Potlatch

Today I celebrate a sort of potlatch alone. Once one of my fellow library science students did a "Pathfinder" on the potlatch. That semester in 1974, each of us created four or five of them; this is how it went: We had to find every single reference to the subject that we chose and our paper was not the information we found, it was the bibliographic sources we found in the University library.

Potlatch is a Canadian word from Nootka. According to one definition it is the "ultimate manifestation of the principle that it is more blessed to give than to receive...Potlatches were part of the way of life of many of the Indians of the northern Pacific coast of North America. Traditional gifts included weapons, slaves, furs, and blankets. Some reports say that a particularly ostentatious host might burn the blankets that guests weren't able to take. The Canadian government banned potlatches in 1884, but they continued anyhow, becoming fully legal again in 1951.

So today I am in a give-away mode. I will never know the recipients; I will know however, that someone will stay a little warmer this winter because of my clean out and my give away. However, I will not burn down the place because I didn't give it all away. That will be the great and final potlatch, and we will know it is over "when the fat lady sings."

Try, Try Again

The Harvest Moon at 9:15 p.m., Sept. 27, 2007. Gray's Anatomy does not pre-empt this wondrous sight, nor the half hour of experimental photography. Is it any wonder our pre-history forefathers spent nights in worshipful amazement.

Harvest Moon

After collecting garbage for the morning pickup, pulling some weeds; O.K., and replanting some ferns, a warm swim as the Harvest Moon was rising was almost an adrenaline rush. Night photography is tricky and I don't have it mastered, but the results are nearly always surprising.

Correction

Hildred of daybyday is an amazing blogger from British Columbia, Canada. I have had an error to her link. I believe she is of such consequence that I spent a bit of time this morning trying to correct it. I believe I have. It works for me now and I hope it does for you as well. Sorry Hildred.

Such Sweet Swimming

I had a lovely swim in the rain a couple of nights ago. Am I a poor steward of God's goodness when we heat our water to a comfortable 90'? I get a little twinge of guilt about it, even if it is almost as therapeutic as a Finnish sauna.

Now there is a nice idea: have a Finnish sauna and jump into a cold swimming pool. No matter, I luxuriate in happiness and am glad for a few moments when I swim in the rain, snow or sun. Who would know that when we built the small back yard pool when we were in our 40's that we would enjoy it more then ever in our 70's. Life is good.

Good for Google

I have a Google Alert on my beloved homeland, "Harding County" to be exact, of South Dakota. It astounds me at what I learn from them. Today it picked up a news article from the Black Hills Pioneer newspaper.

"According to Mark Gabel, BHSU emeritus professor and curator of the Herbarium, the primary goal of the Herbarium staff is to document the little known flora of western South Dakota and the Black Hills including the Bear Lodge Mountains of Wyoming. An example is the ongoing study of the flora of Harding County that is an example of combining field studies with collection based research. The Herbarium is a vital resource for conservation research.
"The flora of the Black Hills (including the Bear Lodge Mountains of eastern Wyoming) is unique, with elements of the eastern deciduous forest, the Great Plains, the boreal forest, the Rocky Mountains and southwestern United States. Species of plants previously unknown in the region are being discovered from the Black Hills every year," Gabel says.
The Herbarium obtained a major grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create a database all of the plants from West River South Dakota and eastern Wyoming. The grant will provide a Web-accessible database with all label data from over 100,000 specimens by 2009.

For this past prairie walker, who loved the plants I pondered as a child, this was indeed good news. Now I will be able to explore the prairie floor once more.

Contradictions

The Museum of Religious Art in Logan, Iowa, was one of our destinations last Tuesday. It was indeed amazing. The early southwestern-style mission chapel above consists of pieces from a variety of sources - including area churches, and even a local barn. A quiet place for reflection.

Life is full of contradictions. A term used by Karl Marx to refer to mutually antagonistic tendencies in a society.

After NE State Senator Chambers made public his lawsuit against God, today's Omaha World Herald has a column in the Living section, "Nonbelievers Finding and Audience." It alludes to this as the age of the New Atheism. "So-called new atheists are distinguishable from the old by the nature and tone of their attacks on God and religion, said Hector Avalos, a professor of religious studies at Iowa State University." Avalos is an atheist himself. "In fact the New Atheism challenges religion as an immoral and destructive force." I wonder how many athiests teach religious studies at our universities in the US?

Martin Marty, Christian Theologian Nebraska native considered one of the nation's foremost religion scholars, said "Your average Baptist, Catholic or Lutheran is undisturbed by them (ballyhooed atheist books). Marty said religion's most recent critics don't hold a candle to such "great God-killers of modern times" as Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.

Marty goes on to say the worst enemy of Christianity is indifference.

Really, Really Mad at God

I would imagine that most of us, if not outright mad at God, sometimes wonder about all of the bad things that happen to good people. Our Omaha, District 2 State Senator, Ernie Chambers, has filed a lawsuit against God. I love the photo that Jeff Baker has of the noisy senator in his blog "Defend us In Battle" It has been said that he is the angriest black man in Omaha.

We all know it is to prove a point about frivolous law suits...but I think it was actually to get the attention of the media. The honored senator is a self proclaimed atheist. For an atheist to sue God, you'd think he might think God is 'out there.' He could have sued Santa Clause, to prove a point as well. If you follow Jeff's links you will be able to read the whole story.

Sometimes when our Nebraska Unicameral is in session and times hangs heavy in the house, I go to the channel that carries the loquacious Chambers in session. He obviously loves a captive audience. Once upon a time I had a student documentary crew that chose him as their subject. He was receptive to their interview and as always, not at a loss for words.

Salty Salsa Dancing

It is easy to read a few hours away. Having our computer between the kitchen and living room is good when there are children in the house; but when one is in their own second childhood, the location is much too tempting. I was on my way to a different task but got side tracked by a well written priest.

The Salty Vicar's column in the SOMA Review was great fun to read. I can identify with his getting caught up in the moment of dancing, in or out of his collar. For this one time jitterbugging/schottishing country girl, his description of the dance was my own reverie of an unsophisticated time and place.

Cattle Gates and Buffalo

A trip home gives weeks of pleasant memories. Photos are a reminder of the sights seen, sweet prairie smells, the sound of a meadow lark.

High Plains Sunflowers

Coming home to Omaha on highway 20 which follows the Niobrara River is a beautiful drive. I had an opportunity to take a few photos of sunflowers and we stopped at the Museum of the Fur Trade: Traders, Trappers, and Indians. It is a marvelous place. It was good to learn more about the early American entrepreneurs.

I wish it were closer so I could spend more time in their book room.
The museum publishs books also. I learned that the Josephine Waggoner papers are in England being edited by a British historian, Kingsley Bray, and will be published by the Museum in a couple of years. The actual work of printing and binding is being done in China. That was an epiphany.

Josephine Waggoner was the grandmother of Carl Braine. "Hokshila Waste (Good Boy in the Sioux Language) was born in South Dakota on the Standing Rock Reservation, once the home of famed Hunkpapa Sioux leader Sitting Bull. In those days woman still carried their babies in shawls on their backs and from that high, snug place Carl watched his Teton Lakota grandmother stir big kettles of corn soup on an outdoor fire. When it rained or the wind blew, Carl's mother covered him completely and he bobbed along against his mother's warm back."

Looking Through Blue Windows

It is always good to go home for Labor Day to see friends, classmates, cousins, and have breakfast on the Lion's Club with the other Old Timers. Once again we hung two prints of my dad's paintings. While we were at the Harding County Museum, a group of cousins and friends took over a table and had a good visit.

I need to go there for a few days to read old newspapers for a writing project I am attempting, the biography of my Great Aunt Elizabeth. But before that I have a stack of papers from Aunt Liz's sons to go through. They take me back to my own childhood as she lived in the same end of town as we did. Actually the entire northwest end of town had been originally in my great-grandparent's name and so consequently there settled my grandmother and two of her brothers and two of her sisters as well as my parents. I grew up with about 14 cousins, mostly boys.

Our strange little house had windows Mumu Haivala brought from the Lead/Deadwood area and were concave and turning blue with age. I loved them; they were wonderful windows. I just bet the glass was beveled.

It is good for the soul to go home.

Good-Bye O.K.

A good neighbor and friend died Saturday morning. His funeral is tomorrow. We were awakened Saturday morning to the knock of an Omaha policeman, asking if we could come and stay with his wife until the mortuary fellows arrived. He wanted to die at home and he did.

O.K. was Oliver Kriss P., one of those best generation fellows that sailed the Pacific during WWII and the Korean war, manning the guns of the Destroyer, USS Brown. He was keen with dates, places and names and for 12 years he organized the Brown's Navy reunions. The Brown had docked in Hiroshima, Japan one month after the big bomb. O.K walked the streets of what remained of that city so shortly after the Enola Gay dropped the bomb that was the end of the war and the beginning of the Atomic Age.

O.K. always had a story ready and enjoyed a cup of coffee with a neighbor, I will miss him a lot.

Nebraska: The Good Life

A little swim, a little weeding, a little reading!

Knock, Knock, Who's There?

The knocking is on my forehead and I swear nobody's home. I wander around with no purpose except when I am in the pool with a brush chasing red algae. I log on and stare at a blank screen and wonder what I am doing.

I can't write so I hunt around for bloggers that make sense. I found three that I think are remarkable. First it was Hildred with her wonderful writing and beautiful photographs of her area in British Columbia; next it was a mother with five little boys reminding me what it was like to have five babies, although I only had four little boys; that blog's comments took me back to Omaha with Jeff who keeps our city safe and is a recently baptized Catholic convert. All three write so well and with such purpose. Sometimes maybe it is good to stop and read. Reading is good.

It is obvious to me that somebody is home out there.

Buffalo Commons Again

A cousin, Lawrence Brown, no longer living, wrote "Buffalo Commons Memoirs" in 1995. He spent a lot of pages on the debate of what should be 'done' with the Great Plains in the beginning of his book. He not only wrote to the Poppers, Frank who taught Environmental Studies at Rutgers University and Deborah who taught Urban Studies at New York University at the time, but he invited them out to his ranch in northwestern South Dakota to have a look at the land and people for themselves, which they did.

A Google alert led me to a hit this morning that starts "Summers are scorching and winters frigid. The wind whips through the grasslands year-round, its wailing adding to the hypnotic desolation of the Great Plains." Immediately under this statement is a photo of the animals of the Serengeti, while the text reads about our Great Plains and Kevin Costner's location of Dances With Wolves. How irritating I find it.

"It’s vindication of sorts for East Coast professors Frank Popper and his wife, Deborah Popper. The two were maligned by residents here for predicting 20 years ago that Plains population losses would be so dire that government one day would take over large expanses of the region and return them to their natural state by creating a “Buffalo Commons” — a national park where bison would roam." “Now, the Buffalo Commons has become a lot more plausible,” says Frank Popper, a land-use planner and professor at Rutgers University. “There are five to eight different ways this is all going on right now."

I found it interesting that the writer includes this statement of the location of my family reunion this summer. "Rural areas continue to grapple with young people leaving and old people dying. In Vale, a tiny town near Rapid City, S.D., the school closed and the Last Call Bar moved into the old schoolhouse. Alumni still gather there for reunions, owner Kathy Wood says. Weddings and banquets are held in the old gymnasium. Local children now are bused to a school 5 miles away."

My defensive feelings well up in me as I read through the article; it started with the zebra and gnu in the first picture and never got softened up by the last paragraph; "The Poppers are happy about the changes on the Plains."

“It’s got to be better economically,(Economic opportunities now include energy — oil wells are being drilled throughout the western Dakotas and investments in renewable energy sources (wind, solar) and bio-fuels are up — and tourism.) even if it’s a gamble, than the continued slow-leak decline,” Frank Popper says. “It’s got to be better than things like casinos, prisons and hazardous waste dumps. … What we’ve got is a Plan B for a region whose Plan A has been failing it for well over a century.”

This is probably true, albeit indelicately put by someone obviously not living in the area. I couldn't find the author. My name was required to leave a reply but I didn't know to whom I would be replying.

More Rocks

Sometimes He Who Must Be Obeyed brings gifts. On Monday I was ceremoniously presented two lighted rocks, one a rough pink quartz and one a single smoky quartz point; both are beautiful in their own right, but really quite spectacular when plugged in to sparkle our night wanderings.

That was the first; the second really set be back on my heels. He off loaded 400 pounds of South Dakota sandstone moss rock which he had hand picked, weighed, and then loaded into his pickup box. He actually handled the 400 pounds three times before I got my eyes on it.

Yesterday morning the minute HWMBO drove out to do his Omaha daughter duty, I got a little two wheeled appliance mover and hauled them over to a row of bushes beside a walk and proceeded to level the dirt and lay them in as orderly and logical manner as I could determine. I like the rocks, I like the results of my own sweat equity. The photos do not do them justice. They contain the color palette of my artist father's South Dakota landscapes.

And So It Goes

Kurt Vonnegut used the chorus "So it goes" every time a passage deals with death, dying or mortality, as a transitional phrase to another subject, as a reminder, and as comic relief. It is also used to explain the unexplained. There are 106 "so it goes" anecdotes laced throughout the story. (Slaughterhouse-Five)

This morning it all started with a blogger writing of the Zen of Picking Berries. Another of those in your blood things passed down by Finnish grandmothers, perhaps. We northwestern South Dakota berry pickers didn't have to stand in swamps to pick cloud berries, we stood in prairie creek bottoms, swatting our own brand of mosquitoes, jumping rattlesnakes, and eying poison ivy to fill our buckets with June berries, wild plum, chokecherry and later in the summer or early fall the buffalo berries that sweetened with the first frost. I can easily understand the zen of it.

Kurt Vonnegut wasn't the only author that intrigued me; when I read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," it was neither the mushroom experiment nor the repair of motorcycles that intrigued me, it was Pirsig's exploration of the meaning of the concept, "quality." He explored the term by assigning his Montana State University students the task of defining the word. Then he said it cannot be defined because it empirically precedes any intellectual construction and it (Quality or value)is the knife-edge of experience known to all. This is all out of wikipedia, and we don't know what that is worth. It fills space and so it goes.

Paralyzed by Hate Mail

Some letters should never be mailed. Our bi-polar daughter sent He Who Must Be Obeyed a 16 page letter detailing my parenting faults. A lot of hate for me was spewed out in it. Apparently she spent days on it as it was dated on various pages. "You sure picked a winner!" she told him.

She and her daughter agree on one thing; I am a mean, selfish, hateful woman. My working was among my wrongs. Apparently both of them would love to drum me right out of the family.

Have you, dear reader, ever experienced real hatred? It is difficult to get through day to day knowing that if you were not alive, it would make some people happy. I wonder if every person experiences this? If they do, I have never been told about it; if they don't, that must make me as horrible as the letters indicate. Am I the only hated person on the earth?

I wonder if I am being delusional and my perception is skewed. I was told to 'forget it.' Some insults are seared into ones brain and are not easily forgotten. I see that HWMBO burned the letter in a trash can. I dove in for the scraps of it this morning reading through and around the scorched and blackened uneven edges of the few pages that were left. I just wanted to see if what I had read a few days ago was real or my imagination. It was real. It was damning. How dare I set foot in church, sinner that I am, I was told by both of them.

Finnish Grandmothers

If it is in the Scientific American, must it be true? The article is "What Finnish Grandmothers Reveal about Human Evolution."

"The 33-year-old Finnish biologist, aided by genealogists, has pored through centuries-old tomes (and microfiche) for birth, marriage and death records, which ended up providing glimpses of evolution at work in humanity's recent ancestors. Among them: that male twins disrupt the mating potential of their female siblings by prenatally rendering them more masculine; mothers of sons die sooner than those of daughters, because rearing the former takes a greater toll; and grandmothers are important to the survival of grandchildren. "I'm trying to understand human reproductive behavior from an evolutionary perspective," Lummaa says."

"The evolutionary biologist has also used this historical data set to ponder the conundrum of grandmothers. That is, why human women often live long after they are able to reproduce (on average around the age of 50), unlike almost all other animals. "If your ultimate purpose in life was to create as many offspring as possible or pass off as many genes," Lummaa says, "it's kind of strange that human women stop halfway."..."That suggests that perhaps one reason why women do carry on living is because they are able to help."

Me here again: What an irony to have sons, destroy your immune system, die sooner; but not before you help, or raise, the grandchildren. It is interesting that Lumma theorizes that it is the testosterone flooding the womb to make boys that destroys ones immune system. The article was interesting.

Lummaa has now turned her attention to the effect of grandfathers on grandchildren. If grandmothers improve survival odds, what do elderly males contribute? "If anything there's a negative effect," she says. This could be because of the cultural tradition of catering to men, particularly old men. "Maybe if you had an old grandpa, he was eating your food," she speculates.