Urgency Part 2

When we were planning my grandma’s 90th birthday party, Mom sent messages to people near and far asking them to share their memories of Grandma and wish her happy birthday. As they trickled in, mom reported back. The messages were sweet. Grandma meant so much to so many people. Many said she’d been like a second mother to them. More than a few said they’d wished she’d been their mother. These letters were kind, but they weren’t surprising. We knew we’d had the best of the best.

Then Mom called to tell me she’d received an email from Grandma’s childhood friend, Cleo. She was forwarding it to me. She wanted me to call back as soon as I’d read it.

I opened the email on my phone. I gasped and then shouted something like, “Ha! I knew it!” and called mom back immediately.

From: Cleo
Sent: ‎Tuesday‎, ‎July‎ ‎15‎, ‎2014 ‎5‎:‎38‎ ‎PM

I don't know if your mother ever told you about this.

When we were in grade school at Rogers, there was a note that went home to our parents one day telling of an airplane that was coming to an area around Rogers and would give rides to those students who wanted to go up in an airplane.  The cost would be $1.00, quite a lot of money to dirt farmers in those depression days.  I was excited and knew for sure I wasn't one of the people who would take a ride.

However, my father was a very big fan of Lindbergh, who had made the famous flight to Paris a few years earlier.  When we would hear an airplane, our family would go outside and search the skies for the little dot and we kept our eyes on it until it had gone out of sight.  I know that sounds crazy, but there weren't a lot of things for poor kids on the farm that were exciting.  

So we went home that night and we told our parents about the plane that we could ride and how much we wanted to ride.  In those days, we never thought of insurance and other connected costs to air travel, but the expectation of going up was just thrilling.

Of course, there wasn't an extra penny around our house, and I do mean penny, so I was pretty sure we wouldn't be going.

But my daddy wanted us to go up in the plane.  I think only my sister who is two years younger than I went from our family, as I don't think your brother was in school.   We (Maxine and I) were somewhere in middle elementary, like 4th or 5th grade.  I am pretty sure Claude went up, and not sure if Gordon did.  The pilot took all of us up at once.  We were the only kids from the whole school to take a ride.

How did we stir up the $$ to go?  Well, we took a five gallon can of cream on the school bus and carried it to George McCormick's store right across the road from school, where we sold it for the $$ to pay our fare on the plane.

We were the only kids who rode on plane number NC235W that day!!  Somewhere in my stuff is the stub of the ticket with the number and date on it, but I have no idea where it is.

That could be one of the most exciting events of my youth.  Ask you mother if she remembers that.  

So glad you're getting to celebrate your mother's 90th.  Mine comes up March 29th.  Never ever thought I would live to the age.  Had my hip replacement 14th of January and am doing fairly well, some days better than others.

Not much news.  Greetings to Maxine and good health to her.

Love,Cleo

I still get emotional when I reread Cleo’s email. There was another person holding Grandma’s stories, even as they slipped from her memory. I wouldn’t let this one go extinct. I felt an even greater urgency to collect Grandma’s stories and preserve them even if I wasn’t sure how yet.

I eventually turned their story into Heavy Cream, published in Cricket Magazine in February 2022. My copy was delivered during my mom’s visit for my birthday and we got to share the moment of seeing Grandma and her family beautifully illustrated, her story safely off the endangered list. Now, here I am, on the brink of releasing my first novel, So Long As It’s Wonderful, based on stories I heard about my great-grandma and her life in Roosevelt County.

Urgency

Grandma came from a long line of shutterbugs. We have generations of family portraits, wedding photos, baby pictures, and candid shots going back over a century. She had photographs of her childhood pals, girls like Deanne Greathouse and Cleo Gray, whose names formed the fabric of my Roosevelt County folklore.

In my twenties, when her house was an easy drive west on 84 and over the Cacouate Road, I visited every month or two to clean her house and spend time with her. My favorite part of these visits was after supper, looking through the photo albums and scrapbooks she kept on a floor to ceiling shelf at the end of the hallway, while the Lawrence Welk Show played in the background. During one of these visits I noticed, on the page opposite a ticket stub for Little Orphan Annie was another ticket stub. I couldn’t tell what it was for, so I carried the book to Grandma’s chair and perched on its arm as I showed her the ticket.

It took her a minute. She looked at the rest of the page and the cover of the scrapbook. Then she told me a story about the time in grade school when a pilot came and offered the children rides in his airplane for a fee. She said not many of the children could afford it, but her father wanted her and her brother to ride. She didn’t remember where they’d got the money.

I was stunned. Little Orphan Annie came out in 1932 when Grandma was only eight years old. Orville and Wilbur had gone up in their plane only thirty years before. And a pilot in a plane just showed up?

My modern sensibilities couldn’t grasp this. As a teacher, I couldn’t imagine what that school day was like. As a parent, I couldn’t imagine allowing my young daughter to go up in a plane without me. Or at all.

Grandma had a wistful look, but she didn’t seem to think this was extraordinary. It was just another story from her quiet life.  

The next time I talked to my mom, I brought up the story, assuming she’d heard it a million times.

She’d never heard it.

She was shocked both by the story and by the fact that it as news to her. We pressed for details but Grandma couldn’t recall much more.

It was a decade later before I was hit with a sense of urgency. If we didn’t start collecting Grandma’s stories and preserving them somehow, they would disappear when Grandma died. Dementia would take them even faster.

Grandma was in a nursing home now and I’d started collecting her stories, not knowing yet what I would do with them. Mom visited Grandma’s brother, Gordon. He was four years younger than Grandma and his memory was holding out better.

She asked him about the time the airplane came. He was puzzled. He’d never heard that story either. He chalked it up to Grandma’s dementia. “You know, she doesn’t remember things. Her mind gets confused. That’s all that was.”

When mom delivered this report, I found myself being defensive. “But this was years ago, before the dementia. And I saw the ticket stub,” I told her. He’s wrong. It had to have happened. Maybe he was just too young to remember. After all, he wasn’t the brother who also got to ride. But surely he would have heard about it. Wouldn’t it have been a story they would retell?

Unfortunately, the scrapbook had disappeared by this time. In the process of cleaning out Grandma’s house, all of the photo albums had been digitized but no one recalled seeing the scrapbook. I was the only one who had heard the story of the pilot and the plane ride. Among all of the aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews, no one recalled hearing anything about it. Now I started wondering whether I was losing mymemory. Had I been mistaken?

I tried to corroborate Grandma’s story. I checked archives of the local newspaper. I emailed local librarians and historians at the town’s university. No one had any information about this sort of thing happening. I added the bits I knew to a running Word document of her stories I was collecting.

I think of these stories like classifications of shrinking animal populations. They’re labeled vulnerable, endangered, or critically endangered based on how many of the species are still alive. There were some family stories we all knew. How Andy’s ear was bit off and how I cried all the way from Lovington to Portales because I wanted to get to Grandma’s house. These would be considered of “Least Concern.” If Grandma’s pilot and plane story was a species, and I was the only one still holding it, the story was near extinction. I tried to get the story to spread, but without the scrapbook and without corroboration from Grandma’s brother, people were skeptical.

“It might have happened to someone she knew.”

“Maybe she saw it in a movie.”

“She was probably confused.”

They didn’t believe the story. They didn’t believe me and Grandma.  The story would hit the extinction list if no one believed it.

Fortunately, this story doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s only the beginning.

Cover Reveal: So Long As It's Wonderful

The best and worst thing about being an indie author is making all of the decisions.

Once again, I stepped to the brink of a stock photo book cover. And for the second time, I backed away slowly then turned and ran for my life.

I could have saved money. I could have put out a book that looks like others in its genre. The Internet gurus advised both.

In the end, I chose not to do either one. I teamed up with the same talented people who created the cover for This Year, Lord.

Eric Peters, Nashville artist, took on the task of bringing my vision to the canvas. Bruce DeRoos of Left Coast Design turned the canvas into a book cover that I am excited to share with you today!

Zoom in to find pages from Zane Grey’s novel, Wildfire, in the house, the windmill, the moon, and even hiding in the wheat field.

Endings

By the time my cucumbers stopped producing, I was so sick of making pickles, I enjoyed pulling up the vines, but I've put off cutting down the zinnias even though they're spotted and mildewy. I’m leaving my tomatoes in hopes that a few more will turn red before the plants give out completely

Eventually, I’ll have to let go of my summer garden. These plants are annuals; they’re meant to grow for a season and then die.

The soil needs a chance to recover. The seeds need time to dry out. I need rest, too.

Endings come. Sometimes we’re ready for them, but sometimes we let matters persist, even when they no longer produce good fruit. We don’t cut ties, holding out hope that the good might still come.

Do you need to let something die so that new life can be planted? Do you need to allow yourself rest or recovery? What’s no longer producing fruit in your life? As we enter another fall, consider what you might leave behind.

But This is Life

. I ended the summer with a wonderful family vacation then was hit with the flu. (Who gets the flu in July?) Even as I recovered, it was back to school flurry and down to the wire with revisions of my debut novel, So Long as It’s Wonderful.

In the midst of other priorities and challenges, I neglected my poor garden.  I was too tired to work in the heat, too busy to pick, shell, and can beans or process tomatoes and peppers. I feel sick when I think of the fruit of my labor going to the birds, rabbits and squirrels. I’m embarrassed at the sight of the weeds, overgrown vines, and rotting produce.

But this is life.

There are times when the season outside doesn’t match the season we’re in personally. For the last two months my body has experienced illness, fatigue, and stress while the world outside is teeming with life and abundance.

Though it’s not my default setting, I’m learning to ask for help, to be kind to myself, and to accept the kindness of others. I’m a slow learner to be sure, but each round of the lesson gets me closer to wholeness with the people in my world.