My Christmas….and Easter….Cactus               

Every year, my great-grandmother’s Christmas cactus decides to display a few blooms in honor of Easter. I like to think that it knows that Easter was the fulfillment of Christmas. This year, the blooms have appeared early. But what can one expect? For a cactus to read the calendar? When has Easter ever been this late? My cactus and I are ready for it now!

Knowing of my interest in the old people, places and things of the Ozarks, folks sometimes come up to me to say, “I know something [or some place or someone] you should see.” They proceed to give me directions and I mentally take notes, hoping that a rare free afternoon will soon occur, allowing the opportunity for a jaunt into the past. Sunday afternoons are often the best times for these adventures. And although this past weekend was cold and rainy and even a little icy at times, by mid-afternoon yesterday the weather had faired off enough to lure us out on the trail of a discovery.

One-room schoolhouses are of special interest to me. While once they were numerous and ordinary throughout these hills, now they are scarce and becoming scarcer. So when an older fellow said this one was worth a visit, I could hardly rest until it was found.

But what he didn’t say was that we were to be doubly rewarded. As we tooled down what we hoped was the correct dirt road, the sight of this old house made me exclaim, “Stop! Oh, farmboy, would you look at that? Isn’t that beautiful?”

No, the house itself isn’t beautiful in any architectural or aesthetic sense, but the setting and the color and the drifts of golden daffodils and the singing spring branch flowing beside it all combined to create the homiest, sweetest houseplace ever.

He sighed, brought the truck to a halt, and patiently picked up a farm magazine to read while I trespassed.

Yes, I admit that I am given to trespassing, when a place like this presents itself. So without hesitation I climbed the fence and, camera in hand, boldly proceeded to get up close. Should I feel that it is wrong to thus break the law? Possibly. But I cannot summon up any guilt. I try to imagine what the current owner would think. He/she surely would not mind for pictures being taken. I touch nothing, not even a flower, but I stand and listen and wonder about the family that lived here, the woman who undoubtedly planted the daffodils and arranged the flat rocks around the perimeter of the square bed they now ignore. There is an almot tangible feeling of contentment and peace here. They were happy, I think, the family whose home it was.

I turn to walk back to my patiently-waiting chauffeur and, glancing off to the north, I see her….a ghost, across the spring branch, standing on a little rise, almost hidden in a tangle of vines and brambles. The old schoolhouse has been watching me the whole time!

So once again, the breaking of the law happens.(I hope no local sheriffs or law-enforcement people are reading this, for a written confession would condemn me if I am brought to court.) Since he spent his early years in a one-room school, this trek holds interest for the farmboy, and off we go.

The little rushing creek must be crossed, and he kindly places a stepping stone in the middle for me. I bravely (read: clumsily) leap and make it across with minimally wet feet, and we climb up the rise to the abandoned school.

Thanks to a good, sound roof, the old building is in pretty good shape. It is nicely built, with a pretty belfry on top.

Though the bell is long gone, it is easy to imagine how it rang through this valley and surrounding hills, calling generations of children to come and learn.

The pump is a Chandler, and if it was primed, I’ll bet it would still work. It looks like a sentinel, still standing at attention after years and years of service, guarding this old place.

Inside, there are echoes of this school’s working days. The old cupboard, now a home to rats, once held supplies.

This crooked bookshelf …

once held a small but mighty library, a window on the world for backwoods children in early times. The old flue…

carried away woodsmoke from a stove that has since disappeared. And the blackboard…

this blackboard could surely tell stories if it could talk, stories of ABCs and 123s, ciphering matches, lessons learned. Do you know that blackboards are no longer a part of the classroom? They’ve been replaced, first by dryboards and now by smartboards. But in those earlier days, they were the teacher’s handiest tool.

Modern schools are vastly different, in every way, from this ancestor…

whose benches and desks once held all eight grades together. It’s hard to imagine how it worked from today’s vantage point. But if you ask anyone who attended one of these old one-room schools, they will tell you they got a first-rate education there, one that prepared them well for the future.

Once our discovery has been made and examined and captured in memory and on film, we set off for home. I feel satisfied at having found the old school; the old house was just icing on the cake. And there is a twinge of sadness, of letdown–

But wait! Remember how that fellow said there was another old school…and the cemetery where his Civil War-veteran grandfather is buried? And that spring with all the watercress and the old springhouse?

Stay tuned…

Sunday was a perfect day for being outside. Celebrating the first day of Spring on the farm…we couldn’t think of a better way than fishing in the farm pond. So after some post-church naps, we were off!

Our transportation…we didn’t go far in the back of the truck…just around the corner and up the hill a little bit, to the lake….

Wyatt couldn’t wait to wet a line…

and Addie was right behind….

She caught her first fish!

“I don’t want to touch it!”

Kristen, the star of the day, employed her expert skills to help Wyatt pull this one in.

The other five Kristen caught were bigger than this perch (it’s there…look closely)…

It took a while, but Derek finally pulled in a keeper.

Sus inherited her mother’s fish-catching ability–she had fun watching, though.

Two buddies….Poppy patiently showed Wyatt how to hold a catfish without getting “horned.”

And that stringer-ful was quickly turned into supper, at just about the exact hour Ole Man Winter was leaving and Sweet Spring was making her appearance, which we happily applauded…and that was our celebration!

There is a fine line between boasting and simply stating facts. I am certain of one thing–my subjects of this writing would not like anyone boasting about them. So let’s get it straight: I’m stating facts, plain and simple. And maybe, to keep me out of trouble, you won’t tell them I wrote this. Let’s just keep it between us, okay? 

I’d like to introduce you to the women of the Prayer Shawl Ministry in my church. If you like to sit and knit or crochet or embroider or quilt, then you’d fit right in with them, for that is what they do when they gather twice each month. They also manage to squeeze in a little visiting, eating, praying and world-problem-solving while they’re at it. But those activities are secondary to the serious business at hand, which is what they are creating.

Prayer shawls are why this group was begun and they were the first order of business when the women began meeting last spring. Patterns were procured, yarn was rounded up, purchased and donated, and needles began to fly. Soon, the women learned an amazing thing. As soon as a shawl begins to take shape, someone–someone–needs it. And then the race is on to finish it and get it wrapped around the shoulders that need to feel the warmth of its embrace. Newborn babies, cancer patients, those grieving…the reasons to give a prayer shawl to someone are limitless. And without exception, the recipients feel the love and prayers that go into the making of these items.

When the holidays rolled around, the women decided to broaden their outlook. They created hand-sewn Christmas stockings, filled them with all sorts of goodies, and then made warm, soft scarves, hats, slippers and other things for more than thirty senior citizens in our area who are home-bound.

Since the new year began, a new focus appeared on the horizon. And today more than two dozen sweet knitted or crocheted hats, to warm and lovingly bless the heads of little ones, were delivered to the local health department, for the nurses to distribute to families who participate in their programs.

Also, two handmade, hand-quilted baby quilts, a lovely crocheted baby blanket and a darling little hand-sewn dolly will go to…just the right ones who need them. We don’t know who…and we don’t know why. We just know it will be right.

When I look into these faces, I see angels. I see selfless love. I see kindness and character and goodness.

I’m not boasting, remember. Just the facts, ma’am.

Who do you think you are…and why should you care?

Reality shows are positively taking over the airways. Since that long-ago premiere episode of “Survivor,” which seemed so unusual and unlikely a topic for a television series, we’ve moved on to being able to choose from a veritable smorgasbord of people who seek the limelight. Want to peek in the window and see how the worst sort of hoarders live? Or suffer along with parents trying to juggle six toddlers going through the terrible twos, all screaming at once? How about witnessing the incredible angst of being so young, beautiful and rich that everyone is envious of you? Bless their hearts, life is challenging, and they just have to say those bad words. Then there are those folks who are fatally attracted to animals. Some….no, a lot of this stuff is just plain weird. Wannabe tycoons will seemingly do anything for power…or is it seeing themselves on television that is the real attraction? Large-size people suddenly don’t mind taking off their clothes for the camera, showing us way more than we wanted to know about how much weight they need to lose….in the next 16 weeks. Right. Honestly, it seems like there is no dignity left when dollars are dangled in front of these….participants.

I sound like I know what I’m talking about, but the truth is I’ve never watched a whole episode of any of those shows. Never watched Survivor or Kate and her bunch, with or without Jon, never stepped on the scales with the losers, never gagged at the squalor people choose to reveal inside their homes, don’t really care about the guy with 16 wives or the folks with 30 kids. This stuff they call “reality” just does not feel like entertainment to me.

But someone has finally come up with one reality show that has me hooked, but good. On Friday nights at 7:00 p.m., I’m glued to the television, watching celebrities find out fascinating things about their heritage on the show, “Who Do You Think You Are?” It’s not the celebrities who are the attraction for me; although they’ve chosen to highlight people who are popular and interesting, it could be any ordinary Tom, Dick or Mary on there as far as I’m concerned. I’m watching to see how they do it and what they discover because I want to do it, too!

It’s sort of ironic that new technology (zoom to the future) has revolutionized the ways in which we can find out about history (blast to the past). The show is sponsored by Ancestry.com, a web-business that allows its members to access its wealth of online records about the past. Census data, birth, marriage and death records, military service and immigration information–all these are some of the collections available, and they can literally be at your fingertips. Where once it required a trip to a musty courthouse basement to find a heavy tome filled with a county’s homestead records, now one can simply type into a search engine and in a matter of seconds know that one’s great-great-grandfather proved up 160 acres and had a document signed by someone like Theodore Roosevelt or James Buchanan to show for it. Heady stuff.

But why bother? Who cares about a great-great-grandmother who bore seven children and died when the eighth was born? Or about an uncle who shouldered a musket in a long-ago tragic war? Why would anyone want to understand the rationale behind leaving the comfort and security of home to head west in search of riches in the gold fields–or just a new life? Can we understand, in the midst of living in the twenty-first century, what it was like to be a pioneer…when western Missouri was the western frontier?

For me, it started with an envelope. A scrap of paper that my dad’s cousin picked up, in answer to my naive question, “Do you know anything about our family’s history?” He smiled and on the back of that used envelope began to sketch out for me a simple graph of our shared family line. He started with his mother and my grandad, who were brother and sister, and then he added their parents, and then their parents, and on back and farther back–and suddenly it was a little tree with roots reaching all the way to the American Revolution. My family tree. And it had names on it–magical sounding names that belonged to my people. I wondered about them from that moment on. I wanted to know them.

Why did my great-grandfather choose to become a printer? Did he, like me, love words? What was it like for his father, a doctor ministering to Union soldiers in the Civil War, to move from Pennsylvania to Illinois to Missouri? Did it seem that he had left real civilization behind? Who was the woman behind the haunting eyes in the faded photograph of my great-great-grandmother? She inspired me to give my daughter her name, even though I never knew her. Could I know more about her than the fact that she was pretty, even in old age?

These are all questions I want to answer, but still the bigger question remains: Why? What does it matter? I think it matters because very often who we are is influenced by who they were. I do not think it is an accident that my father-in-law loved his work. When I talked with him about his predecessors, I learned that his father and grandfather before him were also well known as hard workers, men who took great pride in the work of their hands and found satisfaction in the fruits of their labors. I do not think it is by happenstance that my daughter devotes herself so fully to her job as a teacher, a role in which she thrives; although she never knew them, several of her great-grandparents and grandparents were well-respected educators. And when I kneel down to plant seeds in the ground or take up a start of heirloom peonies from an old, abandoned houseplace, I can almost feel my granny looking over my shoulder, encouraging me to not set them too deep–or to tamp the soil down just so. She never said that me during her lifetime; I just know it.

People argue over which is more influential–genetics or environment. Those who are strictly scientific might say that the behaviors I’ve described are learned, rather than transmitted through the genes. But I don’t buy that. If scientists can prove that people are genetically predisposed to certain negative things, then surely the same can be true of the positives. I just know…in my blood…that Granny gave me her love for gardening and growing things. I know that my husband’s love of agriculture is a part of him, as much as his dark hair and large hands. And this is why we live the life we do today, pure and simple. 

Genealogy is about blood–and it gets in your blood. Finding out about one’s ancestors allows you to solve mysteries, put together puzzles, and have the satisfaction of filling in the blanks. Sometimes you search and dig and look high and low and finally must accept that there are unanswerable questions, puzzle pieces that don’t fit or mysteries that, at the end of the day, must remain unsolved. Not every clue leads to a solution, and sometimes fiction is clothed as fact, leading the searcher far astray. Nevertheless, once begun, this journey cannot be abandoned. One does not give up, and I’ll probably go to my grave wondering…still wondering…was that James Taber the one I think he was? And if he was, whatever happened to him? Why does he simply disappear from the face of the earth? Is there one more little thing I’ve overlooked, one more land record I could find or spelling of his name that I could try. Perhaps if I go back to Forsyth, to the genealogy room in their library, and look through the old newspapers once again I will find something… that one little something….