Le Chandail Rouge

When Kari came for a week's visit and our annual family Christmas get together the end of July, she came out of the guest bedroom saying, "I brought you something, Mommy".  I looked up to see this:

It took me a moment to recognize the red sweater from my high school days! I didn't even remember that she had worn it during her high school and college days nor knew that she had kept it all these years.

My freshman year of high school I wanted a fancy dress for the Homecoming Dance. I picked out some purple taffeta and a pattern and Mom made me a lovely gown. I went to the first big dance of the year hoping to have a good time. Unfortunately, a pretty dress did not make me any less of a wall flower. It also was not a dress that I had many occasions to wear.

My sophomore year I decided to be practical. I ordered a red, black and yellow plaid skirt and a red sweater from a catalog. They arrived in the mail October 11, 1958, making this sweater almost 61 years old. I wore it to the homecoming dance October 17 and many times more. It was practical and pretty and I felt much more like myself than I had in taffeta.

Kari and I wore one another's clothes during her years at Valley High School. When she went away to Macalester College in St. Paul, she took Le Chandail Rouge with her. Here she is wearing it one weekend when she brought her roommate, Carla, home for a visit.

When I saw my sweater again after about 30 years, I said, "You know what we should do? Take it with us to Katrina's for Christmas in July and get her to wear it."

Which we did - three generations wearing that old red sweater. If I had been thinking, I would have asked Lily to put it on too and we'd have had four generations.

Maybe next year. And then we could see how many generation this could carry on. Wouldn't that be fun?

And The Tiger Lilies

        Boundaries

There is a place where the town ends,
          And the fields begin.
     It's not marked but the feet know it,
Also the heart that is longing for refreshment
          And, equally, for repose.

     Someday we'll live in the sky.
Meanwhile, the house of our lives is this green world.
          The fields, the ponds, the birds.
     The thick black oaks-surely they are
     The invention of something wonderful.

          And the tiger lilies
And the runaway honeysuckle that no one
          Will ever trim again.
     Where is it? I ask, and then
           My feet know it.

     One jump, and I'm home.

          (By Mary Oliver)
  

Read In July 2019

Summertime and the reading is easy - just less of it.

The Book Woman Of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson is one of the best books I've read in some time. So good, I gave it its own blog earlier this month, July 5th.

The Pioneers by David McCullough is an interesting account of the colonization of The Northwest Territory, specifically, Ohio, once it was opened to settlement.

A Pattern of Lies by Charles Todd is #7 in the Bess Crawford Mystery Series. This series is still one of my favorites as is the mother/son writing team.

Lies That Comfort and Betray by Rosemary Simpson is the second Gilded Age Mystery book. I am liking this author and series very much.

How to Forget: A Daughter's Memoir by Kate Mulgrew is an honest, often painful, recollection of her experiences when she returns to Iowa to care for her ailing parents. Though cancer took her father, it was relatively quick. It was the several years journey of Alzheimer's with her beloved mother that was the most poignant for me to read.
I've always admired Mulgrew as an actor, now I admire her as an author.

This month's reads may have been fewer - but they were all good.

Instead of Worrying

Sunrise - 6:36 July 18, 2019

I Worried

I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well, 
hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading, or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang. 
    (By Mary Oliver)

A Natural Leafy Bower

A week ago today, on the way home from a short trip to Eastern Missouri, we stopped at the Locust Creek Covered Bridge State Historic Site off Highway 36 between Laclede and Meadville.

Because of a change in the river channel many years ago, you actually cross the creek on a foot bridge. The covered bridge is about a quarter of a mile down what once was a main thoroughfare in Northern Missouri. Now it is a narrow footpath which, according to the warnings, could be muddy, even under water, during a heavy rain or a wet season. Indeed, as we walked down the path you could see where the water had washed away some of the gravel and there were some puddles and muddy places.

The bridge which once crossed Locust Creek now sets above the wetlands. It is the longest covered bridge I've ever seen. And while many covered bridges, like Madison County Iowa's, are celebrated, this one seemed almost forgotten.

Missouri had a very rainy spring. On the signage near the bridge you can see how high the water had been.

On the way back to the car I noticed what looked to me like an almost perfect natural bower. But for the mud, I would have been tempted to follow it to? A secret garden? A trysting spot?

"And bid her steal into the pleached bower
Where honeysuckles ripened by the sun
Forbid the sun to enter ....."
  (Wm. Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.)

The River of Your Imagination

For years every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
The feet of ducks.
And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be, 
darling citizen. 

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,
and put your lips to the world.

And live
your life.

Mornings at Blackwater
  by Mary Oliver

A Day In January
My photo of Walnut Creek
West Des Moines, Iowa
Thirty Years Ago

A Recommended Read

Once in a while I read a book so good I have to comment on it before the end of the month round-up of reads.

If you enjoy well-researched and well-written historical fiction, as I do, give this book a try:

I rate it a solid five and put it in the same category as Where The Crawdads Sing which has been #1 on The NY Times Fiction Best Sellers list for weeks.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson combines the history of a WPA job creation enterprise for women known as The Pack Horse Library Project, which lasted from 1935 to 1943 in the poorest and most isolated areas of Eastern Kentucky, with the lives of the remaining descendants of a family whose skin was blue. (Based on the real Fugate family - The Blue People of Kentucky.)

I vaguely remember once hearing/reading about the blue skinned people, but I think I related them as part of the Melungeons of Appalacia without learning my error. As for the Pack Horse Library Project, I had never heard/read of it. (Only the New Deal WPA and CCC projects for men.)

When I began this book, reading about the poor, mostly illiterate, proud, clinging to the old ways, people, I felt as though I was reading about life in the 1800's. I had to remind myself the book was set in the 1930's. I thought surely by then things were much better for them. Then I remembered a class I took at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids. One of my classmates was a woman who had been working as a visiting nurse, tending to people in the hills, hollars and back woods of Kentucky. Her stories of families still living without electricity or running water and distrustful of 'outsiders' were remarkable - almost hard to believe - and that was in 1967!

There are eight pages of photos of the real women of the Pack Horse Libary Project at the end of this book. Regardless of weather conditions, they went by horse, mule and shanks' mare, traveling many miles, to deliver reading materials to their patrons* - all for wages (sorely needed) of $28.00 a month. I know how much I would have welcomed a Book Woman had I lived there and then. What an amazing service they provided.

This is Richardson's fourth novel and the only one available through my two libraries at this time. I would love to read her first three. I will return my books to Gibson Memorial Library some time next week, so consider adding it to your reading list. I don't think you will be disappointed.

*Now that I am a Patreon of at least one author, material is delivered fast and on time via E-mail - no mules involved. 😉