“You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.” Jane Goodall
Gelada in Simien Mountain National Park, Ethiopia
personal identity
A Birthday Tale
Several weeks ago, the tail of my favorite horse, Miracle, disappeared. When she died from colic after giving birth several years ago, one young lady at the vets took hairs from her tail, made a braid, and gave it to me. Since then, it had hung in the hallway next to Dad’s spurs and a photo of the family farm above Dad’s parade saddle. Suddenly, it disappeared. Where could it have gone? No one had recently been to the house except Martina, my Italian exchange student, and me. My daughter and grandson had stopped by, but no one else. Nothing else had disappeared. It was a mystery like the time I found a handful of dry dog food under the saddle. I never solved that one and had given up on solving this one. I had even considered looking for something else to hang in its place.
On my birthday yesterday, the principal walked to my room with a bouquet of flowers and a package. The bouquet was from my grandson. I opened the package. Much to my astonishment, there was Miracle’s tail, the top of the braid carefully and colorfully wrapped, a thin copper wire winding through it, and and then wrapped around the bottom. My daughter had managed to take it without my seeing her do so, took it home, and had wrapped it so it would not come apart. When I originally told her about it, she and my grandson commented how strange it was and made note of the dog food incident as if some mystery lurked in that particular place in my house.
My grandson had picked out each individual flower. He obviously knows my favorite color is orange.
Then to top off the day my son also sent flowers. It dropped 50 degrees from yesterday afternoon to late last night, the wind shrieks, clouds loom dark and ominous. It is a good day for bright flowers.
Thoughts on New Year’s Day
16 degrees, windchill 2, flurries.
Keep warm, reflect, remember, don’t relive,
forgive, move on.
Work hard to become the change you want to see worldwide:
-Empathy
-Kindness
-Love
-Patience
-Understanding
Black Raspberries
Mom filled the white bowl with black raspberries.
I pour Bossie’s white milk over them,
watched it form a pattern,
flowing around the raspberries–
a design in deep purple and white.
I thought it almost too beautiful to eat.
I was seven.
Now I rarely find black raspberries. Red ones won’t do. They lack intensity, the beauty. Every year we went to Hunt’s Orchard north of Amazonia, Missouri, to buy black raspberries, took them home, sorted to discard the imperfect ones, then threw them way behind the garden next to the timber–huge trees, oak and hickory. Eventually, these imperfections transformed into thriving black raspberry bushes. We had our own patch, created from the discarded, the imperfect.
Mom fed us fresh raspberries for a few days. The rest she used to create her famous pies, froze a freezer full. Baked, they transformed a winter kitchen into the warmth and sweetness of my mother’s family devotion.
I bake pies, many kinds of pies. I have never made a black raspberry pie.
Note: this will be published in an upcoming publication by the Story Circle Network. In July my daughter, grandson, and I went to Hunt’s Orchard–yes, it still exists. I asked about black raspberries. We were too late; the season was over. The timber behind the garden area was to the right in this photo. The person who bought the land years later bulldozed down all the big trees.
Memorial Day–Memories
While I was growing up, my mom grew peonies by the side of the vegetable garden. Red, pink, white, huge spectacular blooms that always arrived around this time of year just in time for Memorial Day. We would pick many, put them in mason jars and take them to my father’s and her family’s cemetery plots. She has created a metal apparatus to hold them so the wind would not blow them over. We took water to fill the jars. We did this every Memorial Day always.
No one lives close any more. There is no one left to take flowers there.
My mother’s family members are buried in the Mound City, Missouri Cemetery.
My mother’s parents’ gravestone. She was Nellie Narcissus Kaiser before she married rather late for back then–in her late twenties. I never knew my grandfather. He was so much older than she that even though he lived to be 80, he died long before I was born. My great-grandfather Kaiser was born in Switzerland and brought here as a child.
The gravestone of my mother’s grandmother. I know she lived with my grandmother and grandfather a lot of the time from family photos, but I also know that she died in San Diego. No one ever told me how she got there or why.
The gravestone of Aunt Julia, Mother’s sister. She never married, loved fancy antiques and china. I frequently use some of what she left me. She came to see me rather often and we visited antique stores when she visited. To say she was an independent woman is an understatement.
My parents’ gravestone is on the right and Dad’s parents’ on the left–in the cemetery in Fillmore, Missouri. My grandfather, Pleasant Lightle, had walked from Illinois to Missouri as a child according to family stories. My parents met dancing. I always smile when I see the peonies planted at their graves.
This is the gravestone of my great-grandfather, Dad’s mother’s father, who came to the US from Switzerland when he was 18. According to my dad, he did not want to be conscripted into the Swiss army because at that time Swiss soldiers were being hired out as mercenaries. His mother stood on the roof of their house waving until she could see him no longer. They never saw each other again. I grew up on the land he homesteaded in Andrew County, Missouri. Andrew County is filled with descendants of immigrants who came from Switzerland.
The old carriage house near the house where Dad spent the first ten years or so of his 90 years. It is all that is left standing.
The house where Dad lived the last 80 years of his life and where I grew up.
When I was a child, the building in the foreground was used at various times as a farrowing house, once for Rhode Island Red chickens, and to store various farm supplies. When I went to visit Dad after Mom died and we were at the cemetery on Memorial Day, a man came up to Dad and asked if he was Doyle Lightle. They started chatting and I learned that when Dad first built it during Prohibition times, he held dances there. The sheriff would send deputies to watch and make sure no one was drinking. I had lived there and visited there for decades and had never heard this story.
I took this photo standing on the levee next to the Missouri River looking toward the Rulo, Nebraska bridge. This is the land my mother’s family owned. On some Sundays as a treat, we would cross the bridge to a restaurant on the Nebraska side. It was famous for its fried catfish and carp.
This is country with lots of water and trees. This picture was taken near Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge. Several times in my life, I have seen flooding from the bluffs on the Missouri side all the way to the bluffs on the Kansas and Nebraska side of the river. When I was a child, my uncle and aunt lived on the river farm until a flood reached half way up the second story of their house. They gave up and moved to town.
When I was a child, there were trees like this in lots of places on Mom’s family’s farm. About this time of year we would hunt for morels and often pick a bushel basket full. Mom dipped them in egg and cornmeal, then fried them. We practically lived on them for week or two. I was shocked as an adult to go into a fancy market and discover that dried morels were 95 dollars a pound.
My Mother–Barbie Doll
Barbara Lewis Duke, pretty petite, blue-eyed and blond, my mother, one fearless, controlling woman. Long after Mother’s death, Dad said, “Barbara was afraid of absolutely no one and nothing.” They married late: 34 and 38. He adored her unconditionally. She filled my life with horses, music, love, cornfields, hay rides, books, ambition. Whatever she felt she had missed, I was going to possess: piano lessons, a college education. Her father, who died long before I was born, loved fancy, fast horses. So did she. During my preschool, croupy years, she quieted my hysterical night coughing with stories of run aways horses pulling her in a wagon. With less than one hundred pounds and lots of determination, she stopped them, a tiny Barbie Doll flying across the Missouri River Bottom, strong, willful, free.
Note: this poem is in my book “On the Rim of Wonder” and was also recently published in “Inside and Out”, a collection of writings by women. It is available on Amazon and published by the Story Circle Network.
Addendum: My mother loved horses and flowers. When I look at the flowers around my house I think of my mother. And, yes, I have horses. The following photos are dedicated to my mother’s memory.
My mother’s mother and father.
Blood Quantum: A Poem for Our Time
My grandson cuts himself into 16 equal pieces:
4/16 Urhobo from Africa
3/16 Spanish from Spain
4/16 European–two Swiss German great, great-grandfathers
(Werth and Kaiser), Irish, English and who knows what
3/16 Mexican–whatever mixtures that may be
2/16 Navaho
Who am I? What am I?
Who are you? What are you?
Do we really know?
Who sets the rules?
white men
black
Indian
Native American
Irish
English
German
from where and for whom?
He looks Navaho:
-blue black straight hair
-pale brown skin
-obsidian eyes.
One four year old girl asks him,
“Are you American Indian?”
His six year old self says nothing.
She repeats,
“Are you American Indian?”
He says, “It’s complicated.”
The Navaho won’t claim him, too little blood.
He needs 1/4, not 1/8.
Caddy and Fort Sill Apache allow 1/16, not Navahos.
1/4 blood is for
-Sioux
-Cheyenne
-Kiowa
-Navaho
1/8 works for Comanche and Pawnee.
Some Cherokees only want a Cherokee ancestor.
But he is none of those.
Is he Navaho?
Is he white?
The old South goes by the one drop rule:
one drop of Negro…
Is a person with 99/100 per cent white
and 1/100 black, black?
Who says?
Kids at school ask, “What are you?”
He tells them.
They say, “You’re lying.”
I only know specifically about two ancestors,
the Swiss Germans.
Another great grandfather disappeared during the Civil War.
I don’t even know his name.
Who am I?
Who are you?
I think I’ll get a DNA test.
Then I’ll know how many pieces I need to cut myself into.
Note: This was originally published in my book “On the Rim of Wonder”. I had a cousin send me 75 pages of ancestry information. I looked up more myself. That one great grandfather remains a mystery. I had my DNA done. It did not match what I expected from the ancestry work.
Blood quantum is the term the US government used to determine whether a person would be qualified as an Indian. Now many Indian Nations use it to decide who can be on the tribal rolls and who cannot.
Jen Payne’s New Book
Evidence of Flossing, WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND provides an unexpected metaphor for individual life, culture, and so much more. Nearly all the poems are accompanied with a photograph, often of trash in which lays a dental flosser (yes, one of those instruments with which you floss your teeth) with date and location. Flossing is supposed to prevent anything from being left behind. Hence, the title brings up an unusual play on words.
The first section Damage contains more than 20 poems which are a lament about much of modern life–mass shootings, the demise of wildlife, unpleasant changes. One poem asks the question: “Would God floss?” In the second section, Contact, the poems focus on the natural world, walks in the city, the woods, beaches. The third section, Connection, emphasizes the interconnectedness of everything, especially the relationships between humans and animals and nature. There are poems about frogs, storms, birds. One called Evidence of Fairies makes the reader feel the magic of old growth forests with moss and ancient trees. In the footnote to another poem she discusses the fact that wolf spiders actually create songs to lure lovers. Then, toward the end, the Alice poems appear, Alice as in “Alice in Wonderland”. In my favorite poem Payne relates her encounter with a stranger picking oyster mushrooms near a path in the woods.
After reading the poems and comments in this book, I will never view flossing the same way again. Will I find dental flossers now, something I never even previously thought about? I use those long strings of floss not flossers. Apparently the poems and flosser photos affected enough people that some sent Payne photos of flossers they saw here and there on the ground, some of which she has included in the book.
Even if I find no flossers, now I will certainly give a lot more thought to what I and others leave behind.
About the author: Jennifer Payne is the owner of Words by Jen, a graphic design and creative services company in Connecticut. She belongs to the Arts Council of Greater New Haven as well as several other arts and poetry organizations. Her work has been featured in various publications, including The Aurorean, Six Sentences, and the Story Circle Network. You can read some of her writing on her blog Random Acts of Writing.
Sunday Poem-Puma I
“An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.” Martin Buber
My neighbor walked out her door
found a puma lying on the lawn.
Puma rose, stretched, disappeared.
At night when I open my gate
I wonder if she lurks
behind the cedar trees,
pounce ready.
My daughter dreams puma dreams:
a puma chases her up a tree.
There are no trees here big enough to climb.
A Zuni puma fetish guards my sleep.
I run with puma
Night wild
Free.
I scream and howl
Moonstruck
Bloodborn.
I hike the canyon
stroll around my house
look for puma tracks.
I see none.
I would rather die by puma
than in a car wreck.
Note: This is the first in a series of Puma Poems in my book “On the Rim of Wonder”.
Sunday Poem–“Hair”
No females in my family had long hair.
Dad did not like it,
said it showed male domination
over women.
Once when grown and gone
from home, I began to grow mine
out, experiment.
When he saw it, he told me
he thought it unbecoming.
I cut it.
Mom said she had long hair
when she was young.
Her dad forbade her to cut it.
In her twenties she chopped her golden locks
off, flapper style, then hid her head
in a scarf, afraid.
Note: This poem is from the family section of my book, “On the Rim of Wonder”.
