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.

 

Marking Her Days with Grace

Recently I took out the few diaries I have from my Grandma Smith and re-read her sparse entries. A true farmer, she always noted the weather, both the high and low temperatures and noteworthy conditions like sheer wind or a blinding snowstorm. Some days in July she would just write “Hot.” My favorite weather entry reads:  Sat, Jan 29, 1966: This morning it’s 40 below so won’t be very warm today. Even in a North Dakota winter, that could be considered an understatement.

Another series of weather entries in 1966 reads like a poem:

Wed, March 9: 45 degrees above

snow melting

just like spring

Thurs, March 10: No need for a weather report.

Fri, March 11: Weather is fine.

Re-reading her diaries this time, I looked for clues about how she spent her days. She sewed a lot and she baked a lot of bread—six or seven loaves at a time. She kept her flour in a deep pull-out bin in the kitchen cabinet that held a 50-lb bag. She would bake once a week, making enough for morning toast, noon sandwiches, and evening bread and butter. Covered by thin cotton dishtowels embroidered with vegetable people or sunbonnet girls, her loaves rose high in their pans.

Sometimes she would make cinnamon rolls along with the bread, letting my siblings and cousins and me roll out the rectangle of dough and spread it with real butter from our uncle’s creamery. Then we would spoon on brown sugar and sprinkle the dough with cinnamon, roll it up tight, pinch the seam, slice into a dozen thick rounds, and pack them carefully in the cake pan to rise. Fresh and hot from the oven, the sugar and butter-filled rolls melted on our fingers and tongues. No “store-boughten” cinnamon rolls could ever taste as good.

Grandma Smith worked hard on the farm, even after she and my grandfather weren’t raising animals and crops anymore. A typical entry of her busy life reads:

Tues, Feb 11, 1966: I baked 2 apple pies/ put in freezer/scrubbed the kitchen floor/fed the cats at the barn/burned the papers/this pm I’m going out visiting.

I remember my grandmother down on her hands and knees scrubbing the floor in case someone stopped by. I marveled that she wore dresses around the house with her old pantyhose, not wanting to waste a brand new pair. When I would ask her why she didn’t just go bare-legged, she would exclaim in disapproval, “No, I can’t do THAT!” She was fashionable her entire life, even when scrubbing the floor.

Because the Smith farm was on the highway into Williston, the county seat, many of my grandparents’ farming friends and relatives would stop by unannounced for coffee on their way to or from town. In her diaries, Grandma Smith noted who had visited that day and what she had baked, like lemon meringue pie, angel food cake, or a kind of cookie she called “Matrimonial Chews.” Visitors were so common at the farm that one entry comments on not receiving guests:  Sat, March 9, 1985: I was home all day. Baked a pie but no company.

My grandmother rarely noted her feelings or reflections about her life, but one of the few reflective passages she wrote makes me laugh: Tues, Jan 25, 1966: I’m cleaning the basement—and it sure looks better. That “sure” sounds just like her, a mix of practicality and positive thinking. If you’re going to do something, it seems to say, do it right—and be happy you’ve done it.

Why weren’t her diaries more personal, more revealing of her thoughts and feelings? I don’t think she worried about someone discovering them. After her death, we found these few diaries stuck in an old cabinet in the basement, more tucked away for safe keeping than hidden.  I think instead that she didn’t feel a need to express personal feelings in diary form. What was important was recording the everyday events of her life, keeping track of the weather and the visitors, the comings and goings of a farm on the edge of town.

In a few entries, though, I catch a glimpse of a more private side of my grandmother, moments of the solace she found in the natural world. In her diaries, she would note signs of the seasons changing, especially when a long, cold winter was turning away for spring:

Wed, April 6, 1983: We walked to the creek and found mayflowers and heard a meadowlark sing.

Tues, April 12, 1983: No snow yet. Cleaned house. Saw a meadowlark today. Gophers are running around and also saw a pheasant and two rabbits.

In entries like these, I can imagine her looking out the window over the prairie, although “prairie” is my word, not hers. She would say “pasture,” since the long grass is where my grandparents grazed their cattle. I can imagine her walking to the creek to look for mayflowers, grateful for a sign that spring had finally made its way to the north. She paid attention to the creatures around her because they inhabited the same piece of land. She marked her days by the weather and the seasons because they formed the backdrop of her life on the farm, determining each day’s possibilities. These diary entries reveal an intimacy with nature that seems a private part of my grandmother’s life, quiet moments of grace in the midst of her busy days.

 

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:

 

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?