Today in the book it is Christmas, and on my way to looking up the spelling of crèche I checked into FB and after several posts about how we will be rearranging our underwear drawers instead of watching TV at 6:00, I found the Resistance Revival Chorus singing with Ani DeFranco in celebration of what happened in those midterms. Those midterms! How they did revive us.
I'm eating mashed potatoes, plain, no butter, since I can't eat butter now or milk or cream either, and sometimes it feels like I live in a soddy in the sand hills surrounded by the endless prairie, and all that matters is a Meadowlark and the lilies that live across the road in the ditch. I know my Mom had some lonely times as a joyful girl in those prairies, and has a few now too in her old people's home where she will be turning 93 in a couple of weeks. Working on her book is overwhelming joy for me.
She's a good writer, Rita. She worked on this book for years and years and workshopped it with insensitive old men and lovely old women, some of whom could relate and some of whom could not. Rita walked miles to the one-room school in the snow and had a lot of brothers and sisters but still, had lonely times, as most kids do. She felt like the black sheep sometimes and I was always the one in our family who looked most like her, with our widow's peaks and low foreheads and dark curly hair and cowlicks. Rita has always been my role model and my supporter and we've weathered a few things together and apart. She says I am the only one who cares if the book gets finished but I know she cares and her joy will spread to everyone when we get this done.
So I'm loving spending my winter week taking out the extra spaces in her sentences and correcting the very occasional typo and trying to decide if Johanna, who was from Obrowiec, Poland, would spell creche with the accent or not. Turns out it is a French word, but Johanna was Catholic and I have no idea if she would use the accent. I finally decided that Mom didn't use it so that's the decision right there.
I'm hardly correcting anything in this manuscript. Once in a while I will change a sentence that could be better if it didn't start with But or And, but it isn't really my job to change Mom's style at all, just to finish the book. Just get the book into print. I'm almost ready to do that, though I got a wonderful idea the other day. I had one of those flash realizations that I could do some drawings for it...don't tell Mom, as it's her birthday surprise. I drew a Meadowlark and the lilies, and am working on some of the other plants that Lewis and Clark found in that part of the prairie, and ones that Mom mentioned in her writing, though I will have to guess what the slippery grass was. The sand hills part of Nebraska was both long and short-grass prairie and there are lots of photos to reference on the internet and in library books.
It's not intuitive at first to realize that there are parts of the land back there that are still natural prairie grass and native plants. On those homesteads, there are lands that haven't been plowed, that maybe haven't even been grazed. I'm still learning that when they got there, they didn't plant alfalfa or anything...they used the natural pasture, not only for their cows, but they twisted up the grasses and used them for fuel. There were no trees where they were, except willows in the creek beds and later, the cottonwoods they planted on their tree claims because they grew fast. There were shrubs, like chokecherry and wild rose, and you can bet they gathered whatever fruits they could find, but mostly they had to coax whatever they could out of that deep rich soil after they took out all the roots and grass and only harvested if it rained properly and didn't hail and lots of other things went right. They burned hay twists, buffalo chips (dried flops) and later, when they had them, corn cobs. After they got some ducks, geese, and chickens, they had feathers for quilts. Before that, they were cold. The soddies were kind of warm though, with walls three feet thick. You still had to go outside to pee, of course, and feed your animals and milk your cow. Once you got one.
Johanna and Gregor arrived in 1886, which wasn't that early, but where they were it was just about the right time because there was a train to Atkinson, about 40 miles away from their smaller town, Stuart, and they had some neighbors (mostly relatives of theirs) and some opportunities to buy land and lumber and things that greatly helped. But they built those first houses from big chunks of sod, whitewashed them inside, spread clay on the floor, and put in a couple of windows and a door. The roofs leaked, there were critters dropping down on them, and they built frame houses as soon as they could, but they really did start in the dirt there and built their wealth the hard way.
Those families were mostly short, powerful people who could sing well and who didn't chatter much. They worked hard and took what came. Johanna lost her 9-year old oldest son in the Blizzard of 1888, just the second winter after she arrived there. That's the part Mom is writing right now, the great loss that defined the rest of their lives. They didn't find Romanic until March, after two months of deep grief. Snow in Nebraska in those days was nothing to play in. Blizzards literally took your breath from your lungs and no one could go out to save you without perishing themselves, so there was a lot of torture in that experience, and Johanna was nursing Uncle Stencil at the time, who had been born in November. January 12th was the date of the blizzard. My own grandfather, John Paul Hytrek, was born the next year. Johanna kept living.
Here she is, surrounded by flowers, when her asthma had gotten so bad she had to live in town. She died at only 69, in 1921. She was 34 when she lost her son.He wasn't the only child lost to these pioneers, these settlers. These immigrants. That wasn't their only sorrow.
I recently finished the book The Bone and Sinew of the Land which was about free black americans who tried to settle in the frontier of the time, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, where the earlier part of the 19th century was acted out in all of its horror and injustice. That frontier story was much less romantic than the one of my Polish ancestors, much less joyful, and way, way harder. One of them was even named Free Frank McWhorter, a different bookend to my family shelf, whom I suppose, was at least related to someone who was at one time, property of one of my white McWhorter ancestors, or someone from our clan. Almost no one in today's world has a history that is fully separate from the injustices of the American past, in America, anyway. And the Poncas had no choices, like the people we're going to be lied to about tonight, have no choices. Their suffering was generational, everlasting, yet they'll find joy. We will only find it if we ground ourselves in reality, as they likely have had to do too.
The thread that ran through all these stories, we know now, was about how ugly, selfish, and grasping some men could be. Nothing's changed there but the victims and the details of the horrors. What an easy story, to be battling snow and drought, in comparison to murder and theft and brutality. What a do-able life, to get over family tragedy and know that things would improve, that strength could be found and abundance would increase. Most of us do have do-able lives, here in the land of our privilege.
Sorrow and joy, birds and flowers, potatoes and wild rose hip tea. Can we keep this world? Can we slow down the destruction, right the insane wrongs of our present reality? I will certainly try. I realized this year I've been doing the Market and Holiday Market for ten years now, without the use of fossil fuels. Not perfectly, as I had some help there when I broke my foot and had to be driven in vans and such, and I suppose there are some compromises made in the climate footprint of bikes and tires and Rubbermaid tubs and zipties and all the details I still have to improve upon. And I'm 69 this year, the age Johanna was when her trials ended.
Rita Louise Hytrek, maybe 17?
I loved reading this. I often read your blog and have every intention of letting you know how much I enjoy your writing, then not being a writer myself, I don't. I love the way you organize your thoughts, then share them in a way that makes them feel alive. Thanks for sharing.
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