Margotlog: Larger Fields, Smaller Towns: A Minnesota Dilemma
When I first started traveling north, south, east and west as a writer-in-the-schools, the towns I visited in Minnesota were thriving. This was the 1980s, 90s, and into the 2000s. Some towns were larger than others, but even the smaller towns who joined together to form "consolidated schools" had several cafes, a bevy of church steeples pointing toward the sky, a car dealership, a garage and mechanic, a pharmacy, several barbers/hairdressers, grocery stores (not necessarily huge chains), a dress shop, and what we liked to call "A Five and Dime," which of course was ludicrous since hardly anything cost only a nickle or dime anymore.
Often mornings and evenings, farmers who passed the slack winter days drinking coffee "in town," sat around in booths or stools "shooting the bull," while their children trudged past outside on the way to school, or took the orange school bus "over the river and through the woods." I almost always had a room in a motel on the edge of town. Sometimes, even farmers, married to school teachers, knew who I was, a stranger yes, but welcome, someone to stare at as I, too, entered the cafe, walked past in my mukluks and red down coat, and slid into a booth. What I ordered for dinner has left no memory, but I do remember the rumble of masculine voices, and a waitress, in pink or blue uniform, with a tiny apron across her middle, standing at the end of the booth and taking my order. She knew me as "the visiting teacher." When I told her my name, she'd remember it for every one of the five evenings I ate there.
Sometimes in warmer autumn or spring weather, I'd walk to the town cemetery, hearing echoes of the students' names I was teaching in grades 4 - 6 or 7 - 9. Sometimes, I even cruised back roads, pausing to stare at tumble down barns and houses with their windows broken and doors off the hinges. Barns had their high roofs "stove in," but the walls often stood foursquare, full now of pigeons, mice, rabbits, and who knew what else. Maybe a traveler on foot who needed shelter for a free night's rest, slept in the dirty hay, unable to afford a motel room.
Gradually, this rather nice balance between people and land, living inside an economy of modest scale that yet supported quite a few families, often enough to keep a grammer school going in town, this lovely balance collapsed. First came bigger and bigger machines which required consolidation of fields, then came the sell- off of farm land to those few with lots of cash. Finally the more diversified farming of an earlier era disappeared. As far as the eye could see, acre after acre of corn or soy beans stretched to the margins of small streams.
It didn't take long before the towns began to dwindle. The few farm families with the cash to buy out their neighbors, purchased huge machines to plant the 'row" crops margin to margin of larger and larger fields. These families upgraded their farm homes, expanding into fireside "family rooms," or huge kitchen/sitting rooms. For all necessary purchases, they could no longer trade in towns where their parents and grandparents had lived because the towns were drying up. There simply weren't enough people to support a garage and a drug store, several grocery stores and a pharmacy, a beauty parlor, a five and dime, and a bank.
But these families sitting in the midst of their huge acerage, enjoyed driving bigger and bigger trucks to larger farm towns that still retained the retail services necessary to keep them fed, clothed, healthy, and practicing the "old time religion." All the high school students rode school buses, but still in some towns, there weren't enough children to support a modest grammar school. The children had to be bussed farther and farther away.
Grant Herfindahl, retiring from his job as executive director of The Farm Service Agency/U.S. Department of Agriculture, has seen this enormous consolidation take place. "Many crop farmers grow only two commodity crops, corn and soybears" he told a StarTribune writer in early January 2017. "The number of farms has dropped" (with average size expanding from 400 acres to 2,000). "When I began working in Pope County 20 years ago, there were about 115 dairies, and now maybe there're 30 left. And all of those 115 dairies were cumulatively raising about 6,000 cows. Today we've got new dairies(with) 6,000 cows in one dairy. This trend has been happening for a long time." (StarTribune, 1/8/2017 Business, D3).
This trend is creating a silent environmental disaster, on the par, if not the scale, with what Silent Spring described years ago. Because of the enormous size of the fields, and the main crops, corn and soy beans, needing vast amounts of chemicals to keep them bug free and growing, our Minnesota streams and rivers, the ground water that most of us pump for daily use, is being polluted, often to the point of killing fish, and endangering our health. Weedy margins where flowering plants grow, necessary for bees, butterflies, birds, have disappeared. We have a nationwide crisis in pollinaters. Monarch butterflies who depend on milkweed plants are unable to survive.
Equally as appalling are the caving in of small towns, with their diversified economies. Yes, according to Grant Herfindahl, some farmers across Minnesota have found a middle way--keeping a chunk of acerage planted, but also working jobs in towns. But the norm becomes larger and larger farms; fewer and fewer jobs. And, of course, as jobs in towns dry up, those who used to make a modest living are now poor, and on welfare. Rural poverty is one of our state's growing problems. It is not a happy land anymore. The rural core is dying.
There are some solutions: such as requiring all farmers to maintain buffer zones on their fields. Such areas of native plants help pollinaters survive, and also filter run-off of farm chemicals to prevent polluting neighboring streams and rivers. But though crucial, such buffers do very little for people left by the wayside as their towns are dying. We need to encourage relocation of small factories to rural Minnesota. We need to re-educate people who used to work in commerical establishments for jobs in various e-industries. These are some thoughts, but there is enormous resistance among "big" farmers to the environmental changes necessary to curb poisoning our streams, lakes, and rivers. If we don't legislate compliance, we will be overcome just like our pollinators. We will all eventually become victims of this current "Silent Spring."
Sunday, January 15, 2017
Friday, December 30, 2016
Margotlog: Phebe Hanson: a Minnesota Original
Margotlog: Phebe Hanson: a Minnesota Original
Maybe it's not surprising that as we watch friends diminish and lean toward death, their most prominent and loved characteristics stand out. I wouldn't have said this about Phebe even three months ago, which was when I probably last saw her. I wouldn't have thought of her essence like this, but since she died recently at 88, I find myself asking, What were the most formative experiences of her life? And without much hesitation, I find myself answering, having her mother die when she was still a child, and developing a rare disease called Wegener's Syndrome when she was edging toward old age.
Growing up in a small Minnesota town where her father was a Lutheran minister, Phebe developed what I think of as a "giving" personality. She must have been born a talker, but the circumstances that shaped this trait had to do, I think, with carrying around a halo, sometimes tarnished (and thus open to humor) which she wore jauntily to better spill its glow. When her mother died, that glow became even more necessary. The girl's humor drew the world close, not in a frantic way, but with a warm, spirited intensity that united us with her in what felt like a mother's energetic embrace. I've never known anyone else whose quirky, inclusive humor could so quickly make us feel like her pals for life, and darn happy to be laughing with her even as we bemoaned what the world was up to.
"Long Underwear," one of my favorite poems published in her first book, Sacred Hearts (Milkweed Editions, 1985), suggests two somewhat contrary but ultimately sympathetic traits. First there's the getting out of bed early in snow-filled dark, and before anything else, letting her "flannel nightgown/ fall to the floor" while she stands "in forbidden nakedness...over the rush of Satanic heat" from the furnace below and pulls on her long underwear, the underwear she "won't discard/
until spring melts the stubborn snow
of my father's caution,
and lets me wear my legs naked again.
I love that little jab at her father because it's so evident that he is the parent of her life, and she with her encompassing humor must foster within herself a motherliness, not only to warm her, but the rest of us, her delighted readers.
Phebe's much later millstone, the Wegener's Syndrome, caused her at various time great distress. Her vision became impaired, and sometimes her mobility. I wasn't privy to the many manifestations of this difficult disease, but I do know that the steriods used to treat it caused her great trouble from time to time. She had to retire from teaching, she a natural-born teacher of all ages from school children to college students to adults. Yet, it seems to me that the teaching never stopped. She herself became the lesson, a witty, often laughing, sometimes mordant mother to the parts of herself that wouldn't work. That instead of isolating her from friends, the disease somehow urged her to reach out with humor that enlivened us as well as herself.
I know there were bitter, bitter periods. But her struggles seemed to disappear when we stood at her door. We became the company she needed to delight and draw close. We were the necessary others to her wit and insight. It was a most satisfactory embrace. So much so that I almost can't believe she is dead. Yet, just as she herself needed to be reminded, we do too. At the end, the obituary in the Minneapolis StarTribune notes: "As a lifelong worrywart, Phebe often expressed anxiety that she would die, and for many years, family members assured her that she would." We love you, darling friend, We'll keep assuring ourselves that without the claw of death reaching toward us, there'd be little need to relish what we have among us.
Maybe it's not surprising that as we watch friends diminish and lean toward death, their most prominent and loved characteristics stand out. I wouldn't have said this about Phebe even three months ago, which was when I probably last saw her. I wouldn't have thought of her essence like this, but since she died recently at 88, I find myself asking, What were the most formative experiences of her life? And without much hesitation, I find myself answering, having her mother die when she was still a child, and developing a rare disease called Wegener's Syndrome when she was edging toward old age.
Growing up in a small Minnesota town where her father was a Lutheran minister, Phebe developed what I think of as a "giving" personality. She must have been born a talker, but the circumstances that shaped this trait had to do, I think, with carrying around a halo, sometimes tarnished (and thus open to humor) which she wore jauntily to better spill its glow. When her mother died, that glow became even more necessary. The girl's humor drew the world close, not in a frantic way, but with a warm, spirited intensity that united us with her in what felt like a mother's energetic embrace. I've never known anyone else whose quirky, inclusive humor could so quickly make us feel like her pals for life, and darn happy to be laughing with her even as we bemoaned what the world was up to.
"Long Underwear," one of my favorite poems published in her first book, Sacred Hearts (Milkweed Editions, 1985), suggests two somewhat contrary but ultimately sympathetic traits. First there's the getting out of bed early in snow-filled dark, and before anything else, letting her "flannel nightgown/ fall to the floor" while she stands "in forbidden nakedness...over the rush of Satanic heat" from the furnace below and pulls on her long underwear, the underwear she "won't discard/
until spring melts the stubborn snow
of my father's caution,
and lets me wear my legs naked again.
I love that little jab at her father because it's so evident that he is the parent of her life, and she with her encompassing humor must foster within herself a motherliness, not only to warm her, but the rest of us, her delighted readers.
Phebe's much later millstone, the Wegener's Syndrome, caused her at various time great distress. Her vision became impaired, and sometimes her mobility. I wasn't privy to the many manifestations of this difficult disease, but I do know that the steriods used to treat it caused her great trouble from time to time. She had to retire from teaching, she a natural-born teacher of all ages from school children to college students to adults. Yet, it seems to me that the teaching never stopped. She herself became the lesson, a witty, often laughing, sometimes mordant mother to the parts of herself that wouldn't work. That instead of isolating her from friends, the disease somehow urged her to reach out with humor that enlivened us as well as herself.
I know there were bitter, bitter periods. But her struggles seemed to disappear when we stood at her door. We became the company she needed to delight and draw close. We were the necessary others to her wit and insight. It was a most satisfactory embrace. So much so that I almost can't believe she is dead. Yet, just as she herself needed to be reminded, we do too. At the end, the obituary in the Minneapolis StarTribune notes: "As a lifelong worrywart, Phebe often expressed anxiety that she would die, and for many years, family members assured her that she would." We love you, darling friend, We'll keep assuring ourselves that without the claw of death reaching toward us, there'd be little need to relish what we have among us.
Monday, November 21, 2016
Margotlog: A Terrible Beauty Is Born
Margotlog: A Terrible Beauty Is Born
In the dark, waking hours when I'm up with the cats, William Butler Yeats' famous lines written September 25,1916, in the Irish/English turmoil, move slowly and repetitively through my thoughts, "All changed, changed utterly,/ A terrible beauty is born."
If I ever knew, I've forgotten the circumstances that led this greatest of 20th-century Irish poets to write this longish poem, "Easter, 1916," though along with others in this volume from my graduate school days at Columbia, this poem is full of minute jottings, paring from the lectures of William York Tindall, now also, no doubt, "changed in his turn."
With Yeats' calm turnings of an almost biographical nature:
"This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force..."
Yeats offers lines exquisitely modulated with sorrow. He suggests an enormous upheaval even as he casts what feels like the ultimate quietly across our path:
"What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may yet keep faith..."
A lot of us this November 2016 are sliding around as did Yeats in dark, yet imagined uncertainties, grasping for names, for what has happened and yet will happen:
"For what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDouagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse...
Can we ever understand enough to grasp what this election of a man called Trump may have done to us? Glimmers there will be, perhaps a cataclysm, but for now, there is foreboding. We are mourning, and listening to the wind in the trees, as cats meow for their food in the dark.
In the dark, waking hours when I'm up with the cats, William Butler Yeats' famous lines written September 25,1916, in the Irish/English turmoil, move slowly and repetitively through my thoughts, "All changed, changed utterly,/ A terrible beauty is born."
If I ever knew, I've forgotten the circumstances that led this greatest of 20th-century Irish poets to write this longish poem, "Easter, 1916," though along with others in this volume from my graduate school days at Columbia, this poem is full of minute jottings, paring from the lectures of William York Tindall, now also, no doubt, "changed in his turn."
With Yeats' calm turnings of an almost biographical nature:
"This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force..."
Yeats offers lines exquisitely modulated with sorrow. He suggests an enormous upheaval even as he casts what feels like the ultimate quietly across our path:
"What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may yet keep faith..."
A lot of us this November 2016 are sliding around as did Yeats in dark, yet imagined uncertainties, grasping for names, for what has happened and yet will happen:
"For what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse--
MacDouagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse...
Can we ever understand enough to grasp what this election of a man called Trump may have done to us? Glimmers there will be, perhaps a cataclysm, but for now, there is foreboding. We are mourning, and listening to the wind in the trees, as cats meow for their food in the dark.
Thursday, November 10, 2016
Margotlog: My Grandmother and the Election
Margotlog: Stunned - My Grandmother and the Election
Like many of us I went to bed after voting Tuesday, thinking I'd wake up to "Hillary Clinton as President." The result unnerved me so much that I walked around the rest of the day stunned. Passing a few very quiet souls downtown and in my Lex-Ham, St. Paul neighborhood, I hazarded a "How are you?" Their looks said it all. "Surviving," I told a few who beat me to the question. "Surviving."
Over the last day and a half, I've also been writing suppositions and tidbits about my North Dakota grandmother Augusta Olein. The only child of North Dakota Swedish immigrants to be born in this country, Augusta had a quiet graciousness about her. The few photograhs that remain show a stately, white-haired woman with a bit of jewelry or lace at her neck. It's her handfull of letters that suggest quite a bit more.
She writes to "Mousie," the young woman who will eventually become my mother. Augusta's loose-limped script spreads across white envelopes, to a Minneapolis address on 13th Avenue, near the University of Minnesota. It's Feb or March or May of 1928, on the cusp of what will become a full-fledged agricultural, then worldwide depression. Augusta notes that "the teachers haven't been paid." She's talking about the two teachers who rent rooms in the family's large North Dakota house. When Augusta's last children, my mother and her twin brother, went off to college, the house felt so empty that Augusta had a nervous breakdown. Not only did she then start taking in teachers as boarders, but eventually my mother's twin brother, Bud, returned to live at home and work for his father's many enterprises.
Augusta writes about expenses: "Buy a new dress," she urges Mousie. "Get a color you like. Spend as much as $35, but if you can find a nice one for less, that would be dandy" What I hear is the indulgence of a beloved daughter by a mother who now has a small income of her own--the two school teachers' rent money. I don't know what kind of dress Mousie bought, but I do hear that Buddy, her brother, brushed his hair before leaving for the train to visit Mousie in Minneapolis. He wasn't giving up on returning to college yet. "Bud put his comb and brush back on the kitchen shelf where the usually sit," writes August. "I hope he could comb his hair before the two of you set off together. Have Bud buy a comb at a drug store, if you can."
There is so much we may never know about people whose choices affect us profoundly. I was so sure that Hillary Clinton would be the choice of a majority of American voters. So sure that I did not pause to consider what drew so many to support Trump. There were a few hints: My husband's brother who has never had much money, and now lives quite happily in a Baton Rouge black neighborhood, said to me a few days before the election, "I'm going to miss Trump."
"You can't be serious," I protested, thinking of Lester's early agitation for equal rights, his summer spent in Mississippi participating in voter registration drives, his lifelong love of Black Music.
"Yes I am," Lester insisted. "I'm not going to vote for him, but I find him very entertaining."
This I dismissed as a very back-handed compliment.
Today, I'm calmer and more resigned. I've also begun to ask that crucial question: what do so many people want that they think Trump can provide? There are probably a million and one answers, some of them negative--the many ways that Hillary gets stuck in people's craw. But an article in The Nation written by a Brit who survived Brexit made me recognize what I had previously slid over: Millions of people are not making it. As Gary Younge says about the calls to "Remain" in the European Union: "From Tony Blair to David Cameron, people who had stiffed working people in a range of ways now insisted they alone could save them" (Nov. 14, 2016, p. 10). "The people" weren't having it.
I imagine Fran's brother Lester, joining Trump to thumb his nose at Wall Street, where Lester has absolutely nothing at stake. I imagine a former school teacher in the middle of Minnesota cheering. She's been living on around $1000 a month, and supporting a retarded daughter and her infant son. There's the displaced Iron Range workers who want what most of us environmentalists hope fervently to prevent--a revival of the mining industry.
I don't for a minute think Trump is a life-saver, but he's a real alternative to a status quo from which millions of Americans are not profiting. If building a wall between the US and Mexico means anything beyond xenophobia, it means keeping the jobs available for native born workers. Ditto for NAFTA. If you aren't making enough to live on, it sticks in your craw to hear that some jobs that could be performed here are being purposefully shipped overseas or across the border. Plus, it's one belly laugh after another to hear Mr. T. disembowel the privileged, shimmy up to women who can't resist him, and blow hot and cold about the power elite. It's enough to make a white, mad dog laugh. It's enough to drive droves of white men to be outright gleeful and mean about the one sure sense of power they have--They are not Mexican or Somali or Syrian. They can out-shoot, out-mock, our-strip most women alive. Hatred or denigration of women is one of a negledted white male's most cementing certainty. That, and the confidence that he's "carrying."
It's enough to make a body weep, if it doesn't drive us all to drink.
Note: this morning, as my husband and I slowy made our way through the StarTribune, we found toward the back of section 1, four full-page ads for liquor of all kinds. This is unprecedented. "Yup," says the Man of the House to the three cats and one woman, "Yup, they'll be boozing tonight."
He's probably right. Some boozing out of desperation; others out of "thank God, there's finally hope."
Like many of us I went to bed after voting Tuesday, thinking I'd wake up to "Hillary Clinton as President." The result unnerved me so much that I walked around the rest of the day stunned. Passing a few very quiet souls downtown and in my Lex-Ham, St. Paul neighborhood, I hazarded a "How are you?" Their looks said it all. "Surviving," I told a few who beat me to the question. "Surviving."
Over the last day and a half, I've also been writing suppositions and tidbits about my North Dakota grandmother Augusta Olein. The only child of North Dakota Swedish immigrants to be born in this country, Augusta had a quiet graciousness about her. The few photograhs that remain show a stately, white-haired woman with a bit of jewelry or lace at her neck. It's her handfull of letters that suggest quite a bit more.
She writes to "Mousie," the young woman who will eventually become my mother. Augusta's loose-limped script spreads across white envelopes, to a Minneapolis address on 13th Avenue, near the University of Minnesota. It's Feb or March or May of 1928, on the cusp of what will become a full-fledged agricultural, then worldwide depression. Augusta notes that "the teachers haven't been paid." She's talking about the two teachers who rent rooms in the family's large North Dakota house. When Augusta's last children, my mother and her twin brother, went off to college, the house felt so empty that Augusta had a nervous breakdown. Not only did she then start taking in teachers as boarders, but eventually my mother's twin brother, Bud, returned to live at home and work for his father's many enterprises.
Augusta writes about expenses: "Buy a new dress," she urges Mousie. "Get a color you like. Spend as much as $35, but if you can find a nice one for less, that would be dandy" What I hear is the indulgence of a beloved daughter by a mother who now has a small income of her own--the two school teachers' rent money. I don't know what kind of dress Mousie bought, but I do hear that Buddy, her brother, brushed his hair before leaving for the train to visit Mousie in Minneapolis. He wasn't giving up on returning to college yet. "Bud put his comb and brush back on the kitchen shelf where the usually sit," writes August. "I hope he could comb his hair before the two of you set off together. Have Bud buy a comb at a drug store, if you can."
There is so much we may never know about people whose choices affect us profoundly. I was so sure that Hillary Clinton would be the choice of a majority of American voters. So sure that I did not pause to consider what drew so many to support Trump. There were a few hints: My husband's brother who has never had much money, and now lives quite happily in a Baton Rouge black neighborhood, said to me a few days before the election, "I'm going to miss Trump."
"You can't be serious," I protested, thinking of Lester's early agitation for equal rights, his summer spent in Mississippi participating in voter registration drives, his lifelong love of Black Music.
"Yes I am," Lester insisted. "I'm not going to vote for him, but I find him very entertaining."
This I dismissed as a very back-handed compliment.
Today, I'm calmer and more resigned. I've also begun to ask that crucial question: what do so many people want that they think Trump can provide? There are probably a million and one answers, some of them negative--the many ways that Hillary gets stuck in people's craw. But an article in The Nation written by a Brit who survived Brexit made me recognize what I had previously slid over: Millions of people are not making it. As Gary Younge says about the calls to "Remain" in the European Union: "From Tony Blair to David Cameron, people who had stiffed working people in a range of ways now insisted they alone could save them" (Nov. 14, 2016, p. 10). "The people" weren't having it.
I imagine Fran's brother Lester, joining Trump to thumb his nose at Wall Street, where Lester has absolutely nothing at stake. I imagine a former school teacher in the middle of Minnesota cheering. She's been living on around $1000 a month, and supporting a retarded daughter and her infant son. There's the displaced Iron Range workers who want what most of us environmentalists hope fervently to prevent--a revival of the mining industry.
I don't for a minute think Trump is a life-saver, but he's a real alternative to a status quo from which millions of Americans are not profiting. If building a wall between the US and Mexico means anything beyond xenophobia, it means keeping the jobs available for native born workers. Ditto for NAFTA. If you aren't making enough to live on, it sticks in your craw to hear that some jobs that could be performed here are being purposefully shipped overseas or across the border. Plus, it's one belly laugh after another to hear Mr. T. disembowel the privileged, shimmy up to women who can't resist him, and blow hot and cold about the power elite. It's enough to make a white, mad dog laugh. It's enough to drive droves of white men to be outright gleeful and mean about the one sure sense of power they have--They are not Mexican or Somali or Syrian. They can out-shoot, out-mock, our-strip most women alive. Hatred or denigration of women is one of a negledted white male's most cementing certainty. That, and the confidence that he's "carrying."
It's enough to make a body weep, if it doesn't drive us all to drink.
Note: this morning, as my husband and I slowy made our way through the StarTribune, we found toward the back of section 1, four full-page ads for liquor of all kinds. This is unprecedented. "Yup," says the Man of the House to the three cats and one woman, "Yup, they'll be boozing tonight."
He's probably right. Some boozing out of desperation; others out of "thank God, there's finally hope."
Tuesday, October 11, 2016
Margotlog: What My Cousin Said
Margotlog: What My Cousin Said
Let's call the oldest of my North Dakota cousins "Ellen." It's not her real name but Ellen captures her gentle though furiously active spirit. Four years older than I, Ellen knew our grandmother, Augusta. We're been talking by phone--she at "the cabin" touching the North Dakota border, I upstairs on the third floor of my St. Paul house, with the spruce spire ascending across the front windows, and the maple brushing the back with its soothing fingers. It's the end of summer, and windows elsewhere in the house are open. I can hear the wind.
As Ellena and I talk, I'm kneeling on the landing of the third-floor. We were going to meet at "the cabin" but my car didn't cooperate. Thus, this call, weeks after we intended to see each other. Her voice is so distinctive I feel as if I could reach through the phone and touch it--it has a slight prairie twang, and the words come rapidly. Ellen has raised three children and now has (can this be right?) fifteen grandchildren? Her life is full of family; mine hardly at all, though there is family to be had. It's just mostly by association with Fran, my husband. His grandchildren occupy much of his free time, almost none of mine.
Instead I find myself occupied by the past, especially prominent on this third floor, with my grandmother Augusta's painted bureau which is very hard to open, as if the old wood resisted any attempt to delve into its interior. I have to pull very hard to unstick a drawer. The interior shelves in the top half, hide behind two engraved doors, which rattle as I struggle to pull them apart. Inside is a swatch of emboidered satin, pale taupe with green, gold, and touches of autumn leaves. Also folders of old photographs, and the packet of letters August wrote to my mother during her last year at the University of Minnesota, 1928-9.
Ellen and I have launched into a discussion of our grandfather's death--Papa Max. If I remember correctly, he died in his late 80s, after living alone in the big house "in town" for at least a decade. It was during that time that I came to know him, the old man with the ring of white hair around his reddish pate, the bright blue eyes, the thick fingers with thick nails, and his paunch covered by a black vest, often slightly soiled . He seemed to have no harm in him. When he fed his canary Sweetie Pie little bits of toast, she twittered, and he spoke to her in German. Then he seemed like a benign ancient tree, part of the family landscape, still upright, still making low music with what was left of his life.
What Ellen said concerned his funeral which was held "at the lake." The lake, small in this case, was named after the wife of perhaps a town founder. Lake Elsie. What a pleasant lake to live beside in the "old Hankinson" house, built by the early entrepreneur who'd brought the railroad to the town that held his name. My uncle and aunt, Ellen's parents, had moved out of town to the lake, and into this truly grand house with polished walnut everywhere--it created the essence of the interior; whereas, turrets and small and large porches defined the exterior facade.
I wasn't there for the funeral. Only my mother attended from our family, after all so very far away in South Carolina. But my mother's twin brother Buddy and his wife Leona, and their four children certainly did attend. The funeral took place in their house. Buddy, by this time, looked like a younger version of Papa Max--stout and short, with a ring of white hair around his head and dancing, or snapping blue eyes. He had given up college, I was to learn years later, in order to take care of their mother. I would need even more years to to understand why.
Uncle Buddy and his family had prospered. Clearly they had far more wealth than we did, or so it would appear to me when my sister and I visited. My mother often mentioned trying to make do "on a professor's salary," meaning my father, though he worked hard, wasn't getting rich.
Let's call the oldest of my North Dakota cousins "Ellen." It's not her real name but Ellen captures her gentle though furiously active spirit. Four years older than I, Ellen knew our grandmother, Augusta. We're been talking by phone--she at "the cabin" touching the North Dakota border, I upstairs on the third floor of my St. Paul house, with the spruce spire ascending across the front windows, and the maple brushing the back with its soothing fingers. It's the end of summer, and windows elsewhere in the house are open. I can hear the wind.
As Ellena and I talk, I'm kneeling on the landing of the third-floor. We were going to meet at "the cabin" but my car didn't cooperate. Thus, this call, weeks after we intended to see each other. Her voice is so distinctive I feel as if I could reach through the phone and touch it--it has a slight prairie twang, and the words come rapidly. Ellen has raised three children and now has (can this be right?) fifteen grandchildren? Her life is full of family; mine hardly at all, though there is family to be had. It's just mostly by association with Fran, my husband. His grandchildren occupy much of his free time, almost none of mine.
Instead I find myself occupied by the past, especially prominent on this third floor, with my grandmother Augusta's painted bureau which is very hard to open, as if the old wood resisted any attempt to delve into its interior. I have to pull very hard to unstick a drawer. The interior shelves in the top half, hide behind two engraved doors, which rattle as I struggle to pull them apart. Inside is a swatch of emboidered satin, pale taupe with green, gold, and touches of autumn leaves. Also folders of old photographs, and the packet of letters August wrote to my mother during her last year at the University of Minnesota, 1928-9.
Ellen and I have launched into a discussion of our grandfather's death--Papa Max. If I remember correctly, he died in his late 80s, after living alone in the big house "in town" for at least a decade. It was during that time that I came to know him, the old man with the ring of white hair around his reddish pate, the bright blue eyes, the thick fingers with thick nails, and his paunch covered by a black vest, often slightly soiled . He seemed to have no harm in him. When he fed his canary Sweetie Pie little bits of toast, she twittered, and he spoke to her in German. Then he seemed like a benign ancient tree, part of the family landscape, still upright, still making low music with what was left of his life.
What Ellen said concerned his funeral which was held "at the lake." The lake, small in this case, was named after the wife of perhaps a town founder. Lake Elsie. What a pleasant lake to live beside in the "old Hankinson" house, built by the early entrepreneur who'd brought the railroad to the town that held his name. My uncle and aunt, Ellen's parents, had moved out of town to the lake, and into this truly grand house with polished walnut everywhere--it created the essence of the interior; whereas, turrets and small and large porches defined the exterior facade.
I wasn't there for the funeral. Only my mother attended from our family, after all so very far away in South Carolina. But my mother's twin brother Buddy and his wife Leona, and their four children certainly did attend. The funeral took place in their house. Buddy, by this time, looked like a younger version of Papa Max--stout and short, with a ring of white hair around his head and dancing, or snapping blue eyes. He had given up college, I was to learn years later, in order to take care of their mother. I would need even more years to to understand why.
Uncle Buddy and his family had prospered. Clearly they had far more wealth than we did, or so it would appear to me when my sister and I visited. My mother often mentioned trying to make do "on a professor's salary," meaning my father, though he worked hard, wasn't getting rich.
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Margotlog: Late Summer Alley Walk
Margotlog: Late Summer Alley Walk
All things are new and beautiful, depending on the light. Today, at noon, with soft overcast skies, colors along the alleys sing "Zinnia" orange, deep red, magenta, pink. Sturdy and hairy, Zinnias clump, taller than umbrellas in a stand. I pause to inspect bees hovering and pausing in their centers. Frost will darken the flowers, erase their colors, but now, mid-September, I edge away from frost. Zinnias right now are as good as they'll ever get.
Walking is the only way to take nature in; otherwise, it whizzes past in a churning haste. Just now, I caught the oldest cat sipping out of the toilet that somehow was left running. Quick, close the lid.The wind has picked up, fluttering the boughs of ruffled locusts outside my study window. I've come home just in time.
Yet I'm still walking toward the alley, toward the corner house where I used to find an old man outside. His tanned face under crust of bright white hair smiled appreciatively--we had cats in common. I bent to pat his "Blackie" who twined around his legs as I congratulated him on his yard which was, and still is, a model of correctness, unlike mine overshadowed by trees, the boulevard rampant with goldenrod, brown-eyed Susans and something tight and purple in a spire, whose name I can't remember. Anyone who knows is welcome to say so.
The point today is to filch huge raspberries, come to fruition in a second ripening. But the owners have stopped harvesting, leaving canes heavy with fruit. As I pass, my hand reaches out and I unhook a berry from its stem, pop it immediately into my mouth. The warm juice rushes around my teeth and down my tongue. I pop in another, and another. Still walking so I won't be accused of loitering, I eat berries in open air, almost on the run, berries that belong to the warm day and the plant's desire--well they're memorable, maybe because filched, warm, lucious, and huge.
It's been an almost perfect summer, with more than enough rain, and plenty of sunshine. Now as the days shorten, I gather up a bouquet of memories, hoping they'll stay fresh in the dark. Some think we store up summer memories to feed us a long time, akin to a pantry stocked with honey, squash, and other eatables for winter. But somehow it doesn't work that way for me. I need a daily dose of outdoors; otherwise, I'm cranky, dislike the world, wonder what's the point.
So, a hurrah for Laura and Mary, and dog Jack, for baby Carrie when she comes along, and for the most simple yet engaging parents I've ever encountered on the printed page. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about woods and prairie not unlike those here in mid-south Minnesota. We have oak groves, left over surely from pioneer days, huge towering, wide-hearted trees that stud a small pocket park on my way home. Only a few oaks rise in yards on our street; none are left on the boulevards. Each time I pass one, I tip back my head and look up as far as my eyes can see their delicious, quirky branches and lobed leaves, almost like fingers. Who says we aren't all related under the skin?
All things are new and beautiful, depending on the light. Today, at noon, with soft overcast skies, colors along the alleys sing "Zinnia" orange, deep red, magenta, pink. Sturdy and hairy, Zinnias clump, taller than umbrellas in a stand. I pause to inspect bees hovering and pausing in their centers. Frost will darken the flowers, erase their colors, but now, mid-September, I edge away from frost. Zinnias right now are as good as they'll ever get.
Walking is the only way to take nature in; otherwise, it whizzes past in a churning haste. Just now, I caught the oldest cat sipping out of the toilet that somehow was left running. Quick, close the lid.The wind has picked up, fluttering the boughs of ruffled locusts outside my study window. I've come home just in time.
Yet I'm still walking toward the alley, toward the corner house where I used to find an old man outside. His tanned face under crust of bright white hair smiled appreciatively--we had cats in common. I bent to pat his "Blackie" who twined around his legs as I congratulated him on his yard which was, and still is, a model of correctness, unlike mine overshadowed by trees, the boulevard rampant with goldenrod, brown-eyed Susans and something tight and purple in a spire, whose name I can't remember. Anyone who knows is welcome to say so.
The point today is to filch huge raspberries, come to fruition in a second ripening. But the owners have stopped harvesting, leaving canes heavy with fruit. As I pass, my hand reaches out and I unhook a berry from its stem, pop it immediately into my mouth. The warm juice rushes around my teeth and down my tongue. I pop in another, and another. Still walking so I won't be accused of loitering, I eat berries in open air, almost on the run, berries that belong to the warm day and the plant's desire--well they're memorable, maybe because filched, warm, lucious, and huge.
It's been an almost perfect summer, with more than enough rain, and plenty of sunshine. Now as the days shorten, I gather up a bouquet of memories, hoping they'll stay fresh in the dark. Some think we store up summer memories to feed us a long time, akin to a pantry stocked with honey, squash, and other eatables for winter. But somehow it doesn't work that way for me. I need a daily dose of outdoors; otherwise, I'm cranky, dislike the world, wonder what's the point.
So, a hurrah for Laura and Mary, and dog Jack, for baby Carrie when she comes along, and for the most simple yet engaging parents I've ever encountered on the printed page. Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote about woods and prairie not unlike those here in mid-south Minnesota. We have oak groves, left over surely from pioneer days, huge towering, wide-hearted trees that stud a small pocket park on my way home. Only a few oaks rise in yards on our street; none are left on the boulevards. Each time I pass one, I tip back my head and look up as far as my eyes can see their delicious, quirky branches and lobed leaves, almost like fingers. Who says we aren't all related under the skin?
Saturday, September 3, 2016
Margotlog: Round Up
Round-Up
During the last month, I’ve been sampling random chapters
of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie. My studio mate,
photographer Linda Gammell, has the book here in our studio as she prepares for
a show of native prairie photographs. My mother, who grew up in North Dakota,
read the Little House books to my sister and me years ago. Now, I’m enjoying
rereading this one, at how the story holds my attention, simply told, though it
is.
In an earlier volume, Wilder described “The Little House
in the Big Woods.” These woods which stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to the
flat lands of western Minnesota and the Dakotas. And where the woods stopped, a
river of grass began. This green river has of grass has flowed through the
middle of North America for millennia. As snow flattened the grasses over the
centuries, and the grasses decayed, the soil of these prairies became the most
profoundly fertile soil in North America.
We
make do with what we have. And sometimes we make “big.” Minnesota’s corn and
soybean enterprises stretch for miles over former prairies. My guess is that
they stretch for hundreds of miles in all directions. And of course Minnesota
soils are not alone. There’s Iowa and Nebraska to our south--flatter and
warmer, prime soil for corn, alfalfa, and soybeans.
This
would all be dandy if it weren’t for one thing: for years farmers have been
using, a deadly herbicide called Round Up, made by Monsanto. Today, farmers
plant genetically altered seeds that are protected from Round Up. Then they
spray Round Up on their plants and soil. Round Up kills everything that isn’t
corn or soybeans.
It’s
as if an enormous genii stood over the Big Woods of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s
Little Houses and sprayed gigantic hoses full of a leaf killer. Within days,
the oaks and maples, the ash and tupelo trees would all shed their leaves,
denuding the canopy and depriving animals of food like acorns, and insects that
depend on trees for food, and animals that need tree cover for protection from
the bigger and fiercer. It’s as if in one fell swoop a gigantic silence and
famine hit the land.
I’m
no Rachel Carson, America’s finest environmental writer. Her book Silent
Spring warned of such a silencing and deadening from another era’s wanton
use of DDT. Now we’re wantonly applying a broad leaf herbicide that eradicates
plants crucial for many insects.
Take
bees. More and more evidence is accumulating that even if plants survive Round
Up, they’re tainted. Bees that draw nectar from such tainted flowers lose their
ability to reproduce or to navigate that life-saving “beeline” to their hives.
It’s as if they have been hit on the head and can only stagger around.
Also
Monarch butterflies. The Sierra Club, mounting a large campaign to outlaw Round
Up, estimates that in the last 20 years, 90% of all Monarch butterflies have
disappeared. I assume that this means they’ve died or never been born. Gone,
Kaput, Fini! Not only is this a loss of one of nature’s most beautiful
creatures—the fluttering gold of autumn passing gently among our flowers. But
like the loss of the bees, the Monarchs’ decimation means doom to plants that
monarchs have historically pollinated.
But
we can’t blame only the farmers. Lawn-lovers too use Round Up. Since lawns are
almost entirely built of thin-leafed grass, anyone desiring a lawn so uniform
that it looks painted onto the soil can use Round Up. Such lawns grow not a
single broad-leaf plant—think dandelions, clovers—whose flowers attract and
feed bees and butterflies.
Round
Up can also directly threaten human life. An old couple I used to know had
maybe six or seven years together at the ends of their lives. They found each
other over a bridge table, and happy to have love in their old age, bought a
nice bungalow on the outskirts of a prairie city. Being nice, accommodating
folks, they wanted their lawn to look as nice as everyone else’s. Like their
neighbors, they used Round Up liberally, for one, then two, then three seasons.
In
the fourth season, the old man began to sicken. He began to totter and slur his
words. “Stroke,” whispered his daughter and son-in-law. His skin began to
slough off. He stopped eating. Within three months he was dead.
His
widow, mourning him, stayed on another couple of years, spreading Round Up on
the lawn just as her husband had done. She’d been the younger of the two, full
of laughter, a hearty, jolly sort. First her skin turned pale, then gray. Her
hands began to shake. She became unsteady on her feet. “Make sure she’s eating
well,” doctors advised her children. “Let’s have a look at her if she doesn’t
improve.”
When
they opened her up, her stomach was riddled with cancer. Quietly, without
telling her, they sewed her together. “You’ll be right as rain soon enough,”
the cheery doctors told her. It did rain, and the Round Up she and her husband
had for seven years lavished on their lawn, once again seeped into the soil and
into the water, which, once again, ran into the lake.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)