Tag: family memories

The Multiplicity of Pilgrimages

Published on by Janet Sunderland5 Comments

And I also do believe that we have this possibility of doing a pilgrimage every single day. Because a pilgrimage implies in meeting different people, in talking to strangers, in paying attention to the omens, and basically being open to life. And we leave our home to go to work, to go to school, and we have every single day this possibility, this chance of discovering something new. So the pilgrimage is not for the privileged one who can go to Spain, and to France, and walk this 500 miles, but to people who are open to life. A pilgrimage, at the end of the day, is basically get rid of things that you are used to and try something new.       Paul Coehlo

A friend turned me on to a podcast interview with Coehlo. Too late to listen, I was able to read the transcript.

I’ve been on a pilgrimage to clean the house, well, the upstairs. Basically, that was my try something new part. My husband cleaned the downstairs a few days ago. He got the kitchen, me the bathrooms and the office and the writing room. He managed the work in one day; I’m on day two with the writing room still to go.

I could whine a little, say all the stuff on shelves and layers of saved pieces of paper on the desk and the bookcases were harder than the kitchen where things all have their place, but I won’t.

In many ways, cleaning the upstairs is a sort of pilgrimage. I cleaned windows and floors, washed and put away the extra fleece blanket I keep on my side of the bed for cold nights, hand washed the rabbit wool socks and retired them for the season.

While we’ve had a lot of rain and chilly days, the sun is now out and growing warm. As I cleaned the little office window, I saw the purple iris are blooming in the back garden. The purple iris are often a topic in my blog posts. There’s one here, and another here, but if you simply put iris in my blog’s search box, there’s several. Seeing them reminds me of the pilgrimage involved in going home.

The office shelves are full of photos. Some of my husband and me, and that takes me on a journey in time, remembering when that photo was taken; another I took of my sister when I lived in Hawaii. There’s a little blue Chinese teapot with gold dragons my son gave me one Christmas, and a small silver kaleidoscope he gave me another year. And books, mercy are there books.

On the top shelf are the art books from when I was going to be a sculptor, forty years ago. The History of Art. That’s a big one. Downstairs, I still have a bust I sculpted from clay, made a cast of, and poured in molten something or another. It’s not metal, but it is heavy. I call her my Bedouin Woman.

The office also holds Cliff’s pilgrimages. One corner shelf, defying easy dusting, is filled on one level with hockey pucks, including one signed by Patrick Roy, my favorite goalie, one year, years ago, when we were in Denver. Another shelf is full of baseballs from various stadiums where he’s watched games.

A spring-cleaned room is a destination one can rejoice in. Yes, yes, I still have the writing room, which, if you could see it, is a little scary. Talk about pieces of paper and books! I am not a tidy writer.

Four floor to ceiling bookcases, filled, mind you, cover one wall and wrap around one corner. Another corner holds a antique built in corner shelf with frilly cut sides (it came with the house) and is filled, mostly, with stones and tiny collections from the places I’ve traveled. Another corner shelf, matching with frilly cut sides, is filled with books and one ceramic lady whose wide skirt is open at the sides for flowers. I painted it, once, so long ago I don’t know when except childhood, and there’s layers of papers and old manuscripts.

I have left this writing room for last. It will feel like 500 miles to Santiago de Compostela by the time I’ve finished, and I will surely feel virtuous.

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It’s That Time of Year

Published on by Janet Sunderland13 Comments

candleOnce a year, the kitchen is full of Mom. This mom, me, and my first mother-in-law, my sons’ grandmother, who originally gave me a banana bread recipe. The year’s perfectly-sized boxes, saved in the basement, are set in one kitchen corner along with the saved box of foam pellets, accumulated over the year, and I pack the banana bread I’ve once more made for the men in my life: two sons, two husbands (one of which I’m no longer married to), a grown grandson, and our mail carrier.

My kitchen rejoices.

The recipe, hand-written on some piece of paper I scribbled out more than forty years ago, lies folded in thirds in the back of my battered Joy of Cooking cookbook. I smooth it out, check the ingredients. They never change. The paper is stained and spotted, but the handwriting is mine, hurriedly written from one corner to another above a left-over drawing by one kid or another.

Perhaps I expected to transfer it to a proper card or something, but now, each year, I refold and replace once the baking is over: six bananas, butter, white sugar, leavenings, chocolate chips, nuts. Each batch makes two loaves. Except, for more than forty years, I have separated the batter after adding chocolate chips. I pour half the batter in a bread pan, and add nuts to what’s left in the bowl before dumping it in the pan. One son does not like nuts in his banana bread, the other son doesn’t care. If I make chocolate chip cookies, I do the same: half the batter without nuts.

I also make, and pack, the same oatmeal cookies, from the same cookbook, with chocolate chips, no nuts, seal them in plastic bags, and add them to the boxes that are mailed. The ones that aren’t mailed, the ones that stay here in the house, don’t last long. Which is probably a good thing.

Mary, my first mother-in-law, died twenty-five years ago, but she lives with me still in the kitchen at Christmas and in the chocolate mayonnaise birthday cakes which I make and which never change although they are only made for whoever is in the house at the birthday time. Mayonnaise cake, moist and fragrant, does not mail well. That recipe is also in my writing, quickly sketching down the direction as my mother-in-law dictated the ingredients.

One box goes to Florida, one to San Diego, the mailman gets his bread in hand, and the men here in the house have theirs.

And as I bake, I remember other times and other seasons. Mother-in-law Mary made banana bread when her boys came home; I usually limit mine to once a year: white flour and white sugar and chocolate chips are not our usual fare. But these are gifts of love, gifts of memory, gifts of tradition.

The mailman tells me his mother-in-law, no longer living, used to bake like this. His eyes shine as he takes my proffered loaf.

An Open Letter to My Great-Great-Grandmother

Published on by Janet Sunderland14 Comments

Dear Lucinda, no, no perhaps I have no right to be so informal. After all, I didn’t know you nor you me. In fact, I didn’t even know about you until last summer when my husband and I drove out to Jewell County, Kansas to see the land where my mother was born, where my grandmother and my great-grandfather and great-grandmother were born, my great-grandfather your last son, the one born in Indian Country at the end of the 17th Century.

I knew my great-grandparents but not your granddaughter, my Grandmother Margaret. She died when I was young, maybe four, after the time my sister was born. We lived in Arkansas. She lived in Kansas. There’s a story of her driving down with my grandpa to visit a year or so before she died. I was somewhere down the dirt road past our house. I’ve always wandered, even when young. I guess I got that from you. Their car slowed, I expect. I imagine my grandfather rolling down his window to ask a little blond-headed, blue-eyed, barefoot girl where my daddy lived. Well, he probably didn’t say where’s your daddy, he probably asked if I knew where Jeanette Sunderland lived, that was my mother. It seems I pointed down the road and said the famous line repeated in family stories, “Ya’ll comin’ to ah house?”

That’s all I know—the story and the line. You might have been appalled at the slurring casualness of my speech; I expect your granddaughter, Grandma Margaret, might have been, as she was an educated woman and wrote poetry. All I knew was that people laughed when they heard that line at the end of a very short story. My mother was educated, and she might have cringed at my accent, I don’t remember, but then she had three children and ducks and chickens to tend. She might not have done much reading in those days. Or much pronunciation training. I was born in San Francisco, but we’d lived in Arkansas all the time I was learning to talk and my favorite neighbor, Mis McNeil who fed me peanuts, talked like that. You’d be pleased to know I grew up to be a writer and a public speaker who is very particular with her words and pronunciation.

But I knew your son, Great-Grandpa Moore and his wife Great-Grandma Moore. By the time I knew them, they’d moved to Marshall County, following their daughter Margaret who’d married a railroad man. Married outside the church—a wayward girl, I gather. I probably get that part of me from her. You wandered but I doubt you were every wayward. Great-Grandmother was a Dillon and stern but she had beautiful white hair. I guess I get that from her. The hair, I mean, and sometimes the sternness. Great-Grandpa always had bad breath but I loved to sit on his lap. He laughed all the time. I guess that means you loved him pretty well, even after moving across the country from the Carolinas, step by step, marrying and burying husbands, moving on, collecting new last names and assorted children, until Great-Great-Grandpa Moore (you outlived him too) made you a home in a dug out against a hill above a stream in Jewell County. Family legend says my great-grandpa, your youngest son, was the first white child born west of the Missouri, but I don’t know how true that is. You’d probably know. I know Kansas Pioneer is written on his tombstone just below his name.

We’re a story-telling family, so I’ve made up a story you might have told my great-great grandfather when he was young. I hope you like it.

You’re sitting with an open Bible in your lap beside the pot-bellied stove in your dug out, the home you lived in until you died at ninety-three, and a neighbor has come to visit and see if you need anything. You’re already in your late eighties and Mr. Moore, your husband, my great-great grandfather has died. You hair is still dark and pulled back into a severe bun at the back of your head. You’re wearing a hand-knit shawl.

The neighbor woman asks if you’re doing all right and you nod. “I’m fine,” you say. “I didn’t see you in church this morning,” she says. “Figured I’d ask if you needed something.” You run your open hand across a page of the great book in your lap, smoothing a fragile page. “I was reading. I’m fine.”

I didn’t know about Quakers until last summer, either, but now I’m shortchanging your story to tell another of mine. I mean, I knew about them and I’d heard Mother’s stories of her Quaker family, especially Uncle Henry who said to a stubborn mule, “I shall not beat thee, I shall not curse thee, but I shall yank on thy dang-blasted head!” I always liked that line. What I didn’t know was that there weren’t any rules or rituals in the Quaker church, nothing to argue about. Just read the Bible and be kind. That’s a pretty good rule, no rules. Maybe there’s more I don’t know about, but I never heard any stories about Quakers arguing. Just Uncle Henry, yanking on the mule’s halter because he wouldn’t drink from the tank Uncle Henry led him to.

Anyway, your story con’t.

“I was thinking about Mr. Moore this morning,” you say. “And I was remembering something that happened shortly after we got here. He went out to check on those cows we’d managed to keep alive from Indiana, and he found a party of Indians skinning one to cut it up. Isn’t that a strange way to say it…a party of Indians. Well, they were elbow deep in grease and blood, but they threw down their skinning knives and ran toward the horses. Mr. Moore said two of them had grabbed bows before he got their attention. He held up both hands, faced them with open hands, and he hollered, ‘Wait.” (You hold up your hands to demonstrate.) Not real loud, he told me, just loud enough to get their attention. They stopped. He turned one open hand toward the half-skinned cow and he nodded. Then he rubbed his belly and nodded again. They were staring at him real hard, he said, bows in one hand, reaching for something, maybe arrows. He patted his chest once and pointed over his shoulder, turned his horse, and rode away. He knew they didn’t have food, we’d heard stories of villagers starving, children mostly. They didn’t follow and they didn’t shoot. A couple of mornings later, we found a big pile of firewood down by the stream. The Indians had brought it in trade. He was a good man, Mr. Moore. I was proud of him.

“No. I don’t need anything. Thank you for coming. I didn’t have anyone to tell this story to and it needed telling. Now it’s done.”

In a Quaker Cemetary

In a Quaker Cemetery

Grandparents in the Grass

Published on by Janet Sunderland3 Comments
Grandparents’ Iris

The question for someone who writes memoirs is, of course, “Who am I?” My answer at the moment seems to have evolved into, “I’m my grandparents.”

The wind in a willow began the whole thing: nothing soothes like a willow, in or out of a breeze, but in a breeze, it’s magic. And then too, we had a boggy stretch in the yard, maybe an underground stream, that seemed to need a water-soaking sort of plant. We planted a willow.

The next spring, or the one after, it seemed a most reasonable thing to create a flower plot along that section, beginning with circling the willow and running twenty-five feet or so beyond. My son did the heavy work, plowing up the heavy Missouri soil with the rotor tiller, adding mulch and compost, tilling again. My job is planting. I planted iris and peonies. Not just any iris and peonies, mind you, but Kansas iris and Kansas peonies.

The flowers of grandparent memories. This is how that all came about.

My cousin Howard, who looks just like Grandpa Sunderland, white beard and all, dug up some peonies at his house and gave them to me. I’d planted them in a back garden but they didn’t get enough sun to be really happy and I knew I needed to move them. It was Howard who first told me who I look like. We were out to dinner after I’d first moved to Kansas City and I said, “Howard, you’re one of the oldest cousins and we know you look like Grandpa Sunderland; who do I look like?” And he reared back in his chair, raised eyebrows and all (Howard is a very low-key person so that’s about all that happened to telegraph surprise), and he said, “Well, Grandma Sunderland, of course!” I laughed out loud. “So Grandpa and Grandma Sunderland are having dinner together,” I said.

That was the peonies part of the garden that developed around the willow. Kansas farms always had peonies. We had peonies, Grandma Sunderland had peonies, but she also grew yellow iris.

The iris part comes from years and years of smelling purple iris whenever I saw them, hoping to smell the telltale Kansas smell of grape soda. It never happened until one spring when I was up visiting a farm neighbor, Zita, and her iris bloomed all around the garage, both yellow and purple. I smelled the purple and they smelled like Grandpa Joe’s.

Grandpa Joe Ellis was my mother’s father. I remember him tending his iris and roses. I have roses, too. Grandpa had a huge backyard in Barnes, Kansas, stretching all the way back to the ditch before the railroad tracks. He also had cherry trees and peach trees and apple. And a garden. But the grape pop iris? They smelled like home. As a kid, I love that grape pop!

Zita said her iris needed to be separated anyway, so after blooming she dug up the roots and put them in plastic grocery bags for me. Bags and bags. She separated the yellow from the purple and the hybrids in yet another bag. All told I had some eight plastic bags of iris rhizomes. Stephen finished the garden tilling and I planted. Kansas iris at one end, hybrids at the other, transplanted peonies in the middle. They were all outrageously gorgeous and prolific and early. No peonies and iris for Memorial Day this year.

I cut peonies and iris, arranged them in vases around the house. More bloomed. I took some to church. And every time I walk into the backyard, I remember grandparents.

I didn’t ask enough questions of my grandparents when they were alive and I wish I had. Did you? How do you retrieve your grandparent memories?

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