Tag: Kansas

Best Writing Workshop Ever!

Published on by Janet Sunderland13 Comments
post-rock
Shot by Tom Parker at Jerry Stump farm

Last weekend, I was part of the best writing workshop I’ve ever attended. Ostensibly, I was the teacher, in Marysville, Kansas for a residency of teaching and reading my work. But the participants and their family stories made the workshop unforgettable.

We have a farm in Marshall County, seventeen miles from Marysville, and while ours is a long history on the land from the late 1800s, the family scattered like cottonseeds. None of us live there. Cliff and I go up and stay for a week every once in a while, but our parents were the last generation to live on and work the land.

The photo is not from our farm. It’s from one of the participants, Jerry Stump. His friend, Tom Parker, shot it on the farm Jerry’s  father bought and worked east of Blue Rapids, Kansas. As you can see, the land is still in production, and the photo is stunning.

On a side note, look up Tom Parker. He’s a remarkable photographer with a precision eye. I met him a few years ago when I did a workshop in Blue Rapids.

Many of the participants had boxes of documents and research, and we talked about ways to shape so many pieces of history. Jerry had the stories in his head. He’d driven one of his daughters around the farm and told her the stories, then a second daughter wanted to hear them, and a third. He came to the workshop to learn how to save those stories and maybe get them written down. He was a mathematician, he said. Not a writer. His experience with the daughters gave us a perfect format to talk about ways to reduce the overwhelming layers of historical documents many others had into a story.

Post Rocks have their own story.

From Jerry: “Post Rock is the proper name, so-called because it was used in fencing, especially where hedge posts from Osage orange trees were not available, such as further west in Kansas.  Hedge posts last forever as do post rocks. This post rock was used as a hitching post, a place to tie up your horse or carriage team.”

We had hedge posts on our farm. They do last forever! I can attest to that. And although some may lean a bit on our farm, they are still there and they do NOT rot. I helped dig holes, by hand, for some of them.

Post rocks come from farther west in Kansas where no Osage Orange trees grow; in fact, few trees in general grew in that western part of the state until settlers began planting them.

From the Kansas Historical Society: The area known as “Post Rock Country” stretches for approximately 200 miles from the Nebraska border on the north to Dodge City on the south. The limestone that is found here comes from the uppermost bed of the Greenhorn Formation. It was out of necessity that settlers in the late 1800s began turning back the sod and cutting posts from the layer of rock that lay underneath. By the mid-1880s limestone fence posts were in general use because of the widespread use of barbed wire.

The first time I saw Post Rock with barbed wire astounded me, growing up in eastern Kansas as I did. Rocks with barbed wire? Around wide stretches of grassland.

People who don’t live in Kansas think of the state as flat, flat, flat. And in Western Kansas, it is that. But the eastern third is the tail end of the Flint Hills with rocky outcroppings and hills. Our farm, for example, sits on a rise that gives us a view of the countryside for ten miles in each direction. Our east pasture sinks down into a rocky gully.

Jerry’s farm is in southern Marshall County lies east of Blue Rapids, named as you might guess, from water: The Big Blue River. And while there are plenty of flat fields, there’s also the outcroppings and springs and hilly gullies that defy farming. And the powerful Big Blue.

Blue Rapids, Kansas – Wikipedia. Among the first projects in 1870 were a stone dam and a wrought iron bridge built on the Big Blue River. A hydroelectric power plant was then added to provide power for manufacturing and for the town. The power plant was destroyed by a flood in 1903. In the late 19th century and early 20th century there were four gypsum mines in the area. The population peaked around 1910 at over 1,750. The public library, built in 1875, is the oldest library west of the Mississippi in continuous operation in the same building.

So much for nothing to see in Kansas except for miles of flat roads.

The next time you’re driving I70 through Kansas and bored, get off the highway, Manhattan is a good place to exit, and drive north. You’ll find some remarkable country, not boring at all. You might even spy a Post Rock if your wander off to the west.

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Weather Report

Published on by Janet Sunderland15 Comments

20160502_163351Family history lives in these yellow blooms and the tightly curled purple buds beyond them. Layers and layers of family and stories. One of the main reasons I love teaching my workshop, Saving Grandpa’s Stories–and Grandma’s too! is because I grew up with stories.

History isn’t only made by people in history books; it’s made by ordinary people living ordinary lives and telling the good parts.

The yellow iris are from my father’s mother, Grandma Sunderland, via Cousin Linda’s garden who got them from Grandma. Grandma Walt, we called her as her husband, our father’s father, was Grandpa Walt. Grandma and Grandpa Walt. That’s how it was. She had a first name but we never called her that; in fact, her first name is my middle name and since Grandma’s name was a secret, my middle name is secret. I never use it, not even the first initial.

We’ve had buckets of rain lately so the garden is voluptuous. Stuff is blooming everywhere. And then it gets sunny and hot and stuff explodes. We’ve had heavy thunderstorms, gloriously noisy affairs. Last night alone we got just short of two inches. I think of Dad, standing at the edge of the yard fence, looking out over the west fields and watching thunderheads form. In the spring, tornadoes were always a possibility, but our homestead on a rise so we could see ten miles in all directions. I hated the thought of having to dive for the old and dank and cobweb strewn cellar if he thought it necessary. But tornadoes prefer flat surfaces and draws to climbing any kind of hill, so tornadoes, as a rule, ran off around the south side and down a draw where they tangled in pasture woods. Dad was a story-teller. Stories were always a good reason to take a break  and lean on a hoe or a tractor tire. One of his favorites was telling about the times he hired Lawrence Welk’s band to play for dances on a wooden platform in the pasture at the end of our lane.

Dad was my father after my first father died. He married a widow with five kids and brought us to the farm. He was short and dark, his lineage Bohemian. And he loved to polka. It has just occurred to me I’m repeating my mother’s story: for my second husband, I married a Polish man about the same height as Dad, who dances a mean polka, whose hair was originally dark, and who tells East Baltimore and Patterson Park stories.

How do we ever make sense of our lives when we’re such a bundle of used-to-be stories?

Along with the iris, which I cut and bring into the house because their heads are so heavy, the rose bushes are loaded, the stems heavy with bloom, and the peonies from Cousin Howard’s yard are covered with heavy, plump buds. There will be peonies a plenty for Memorial Day.

When I moved back here from Santa Fe in 1999, I didn’t know I’d own a house and live in that house long enough for a twelve-foot newly planted willow to reach forty feet. I’ve never lived anywhere this long. When I first came back, Cousin Howard and I would go out to dinner. One of the early times, as we sat across from each other at a hotel dining room table for two next to the window, and we picked up our white cloth napkins and lay them on laps, I looked at Howard, he of the lovely white beard, and said, “We know who you look like, Grandpa Sunderland. You’re one of the oldest cousins, so who do I look like?’

Well. Howard reared back in his chair, eyes wide as if completely astonished at my ignorance, and said, “Why, Grandma Sunderland, of course.”

I hooted laughing. “So Grandpa and Grandma Sunderland are at dinner.”

He grinned wide through his beard and his eyes twinkled just like Grandpa Sunderland’s. “I guess so.”

I had no idea I looked like Grandma Sunderland. I knew I baked bread and biscuits like her and rolled out dough like her. I’ve never been able to duplicate her sugar cookies although I’ve tried. My hands look like hers although she’d had two middle fingers chopped off at the first joint when a young teen by an errant hatchet aiming for a chicken’s neck. I used to bite my nails and I’ve certainly banged up my hands on more than one occasion, but I have all my fingers.

The purple buds among the yellow blooms are from my mother’s father, Grandpa Joe. He tended iris and roses and apple trees and cherry trees and an expansive vegetable garden in our backyard in Barnes, Kansas where we lived from the time I was four to nine. Railroad tracks ran at the back of our long yard. Grandpa was the depot agent. A chicken house with chickens sat at the edge of a ditch before the ditch rose to the tracks. The ground was built up so high for the tracks, evenly spaced and wooden ties-shored tunnels ran under it. We’d stand in the ditch and dare each other to run into the tunnel as the Missouri-Pacific thundered past above our young heads. It probably wasn’t running as fast as we thought, however, because the depot was only about three blocks further on. But those engines, which still belched smoke when I was a kid, were huge and heavy and loud. I remember kids putting pennies on the track but I never did. I worried it would derail Grandpa’s train. And we’d been warned often enough to stay off the tracks. Grandpa Joe also had a special spot in the shade under one tree near the house where coffee grounds got dumped. That was so worms would come and make a colony and my father could find them with only a brief dig to go fishing.

The preacher, Bob, who’d known us forever, told a story about the garden and chickens at my mother’s funeral. He remembered when the chickens got loose and into the garden’s garlic patch, and mother fried up garlic flavored chicken for weeks.

I tried that once with fresh garlic in the flour and pan before cooking. My sons were not impressed. Mom’s garlic chicken is still their story when we’re together. “No garlic chicken!” they say.

Grandpa Joe’s purple iris smelled exactly like grape pop. You can’t find that kind of iris at a nursery. But a farm neighbor I visited one day dug up bags full of tubers for me and now I have Grandpa Joe’s grape-pop purple iris.

Who am I in this trail of flowers and weather and bird song? Life is like writing: the good stuff is in the revision process. I can keep track, more or less, of personal revisions and renewals, but it’s a long list. And now I’ve recreated childhood.

The house we live in looks like Grandpa Joe’s house in Barnes, and if you’d cut it in half, long ways, it would look like the Baltimore row home Cliff grew up in. The metal frame you can sort of see behind the iris is a metal shelf from his mom’s place. Much of our furniture is from that Baltimore row home, which we brought back here after Mom sold the house and moved into a senior’s apartment building.

Cliff tells stories of his brother banging into the Duncan Fife china cupboard corners as he dashed from room to room. We have a small cupboard his grandfather, Dziadz, Polish for grandfather, built. Our home is filled with stories. Every painting, every piece of art, every photograph on our walls (and we have many) comes with a story.

The sky’s been clouding up again as I’ve written, sitting at the wide front upstairs window with a Romare Bearden quote taped to the sill: Artists are like mice. They need old houses where they can roam around and nobody bothers them.

We have that kind of house. The kind of house a child might draw: peaked roof, front door flanked by windows, a tree out front.

Across the bottom of the drawing, I’ll write, Honey, I’m home.

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The Wizards of Oz

Published on by Janet Sunderland6 Comments

The State of Kansas has had less than favorable notice the past few years. The Governor, the Secretary of State, and the legislature, in particular, head up the news you’re seeing. “What’s Wrong With Kansas,” became a best seller.

Kansans have always been touched by the crazy bug. I mean, consider moving to where no one lives, where nothing lives, really, but tallgrass and Native Americans, and building a home out of sod. We’ll start there. But Kansas also boasts the Garden of Eden, complete with concrete poured animals and a beloved, shrunken to a mummy, in a glass-topped coffin; a Wizard of Oz Museum; and a Rock in a Cage. That’s a very very very brief list. If you’re really curious, go here. You’ll find more in alphabetical order by town. Oh, and the geographical center of the Continental United States.

But here’s a Kansas only the local community will talk about, in particular, Marysville, Kansas, the town where we shop when we go to the farm, and the home of The Marysville Advocate, home town newspaper which arrives in my mailbox once a  week.

This week’s top story, along with a bond election for the schools, but we’re not going into politics, was on the Hong Kong Restaurant, a town favorite, which opened in 1997, and is closing. The owners are retiring and moving closer to children. Crowds filled the restaurant for a last meal, the patrons sad; someone changed the closing date on the door sign from Nov. 1, 2015 to Nov. 1, 2016. One of their children, Connie Chan, who grew up in the restaurant, graduated from high school and subsequently from Carnegie Mellon University, wrote a column in this week’s paper, saying thanks for the memories. And thanks to Marysville, her “hometown.”

While not exactly my hometown as the farm is seventeen miles northeast, nonetheless, I’ve known Marysville, Kansas since about five years old. As we drove Highway 36, the old Pony Express route, on the way to Grandma’s house, I always looked for the neon sign that read EAT horizontally and GAS vertically. EAT GAS. Even at a young age, words amused me. Eat gas was my first introduction to Kansas crazy.

When I returned to this part of the country, we live in Kansas City, Missouri, across the state line from Kansas a few blocks to the west, and when I began regularly going to the farm and to Marysville for supplies, one of the first things I noticed was the Chinese restaurant and the Mexican restaurant. In the newspaper, I noticed Asian and African-American and Mexican and Caucasian schoolkids, laughing in newspaper photographs.

Something remarkable had happened in Marysville and in Marshall County. True, it’s at a crossroad: the Pony Express, the train, the highways 77 and 36 in a major crossroad, and the county seat. But so much diversity in a small Kansas town surprised me.

So yes, while there’s a lot wrong with Kansas, there’s a lot right, too. And acceptance for differences (we’ll leave out the Legislature for now) is a hallmark.

We be a little crazy in Kansas. It’s probably in the wind.

 

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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

Daily Post: Futures Past

Published on by Janet Sunderland1 Comment

Twenty years ago, the premier advice, from givers-of-advice on job searches, was how to prepare for the question, “What do you see yourself doing in five years?” Sometimes the time frame in a very aggressive job search put the number at ten.

I had no idea. Usually I could figure out today and even a week in advance, but five years? What would I be doing in five years? Even pondering the question made me laugh out loud. Not to a recruiter’s face, mind you, but otherwise, yes. Laugh out loud.

I was asked to ponder the question in high school. And after I began college. Again, I had no idea so I took the basics and let it go at that.

Even twenty years ago, living a professional life in Washington D.C., I had no idea. I’d already had several careers. Perhaps I should say “faux-professional.” As a contractor for the Office of Personnel Management, I was, essentially, a part-time teacher.

But today’s Daily Post question asked “As a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? How close or far are you from that vision?”

Oddly enough, my future really was in my past. As a kid, I wrote all the time. A diary, mostly, that I hid under my pillow and was always surprised when my mom found it. And outraged, I might add. But I never expected to be a writer. That simply wasn’t on my horizon even though my mother wrote a column for the local paper and my grandmother was a poet. But my grandmother was dead and my mother annoying. Why would I be a writer? But I am.

What I really and truly dreamed about was a home, a husband, kids, and a picket fence around it all. Truly. So in high school, I got tired of the question and left school to marry a soldier. We moved all over the place but no picket fence. No marriage after a while either. But I did have kids. I was part of the way there.

In 2003, Cliff and I bought this 1924 two-story stucco and brick house with a privacy fence around the back yard. Taller than a picket fence, but nonetheless, a fence. In 2004 we married. In 2005 we got a kid. True, oldest kid who came to live with us and go to college, nonetheless, a kid.

And that’s how we’ve lived ever since, home, fence, kid.

Oh. And writer.

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