities in a big bag next to my purse. If we had to leave fast, I wanted to take our irreplaceable and emergency supplies with us.

After thirty-eight years of marriage, my husband has resigned himself to his wife’s early Girl Scout training that instilled the “Be Prepared” motto into her DNA. She could no more hear there might be a catastrophe than she’d have a plan to deal with the outcome. Despite a few awkward moments when he’s had to explain why the family has the equivalent of the kitchen sink packed in the trunk, this force that drives my planning hasn’t caused any major problems.

Following that early morning siren and the accompanying flashing lights and hoses stretched the length of the block, I tried to think why I was compelled to prepare to evacuate. Then the answer popped into my head. It’s because I was a Brownie and Girl Scout. From second grade on, I’d been practicing to handle difficult situations. After all, the whole purpose of this organization is to inspire girls to be the best they can be.

From the earliest years, members vow, “On my honor, I will try: To serve God and my country, To help people at all times, And to live by the Girl Scout Law.” In case you weren’t part of this group, the law involves the following principles: honesty, fairness, consideration, compassion, courage, responsibility, respect for self and authority, management of resources, and improvement of the world. It’s easy to see that anyone indoctrinated into this philosophy would make a responsible citizen.

As a kid, I thought I was just having fun tying various knots, learning first aid, practicing cooking, making sit upons, and eating s’mores. I didn’t realize those field trips and campouts where each girl had a job to complete were training future wives, moms, employees, and neighbors to handle whatever life threw their ways.

After holding and re-examining treasured scout pins I earned five decades ago, I have a new appreciation for those women who served as leaders for our noisy and not always cooperative groups. Since I, too, took a turn as a scout mom for our daughters, I know these organizers work around already busy schedules to plan meetings and activities to assist little girls in earning coveted awards. They had to reread that already worn manual to refresh their memories of the motto, the laws, and badge requirements. They missed date night with the hubs to spend an evening around a campfire with sweaty, pigtailed urchins who took that sacrifice for granted.

As a grandma now, I know scouting affected my life in uncountable ways. It made me a better, more prepared person. The women who led my early troops are probably gone now, so I’m going to say thank you to those gals who currently change the world one little girl at a time. You are making a difference.