Poetry
Here’s Ada Limon’s poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up”
Journeying
My family didn’t take vacations. Instead, we took long walks and Sunday drives. We spent most Sundays after church driving through the flat central Illinois corn and soybean fields around our city. My mom initiated these trips. She inherited the practice from her dad. My grandfather loved to spend a weekend afternoon driving through the hills and bottom land of southern Illinois, remembering and telling stories. He always started or ended his sojourns with a trip to the local Dairy Queen. We didn’t visit the Dairy Queen on our drives, but we did stop at the Amish businesses and farms along our route. That part of Illinois has a robust Amish community, and we enjoyed shopping for Amish cheese and baked treats, visiting dry goods stores, and for my step-father, blacksmithing shops. We watched black buggies pulled by slim bay horses traverse the dirt back roads and noted the bright blue, black, and turquoise tieback curtains in the windows of each white farm house, the big brown Belgian draft horses, either pulling a plow or resting in a paddock, the quilts and simple color-block clothing drying on laundry lines. As we drove, we imagined purchasing our own farm house, planting a garden. I imagined having my own horse to ride in the fields.
We could not afford a livable farm house, although we did visit a couple of abandoned places. One had broken windows, a disintegrating kitchen and a blackbird in the toilet. When we opened the root cellar doors on the other, we found it full to the second step down with water. We could not inhabit the life we wanted, so we imagined it. In some respects, this wasn’t difficult. Our home, my step-father’s before his marriage to my mom, was white and resembled a farm house. A wood stove heated the house, and it did not have air conditioning. We used oil lamps instead of electric lights. The heating, cooling, and lighting decisions came as a direct result of poverty. We couldn’t afford, and my parents did not make choices that would have allowed us, to do otherwise. My mother easily incorporated these restrictions into the imaginary world we built, a world that included our favorite elements of Amish life with a heavy dose of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Tasha Tudor. My sister and I learned hand sewing, quilting, embroidery, crochet, knitting, and bread-baking. We practiced many of these crafts lit by oil lamps or sitting next to the fire. For fun, we wore long skirts and bonnets. One year, we lit our Christmas tree, very briefly, using only candles that we had fastened to it with special clips.
During the week, we didn’t have time for long drives, so my mother, sister and I took walks. We walked in our neighborhood but often went further afield, following our feet to the nicer, older neighborhoods near downtown and downtown itself. One day we walked from one side of our mid-size city to the other, stopping halfway at a mall to rest. I climbed inside and around the huge stone whale that dominated the mall entrance, while my mom rested her legs. To occupy us as we walked, my mom told stories. These stories always had the same theme and often the same setting. Two girls and their mother lived in a remote cabin in the Canadian Rockies. A shadowy father figure existed but never made an appearance. He was always away hunting. As a result of his absence, the girls and their mother had to be especially resourceful. They sewed their own clothes, cooked food they had grown, and made their home warm and cozy through the long winters. Other than the absent male presence, these stories never contained any conflict, no bears trying to get into the cabin, only the quiet ingenuity and space making activities of the mother and her daughters. On our walks, my mother built us worlds we could live in together thanks to our collective imagination. These were safe places, where we were always together, where we had agency, where the rest of the world and its people could not disturb or hurt us, where all male figures, even supposed family members, could not interfere.
The kind of imagining we did on our drives and long walks, the role playing that happened as a result, allowed us to escape the reality of too many bills and not enough money to pay them, of cars that lost their doors and ran intermittently, of meals of oatmeal, generic Cheerios, and bread with melted American cheese. My mother could briefly leave a world where she worked to parent three step-daughters raised by a mostly absent father and mentally ill mother, tried to make her earnings ironing shirts and cleaning houses to pay the bills when winter weather kept my step-father from his work, all while learning to live in a new marriage. I could emerge from my debilitating shyness, precipitated by my very real experiences and a sensitivity I did not comprehend, into a world that extended only as far as the light from the fire or a low burning lamp. No actual “little house in the big woods” would have given us what we wanted: security, choices, a life that made sense. But our imaginations provided a necessary, if fragile and temporary, space for our longings, a place where we could step at will into fulfillment and belonging.
Gardening and Making/Mending
Our county has instituted a controlled burn ban, which means you can’t light up last year’s yard waste as a means of disposal. I don’t mind this as I use all of my yard “waste” in compost or on garden beds. The continuing drought does have me pondering a new to me water retaining resource - wool. Ironic, right? I’m a knitter, and I know that wool is great at both repelling water and retaining it once saturated. So I should not be surprised that wool works great to keep watering needs down. I’ve done a little research and discovered that some people use raw wool fleeces as a warm and wet protective mulch around their garden beds. I gather that it helps to know someone with sheep who has fleece to spare for this. If you’re not friendly with any sheep ranchers, you can buy wool pellets to spread around your plants. Wool pellets supply nitrogen and other minerals to the soil, while keeping soil moist, and repelling slugs (not something we have too much trouble with in Nebraska). Now, I sound like an advertisement. I plan to try wool pellets in my garden this year. I’ve even found a small local company that sells them. I like knowing that amidst uncertain climate shifts, I can make decisions that will benefit the small natural space of which I am a caretaker.
My body is the mending subject for this newsletter. My left wrist (which I broke in January) is almost healed. I’ve been diligent in my occupational therapy, and my therapist says that I will get all of the mobility back in the joint, a feat evidently, because I had already broken this wrist twice. This past weekend, I went for my first hike post-surgery. I wore my wrist brace and borrowed some hiking poles for extra security. I fell, of course (on my bum this time, which is far less breakable). I never fall hiking, so I’m not sure what meaning, if any, I should attribute to this one. Maybe it was the poles? With or without poles, I don’t plan to stop hiking, but learning to trust the stability of the bone and joint will only come with time and practice.
"We could not inhabit the life we wanted, so we imagined it."
How many times I've had to grow in this space! One I cannot hold in my hand but can build with my mind. I'm recently realizing what a gift it is to be able to imagine. I might not ever get to have a house of my own, but I can imagine it. Today, that is enough. Thank you for sharing!
I stayed with my grandparents in the summer, and taking a drive to see the crops and count the cows was the end of day entertainment. If we got to stop at the Dairy Queen, that was an amazing day!