Mother's Day

On the shuttle back to the airport parking lot the other day, a man got on with a box with a handle like travellers from Maine use to carry lobsters, but this one said "Caramel Apples."  Someone said a caramel apple would hit the spot on the way back to the car, and someone else asked if he'd brought enough for everyone.  He didn't say anything; he had earbuds in his ears, and I think he missed the whole exchange. 

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate came back from somewhere with a caramel apple for me.  After the apple was eaten, I planted one of the seeds from it in a cutoff milk carton and put it in the window of my dormitory room.  The seed did germinate and I think for the rest of the year I had it in my dorm room, a bit of green in a room on the sixth floor of a twelve-story building with windows that didn't open.

At some point I took it home with me, to my parents' house, and my dad planted it in the alley.  The standing joke of course was that if it did ever make apples, we'd have an awful time keeping the insects off the caramel.  It did make a few apples over the years but they weren't very good and they didn't have caramel on them. 

The tree eventually died; by the time I sold the house, it was gone.

Last winter, a neighborhood group raising money for the new park at Highland and St. Charles had a plant sale, and I bought a Granny Smith apple tree, along with some blueberry bushes and strawberries.  My only prior experience with apple trees was not that successful (see above), and I didn't get off to too good a start with the new one, leaving the bareroot tree out of the ground for a while before I got it planted.  But I did get it in the ground eventually, and it made leaves in the spring, grew a little in the summer, and dropped the leaves in the fall.  It's 3 or 4 feet tall and years away from making apples, caramel or not.  But as the winter days drag on, something to look forward to, waiting for the leaves to emerge on the little tree, seeing it grow.  Someday, if all goes well, there will be apples; planting trees definitely requires a longterm view.

Then last year on Mother's Day, we were all working in the backyard, getting kudzu off the back fence and doing some general clean up.  There used to be two dogwood trees in the backyard, but they both died - blight or drought or old age or some combination of the above, I guess.  At some point that afternoon I told Tom I knew what I wanted for Mother's Day, that I wanted a dogwood tree.  (I could have told my children this, given that they were technically the ones responsible, but going straight to Tom was more efficient.)  So he went to Pike's and got one, and the kids dug a hole and we planted it, near where the other dogwood trees had been, on the other side of the yard from the apple tree.

Sarah said it should be our Mother's Day tradition, to take a picture of the dogwood tree every year.  I thought that was a great idea but of course we didn't get around to doing it.  Maybe this year.

Hiking the Homestead Trail

Monday was a holiday, and we took our traditional Martin Luther King Day hike at Red Top Mountain State Park this year.  With rain expected during the afternoon, Tom planned for us to be off the trail by then.  So we loaded up everyone and the dog and we got to the Visitors' Center parking lot around 11 a.m..

We should have thought to bring a trail map with us, because (probably thanks to cutbacks to state park budgets) the Visitors' Center was closed.  But we basically know the way, having hiked these trails before.  We took the Sweet Gum Trail as far as the lodge, then the White Tail Trail to the edge of the lake, then back to the Sweet Gum Trail until it intersected the Homestead Trail, which we took back to the Visitors' Center.  It was 4.5 miles or so altogether, and we did get back before the rain started.

It was a nice walk.  There was still a little packed snow in places on the trail, but it was mostly clear.  Not too many people there, given that it was a holiday - maybe people were still concerned about the roads, after the big Ice In the week before.  There were some dogs who were happy to be out of the house.   We didn't see any deer.

While we were walking, I asked Tom if we were in Bartow County.  Maybe, Tom said, he wasn't sure.  Why was I asking?  Some ancestors had moved from North Carolina to Georgia, I told him, and I was thinking that they might have been in Bartow County for at least a while.   Maybe if I want to do some family history research there's some to do that is not so far from home.  Jacob Rhyne, who had left his first wife and married a woman named Sally Hope, had moved to Georgia, and so had Jacob Stroup, the second husband of Jacob's mother (and the father of Jacob's first wife).  Red Top Mountain is red because of iron ore, and I knew there used to be iron mining there; Jacob Stroup had been an ironworker, and I thought that he might have been in Bartow County for a while, so maybe there was something to find out that would be interesting.

When we got back to the parking lot, a Bartow County Sheriff's car pulled into the parking lot.  Probably Bartow County, I told Tom.

No time to look anything up until today.  So I was quite surprised to find that Jacob Stroup is credited with building the first iron furnace there, in 1836, and that the last one he built was at the entrance of what is now Red Top Mountain State Park.  The remains of it and another one he built are under the water of Lake Allatoona.  Tom and the kids have sailed on Lake Allatoona for years, and the girls went to Girl Scout camp there, too.  How many times have we been at this park?  And I had no idea.

On March 19, the park is firing up two iron furnaces to commemorate the early iron industry in Bartow County.  We've enjoyed for several years attending the Georgia State holiday iron pour downtown; this year, I hope I can make it to the one at Red Top Mountain, now that I know that indeed this was where Hannah Hoyle's second husband ended up.

After the Ice

Atlanta doesn't do well with winter weather. This is the south, so it's not supposed to snow, even though it does, sometimes. Ice is more of a problem than snow, and what happened this week - in addition to the sleet and freezing rain - is that nighttime temperatures have been very cold so anything that managed to melt but stayed on the roadways and sidewalks turned to ice overnight.

I was out of town when all this started on Sunday. Expecting my flight back Tuesday to be cancelled. Checking Delta.com frequently on Monday, but my flight was listed as "on time" so I was hoping for the best. If I did make it back to the Atlanta airport could I get home? Wondering about taking MARTA, or being stuck in an airport hotel. Hoping for the best.

A new inscrutable rule that you can't use your cellphone til after you clear passport control. I tried, walking up the jetway, but got caught and had to hit the "disconnect" button. (I started to say "hang up," and wondered if children now wonder why anyone would refer to ending a telephone call as "hanging up." But I digress.) Tom hadn't answered but called me as I was making my way towards passport control. I'm here, I said, but can't talk. Can't use cell phones til after passport control. Already got caught once. Call you back as soon as I can.

I asked the officer at passport control if I was going to be able to get home. He looked at the address on my customs declaration and said "probably." He said it had taken him 3 hours to get in that morning from Acworth. Good luck going home, I told him. He shook his head and said he wasn't sure he was going home.

Once I was out of the cell-free zone, I called Tom. He thought if I could get out of the parking lot I probably could make it. The guy at park and ride said they would make sure I could get out. It had been just a little above freezing for at least some of the day, so when I got to my car, some of the snow and ice had turned to slush. The park and ride guy helped me get the ice off my car (there wasn't much), and I headed out at about 4:30.

The drive wasn't fun (and some of it was terrifying) but I did make it. Fortunately there were not many cars on the road. Lots of ice and snow left on the interstate, especially on bridges, and Wessyngton Road was barely passable. But I made it. I parked my car and didn't drive again til yesterday.

Kids out of school all week. Caroline and Sarah were supposed to be having their end-of-semester exams, but those have been rescheduled for next week. Watching the dog slide on the ice in the backyard. Keeping the birdfeeders filled, and putting the suet that the squirrels had attacked on the diningroom window with a piece of packing tape, and seeing an array of birds I'd never seen up close, pecking at the suet, knocking the metal cage into the window and making a racket.

Of course, the week of the January 2011 ice event was also the week we learned the name of a third term congresswoman from Tucson, Arizona. On Saturday, the first news alert was that she'd been shot, then that she was dead, then that she was alive. Watching CNN in the airport lounge before departure Saturday night, CNN International in my hotel room, and back to CNN once I was home. On Wednesday night, we watched the President's speech, and on Thursday, we watched the pundits talk about the President's speech.

It was one of those moments when you think, is this the inflection point, is this the time that people stop shouting and start talking, that short term strategy gives way to something more constructive?  Is it a time when we actually have a chance to take action in the long term best interest of our country? I remember wondering the same thing about September 11. The feeling didn't last long, but we did get wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By Friday, the roads were a little clearer, and I went to the office. The House Republicans were in Baltimore, and the news cycle had move on to events in Tunisia (a chance for Americans to learn a little geography). Floods in Australia. Is anything going to be any different, this time?

It's Saturday morning. In a little while, Iain and I will walk the dog and see if Alon's is open. Hoping for something better, as life resumes.

More Lessons from Family History

They were my first cousins, four times removed, according to Ancestry.com; I'll have to take Ancestry's word for that (I don't really understand what "four times removed" means), but my great-great-great-grandfather and their father were brothers. The girls were born in Tennessee, in 1815 and 1818. Most of my ancestors moved west during the 1830s, to Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. By 1837 my great-great-great-grandfather had left Tennessee and was in Arkansas. I think the girls' family must have moved there around the same time, because Nancy Jane, the younger sister, married in Arkansas in 1838 and her older sister Mary married there in 1839. The men they married were brothers; the Dunlap boys also had been born in Tennessee. I don't know if the two families, the Whartons and the Dunlaps, were from the same area of Tennessee, or if the young people met in Arkansas. In those days, families were large; Mary and Jesse Jr. had ten children, and Nancy Jane and Lorenzo had eight. They lived in what is now Madison County, Arkansas. I have read that Jesse Dunlap ran a general store, a mill, and a blacksmith shop; I don't know about Lorenzo.

By 1857, the two families were ready to move west, to California. I've read that Jesse's family left with three wagons, nine yoke of oxen, thirty cattle, three guns (plus pistols and knives), provisions, gear for trail, and $320. Lorenzo's family had one wagon, four yoke of oxen, and twelve cattle. They were part of a wagon train that assembled at Beller's Stand in April 1857. Jack Baker lead the group, which set off, following the Cherokee Trail west.

In September 1857, the wagon train was camped in an area known as Mountain Meadows in southwestern Utah. There, they were attacked by Mormon militiamen and their Indian allies. All of the emigrants, except for a few small children, were murdered. The seventeen survivors included three of Mary and Jesse's children and two of Nancy and Lorenzo's children. The children were cared for initially by the families and neighbors of the men who had murdered their parents and siblings, until 1859, when the Federal government sent the Army to retrieve them. The children were returned to Arkansas and were raised by relatives.

I had never heard of the Mountain Meadows Massacre until I found mention of it attached to the lives of Mary and Nancy Jane, first cousins of my great-great-grandfather. Historian Will Bagley has written a compelling book about it, Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows, which provides the historical context for this dreadful event. The Mormons and the Federal Government were on the verge of war in 1857, and Mormon leaders were preparing for the defense of Utah from an invasion by the United States. It is not clear that Mormon leaders ordered the massacre of the emigrants at Mountain Meadows (although Bagley believes they did), but they did create the environment that led otherwise law-abiding men to massacre men, women, and children. The historical record is clear; closing the overland road through the Great Basin was Brigham Young's trump card, and he was prepared to play it as the conflict with the Federal Government escalated. Bagley quotes Brigham Young:

"If the United States send their army here and war commences, the travel must stop; your trains must not cross this continent back and forth. To accomplish this I need only say a word to the [tribes,] for the Indians will use them up unless I continually strive to restrain them. I will say no more to the Indians, let them alone, but do as you please. And what is that? It is to use them up; and they will do it."

"Use them up" means "kill them."

It was decades later that one man, John Lee, was tried and convicted of the murders at Mountain Meadows, in what passed for justice at the time.

I don't know if Brigham Young and his inner circle actually gave an order to kill the emigrants or not. The journal pages, the diaries, and the letters that might have clarified the role of Brigham Young and the other leaders of the Mormon Church of the day have disappeared. But the records of the speeches they made and the sermons they gave have not been lost. These are the men who created the environment that allowed the Mountain Meadows Massacre to happen, and so history has held them responsible.

The History of Ordinary Lives

A friend, just back from Thanksgiving, said she had gone through old photographs with her mother while home for the holiday. I told her that was good, that I wished I had done more of that, while my mother was alive. I had started trying to learn something of my family’s history in a limited way before my parents died, but didn't ask as many questions as I should have. Going through my mom's house, I found photographs of people that I will never know who they are. I did get some information though from both my parents, and am glad that I did, but I wish I had done a better job of it.

Several years ago, based on what my mom could tell me, I had checked out some of the databases that the Mormon Church has assembled and made available on line. I eventually subscribed to Ancestry.com and assembled a massive family tree based on linking to trees other people had done that were of unclear accuracy. I only worked on it intermittently, and although there was something very gratifying about figuring out which of several people with the same name in the census records actually was the person I was looking for, I wasn't very systematic and didn't find out anything that was particularly interesting. Without stories or context or knowing about the people, extending a family tree back into the 18th century seemed a pretty empty exercise.

Then a couple of months ago, I started being a little more systematic, and trying to confirm some of the people and relationships that I wasn't sure about. And in the process, I got hooked, trying to reconstruct these 19th century lives from census records and engraving on tombstones and Civil War pension records. I hadn't known, before, how deep were my Southern roots (I grew up in Oklahoma and Kansas, and never considered myself a Southerner, even though I now live in Atlanta), but my ancestors over the generations made their way from Pennsylvania and Maryland to North Carolina and South Carolina and Georgia and then west to Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas and then to Texas and eventually to Oklahoma. As best I can tell, my relatives who were here by the late 18th century were on the right side of the Revolutionary War (a great-great-great-great-grandfather, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, had trouble getting his pension because he was illiterate and couldn't read the discharge papers he needed to establish his service record) but they were uniformly on the wrong side of the Civil War. Two great-great-grandfathers fought in different units of the Confederate Army, and both had brothers (or brothers-in-law) who died. I've never been particularly interested in Civil War history, but it does make me wonder what cause these hardworking subsistence farmers were fighting for. (A cousin several times removed has relayed a family story that our great-great-grandfather said later in his life that the whole thing had been a bad idea. It may have had something to do with having been there when his nephew was shot in the head during the siege of Port Hudson.)

So I am looking for records from Marion and Fayette Counties in Alabama, and Itawamba County in Mississippi. There are other counties, too, that I haven't looked for yet. These are places whose histories are documented by local historians, working as volunteers for county historical societies, mostly. A massive amount of information is on line now, through commercial sites like Ancestry, but also through noncommercial volunteer-built sites that are part of the USGenWeb project. There are lots of local histories that are written by local historians and published in limited runs by small presses. Once they go out of print, they are really hard to find (and expensive if you do find them), but presumably there are copies in the local library or at the county historical society.

Until I got interested in places like Itawamba County, Mississippi, or Fayette County, Alabama, I never thought much about who documents the histories of small places. With so much mobility, is it doomed to disappear, without a critical mass of local people to keep it going? (My family moved to Woodward, Oklahoma, in 1969. Although I've enjoyed visiting the local historical museum over the years, the history there wasn't the history of my family, who came to Coal County and Greer County from Texas, back when Oklahoma was still Indian Territory.) Of course, now there is the internet, which I know has been huge for genealogy. Has it done the same for local history? For while most of us no longer live in the same communities that our parents lived in, much less our grandparents or great-grandparents, all you have to do is type a name in Google, and you can find more than you imagined about the people who came before you, or the places where you live. And people like me are looking for histories of Fayette County, Alabama, and seriously considering becoming dues-paying members of the Itawamba Historical Society. The baby boom generation is approaching retirement age. Maybe technology will make up for some of what has been lost with the mobility of my generation. For what it’s worth, I did mail that check yesterday.

Thanksgiving Day, 2010

The morning after. The turkey leftovers are in the refrigerator, and there is a little bit of blackberry pie and pumpkin pie left. There aren't many dishes left to do - I did, I think, 5 loads over the course of the day yesterday - but there are wine glasses and empty bottles on the table, left from the after dinner conversation.

The day was less eventful than last year, with the dishwasher performing as expected and not almost burning the house down. Last year I tried to get a heritage turkey but the farm in Elberton (the only place I could find close to nearby that raised them) was sold out by the time I got around do looking. So I ended up on the waiting list, and sometime early this year I got an email asking if I wanted to order one this year. So I paid my $25 deposit to hold my place in line.

We got an email a month or two ago, giving us the pick up dates - November 15 and 22 - so Tom and I went there on November 15. There were half a dozen cars there on a beautiful morning at Liz and Tim Young's farm. Tim was teaching a class on about how to dress your own turkey and a young woman was cooking beignets. (They were really good.) Liz had the scale and the preorder list and got a 16 lb turkey out of the freezer for us. It was bird shaped, not round like the ones at the grocery store. She told us that they had raised about 150 birds this year. As turkey lives go, this turkey had a good life, wandering a 126 acre farm; Liz said that for the last two months, their first task each morning was to find the turkeys. How to cook it? Pretty much the same way you cook any other turkey, but no basting needed as there is a thick layer of fat under the skin. Tom had brought a measuring tape to make sure it would fit inside the smoker (it would), so into the cooler it went.

So, after brining overnight, the turkey went on the smoker yesterday morning. The girls made pies and I made cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, two loaves of bread machine bread, and butternut squash with sour cream and dill; Caroline made green bean casserole. I'd gotten a folding table with the idea we'd have the kids at separate table but Iain wanted to be with the adults and I told him that was fine, as long was we could get 10 chairs around the table. So he and Tom put in all our extra leaves and we could seat 10. The tablecloth was just long enough.

It turned out that we only had 8 people (Max and Emma didn't come after all) so I was glad we were set to have everyone in the dining room. And we didn't eat the bread from the bread machine, because Fred bought a wonderful loaf of homemade sourdough bread. Angela came, and Mark, and Angela brought two of her dogs, who kept Bullwinkle company in the backyard for the afternoon. After dinner, Fred and Angela stayed til they had to go home and attend to the dogs that were still at home, and Tom and Mark and Iain played guitars. The girls wandered in and out and had seconds and thirds on pie. (Bullwinkle did get a slice of pumpkin pie that Sarah left, just for a moment, unattended at the edge of the kitchen counter.) Kathy came over to visit with Angela and the leftovers got put away.

The turkey was good - it was more like meat than the grocery store turkeys are. Of course, it lived a life more like a bird than the factory farm turkeys do, so I guess that's not unexpected. We'll enjoy the leftovers and make some more pumpkin pies. The dishwasher didn't autodestruct. It was a good day.

Two Years and Counting

I just read a notice on one of the neighborhood listservs that someone who was moving due to foreclosure was looking for a home for his dog. It was a brief message, with some links to pictures of the dog. According to economic statistics, the recession ended last summer; since then, the economy has stopped shrinking and has started to grow, but the growing is not enough to stop the world of hurt that's still going on. It would be bad enough to tell my children we were moving, but if we had to give away the dog...it would break my heart.

There is a house around the corner on Cumberland. Several years ago (before the economy crashed) the brick ranch house that use to be there was almost but not quite completely demolished and replaced by a big box of a house, with just a sliver of the old orange brick left (is there something about the building permitting process that made them do it this way?) . The new house never quite got finished, though. It never got garage doors or a proper front door and the outside of the house never got done, either. But there were people living there - we talked to them at a couple of yard sales, and Caroline bought a wooden porch swing like my grandparents used to have on their front porch that she set on milk crates and used as a bench in her room for a while.

And then, they were gone. Last winter, peculiarly, the upstairs windows were open for a long time. At some point a Pile of Stuff appeared in the front yard, the kind of Stuff that you don't sell but maybe you want it or maybe you throw it out but you never envisioned it would be all that was left when you lose your house and then you're gone. A padlock got put on the not-really-a-front-door and the tarps that covered the spaces where the garage doors should be were replaced with plywood. The house sits there, empty, and every time I walk by in wonder who they were and why they left the orange brick there when they knocked the rest of the house down and what conjunction of bad luck and recession led to the loss of the house and where they are now.

On our street, Angela is moving because her landlord is having to sell the house she has been renting. There's a For Sale sign too at the apartments at Wessyngton and Highland that suggests they can be replaced with three luxury homes, which seems to me to be highly wishful thinking. Businesses keep disappearing in the small commercial area nearby on North Highland. Some of them moved elsewhere (Caramba Cafe lost their lease), but most of them are just gone.

It's been two years since the bubble burst, the credit markets froze up, and we were on the precipice of Something Really Bad happening. The government stepped in to Save the Financial System, and I hear they are making money on Wall Street again. But in my neighborhood - my very nice neighborhood - there is a guy who is trying to find a home for his dog because he lost his house.

It just makes me want to cry.