Tag: marshall county

Am I Back? And to What?

Published on by Janet Sunderland24 Comments
Groundhog Day 2005 by Aaron Silvers Wikimedia Commons
Groundhog Day 2005 by Aaron Silvers
Wikimedia Commons

About the middle of December, I boldly announced I was taking a break from blogging and would be back after the holidays. Obviously, I wasn’t. Unless we count Groundhog Day as part of the holidays in which case, I’m a little early. So is the sunshine and warmth in this part of the country while in the Northeast, there are mounds of blizzard.

But since I’m here, no doubt I’ll see the sun and thereby the forecast is for six more weeks of winter. Well, fine.

The groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, is the little furry clump in the arms of the man just to the left of the man reading the proclamation. I wonder just what sort of fellow would hold a fat groundhog.

I’ve been holding onto sanity.

Christmas was nice. Quiet. Just the two of us, laughing and building fires in the grate. And doesn’t that sound romantic. It was. After Christmas, we drove up to the farm to our little house on the prairie for a week of quiet, METV and DVD movies, and some writing time for me. Only things changed. Life and death, I guess you could say.

A good friend and farm neighbor died the second day of our week’s stay. We came back to Kansas City, a three-hour drive, got things ready that we would have done after we would have come home Saturday, drove back to farm and viewing and funeral. And came home to taxes for the farm. And then, oops, a grant that I didn’t know was due and which I did, now done, the farm taxes on a pile on the floor, and it’s almost Groundhog Day. But I’m okay. Doing one thing at a time.

I watched a flock of young sparrows, yearlings by the look of them, one day on the farm. A sunny, windy, cold day. They gathered in the tree branches outside my window. And in unison, flew down to the ground and began pecking away at something, seeds too small for me to see, hopping sideways to the wind, and yet focused and although buffeted by the ground wind, in balance.

Nature once more gives the lesson. Be present and balanced in the doing.

“There is need of only one thing.” And the overriding and necessary thing in the world today is balance. And when we are in balance, our spirit soars and the sun rests lightly on our skin, even in the winter.

.

 

The Dream Inside: Daily Post–Containers

Published on by Janet Sunderland4 Comments
Windows of Dreams
Windows of Dreams

While these windows don’t look like anything much, in reality they contain a dream. And not only a dream, but a dream of nearly forty years. Hard to imagine, isn’t it, that two windows and a red stepladder might hold so much.

Years ago, when I returned to college to complete an undergraduate degree, my life was in chaos; grief followed me; and I knew I was in trouble. While I have, as most will attest, a less than stellar memory, I clearly see myself walking across campus on a sidewalk bordered on the right by green, fresh grass and noticing a sign outside the low brick building on my left–Counseling Center. Abruptly turning in, I made an appointment. My counselor, Tim Lowenstein, taught me bio-feedback and self-guided visual meditation.

When I needed to go to a quiet and safe place, I’d visualize going to the farm, walking down the lane toward the road (Mom and Dad still lived on the farm so I couldn’t go to the house), turn left on the road towards the bridge over Mission Creek, climb over the fence to a wide grassy patch of pasture on the south side of the creek, and go to the cabin I’d built in my mind. I’d sit on the porch in a rocking chair to breathe and be at peace.

That went on for several years. I also talked to Dad from time to time about the farm’s future. When I worked on a BFA in metals, I’d talk about an artists’ retreat. How I’d build cabins at the perimeter, how his old heavy anvil would be useful again. I had to let go of that dream plan when I decided I’d never be more than an adequate visual artist and went back to acting. But I hadn’t forgotten the farm.

Mom and Dad moved to town; I moved everywhere else, including New York and Mexico, but the farm remained a place of peace and safety. After all, how loud can it be on a place six miles from the nearest paved road? By that time, I’d become a writer, but that made being on the farm even more attractive. I continued dreaming of a writer’s retreat.

My bookcase filled with Annie Dillard and William Least Heat Moon, Edward Abbey and Diane Glancy. Jane Brox wrote Clearing Land: Legacies of the American Farm and I underlined and underlined passages: “The heart of the New World had its own name: prairie. The long open center of the word conjures an endless, calm, undefined expanse…”

Dad died. Mother followed ten years later.

By then, I’d moved back to Kansas, my brother moved to Hawaii, and I took over managing the family farm, planted to tallgrass prairie, and with some of the outbuildings still intact although not the house. I’d helped Dad tear down to make way for a new double wide mobile home. But Dad saved the timbers of the old house and built a room onto the double wide, which we called The Little House, to accommodate kids when they came home. They’d sold the double wide when they moved into town, but the Little House still stood. Dead birds in the screens; pack rat nests in the basement; old jars of canned vegetables in the corner “cellar”; mold on the walls. I cleaned and tossed.

My husband and I bought an old camper and put it on the land. We’d go up when the weather permitted. Too hot and the air conditioner didn’t operate; too cold and the furnace couldn’t keep up, but we went. The folding panel of the camper shower cracked and leaked water onto the floor, but we went. We painted the inside walls of the Little House and turned it into a writing room. The antenna outside for television reception finally broke; we resorted to videos. The ceiling began to leak; we resorted to duct tape inside and vinyl coating on the aluminum roof; the mice and bugs got in; we resorted to moth balls, rat poison, and stinky air “freshener” when we left each time and swept up dead bugs and tossed dead mice when we returned. It was a process as they say, but the camper continued to decay.

It wasn’t until we were mid-way into the reconstruction of the Little House, adding a kitchen and bathroom, a new roof, new insulation and siding that closed cracks to critters, new front deck, and driving the two and a half-hour drive up, again, to take light fixtures and paint and to once more clean out the basement, when, on the two and a half-hour drive back that evening, I woke from a doze and realized a dream was coming true.

An artist’s retreat was about to be born.

This is land my grandpa’s father homesteaded in the 1800’s, the man who’d walked the long journey to St. Joe to buy supplies like salt and sugar and lug it back. Grandpa told stories of the Jesse James’ gang coming by one time his father was on a trek to St. Joe and how they’d asked for dinner, politely, and slept the night. This is where Grandpa traded with the Otoe Indian tribe–cattle for firewood–whose reservation was north of our place. This was where his wife died and where Grandpa died. This is where Dad grew up. This is where I grew up and couldn’t wait to get away. And then, it’s where I returned.

Dream your dreams, boys and girls. Because you know what? The more you dream, even with editing, they may just come true.

And the windows? I’ll put a desk in front of those windows and sit there and look. Here is the prairie. This is what dreams are made of.

Night comes to the prairie.

 

 

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.

.

 

Daily Post: Journey

Published on by Janet SunderlandLeave a comment

???????Some journeys are made in miles and some in memory. And sometime, both miles and memories make the journey together. This week, during our run-away to the farm days, we made a cemetery journey in miles and memories.

Our family in cemetery life is as scattered as they were in living life. Most, however, are in or near Marshall County so that makes it at least a doable afternoon journey. One set of grandparents lie outside Vermillion, Kansas where as youngsters they grew up and where their parents lie, one set in Frankfort, Kansas, again, where the parents, my great-grandparents, lie. My mother and dad are in Barneston, Nebraska, just over the State Line from Kansas, and my father, John, and his firstborn son, Walter Joe, are buried in Barnes, Kansas which is where we lived as children when our father died.

Yes, the lineage is complicated and even more complicated in the reading since it seems I have two fathers in different cemeteries. And I do.

So anyway, as you can imagine, the circuit around all of those takes the better part of a day. We didn’t do all the grandparents this time, only my double set of parents.

Cliff and I drove to Barneston, Nebraska first, as Nebraska is only three-quarters of a mile north of the farm and Barneston just a few miles north of that. When you’re a farmer, or a farmer’s daughter, you learn to make a clean circuit rather than backtrack across the countryside. Barneston has a small town cemetery, as all the family plots are in for that matter. The gravestones are a little haphazard, some date back to the mid 1800s and in one corner, bounded by a fence with bluebird houses on each fencepost, a headstone rock for the Otoe Indians who were native to the area and with whom Grandpa Albert, dad’s dad, traded when he first moved onto the farm. Grandpa liked to tell us kids “Indian Stories” as he called them.

I also noticed that all the decorations (in the country, by people of a certain age, it’s still called Decoration Day), were plastic. No iris yet bloomed, no peonies, both traditional plants in rural cemeteries. I heard my mother’s old lament from past years in my head, “The peonies won’t be ready for Memorial Day this year.” It’s been a cold spring. When young, we had no plastic flowers, only live, cut flowers from the yard, sometimes stuck into quart jars with water. Hence, not having the iris and peonies bloom was a problem. My mother always wrapped her bouquets in aluminum foil to keep them fresh until at least the end of the day.

I put plastic flowers on Mom and Dad’s graves and on Grandpa Albert’s and his wife Susan’s although she died the year before Mom and Dad married and we moved to the farm. I didn’t know her. But I knew Dad’s stories of her.

And then we drove down to Barnes, Kansas. This is a bigger, neater cemetery. There’s a covered graveyard registry with all the names, and corresponding plots, in alphabetical order. Stones lined in rows, all, for the most part standing straight. Some date back to pre-Civil War days. Those are mostly young children. The cemetery in Barnes puts flags by veteran’s graves in little holders branded by the war of the time. Some held the insignia for a Civil War soldier, some for World War I, some for WWII. I didn’t see any for later wars. My father’s flag holder is marked WWII. I’m glad he has a flag. I guess that if Little Joe had lived, he might have been in the Vietnam War.

For whatever reason, a sunnier hill, or less wind, or a bit further south, or fewer cold storms, the peonies and lilacs were in riotous bloom. I planted peony bulbs by my father’s grave once, but you just about have to live in an area to tend graves and make sure the mowers don’t flatten new and tender shoots. We put plastic flowers on John Sunderland and Walter Joe’s graves.

And then we came home. Our backyard was riotous in color in just the few days we’d been gone. Peonies and iris and roses in full bloom. This morning, I cut fresh flowers and took them to church. The photo above is from that cutting. But these aren’t just any peony/iris/flowers. These have a history of journeys too.

The purple iris are Grandpa Joe iris, the grandfather buried in Frankfort whom we didn’t visit this time. Not that I got them from him, rather, Zita, who was a friend of my mother’s up by the farm, dug up rhizomes and gave me several sacks a couple of years ago. But they aren’t just any old iris. These smell like grape pop. I’d searched forever for iris that smelled like grape pop. Impossible to find in a greenhouse; only possible from a farm friend’s old iris bed.

The yellow iris are my Grandmother Sunderland’s iris, the grandmother who is buried in Vermillion. We didn’t visit her either. But my cousin, who had dug up Grandma’s iris back when, dug up these and I planted them. The peonies are also Kansas peonies, dug up by my oldest cousin, Howard, and passed on to me several years back.

Just as my journey back to Kansas was a twisting turning road, the journey these flowers took has a lot of curves even if not as many miles as I traveled. And they are still in pretty good shape. No doubt they will likely outlast my own journey, when you get right down to it.

And travel into another Memorial Day; another journey into stories.

.

Related articles