Simple Cooked Apples and Aunt Annie

Here’s another recipe that’s really more about family. As I and my cousins and classmates have slowly become the elder generation, I’ve been sifting through, transcribing, and annotating recipes written on cards, in notebooks, on scraps of paper tucked into church-ladies’ cookbooks, on the backs of old envelopes. These are mom recipes, grandma recipes, aunt recipes, great-aunt recipes.

It’s been hard to complete this project, because I keep acquiring more of these recipes. I open up another one of their old cookbooks, and another little recipe falls out.

Then there are “recipes” that no one bothered writing down, because they were so standard, so simple, or so memorized they didn’t require it. But as I think back to how we used to eat, and compare it to how we eat today, I find I want to include these dishes.

This post is more about a person than it is about a recipe, and it’s only marginally a recipe, anyway.

This time, we’re featuring Aunt Annie—my great aunt Anna (Eggert) Wilmesherr (1904–1981), who married Emil Wilmesherr (1899–1990) in 1922. Emil was my grandma Clara (Wilmesherr) Renner’s younger brother.

Emil and Annie lived in Washington, Missouri, where his and Clara’s parents, William August and Pauline (Wehmeyer) Wilmesherr, had moved their young family from Kansas in about 1901.

Grandma Renner, though she didn’t have a car and couldn’t drive, still got to see her kin in Washington pretty often, with it only about an hour away on Highway 50. Emil and Annie had nice cars.

Fun fact: Aunt Annie’s sister Ida Eggert (1902–1956) married Clara and Emil’s older brother, Andrew Wilmesherr (1899–1990); they lived in New Haven. Two sisters married two brothers!

With Franklin County a center of the extended Wilmesherr-Wehmeyer-Brinkmeyer-Busekrus family, Emil and Annie often hosted the annual summertime family reunions. Sometimes it was at their house, but later it was held in the basement of the Leslie [now-Zion-no-longer-United] Methodist Church. (That congregation must have split from the mainstream denomination in 2023, but whatever.)

Uncle Emil often made homemade ice cream for the reunions, and when he got too old to make it, he ensured there was plenty of vanilla ice cream from the supermarket (or dairy).

I can picture him, sitting next to the big cylindrical tub of ice cream, professional-quality ice cream scoop in hand, dipping out perfect spheres of ice cream into everyone’s bowls. Between servings, he’d plunge the scoop into a container of hot water, to make the scooping easier. You only had to hold out your bowl to him, and he would fill it, or refill it, smiling, his eyes twinkling. So, so, good.

These reunions were potlucks, of course, so before the ice cream was served, we enjoyed a selection of all kinds of hot dishes, cold dishes, fried chicken, sliced ripe tomatoes, cold cuts and sandwich fixings, Jell-O salads, pies, cookies, and cakes.

While the adults visited, trying to figure out how they were related, and how many cousin-times removed they were, and learning about recent marriages and babies born, we kids visited and revisited the food tables. It was always really hot.

When the family’s formal meeting started, we went outside to play, or carefully explored the church sanctuary above. Being a young pianist, I was amazed with their 1908 pipe organ.

Emil and Annie had fruit trees in their yard, so they often provided bowls, or pies, of fresh peaches and apples.

And here is the “recipe”: one year, I remember that Aunt Annie had served a big bowl full of cooked, cold apples. They were fresh apples (probably Jonathans) from their trees, peeled, cored, and quartered, cooked until perfectly tender, sweetened with a bit of white sugar, chilled, and served in their own juices. Was there a hint of cinnamon? I can’t recall. They were tender, with only enough body to hold their shape just long enough to collapse when you closed your mouth on them.

I recall going back again and again to get more of those icy cold, delicious apples, on that hot day, in that musky church basement. These simple apples blew my mind. Yes, I was pretty young, but I was at an age where I was starting to notice and think about such things.

They weren’t apple pie, apple dumplings, applesauce, or baked apples. I asked Mom about them. “What do you call these?” She said she was pretty sure Aunt Annie had brought them. “Ask her.” So I did.

Aunt Annie kind of laughed her bubbly laugh and shook her head, with its snow-white hair, and told me, “Why, they’re just plain cooked apples, honey! How do you make them? Well, you just cook your apples, like you’re making applesauce, but you don’t mash them up!”

I must’ve expressed to her that I thought they were the best things on the whole potluck. She was flattered, but had to chuckle. She was always kind to us kids. And she had the sweetest smile.

Today I understand her bemusement, since at that point, for all I knew, applesauce was something everyone bought in a can. Only old-fashioned country people, it seemed, made homemade applesauce. But in Aunt Annie’s world, every female probably knew how to make applesauce from scratch by the age of eight. The simplest thing on earth.

I’ve been making them for myself for as long as I’ve had a kitchen. I use a steamer. I don’t turn them into applesauce—you can buy applesauce, right?

But each time I make them, I think of Aunt Annie, and her smile.

Grandma Renner's Southern Cornbread

My grandma Clara Renner’s recipe, as my mom typed into her own recipe notebook. Mom said that her Grandma made cornbread frequently.

As usual, although this post is about food, it is also about the connection: my grandma. Therefore, I’m sprinkling in some photos of her, taken by Mom in the 1950s.

A note on the photos: About fifteen years ago, Mom diligently digitized her old slides, but she didn’t clean the slides before scanning. So there are zillions of unfortunate specks and spots. Sue color-corrected some of them for me, but others still retain a pinkish red color shift. She did all she could. Sorry about that.

Better to have imperfect pictures than none at all. Sometimes soft photos have a perfection all their own, you know?

Grandma was born in Kansas and grew up in Washington, Missouri. From the time she was a teen and throughout her adult life, she lived in Jefferson City. She worked hard, raising four children and taking care of her husband and his father during the Great Depression and then World War II. Grandpa worked at the local printing company.

Like I said, Grandma worked hard. She had a garden, she raised rabbits for cash, she took in laundry and ironing for cash. She had to hide her grocery money from Grandpa. (I didn’t learn about Grandpa’s depression and drinking problems until long after he had died.)

Grandma had German heritage; her dad’s grandfather had immigrated to America in 1858, and her mom’s mother had been born in Germany, too. She grew up speaking German in the Lutheran church she attended. (If you struggled to learn the Lutheran Catechism, just imagine learning it in German!)

Unlike my other grandma, who was the daughter of German immigrants, Grandma Renner seemed much less Germanic. Culturally, she was more rural, or more Americanized. Grandma Schroeder would make split pea soup served with rye bread, and Grandma Renner would make ham and bean soup served with cornbread. At Christmas, Grandma Schroeder would make sauerbraten; Grandma Renner would make roast chicken (or turkey, though she greatly preferred chicken) . . . or a plain pot roast.

Or she would grill steaks out in the backyard, basting it with homemade BBQ sauce.

So, I find it interesting that she’d have a recipe for southern cornbread: southern. Most people would just call their cornbread “cornbread,” right?

Therefore, we need to talk about southern cornbread.

First, the sugar. Always the sugar, with those southerners. Can’t have too much of it in the iced tea, but can’t have a speck of it in their cornbread.

There’s a lot made out of the idea that “true” southerners never, ever, ever include sugar with their cornbread. But then, many southerners “admit” that they use “just a titch” of sugar.

Grandma’s recipe includes one tablespoon of sugar for four cups of corn meal and flour. That’s not very much.

I think it’s reasonable to include a small amount of sugar with cornbread in order to correct deficiencies in the sweetness of the cornmeal being used. If it’s super fresh and high quality, it’s probably sweet enough on its own. But if your cornmeal sits around on your shelf, or if it’s been in a warehouse for who knows how long, it might need a little help. In fact, what you bought at the grocery store probably does need a little help.

The overall idea, however, is that southern cornbread is not obviously sweet; it shouldn’t be like cake; it should be sweet only in the sense that corn itself is sweet. It’s a lot like adding a small amount of sugar to a tomato sauce.

Another southern thing is to make cornbread in a cast iron skillet. The old-fashioned technique is to preheat your oven, then heat your well-seasoned iron skillet on the stovetop, mix your batter, dollop some butter or lard into the skillet (which is so hot it immediately starts to sizzle), and right after that, put your batter into the skillet; it sizzles instantly. Then you transfer it into the oven to finish. This way, it develops a buttery, crisp, golden crust on the bottom, which you can make the top by inverting it upside-down onto a serving plate. Or serve out of the skillet, as you prefer.

But I’ll bet my grandma didn’t fuss with that. She wasn’t a southerner, anyway. For goodness’ sakes, her immigrant grandpa had served in the Union Army from 1861 to the end of 1864. And she was a modern midwestern homemaker. I bet she made it in a cake pan or a baking dish, in the oven.

So, what’s better, northern or southern cornbread? Southerners apparently see it in black-and-white: southern style is best, doggone it! Meanwhile, northerners usually don’t get so het up over it.

Me, I prefer to have all the colors in my coloring book. I like both the sweet kind and the unsweet kind. I like cornbread with blueberries, cheese, jalapenos, peanut butter, jam or jelly, split and toasted with butter and caraway (or poppy) seeds—you name it.

And I like corn griddlecakes with sorghum molasses!

As always, I have some comments on the recipe:

First, with its 3-to-1 ratio of cornmeal to flour, it will be dense and rather dry, not delicate and cakelike as in northern cornbread. Cracks will develop on the top, like the Dry Tortugas, or the Nevada Proving Grounds. . . . Rub some butter on the top surface.

This is perfect for crumbling into a bowl and topping with cooked beans and their juices, or with bean soup, or with thin, soupy chili.

As with most quick breads and muffins, mix the drys and wets separately, first; then combine them together.

Grandma’s recipe doesn’t give a pan size, precise temperature, or baking time. I use a 9 x 13 Pyrex baking dish, set the oven at 425 degrees, and start checking it at around 12 minutes; it’s done when it starts turning golden brown on top and a toothpick comes out clean.

• 3 cups cornmeal
• 1 cup flour
• 1 tablespoon sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 heaping teaspoons baking powder
• 3 or 4 eggs
• 2 cups sweet milk
• 1 tablespoon lard [melted, surely; or melted butter or vegetable oil]

Mix all together and bake in hot oven.

Hurricane Eyes

Hello, there. It’s hard to figure out how to jump back into this blogging thing, after so much time away. I mean . . . I’m still here, but I’m been busy with other things. It’s the same story as the last several “where have I been?” posts. Skip this post, and hope I post a new, better one soon, unless you’re really curious.

It’s been like moving from one hurricane eye to another: Just give up on the idea of more than a few weeks of relative normalcy. Chaos is the new normal.

But first, the requisite pretty picture, because the Internet loves pictures. It's a dickcissel that was dickcisseling at us at Friendly Prairie on May 31.

Okay. So. Basically, Mom and Dad have required a lot more attention and help than I had expected. They’re basically helpless. It’s been exhausting, physically, mentally, emotionally. It turns out that being in charge of two people’s lives and affairs (in addition to your own), and being in charge of a second house (in addition to your own), and having it all fall on your shoulders abruptly, is basically overwhelming. This doesn’t even count the parade of maladies that require medical attention, a litany of follow-ups. Teeth breaking off; outpatient Moh’s surgeries; and then Mom fell and broke her hip in early March. And it wouldn’t be so bad if both of my parents followed the doctors’ and physical therapists’ instructions (and not just Dad).

With all the time they require, and me feeling wiped out all the time, it’s been hard to find the blocks of hours I need to focus on my job, which is editing. Turns out you need to use your mind in order to edit things . . . or, for that matter, to write blog posts. Obviously, my job, and income, has to be Priority One. . . . Our yard has kind of gone to hell this spring; Sue has stepped up to do some of the yard things I used to do, in the Before Times.

Meanwhile . . . I have found time to write things in my actual physical journal. With it, I take a lot of notes, and I do a lot of “processing,” at odd times here and there. As always, I carry it and a pen with me everywhere. So if I stop at a restaurant for a bite, or get dinner to-go for Sue and me, I’ll sit there while I wait, and set down the frustration or vexation du jour. My theory is that if I write it down, it removes it from my immediate mentality. It sets it in the past, and it lightens the load.

I also write about the funny stuff, and the sweet stuff, to balance it out. I write about the “here is where I am right now,” for the historical record. One day, I may look back on this and think, Wow, wasn’t that a time.

One of the bright things about the journaling this year has been thanks to some lovely new inks Sue gave me for Christmas. There’s an outfit in Pittsburgh, the Birmingham Pen Company, that makes handmade ink colors. They’re really nice, and Sue got me a five-pack: Heron (blue), Tiger’s Eye (yellow-brown), Burlywood (a different yellow-brown), Pitted Nickel (gray-green), and Byzantium (gray). I had previously tried out the company’s Waterfront Dusk (maroon), and decided I loved it.

Over the years, my inveterate journaling has included various writing implements, but I usually circle back to traditional fountain pens. I’ve used the same one since about 1995, I think. Before I got it, with its refillable cartridge, I used ones that had prefilled disposable plastic cartridges, and I was always trying to squeeze a drop or two of black into the bright blue, bright green, or bright red cartridges. “Tube” colors never did much for me.

Which is why I like the Birmingham Pen Company’s inks; they’re complicated, natural, intriguing colors. If you like using a fountain pen, do check them out.

On the subject of journaling . . . a few years ago, I prepared a series of blog posts about journaling. They’re literally all done; I even had the photos cropped, sized, and ready to go. I just never pulled the trigger on posting them all.

I don’t see what I’m waiting for, except that every time I sit in front of a computer, I feel like I need to be working, and not farting around with my blog.

Maybe I should try to fit in a little blogging, though. Maybe it’d make me feel like I’m doing something kind of fun.

Update: Where Have I Been?

Just in case anyone's wondering, I'm still alive. My parents have needed a lot of help since the beginning of April. Dad was hospitalized from April 1 through the 18th. I've basically been helping them almost every day since then. Paul was in Missouri for six weeks to help. Neither of us could have gotten through these few months alone. I'm flat-out exhausted. Hopefully they are in a place, now, where they don't need me to care for them on a daily basis. There is still a load of work to do. Now that my shoulder's good and messed up, and all the joints and muscles in my legs, arms, and back ache, no more furniture needs to be moved. (Good, but not surprising timing, there.) But there's a lot of administrative work to do, financial, logistical, healthcare, etc.

I haven't been able to get billable hours, to speak of, for this whole time. So naturally, no time to blog. And I'm not ready for any kind of Jar of Goodness crap.

Except . . .

For all of those who helped me, and helped us, and helped my parents, these past months. Far too many to mention right now.

I don't have the time for gratitude now. I shouldn't even be writing this now, because I need to WORK. And I need to mow the lawn before it rains again. And so much more I need to do. I need to make dinner. The beat goes on.

In closing (for now), here's a gratuitous picture of Brenda sleeping on the sunporch. Gggggghhh.

P.S. Oh yeah, we still need to take down those storm windows and put up the screens . . . so much for my sore shoulder . . .

Jar of Goodness 1.5.25 B: New Mailbox, Just in Time

At the risk of possibly using up my next-week's thing to feel grateful for, I'm going to double-up and post two gratitudes in a single day. Hopefully there will be something else to be grateful for by next Sunday. Right?

Here's JOG 1.5.25 "B": I'm glad we got Dad and Mom's new mailbox installed (and without any hitches!!!) on Friday afternoon. Sue and I prepared hard for it: make sure we have all the tools we'll need, all the hardware, a board to raise the bracket above the railing where we'd be installing it (so the flap would open), and what-all. Because, you know, these kinds of "simple" things often turn into some kind of production, another trip to the hardware store, whatever. But our preparation was perfect! How about that!

I'd been trying to get my dad set up with the Post Office for door delivery for over a year, but apparently the stars have to align, and you need to be Sherlock Holmes in order to discover the correct procedure for applying for this service. Like, don't bother looking online; just start by asking the letter carrier who comes near your home each day. The stuff online is contradictory, and half of it is hidden in the USPS's puzzle-like website.

Anyway, we got the doctor's letter, I found the official form, I filled it out a few different ways, Dad signed it and a letter I'd composed officially requesting the service, I printed out a satellite view of their house, driveway, street, and current mailbox location (marked with distance my Dad has to walk), and in early November I hand-delivered it all to the cryptic, non-public USPS distribution station (because, of course, you can't mail them the form), and just a month or two later, I discover they've been approved. (The only hitch was that a month ago, they'd called my parents and left them a message saying it was approved, so naturally I didn't get that information.) But I called them to follow up, learned it was approved, so it was time to install the new mailbox by my parents' door.

And just in the nick of time! This snow and ice storm is gnarly, especially since it'll be followed by at least a week of super-cold temperatures. Thank goodness my dad won't be staggering through ice and snow on his concrete sidewalk and steps, long gravel driveway, and the icy road. (Columbia is horrible about clearing any of its roads, much less ones in neighborhoods.) Because yes, elderly people still really do rely on postal mail to get their printed newspapers from their former hometowns, their printed magazines, their tons of printed direct-mail catalogs, their bills, their correspondence, their junk mail, their coupons, and all manner of non-television entertainments.

So anyway, whew, there we go. And their letter carrier saw it as we were installing it and approves of its location, and everything. He'd been notified of their door-delivery status and had already started delivering to their door. Hooray!

Jar of goodness . . . mailbox of happiness.

Changes

The first snow of the winter of 2024–2025 came today.

I awakened at five and sensed something was wrong. As I grew more conscious, I realized I was smelling smoke. That’s never a good thing, unless you’re sitting near a campfire, or burning incense. And it was ugly-smelling smoke—not the pretty scent of someone’s fireplace or woodstove, wafting in the chilly air. No. It smelled like plastic, vinyl—acrid—nothing anyone should be burning, although we’ve had our share of neighbors who burn their trash in their backyards, in the early hours of the morning, trusting that no one will care about the smoldering dioxins and other toxins they inhale while asleep. Most of our neighbors smoke, anyway, so how would they even notice it?

But I was concerned. I tiptoed around our chilly house in my bare feet, making sure that all rooms on all floors were free of an obvious problem. I mean, we do have smoke detectors, but . . . Then I stepped onto the sunporch, which was colder still, and the attached “screen” porch (now with storm windows, of course, but still fairly open to the outdoor air, since we haven’t yet chinked the windows with insulation). And the smoke odor out there was much stronger. I moved back indoors and down the stairs to the front door, and stuck my face outside: again, smoky. Ugh. Whew.

This information led to another round of the second and third floors, this time with my glasses on, squinting more carefully out the windows. Is one of our neighbors’ houses on fire, or billowing smoke? Or is someone actually burning trash covertly? If the latter, I knew the fire might already be done with, even though the heavy, still air can let the stench linger for hours after the deed. But all I saw was a diffuse haziness in the direction of the motel on the expressway. (Hmm. And we need to clean our windows. Kind of late in the season for that, now.) Somehow, I managed not to awaken Sue with all this traipsing around at 5 a.m. (I also managed not to stub my toes on anything. Huzzah!)

Well, it turned out that around 2:45 a house had blown up on the east side of town. They haven’t yet announced a cause, but my money’s on a natural gas appliance or exhaust malfunction, possibly combined with electric space heaters or some such. It’s the first time this season that people’s heaters are running full-bore, and heating systems in poor repair are getting their dangerous shakedown this weekend. Yeah, while everyone’s observing Thanksgiving and Black Friday, and all that. Happy holidays.

And yes, if you know me, you know I’m too appalled about the results of the presidential election to feel very “thankful” this year. I live in a red state that was a purple state not long ago, before a Republican supermajority and gerrymandering, and toxic fundamentalist misinformation bubbles. I’m literally surrounded and ruled over by crazy, het, right-wing Trump-Jesus-gun worshippers. . . . And Thanksgiving? Are you kidding me?

Also, my parents are a grim situation all by themselves: it’s the inevitable collision between my mom’s unbending and increasingly unrealistic notion that she and Dad can continue forever to live in their home, with its staircases, and Dad’s flat-out exhaustion and increasing disability. He is her caregiver: he staggers and stumbles around their house; he fixes all her meals and carries them to her on a platter, brings her beverages and begs her to drink them, launders her clothes and bed sheets, supplies her with Depends and Poise pads, dispenses and tracks her (and his) medications, deals with all the house upkeep, pays the bills, everything. He exercises, does PT, walks, to stay in shape (“to keep myself physically fit . . .”). As she has for years, she sits in her puffy recliner and does nothing, not even the tiny amount of walking the doctors have been telling her for years that she must do if she wants to stay at home . . . and he’s simply exhausted. And so am I.

In retrospect, my brother and I should have talked them into moving a decade ago, and if they’d done nothing, at that time, we should have done it for them then. Too late for that now.

Mom, psychologically increasingly like a toddler, expects me to quit my job and move in with them until they both are gone, which, given my mom’s genetics and lack of serious chronic illness, could be another decade, in her case. Well, actually, I don’t think she knows I have a job, because I’ve been so generous with my time with them. As a freelancer, I’ve been able to skip some hours of work in the past five years to drive them to their haircuts and doctors’ appointments, to pick up groceries, computer supplies, and what-not, but those demands have exploded in the past few years, with Mom being taken to the hospital, often with rehab, six times in the past two years, and Dad twice.

Dad had a stroke, and he needed outpatient PT after it, and he needed me to drive him there a few times a week. And there’s always the questions about the computer. Or, Why isn’t the phone working? Or, I think we might need a new water heater. Your Mom needs more Depends: this size, overnight, super absorbency. . . .

Wash, rinse, repeat. I know Dad remembers I have a job, but I’m pretty sure Mom doesn’t realize it—or if she does, she doesn’t respect it.

Talk about pushing my buttons. I try to just see it, acknowledge it, know that it’s old, old material, breathe, and move on without, like, yelling. Of course I’m not respected. And I don’t need her validation anymore.

When I tell her she can’t expect me to come take care of them at their house 24/7 for the next decade or so, she tells me that she and Dad will simply have an elevator added to their house, or they will just hire 24-hour in-home assistance. I recently sketched out the math for her: $30 an hour, times 24 hours in a day, is $720 a day; multiply that by 365 days in a year, and you’re paying $262,800 annually just for someone (some person or persons—who?) to be there to help you, in a home that’s not going to accommodate a wheelchair, which she will soon need to be in—it does not count food or food preparation, transportation, incontinence supplies, heating and cooling bills, water, house maintenance and property taxes, medical copays and drug costs, and the ever-loving cable TV and landline/internet bills. It’s just fantasyland.

In our family, the dynamic has always been to go along with Mom’s ideas, because she’s always been “the practical one.” The one good with finances. The one who takes care of the house, the bills, the do list. Balances the checkbooks. (Kind of like the myth about Republicans being good about the economy.) She was always the one to deal with the plumbers, electricians, and handymen. She used to be sharp as a tack, “on top of” everything. But those days are long gone, as she becomes more confused and lives increasingly in the past. Actually, they both are.

So it’s past time for independent living; it may already be too late for assisted living, for Mom. She’s hurtling toward skilled nursing; she doesn’t want to drink, so she gets dehydrated and gets UTIs, she doesn’t move around, she’s weak, her blood pressure tanks when she merely stands up. The idea of getting her up the staircases is a horror for me. She’s been hospitalized three times in the past six months. But she still expects us to treat her as if she knows best, and we all still tend to twirl around trying to make her happy. Of course, that is impossible. People like her will never be happy; this is how ninety years of untreated depression and anxiety disorder, with a little side order of NPD, ends up. And so we are moving ahead with plans for senior living for them both. Dad is ready. We simply leave her out of our conversations, which is easy to do since she only ever sits in her living room chair and has grown pretty hard of hearing.

So we’re in a race to get them moved into a good place where they can be safe, clean, fed, comfortable and hopefully find things to be happy about, to be entertained with; to have people to talk with; to maybe even find ways to still contribute to the world (Dad would like that, I think).

You know, I started this blog in a state of deep stress and depression. Hopelessness. Things that used to cheer me only made me feel like I’d been slapped. I was repeatedly contemplating suicide. I thought that starting a blog about the things—the few little things—that I can unequivocally claim as good would help me regain a sense that there is something still to enjoy, even when my life seems in shambles, when my career—hell, my whole life—seems a big fat joke, when I see myself as the center of all my problems. Even when I’m almost convinced that I don’t belong here, that I have no place or purpose.

I truly don’t have any goddamn time to be fucking around with a blog, or anything, anything, that is not related to my job, or with the needs of my parents. I’m not going to fuck around with Christmas cookies this year. (Well . . . maybe I’ll make a few kinds. To give to the elders who remain.) Christmas tree? Bah, humbug. I’m down on Christianity, too—all the white Christian nationalists have turned me off of religion entirely—in America and globally, the trouble, the evil, that religion causes far outweigh its so-called blessings. Overall, religion is still, always, eternally a way that greedy, mean, power-hungry people convince other people into doing horrible, selfish, mean-spirited things. I’m sick of it. Grow the fuck up and learn how to be a good person without having the imaginary threat of eternal damnation hanging over your head, okay?

But yeah, I think I’m gonna attempt another year of “Jar of Goodness.” Because I kind of need it. At least, let’s give it try before I call my doctor and ask to “up my dosage.” I’ve been doing a lot of journaling the past few years, and I have a lot I’d like to say about that. And there are several other half-baked posts I can complete and upload. Let’s keep a-goin’.

Totem Pole Is Up!

Ta-dahhhhh--! The totem pole is now standing in our backyard! This is its third location, and after more than forty years in Columbia, it’s back in Jeff City!

I told you about it in my previous post—how my cousin Phil made it, how it was in Aunt Minnie’s backyard, then got moved to my parents’ home in Columbia. It fell over last year, Dad gave it to me, and I’ve been rehabbing it.

The last thing to do was patch some missing broken wood on the wing, and let that dry, and dab it with some paint to make the wood filler look better, and wait for it to dry again.

On Saturday, Sue and I carried it out of the garage and up the steps to the backyard, where the two support posts and concrete platform were waiting. Sue held the totem pole against the posts while I wrapped wire around and around it, hopefully unobtrusively.

Later that day, we bought some solar-powered lights (for fun), including a solar-powered spotlight that is now pointed up at the totem pole. So I can look out the window and see it at night!

Earlier in the day, I mowed the lawn (first time this year!), so the whole yard is seeming really pretty right now. Despite the pollen, and the cold, gusty winds we had over the weekend.

Totem Pole

It’s a project! With a history! Oh, boy! I’ve been going around showing pictures on my phone to anyone who’ll look at them! It’s a totem pole, and my work is almost finished. About the only thing left is to stand it up in the yard.

First, the history. My cousin Phil made this in the late 1970s, I think as part of a Boy Scout project. Or maybe it was just for fun. Did Uncle Richard help him or at least inspire him? Probably, at least as a scoutmaster.

It was made out of a utility pole. The wings, bill, nose, and ears were nailed on. The features were chiseled in. The paint was Rust-Oleum, in the standard colors available in the seventies. Phil’s initials are carved into the back of the wings.

When first created, it was installed in the backyard of Aunt Minnie’s, out on Forest Hill. She had it in the far southwest (left) corner. It added a really unusual touch to her otherwise quite proper, upscale landscaping. She loved her family and appreciated everyone’s unique characters, so it probably didn’t faze her at all to have a totem pole in her yard.

It also has strong connections to scouting’s early, and sincerely held admiration of Native American spirituality and philosophy. Today, we call it cultural appropriation and know that it isn’t the innocent thing we used to think it was. We see that white people’s “take” on Indigenous people’s culture was indeed just that: a gleaning, from people who had had nearly everything taken from them: their land, their property, their rights, their language, their culture. But I contend that we should also recognize that early scouting’s admiration was sincere, even if flawed in hindsight, and that their idealized understanding of Native American perspectives and life-ways helped produce better people. It represented a bend toward nature and ecological wisdom, toward harmony, toward quietude and humility, toward simplicity. These are good things, considering the overall trajectory of US culture in the twentieth century: commercialization, natural illiteracy, discord, selfishness, materialism.

Anyway, I recognize that the totem pole could be viewed as problematic, but I appreciate it for what it has meant to my family. For me, it’s a totem of a time when scouting unselfconsciously admired and emulated Native American culture, and it produced some generations of people who were better humans for it.

So after Aunt Minnie passed away, by 1982 the totem pole was moved to my parents’ house in Columbia. There, it stood in the southwest (right) corner of their backyard. I was about sixteen, then, so the totem pole doesn’t figure into my childhood memories. But I sure mowed around it, lived with it, and it has long been a fixture in my parents’ backyard.

Here it is in April 2008.

Well, last year, it finally pitched over. (It was a rough year all around, I guess.) The base had rotted to the point that it fell over.

Dad picked up the pieces that broke off (the bill, the nose, the ears, a bit of the wing) and moved it all under his screened-in porch. And there it lay for months. He was wondering what to do with it. Last fall, he asked me if I had any ideas. Did I want it? Should we just chuck it down the ravine on top of fifty years’ of yard waste? So I took it, and all the pieces. It actually fit in my Civic, if I folded down the seats.

And so it ended up in our garage for the winter. The last few months, I started on its renovation. I decided, first, that I wanted it to remain looking elderly. I wanted to embrace its weathered look, its impermanence. Wabi-sabi. I would mix the paint with thinner so it would not look too dressed-up.

Here's a picture of it laying in my backyard, in early March. It had been rained on, so it looks dark. Remnants of the original paint are more visible, looking like flecks of white.

The wings were hanging on by only one screw, its nails having rusted and broken clean through, so it needed to be secured. That was pretty easy.

The bill, fortunately, was still in pretty good shape. A light sanding, and some thinned-out yellow Rust-Oleum, and it was ready to reattach.

The original nose had split in half, so it needed replacing. I’ve replaced it with a section of sweet gum from a limb that fell out of my parents’ front-yard tree. It is pretty sound wood, and I left the bark (with lichen!) on it. I think it gives a nice woodsy, organic look.

The ears, however, were a problem. Only one of the originals survived, and it’s pretty rotten. I’m no woodcarver, so I couldn’t fabricate new ones on the original pattern—even if I thought brand-new wooden parts would look good.

But I wanted to do something different, also woodsy, so we found some cedars that had been culled at a local conservation area. (MDC had cut them down in order to improve the native woodland habitat. Did you know that before white settlement, the only places cedars lived in Missouri was on cliff faces? Pretty much!) With loppers, I extracted some good-looking branching portions and brought those home.

After a bit of reflection, cocking my head to one side and the other, some careful trimming, and holding different branches in place against the totem pole, I selected my two new antlers. It’s a different look, but I like it.

I’m surprised I got them to balance as well as they do. I’m not convinced I’ve attached them very securely, but I think we’ll get at least a season out of the current construction. Reevaluate next spring.

Before I got too far with any repainting, I wanted to find some old photos. I kept looking through my parents’ old photo albums and striking out.

A lot of the photos I found were generic views of the backyard, and the totem pole was so blurry, I couldn’t tell much. But we sure had some pretty fall color! And my parents have a beautiful backyard.

The day before Uncle Richard’s memorial a few weeks ago, I finally found a photo of it from 1982, which turned out to be the year it was put in my parents’ yard (apparently). I was surprised at how much color had been on it—it had faded so much over the years!

I changed some of the color patterns, though I kept the same “palette” of 1970s Rust-Oleum paints: royal blue, sunburst yellow, regal red, gloss black, gloss white. I think it’s looking pretty good!

The only thing left to do is figure out how to repair a chunk of wood missing from the top edge of the wing. I glued a broken portion back on, but there is still a hole where (I think) a knot had been. Should I cut out a square-edged hole and replace it with a squarish piece of wood that fits in it? Or cut an old piece of wood to “kind of” fit and fill with wood putty? Or maybe leave it as is? Maybe I can think of a clever workaround. Beads or feathers. A big scallop shell?

After that fix, it’s time for the ceremonial placement in our backyard. It will be in the north corner, next to The Door. It will stand on a small circular concrete platform (so the rotten bottom won’t sit in water or stay moist), and it will lean against two stout metal fence posts, to which it will be wired. I could instead sink it into the ground, but with it already rotting and shorter, and the depth it would need to be sunk, I think it would end up shorter than me. And we can’t have that.

Because I think you’re supposed to look up at totem poles.

So, we’re in the home stretch with this project. More news soon.