Memorial Days

It’s the bookend to Labor Day, and it’s one of the few holidays that don’t involve any specific or mandatory activities. For sure, it’s great to have a day off, and, since it’s the last Monday in May, it serves as the symbolic beginning of summer.

And we remember people who aren’t with us anymore.




Although it apparently started as a day to memorialize the fallen soldiers of both sides of the Civil War, starting in the early 1900s it became a day to decorate the graves of all relatives and loved ones. (Some people even remember this little fact.)

If your focus is purely on military participants, then I guess you must see Memorial Day as a sort of bookend to Veteran’s Day, the latter honoring living veterans, and the former honoring the deceased ones.

Personally, I’ve always viewed it as a day to decorate the graves of one’s relatives, pure and simple, sort of like the Bon festivals in Japan, where families reunite to clean the graves of their ancestors and celebrate their memories. Or, closer to home, the Mexican Día de los Muertos, which is kind of the same thing.




And although I value the sacrifices made by the members of the military as much as anyone else, I have to question how appropriate it is to honor their memories via air shows of fighter jets and parades of tanks and other weapons. Didn’t they give their lives so that we wouldn’t have to even see such dreadful vehicles and instruments of death? Isn’t war hell? I’m not sure it’s a good idea to make war look “cool.”

Anyway, Memorial Day in my family is a time for decorating the graves of relatives—women, men, and even children, whether or not they ever experienced a war directly or indirectly. (I know that the experiences of many soldiers are far beyond what some of us can imagine—but then I think we should recognize the hard work and sacrifices made at the home front, via Civil Defense activities, Red Cross service, rations, scrap-metal drives, deprivations, Victory Gardens, and worry.)




In fact, my parents were recently commenting on how, in both of their families, it was “Decoration Day,” and not particularly associated with the military. Mom described how her family would walk the ten blocks to Woodland Cemetery (they didn’t own a car). Her dad would wheel their push lawnmower, upon which sat a bushel basket holding hand trimmers and other gardening implements, while her mom would carry coffee cans with flowers in water, which would decorate the graves.

Yes, before there were cheap, multicolored fake flowers for sticking out on the graves, people would collect real, beautiful flowers out of their yards, drive or walk them to the cemeteries in galvanized buckets and tin cans of water, and arrange them at the graves, sticking them into position with wire and adding ribbons ad libitum.




One of the first things I wrote about when I started this blog was how moving it is to live in the home of your ancestors, and inherit flowers and trees that were planted by grandparents, great aunts, great-grandparents. For instance, we have a mock orange bush that grows near our back porch steps—I’m pretty sure the same exact shrub appears in a photo of my dad’s family, taken in the backyard around 1941.

And so it happens that Memorial Day, for me, becomes a sort of exercise in phenology, where the flowers for decorating graves on Memorial Day have become, over the years, the same customary types: peonies, mock orange, roses—because that’s what’s always blooming at the end of May. You say “peonies,” and I think “tombstones.”




Memorial Day wasn’t the only time for this activity, of course—there are many other good occasions for decorating graves, such as Christmas, when juniper boughs and red ribbons were de rigueur—but Memorial Day is the time of year to decorate with peonies and mock orange boughs.

And so here they are, these long-lived plants, blooming their little heads off in the backyard, telling me which holiday it is, reminding me of my ancestors, whether or not they, or their loved ones, had fought in the battles of history.

Prairies Are in My Genetics

I’m lucky beyond all reason, because the love of prairies runs in my family. My Grandma Schroeder, a loyal garden clubber and enthusiastic horticulturalist, was a charter member of the Missouri Prairie Foundation (MPF), and as far as I know, she always had prairie species such as purple coneflowers in the flowerbed—and yes, they’re still there. If you want to see them, just drive by on Broadway in midsummer.




Grandma used to gush on about the prairies and how beautiful they are, “natural flower gardens,” she’d say. To give you an idea about how she felt toward the prairie, here’s how she’d pronounce the word: “pHRARE-ie!” You could hear the h when she said it. Indeed, the sun-drenched rolling landscape of waving grasses and dancing wildflowers was a romantic, almost overwhelming place for her.




My dad and uncles carry on the interest—my dad’s a geographer who in the 1970s and early 1980s did the intensive and immensely tedious work of turning zillions of early surveyors’ handwritten notes into a precise map of the presettlement prairies of Missouri. Land managers and conservationists are constantly referring to this map. It tells them, for instance, about the ecological history of a particular parcel of land: Was it prairie before white settlement, fire suppression, and the plow? Or was it forest?

The MPF awarded him Prairie Preservationist of the Year in 1982 for his work. And he has analyzed, mapped, and cared for Missouri landscapes throughout his career, even to 2002, when he cowrote the Atlas of Missouri Ecoregions, another invaluable tool for conservationists and land managers.




My Uncle Richard’s career was with the Conservation Department. He was a conservation agent who tirelessly interpreted the landscape and its history to, well, everyone, from kids in classes to good ol’ boys in cafés to hunters in the field. He used to don historical garb and play the part of “drover” during the MPF’s annual Prairie Day event. As a law enforcement officer charged with enforcing conservation law, he quite literally protected Missouri’s landscapes from poachers and their ilk. Both he and my dad have long been associated with the MPF, too.

My Uncle Tom has also worked hard for the environment, and today he deals with land-use issues in the West. And those of us in the next generation—me, my brother, and our cousins—continue in our own ways not only to be interested in prairies and the land, but also, often, to work in jobs associated with biology and the environment. With the guidance and enthusiasm of our family, there was hardly any other alternative.




From the time we were little kids, we were crouching down looking at wildflowers in the spring, capturing bugs all summer, learning oaks from maples in the fall, and listing our birdfeeder visitors in the winter. We picked up feathers and naturally had to know what kind of birds they had come from. I took it for granted that everyone did these things.




Looking back, I’m sure that my mom and dad planned our various outings to some degree, but at the time it just seemed like something that is a basic part of life—to go out hiking on a weekend afternoon.

And so today—the medical and insurance industries be damned—for me, going outdoors into nature, whether to the prairie or a forest, on a hiking trail or just busting through the woods, is my best medicine, my method of getting away from it all and yet somehow getting in touch with everything that truly matters.

Mississippel

This post builds on the previous one, about the women of the Greatest Generation.

I’ve learned that someone connected to me, a member of this generation, passed away recently: Mildred Sippel. She was born in 1916, got married in 1954 (yes!), and was the organist for her church for many years. This information is from her obituary, here.

I copied this picture from the newspaper’s obituary, and ten bucks says that it, in turn, was copied from her church’s directory.

Here’s how she’s connected to me: My mom’s aunt’s husband was Mildred’s brother. Which is to say, she was the sister of my Great Uncle Adolf. No, I didn’t know her, but my mom did. And I’m sure we’ve attended some of the same weddings and funerals.

So. Mildred Sippel passed away, and I had to go look in my copy of Cooking with Faith, 1950 to 1975, also known as “Favorite Recipes of Faith Lutheran Church Women, Jefferson City, Missouri, 1970.” Because she was a longtime member of Faith Lutheran.

(No, it’s not very clear what the official cookbook title is—the thing on the cover, or the thing on the first page. And you can’t tell what the publication year is, either. Church ladies’ cookbooks can’t be bothered with such details—it’s more important to copy all those precious recipes accurately.)

And behold! I found one of Mildred’s recipes—in fact, I remember looking at this recipe before, because when I was first teaching myself how to cook red cabbage, I studied her instructions with curiosity. (How much red cabbage to use, then? Apparently this must not make very much. Maybe she was just thinking about cooking for two, huh. And do you think the spelling should have been “Bierich,” or what? Hmm. I’ll bet she was one of those gifted “cook by feel” people. . . . Or maybe that’s the pun in the book’s title—you have to have “faith” that it will turn out!)

Anyway, here ya go, verbatim from the bottom of p. 46 of Cooking with Faith. Read my note right after it, however. Very important.

Beirich Kraut

Place finely cut red cabbage in pan with slightly salted boiling water. (Water should barely cover the cabbage.) Add 1 teaspoon vinegar to water, cover pan and cook cabbage until tender, adding water if needed. When finished, add a little sugar or sweetener to taste.
Mrs. William Sippel (Mildred)

Note: I don’t know how long Mildred had to cook this after she’d added her vinegar, in order for it to get tender, but my advice is to cook the cabbage in water alone, first, until it’s completely done, before adding any vinegar. It can only be a small amount of water, too; it basically steams. As a general rule, if you add vinegar before the vegetable is soft, it will stay crunchy. . . . Hmm. Well, maybe Mrs. Sippel liked it crunchy.

Oh, and of course: Use apple cider vinegar. Of course.

Someday I’ll post my own recipe for red cabbage. Which is better; everyone loves it. But this is Mildred Sippel’s memorial post, and I don’t want to brag . . .

---------------

And now here’s a bonus recipe for you! From my mom’s handwritten collection! This recipe is known as “Mrs. Sippel’s Meatloaf,” but my Mom pointed out to me that it’s not from Mildred Sippel . . . and it’s not from Mildred’s mother-in-law, either. Nope. It’s from Mildred’s predecessor, the first Mrs. Sippel, who passed away—hence William Sippel’s remarriage in 1954, to Mildred, who was the second Mrs. Sippel.

So yeah . . . I’m feeling warm about this dish. This is the exact same meatloaf recipe my mom used all while I was growing up. This here is real home cookin’, I’ll tell you what!

Note: Making these kinds of connections are one of the best things about living in your extended family’s home turf.

Mrs. Sippel’s Meatloaf

1 1/2 lb. hamburger
1 egg
2 tbsp. chopped onion
1 cup cracker crumbs
1 cup milk
salt and pepper (to taste)

For Topping:

bacon (2 strips)
catsup

Mix together meatloaf ingredients and place in baking dish. Put 2 strips of bacon on top and dot with catsup. Bake 1 hour at 350°.

(For more on these recipes, with pictures, click here!)

Greatest Generation: Women

It has often bugged me that modern feminists so often apply to the women in earlier eras a gauge of success based on standards artificial to the women of the past. Sometimes this isn’t done consciously, but it is a way of judging the past by comparing it to the present, which isn’t fair, or possible. If you use a yardstick that’s fit for women like Senator Dianne Feinstein or Martha Stewart, it simply won’t work for the women who lived the majority of their lives well before the modern feminist movement opened opportunities and (indeed) expectations.

And likewise, even though the term “Greatest Generation” does certainly refer to everyone, men and women, and Tom Brokaw didn’t mean to give more praise to the males, it seems that most of the attention given to that generation goes to the men. The war veterans.

As of this writing, the Wikipedia entry for “Greatest Generation” lists eleven “Famous members” of this generation, and every one of them, from DiMaggio to Graham to Carter to Capote to Kennedy, is a man. (Except for one: Harper Lee.)

And of course . . . if we’re defining that generation in large part by the fact that “they” participated in World War II, then men do come to mind, since the military was almost entirely a man’s occupation then.

And I know that people are pointing out, with great sadness, that we are losing this remarkable generation of Americans as they die of old age, but it seems to me that most of the attention is going to the loss of the veterans—the men—and not their wives.

As if the wives weren’t veterans, as well, in their own way.

Maybe they didn’t know the combat, but they were severely traumatized, too.

I guess my feelings for this generation’s women grow out of my admiration for my two grandmothers, who had to figure out how to struggle through the Great Depression and were grown adults—parents—during World War II and Korea . . . and Vietnam. They had brothers and cousins who fought in World War I, and sons and nephews who fought in the other three.

But I think especially about the effect the Depression and World War II had on them, particularly as they were parents of young children at that time. Making ends meet. Each day, enacting home economies that would make us cry and whine today, even with our own “economic downturn.”

Dad’s Day

Sigh. Dad wasn’t here for Father’s Day this year, and we got home too late to call him. He and Mom are out of town this week visiting her sister, and while Sue had a few things to do at work in Columbia this afternoon, I drove over to their house to check on it.

While I was there I rolled up my pants legs, kicked off my Birkenstocks, and unfurled the garden hoses. It’s been hot and humid here, and Mom and Dad’s plants looked like they could use a drink.

There is nothing like standing barefoot in the yard of the house where you grew up, where your parents’ hands (as well as your own) have tended the lawn, planted trees, bushes, flowers . . . everything.

Everything.

Their landscaping isn’t a breathtaking showplace or opulent display of knockout plants fresh from the garden store. But it is beautiful and comfortable.

Still barefoot, I walked through the grass to water in back and started to feel philosophical. I felt so much at home.

The sycamore tree is the same age as me. The honeysuckle on the fence, the sweetgum, the walnut tree are older than me. The flower bed in back planted with bright pink impatiens and cheery begonias, and ferns, and columbines. The quince bush, the daylilies. My dad’s taken care of most of these for forty years.

Images of my dad working in the yard flooded my mind. When I was a little girl; hot days, working without his shirt, his back wet with sweat. Dad in an old flannel shirt, raking leaves and picking up walnuts in fall. Dad showing me how to do stuff. How to get my hands dirty. How to make a hanging basket of airplane plants and wandering-jews. How to knock the dirt off of a weed’s roots before tossing the weed into the discard pile. How to plant annuals with a trowel. How to mow the grass. How to arrange rocks into a border for a flower bed.

Yes, my mom taught me a lot of this stuff, too, but much of the backyard’s design and labor has been my dad’s.

And where did he get it? From his folks; from Grandma.

And when that thought occurred to me, I felt strongly the connection that has come to me, to all us grandchildren of Edna, from our fathers. Like the magic of genetic recombination, the gardening vision and techniques are altered and modified with every generation, but like the life force itself, the urge to garden, to comprehend and care for and love a spot of earth, is an instinct that continues unaltered in purity and intensity.

And I felt a little blue that I wasn’t able to fix a dinner for my dad today, but I’ll just use this extra time to decide how I want to fix his belated Father’s Day salmon dinner. Salmon’s his favorite.

I’m so glad I have a Dad I appreciate, admire, like, and love.

Peonies: Connections

Now that I’ve been blogging a few weeks, I’m finding myself looking forward to what comes together in my mind by evening, and tonight I’ve got a good one.

This evening I stepped outside to walk around the yard a little, and I admired the way the peonies are sprouting up. Only a few weeks ago (remember?) I was in our terrace garden, raking out last year’s foliage, snipping off the dried stalks of the 2008 peonies. At that point, they were just tender pink cones peeking out of the ground. Now some of the stalks are about a foot tall, the leaves beginning to unfurl.

More and more, I see spring as an overwhelming, virile, raw, powerful force. Something, a long time ago, had led me to characterize spring as tender and moist, soft, delicate, but that attitude is changing. When we say “winter’s back is broken,” then I guess we also have to acknowledge that the thing that broke its back was the sheer, wild strength of spring.

But I digress. I was talking about the peonies. See, I’ve already told you we live in what used to be my grandmother’s house, and yes, that presents many situations that, in today’s world, seem remarkable. So tonight I’m going to remark about it. It fills me with an overwhelmingly strong sense of connectedness, and I feel that is incredibly precious, in a world where so few people live where their ancestors did.

So the peonies in our yard have been in this yard since about 1930, when my great-grandparents (paternal grandma’s folks), and my paternal grandparents, moved into this house (from where they had been living next door). (Got it?)

The peonies were moved to this property during the original landscaping my grandma and her folks did back in 1930. And they are basically where they have always been, all these years—some along the driveway, others over the retaining wall facing the street.

Here is something, kind of an aside: The peonies always bloom about the same time the mock orange blooms in the backyard. And that is right about at Memorial Day. And that is how, for years and years, the graves of my ancestors out at Riverview Cemetery have been decorated annually with peonies and sprays of mock orange blossoms.

I called up my dad tonight to ask him where the peonies had “come from.” I suspected they had come from his Aunt Polly, but I was wrong. He gave me the background.

Note: I fully expect to be coming back and editing this post, because I suspect I’ll get some things wrong, or “not-quite-right.” But here is what I know tonight.

See, down at 318 W. Elm, there used to be a house, which was demolished, I guess, about the same time my grandparents were moving here, just a block away. This house at 318 had been “the old Bartlett house.” Old Mr. Bartlett was the previous owner of these peonies, before they were transplanted here. Charles T. Bartlett. That was his name.

Okay, with me so far? The Bartletts were connected to me through marriage. My grandma’s older sister Minnie married Claude Bartlett, the son of Charles and Amelia Bartlett. So Charles Bartlett was the father-in-law of my Great-aunt Minnie. Claude and Minnie were living nearby at that time, and you know how gardening-inspired people can’t stand by and let perfectly good peonies get wasted because a house is being razed.

So the peonies ended up here. And Claude and Minnie soon ended up on Forest Hill, one of Jeff City’s swankier streets, while my grandma, her family, and the peonies stayed here in the ’hood.

Want to hear more? Sure.

So. Charles Bartlett’s wife, Amelia, had been born a Maus: Her dad was none other than Captain Charles B. Maus, the Civil War veteran who built the Union Hotel down at Lohman’s Landing, now part of the Jefferson Landing State Historic Site. Historian Gary Kremer says that Maus named it the Union Hotel “to reflect his loyalty to the U.S. government.” (He warn’t no rebel.)

The Union Hotel contains the Elizabeth Rozier Gallery, named for the woman who, in the sixties and seventies, was so instrumental in saving those historic buildings when government officials wanted to demolish them for parking for State Workers (we capitalize them in this blog, because of their separate, distinct status).

The bottom floor of the old Union Hotel is currently the city’s Amtrak station; that’s where we said goodbye to Paul and Karla and the boys as they were headed back home at Christmas. (Connections . . .)

Just up the street, and also part of the Historic Site, is the Christopher Maus house, built around 1854; Christopher was the brother of Captain Charles B. So Christopher was the uncle of Claude Bartlett’s mother.

Are you getting all this? Do I need to make a flow chart for you?

Now: The Maus brothers were German, and they pronounced their name so that it rhymes with “house.” This is why Sue and I refer to Christopher’s house as “the mouse house.” And we laugh. (We think of little wedges of cheese, wiggly whiskers, big round ears, beady eyes.)

But here is something else my dad explained to me: Amelia Maus had siblings, and one of them was named Wilhelmine, or Wilhelmina (spellings were more shifty back then between German spellings and English ones) . . . and she went by the nickname of “Minnie.”

Um, can you see where this is going? Yes.

Yes.

Her name was Minnie Maus.

Dad says his Aunt Minnie (Claude’s wife; my grandma’s sister) used to refer to her husband’s aunt as “Aunt Minnie Maus.”

Dad says the Maus family changed the pronunciation to “Moss” in the generation after Amelia and Minnie. Shucks! But in a land of English speakers, I guess it sounded less rodentlike.

. . . So now I swirl my figurative brandy snifter and I wonder: Do you suppose our peonies might have once graced the sideyard of the Maus house or the Union Hotel down there on Jefferson Street? I try to picture how it might have looked in the 1880s.

The dresser we have in the back bedroom, Grandma told us, had belonged to Captain Maus, Claude’s grandfather. There’s a solid wood connection between me and the proprietor of the historic Union Hotel. I keep my socks in the same drawer where he might have kept his drawers!

But somehow, it’s even neater to think that the peonies might possibly serve as a living connection between me and the old captain.

And who owned and cared for the peonies before then, do you suppose? Who trimmed away the winter’s dead foliage each spring and smiled in May at their bright white blossoms flecked with blood red?

A friend recently told me that she and her partner had recently transplanted iris from New Mexico to their home in the Bay Area, iris that had belonged to her partner’s grandmother. And it goes on. And it goes on.

Plants have histories and genealogies just like we do, and our mutual paths merge and diverge and cross back again. Do you know what this feels like? It makes me think of those Hubble Telescope views of distant galaxy clusters—we see just a miniscule fraction of what’s really out there. Just enough to know how very little we know.