Sepia Prairie

When I was in high school, I found an old sepia postcard in my grandfather’s envelope of special photographs that he kept separate from family albums and treasured for his own reasons. In this photograph from the 1910s, his older sisters Myrah and Lerah pose with a woman identified only as “the friend from town” whom my grandfather believed worked at a North Dakota telephone company. The three young women are wading near the grassy bank in the wide creek, which is pronounced “crick” in that part of the country.

Myrah and Lerah, farm girls who probably didn’t have many afternoons free to go wading, look a little surprised to find themselves standing barefoot next to each other in the water, holding up the skirts of their long dresses with both hands and giggling for the camera. Lerah, the youngest, beams playfully in her pretty white dress and hair bow, while Myrah, the older sister who already worked hard on the farm, grins sheepishly in her wide-collared calico dress.

But turning away from the sisters, the young woman from town is splashing through the water in a fancy white blouse, sleeves rolled to mid-arm, her long, full skirt held above the water. Her eyes are closed, her smile wide, and her head thrown back in laughter. She was a town girl who probably didn’t spend many days wading in a cool summer creek. Town girls’ lives were undoubtedly easier than those of farm girls but a chance for an afternoon outdoors with friends was probably a treat all the same.

I was so taken with this photograph as a teenager that I made my grandmother write “Give this to Kayann Short” on the back. After my grandparents’ deaths, my mother brought it back from North Dakota for me and it’s been an iconic image for me all these years.

In this photograph, women’s friendships form the meeting place of country and city. Against the backdrop of sky, creek, and prairie, the young women delight in each other’s company and in the chance to move without restriction, breathe fresh air, touch the earth with bare feet, and be surrounded by the vast prairie stretching beyond them. The photograph even captures the fine detail of long grass as it bends in the breeze, a sepia whisper behind the women’s laughter.

I yearned for this place myself growing up, yet with which of the women I felt a kinship was unclear, despite my bloodlines. I was the town girl delighting in the country, her fancy clothes no longer a hindrance as she wades in the creek but an embellishment to the prairie behind her. She had come from the city to visit my great-aunts on their farm outside of town and found herself on the edge of cultivated space. When she returned to sidewalks and streets, she would remember the coolness of the creek bottom. There’s just more outside to life on a farm than “in town,” as my grandparents would say. But looking at that picture, I always hoped my life could include both.

 

Note to Self: This Is What Beautiful Looks Like

I’ve been busy the last few weeks working with students in the women’s wellness service learning practicum of my women’s literature course on a digital story that challenges the degrading and even dangerous images of beauty found every day in the media. As young women coming of age in a world where competing ideas and values are difficult to evaluate, my students are particularly sensitive to consumerist messages that tell them they’re not good enough. While the students know what beauty really looks like, they have to work hard to shut out constant feelings of not measuring up to superficial portrayals of women.

In response to these negative messages, we decided to use media techniques and communication channels for our own purposes: to create and share a digital story that promotes feeling good about who we are as women for our accomplishments, goals, and relationships rather than just for our physical appearance. We answered the question “How can I feel good about myself when everyone else tells me to feel bad?” by describing experiences that challenge the “you’re not good enough” message with self-affirmations and peer and family support.

For each scene, the students created a “note to self” that illustrated their own positive messages. I then compiled images of these “notes” with personal photos from the students’ lives, joined by thematic photos shot at Rock Your Body Day, a fabulous event organized by our campus’s Community Health that celebrates real bodies accomplishing real goals. As part of RYBD, the students were photographed holding signs stating what they love about their bodies and these black and white images appear in the final sequence of our piece.

I loved working with my students on this project and I applaud the honesty with which they shared their stories. While the students still recognize fashion and body image as part of their young lives, they offer strategies for re-defining beauty on their own more constructive terms. We hope that Note to Self: This Is What Beautiful Looks Like will inspire all of us to create messages reminding each other that beauty is not what we don’t have, but rather what already exists in our own hearts and minds.

I invite my readers to share this video with women of all ages, but especially with younger women who feel their lives are reduced to the way they look, the products they buy, and the labels of the clothes they wear. I hope they’re inspired by my students to create new images and ideas of beauty and “put it out there for the world to see!”

And if you have any ideas for ways to share our story, please let me know! It’s also available at vimeo.com/kayannshort/notetoself

 

 

Girls, Intercepted

Even before Winona Ryder produced and starred in the film with Angelina Jolie, Girl, Interrupted was a strikingly honest memoir that exposed the consequences of rejecting traditional female gender roles for white, affluent girls in the late 1960s. In the book, Susanna Kaysen alternates memories of her stay at McLean psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts with analysis of a mental health system that recommended institutionalization for rebellious girls whose families could pay the $60 a day fee, an enormous expense that, as Kaysen ironically notes, could have paid for several college educations.

But Kaysen refuses to go to college, rejecting the upwardly bound expectations of her parents and teachers. Instead, she lives in a Cambridge boarding house, working various jobs without a plan for her future or any particular ambition other than to be a writer. When her self-obsessive thoughts lead to an aspirin overdose, a therapist suggests that she “needs a rest” after a consultation of only thirty minutes (the amount of time is debated in the memoir as an example of the medical profession’s acquiesance in institutionalizing young women from the right kind of families).  He calls a cab and Kaysen checks herself into McLean for what she believes will be a short stay. Instead, she’s there for nearly two years.

One of the debates framed by the memoir is the definition of insanity. Kaysen admits that she knew she wasn’t crazy but instead living in a state of contrariety: “My ambition was to negate. . . . So the opportunity to be incarcerated was just too good to resist. It was a very big No—the biggest No this side of suicide.” At 18, saying No is easier than suggesting an alternative and Kaysen doesn’t yet have the wisdom or role models to find her Yes.

Kaysen is diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder, a diagnosis given more frequently to women than men and a familiar description of many young women who don’t follow social expectations: instability of self-image, interpersonal relationships, or mood; engaging in impulsive acts like shoplifting or spending sprees. BPD can also have a self-damaging side such as self-mutilation or suicide. Still, the diagnosis remains controversial because of its gender bias and because many young women experience these types of symptoms at some point in their adolescence or young adulthood. As a therapist later told Kaysen, “It’s what they call people whose lifestyles bother them.”

One of the delights of Kaysen’s memoir is the inclusion of her hospital records detailing observations by hospital doctors and staff. One admission form notes that Kaysen is “likely to kill self or get pregnant.” Which fate would be worse for an affluent white girl in those pre-women’s liberation days? The note also labels her “promiscuous,” but as Kaysen later writes, “How many girls do you think a seventeen-year-old boy would have to screw to earn [that] label?”

Another debate at the center of the memoir is whether McLean was a refuge or a prison for young women like Kaysen. At that time of countercultural upheaval when attitudes regarding women were changing but social opportunities had not yet met their pace, the options for girls who questioned the status quo were still limited. Trying to live independently of her parents or a husband, Kaysen is confronted with sexist attitudes about women and the lonely struggle to make a living. In McLean, however, she is part of a community of young women who support each other and accept each other’s idiosyncracies within the shelter of a hospital that cares for their every need–except to let them leave the way they are.

Eventually, Kaysen does decide to leave this ensemble of misfit girls in order to pursue her own life, but the admiration and love they’ve provided strengthen her belief in herself. It’s this community of women that makes the memoir so appealing to young women readers, who are drawn to the sisterhood formed within the walls of Kaysen’s imprisonment and the collective antics that fill the time.  They relish its depiction of friendship offered fully and freely, like the young women I saw on campus yesterday, two with arms around the third one sobbing, letting her cry as long as she needed, willing to wait as long as it took. How iconic that image and how important to coming of age for young women today as much as in Kaysen’s time.

My students love Girl, Interrupted. In part they’re fascinated by the story of a girl who refused the script that they themselves are living—college in preparation for a comfortable and interesting life, one they hope will balance work, family, and friends. But they can also see the allure of the hospital as refuge for Kaysen, the appeal of being taken care of while the world’s craziness goes on outside. Still, they know the value of their youthful years and they empathize deeply with Kaysen’s insistence on accounting for each minute she’s lost.

Girl, Interrupted makes me think about my own teenage years and I hope to write more about them someday.  It’s tricky, though, to tell those truths because if they don’t sound trivial, they certainly sound crazy, an admission of behavior somewhere between bad judgment and caution thrown to the winds of wanting more.  If you haven’t read Girl, Interrupted, give it a try and then watch the movie too. You’ll root for these girls and their crazy lives, intercepted until the times can catch up with them.

 

 

A Friend Like That

“What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?/She lost her sparkle, you know she isn’t the same./Living on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine;/All her friends can say is, Ain’t it a shame?”

In high school, we’d joke that “Truckin’” by the Grateful Dead was about our friend Lisa. Lisa was the daredevil amongst us, but if Lisa went first, I usually went second.

Like the time she leaped off the steep side of Horsetooth Reservoir into the lake twenty feet below without checking the water level for bone-crushing boulders first. Crossing her arms over her chest, she jumped straight as a board into the water without hitting any rocks. When I saw her bob up to the surface, I jumped too.

Or the time we realized the friend who was driving us to the country party was pretty high on something so Lisa bailed out of the back door and I followed, tucking and rolling our way to relative safety. Lisa was fearless because she didn’t really care about the rules.

I couldn’t always keep up with Lisa, though, or follow her into the dark where life became a joke to mask some kind of pain. One day she stole some downers from the pharmacy where her mom worked and showed up at school laughing at nothing in particular. By lunch period, she could barely walk or talk. I was taking college classes in the afternoon so I brought her to campus with me, hoping she’d sit in the café and wear off the drugs with caffeine. When I got back from class, she was gone; I found her wandering the hallways and took her to my house to sleep. Her mother had turned her in to the police before and I wasn’t going to let that happen again. Self-medicating wasn’t a word we used back then, but it would have described Lisa.

Whatever became of sweet Jane? She didn’t even make it to our tenth reunion. She died of breast cancer, leaving her two-year-old daughter to be raised by her straight-edged sister, a secondary tragedy as far as I was concerned.

Lisa was my daredevil friend; she taught me to leap and then look and then leap again.  I miss her laugh and her teenaged irreverence for rules that say “don’t” instead of “do.”  We’re raised to follow authority, not question it, but sometimes I wanted to follow Lisa instead. What better time in life to have a friend like that?

 

Seeds of Never-Seen Dreams

Rather than write this week, I created a digital story based on a previous post called Our Great-Grandmother’s Gardens. I loved putting old photographs to Flora Hunsley Smith’s story. Although she was a quiltmaker herself, none of her quilts have survived, so for background images I used quilts that were passed down to me from my Grandma Short on my father’s side of the family. I had fun with the transitions between quilts and flowers, looking for similar colors and textures. The music came last. I knew I wanted a traditional piece but hadn’t imagined something this melancholy. I loved the title–and Rayna Gellert’s liner notes–and its driving tone captured the sense of perseverance I associate with my great-grandmother’s life. “Coming through the rye” says it all for me–you come through life the best you can by making the most of each day.

Watch Seeds of Never-Seen Dreams:

 

June

Today is the 28^th anniversary of my friend June’s death. June was murdered in her home on June 11, 1982, just a year after we graduated from college. Three years ago, I decided to make a digital story about June, not only to mark the 25 years since I lost her, but to celebrate our friendship and the 1970s feminism that brought us together.

I can’t remember those days without imagining June.

You can see the digital story here:

June from Kayann Short on Vimeo.

Since the making of this story, June’s case has received new attention and is being reinvestigated by an official cold case unit and a wonderful detective who is determined to see June’s killing solved. The murderer knows that he is again under investigation; he may be laughing now but his time will come. I believe that someone or some evidence will come forward some day to lay this crime to rest.

Making June’s story was painful but necessary because I don’t want to forget her and the movement that shaped our friendship. I loved my life then. I could hardly wait each day to meet my friends at our student group’s office. We argued and laughed and sometimes published our ideas.  We organized and marched and wrote letters and showed up when needed to voice our demands. We held garage sales and feminist film festivals to raise money for our efforts. We simultaneously cared so much and so little because our irreverence for the systems of power just pushed us harder to insist on change.

We didn’t yet know how much could be lost.

But at June’s death, we came face to face with the very thing we most wanted to change—the violence in our everyday women’s lives. And 28 years later, I’m still engulfed with rage and pain and sorrow that none of us could save her.

 

Our Great-Grandmothers’ Gardens

On Thursday mornings at Stonebridge we work with a small crew of bartering members in the gardens, doing the tasks for which “many hands make light work.” With the cool weather and wet soil, I hadn’t yet planted gladiolas, but yesterday with the help of two other women—one my age, one twenty years younger—we got them in the ground. Thursdays’ biggest pleasure is the wide-ranging conversation in the field, and yesterday was no exception. As we laughed about the inconsistencies of patriarchal religions that undoubtedly informed our feminist views, we dropped corms into holes spaced three and then two across the bed like cookies on a sheet, but the more we laughed, the more crooked our rows became. Every fifth row or so, we’d have to stop and start again with a straighter line. We planted just over 200 gladiolas, beginning with 60 new bulbs in deep red, violet-blue, and hot pink, and finishing with corms dug last fall and stored in peat moss in the basement. In August, we’ll have a vibrant stand of elegant gladiolas welcoming us to the garden.

Our next task was weeding the long bed of transplanted head lettuce, only a couple weeks away from harvesting. Using our horis—our favorite Japanese digging tools—we weeded with our knees in the clover walkways while sharing stories of our grandmothers, or at least the pieces we know.

With the help of the alumni association at Valparaiso University, I’ve just found my great-grandmother’s name listed in the 1890 Northern Indiana Normal School’s catalogue under the Teacher’s Department pages:

Hunsley, Flora                                           Macon, Illinois

Northern Indiana Normal School catalogue, 1890

Flora Delcina Hunsley had traveled from Decatur, IL, at the age of 22 to get her teaching degree at the same school her brother Jake had attended for music a couple years before. What a thrill to see her name 120 years later, evidence that my great-grandmother was a college graduate and a teacher like me.

That catalogue is one of the few documents we have for Flora’s life; the rest of the story can only be pieced together. At the Normal school, she became friends with Lola Belle Huckleberry, who had a stepbrother named Jasper Lemuel Smith. Although he was 10 years older, Jasper and Flora met, courted, and married after she had taught school for a few years in Illinois.

Flora and Jasper before their marriage

My great-grandparents moved to North Dakota to homestead after Flora’s brother Jake had staked a claim there and her parents, Malinda and Charles, originally from the English county of Lincolnshire, came too. Flora and Jasper raised five children, including my grandfather Kermit, on the Waterloo Farm, named after the family place in England. Their lives were typical of farming families, raising crops and livestock on the windy prairie.

Flora Hunsley on the right with her turkeys

But after their deaths, their children found their parents’ secret in an old trunk: another document–their marriage certificate, dated one year later than the wedding date they’d always claimed. Flora had gotten pregnant before they were married. Since they’d left Illinois, no one but their parents and siblings were the wiser.

Not an unusual story, but I wonder how Flora’s life might have been different without that surprise. She probably would have married her best friend’s stepbrother anyway and as a married woman, would have had to relinquish her teaching position, as they did in those unenlightened days when marriage meant pregnancy and pregnant women in the classroom wouldn’t be proper. She probably would have followed her brother to North Dakota too, just as she followed him to college in Indiana.

But I like to think that she never entirely forgot those days of relative freedom with friends, going to classes and living away from her family. When my aunt was born, my grandparents named her Lola after Flora’s best friend. A college picture tucked into my aunt’s baby book shows the two of them in black dresses with buttoned bodices, their aspirations still ahead of them.

Flora seated with Lola in the middle behind her

It’s a good story and I’m sorry I never met Flora, but I’m happy that I’ve followed in her teaching and farming footsteps. I can’t help but think of Alice Walker’s influential essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens,” in which Walker writes of “Sainted” and “crazy” Black foremothers who, denied legal, economic, and political power, still told stories and planted gardens and pieced quilts of “powerful imagination and deep spiritual feeling”: “And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see: or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.” If you haven’t read Walker’s essay lately, you should.

These are the stories we tell as we weed lettuce and plant gladiolas and plot the trajectories of our lives. As we search for our mother’s and grandmother’s and great-grandmother’s gardens, what better place to start than our own?