Fletcher family

Minnie Alice 

~ Sharon Abbott ~ Leave a comment

When I was little I thought my sister Minnie was a queen. She was beautiful and tall and regal and comported herself with the air of someone who should rule over a kingdom – not a farm or a feedlot. By the time I knew her, she wore her strawberry blonde hair in a french twist and dressed with the style and class of someone born to royalty. Nothing made me happier than when someone in the family would say, “You look like your sister Minnie.”  But of course, I didn’t.  I was short, had an unruly mass of dark auburn hair, and was lucky if my socks matched on any given day.  But still . . .  it was something to which I aspired.

This queen-like woman who dressed and carried herself with such class was a child of the Great Depression. Born in 1931, she was the fourth of the five children my parents were struggling to feed and clothe with no job and no money. When I was in grade school I mentioned to my mother that Minnie always had such beautiful clothes. “It wasn’t always the case,” she said. “When she was your age she had two dresses to her name. I would wash one out at night so she always had one clean to wear to school.”

I learned from watching my sister what it meant to care for people, how to make them feel special and noticed. She did this so well. Maybe it started for her in high school when her boyfriend, an athletic young man and star of the football team came down with a virus. Before it was over, the entire team would be diagnosed with Polio. . .  a terrible disease which left  many of them with life-long paralysis and disabilities. Minnie married that high school football star and with the aid of crutches, braces, and then a cane, Charles was able to lead a normal life. She was a big part of that “normal life” part. She remained steadfast and strong throughout, as well as later in his life when he lost mobility of his legs and feet due to post polio syndrome. She was his rock for 58 years.

 What I remember about Charles from my childhood is that he was witty and smart and his sarcasm was often lost on me. He tended to scare me a little and to hurt my feelings. But Minnie was always attuned to the moment and knew when maybe he had pushed it too far and she cleverly and carefully diverted the conversation to something safer. She was like that.

Minnie was one of the most generous people I have ever known. With her time, with her money, and with her attention. I don’t think many months went by that she didn’t drive the eight hours from her farm in Nebraska to our house in Colorado to visit my mother, my sister Lola, and me. She took us out to eat, a rare treat in those days, took my mother to run errands, and took me to buy a new dress for the first day of school or whatever the need was. One Christmas she bought me a HUGE pink stuffed poodle for my bed (something I would never have asked for because of the expense I imagined it would incur).  She asked my mother for her engagement ring setting which had been long been missing its ruby stone and for years had sat naked in Mom’s jewelry box because she could not bear to part with it. Minnie retuned it to her with a new ruby on the next Mother’s Day. She took me shopping for a rocking chair for my high school graduation because she knew I would always need a rocking chair. And the list goes on.

Sometimes her generosity combined with the age gap could create an awkward moment. Paul remembers the time we made a trip to Nebraska for a visit after we were married. We had accompanied Minnie to the grocery store. As we were waking through the aisles, Minnie reached in her purse and pulled out a quarter which she gave to Paul, “Do you want a soda out of the machine?”  “How old does she think I am? Ten?” Maybe twelve, I told him.  

But perhaps the best gift she gave me was her daughter Shirley – one year younger than I. Our worlds were vastly different, yet we were fast friends. Shirley lived on a farm and loved all things outdoorsy, animals, and non-domestic. When Minnie and Charles moved from a house in town to the farm, Shirley was delighted – the farm came with a 30 year old horse named Sugar. Minnie became a 4-H leader and immediately signed her daughter up for” Let’s Cook,”  “Let’s Sew” and “Let’s Groom Your Room” in an attempt to get her off the horse and out of the corrals. Shirley told me once, “I can still picture the old kitchen curtains she gave me to make my quick-trick skirt. I immediately saved my allowance money and paid a fellow member to do my sewing so I could pursue my trick riding.”

When Shirley came to visit me, her mother took us shopping and to Baskin Robbins. Without fail. We rode our bikes to the little store and got Cokes and Dreamcicles and Archie and Veronica comic books and came home to lie on my bed with the big pink poodle and read our newly purchased comic books. And my mother made her peach cobbler because it was her favorite and we pretended we were sisters instead of aunt and niece. 

Shirley had a brother thirteen months younger than her. When he was in first grade his teacher told him he couldn’t come back to school until he had learned to write his first and last name. So Minnie sat him down at the kitchen table one Saturday afternoon and told him he wasn’t leaving that table until he could write Phil Smith on the paper in front of him. After a long and trying session he had mastered the assignment. But as he got up to leave she heard him say under his breath, “I’m just glad my name isn’t Marjorie Spikelmier”.  I’m sure my sister was just as glad. This was the same Phil Smith who climbed the water tower of their small town the week before his high school graduation and spray painted his name on it in huge black letters. When called to the principal’s office and asked to explain himself, his defense was, “Do you think I would be dumb enough to paint my OWN name up there?” Apparently the principal thought exactly that because  Phil was expelled and not allowed to graduate with his class. Instead he could attend graduation at a school in another small town a few miles away.  “Okay,” his mother told him, “but YOU will be the one to call your grandmother who put in for vacation for this date a year ago and tell her you will be graduating next weekend instead.” It would seem Minnie was as afraid of my mother as I was.

Minne, Shirley, and Phil

Eventually Charles and Minnie left Nebraska for Texas. where the weather was warmer and it was easier on Charles. They owned and operated a feed lot there until they retired, moved to an apartment building for seniors and purchased a camper which they used to  to visit the coastal areas of Padre Island, Corpus Christi, Brownsville, and many other places in Texas and Florida.  Minnie was nothing if not flexible. 

That apartment is where I went to visit her before she died. Our sister Lila and I flew to Texas to see her when Shirley had called to say, “If you’re coming, you might want to come now:” No sooner had we stepped through the door than she led us into her bedroom. “Come in here, girls. There’s something I need to show you.”  She pulled out the ruby ring which my mother had left to her when she died.  “Sherry, you should have this.” She put my mother’s gold wedding band in my sister’s hand. “And Lila, you take this.” 

It was during that visit as I listened to Minnie and Lila and Charles reminisce about growing up together and the pranks my brothers played on them and the stories they told about a time and a place and people who were not a part of my story, that I learned more about her than I had ever known in all the years before. 

my last visit with her

I loved my sister. But what I discovered as i grew to adulthood is that I didn’t really know her. I had not grown up with her as had my brothers and sisters – had not shared their stories of poverty, of hardship, of war and life on a Nebraska farm. And she was not quick to share any of that. What I came to realize is that Minnie was a very private person. She simply did not talk much about her life or herself. When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she did not share that information with her daughter, her sisters, or as far as I know anyone but her husband. No one knew when she had a mastectomy or reconstructive surgery. It was not until her doctor told her, “You really have to tell your daughter and sisters; they need that information”, that she shared it with us. When the cancer later returned as bone and then brain cancer, I learned it from our older sister. I called Minnie. “I’m so sorry,” I told her. There was a long pause. “Sherry, I’m so scared.” It was the most vulnerable I had ever known her to be and it broke my heart. 

When Shirley was in fifth grade, her P.E. teacher once had this woman –  the one with the perfect posture, the perfect way of walking through the world, the perfect sense of elegance – to  come to class to teach the girls to walk with style and grace. “Like Minnie.”  She was as close as our family got to royalty.  

She loved being a grandmother.
my mother and five of us
Minnie & Charles, Irvin & Joyce, Lila & me

“You look just like your sister.”
I could do worse.

Thank you to my niece Shirley for sharing stories and details about her mother’s life which helped in the writing of this piece. It helped me to know my sister better and I hope to do justice to her story. 

The Maker and the Keeper of My Memories

~ Sharon Abbott ~ 1 Comment

Lila and the boys

“I, Lila Rae Fletcher Gradisar, was born Nov. 21, 1926, on a farm in Hayes County Nebraska about 6 miles east of Wauneta. I was the first daughter and second child of six children of Hazel Barnes Fletcher and Ray Fletcher. I was born at home . . .  in a very small house having a room which was used for kitchen, dining room and living room and two bedrooms. My earliest memories are of taking our Sat. night bath in a wash tub in front of the kitchen stove. The water of course had to be pumped by hand and carried inside and heated on the stove.”

Thus begins one of my sister Lila’s accounts of her childhood and our family history. When she died in 2013 at the age of 86, we discovered pages and pages of her writings in a trunk in her house. Many were handwritten in Big Chief tablets, some were typed on a typewriter, all contained details of a life and a family that would otherwise have been lost. It was after I returned home from that trip that I started to record and preserve these and other stories that might some day be of interest to my children and grandchildren. 

She wrote of what it was like to be a child, growing up during the Great Depression. Of the struggles my parents had when they lost the farm and struggled to feed their family. Of her first day of school in the one room school house and how she cried when the school burned down over Christmas vacation because now how would she ever learn to read? Of what it did to my family when my brother Don was missing in action in World War II. Of the fear and uncertainty they lived with during the Polio Epidemic. And she wrote of my father’s last days and words before his death in 1954 after a car accident left him paralyzed and lying in a hospital for sixteen days while she and my sister and mother sat by his side. All of this gives me insight into where I come from. And I am in her debt.

My memories of her come much later than any of these stories.

After my father’s death, my mother and sister Lola and I moved to Pueblo, Colorado, where Lila lived with her husband and family and worked as a nurse. Lila’s original plan had been to move to Denver after her high school graduation to attend nursing school, but she delayed this by a year to support her parents as they waited on news about my brother. However, when Don returned home from the War, she was off to live her dream. By the time we arrived, she was well established in her career.

The day after she finished nursing school, she married Tony – the tall, good looking guy she had met on a blind date the year before. The tall part was important to her since she was tall herself. And even after age had put a few pounds on him and grayed her once auburn hair, she always called him Slim and he called her Red. They were married 52 years.

Tony’s parents were first generation Americans who immigrated from Yugoslavia, whose first language was not English, who ate foods the Fletcher clan had never heard of (It was from her mother-in-law that Lila learned to make the Potica that has been a part of every holiday gathering I can remember) and they were Catholic. But whatever conversations came before, by the time Lila decided to marry her tall, good looking guy, my parents had made their peace with it.  

In a letter to my mother explaining her engagement she wrote:

“I was just thinking the other day how disappointing kids must be to their folks. You work like heck for years to get your kids through school, then instead of getting a job and supporting themselves for awhile they get some crazy idea like going to school for three more years.You think now after this is over they can really make something of themselves etc. so as a last straw they get married the day after they finish. Gee this all could be so much different. You could refuse to speak to me and make a big fuss about it. I want you to know how much I appreciate you being so swell about it …“

Much later Mom told her, “I’m glad you and Tony are of the same religion and are raising your kids in the church. I wish we could have done that.” My mother was a Methodist and Dad was Church of Christ, but apparently “church” was not something they did together as a family. By embracing her husband’s rich Eastern European culture and faith, she brought together their two backgrounds and her children were better for it, as were we all.

In Lila’s writings I see the woman I came to know much later in her story:  tenacious yet gracious; determined yet flexible; deeply committed to family and also to her career and her community; selfless yet understanding of the need to take care of herself; and a life-long learner. 

Like the little girl who cried when her school burned down, she never lost her love of learning.

In her retirement, she traveled with senior groups to places all over the world, staying in “elder hostels”. She joined a women’s investment group and learned the stock market. When her aging joints complained about her continued participation in the Senior Running Club, she contacted the local Agency on Aging to ask why Pueblo didn’t have a program for Senior Walkers. “Because no one has started it.” And so of course the Senior Challenge Walkers was born. She believed that the camaraderie and friendships were as important as the exercise “and of course, the nice breakfasts”. When she was no longer able to be a part of the walking part, she still met club members for breakfast after their walks.

My sister never learned to swim – if I remember correctly she had a terrible fear of the water, perhaps stemming back to being thrown into the lake by our brothers to “teach her to swim”. But in her 40’s she was determined to learn, so she signed up for the beginners adult swimming class at the local pool. After one four week session she had made very little progress. The end of the second session found her no further along. She registered for the third session. When the instructor saw her walk in he sighed. “Lady, you don’t need a swimming instructor, you need a psychiatrist!” But learn to swim she did – at least enough to feel comfortable in the pool with her grandkids.

She started attending her first Bible study in her 70’s.

When her son moved to Washington state and started having children, she researched how to stay connected to grandchildren who live far away. How do you even do that kind of research before the internet?! But she was the most connected grandmother I ever knew.

She took a course through the county (one of many she did over the years) about recording your memories and this is when she began writing the papers that we later found in the trunk.

I remember one year showing up at her house for a Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. Up to this point holidays had always meant that the women spent the day in the kitchen cooking and cleaning up, the men spent the day in the family room watching sports or napping, and the kids did whatever they chose. This year Lila was standing at the door with a bowl of folded up papers, with a task written on each one : set the table, bring the chairs up from the basement, clear the table, wash the pots and pans, load the dishwasher, put away the leftovers, sweep the floor. . . and so it went. And nobody got by her without taking a paper. She just woke up one day and decided – this is crazy! Things have got to change. And so she changed them.

Like I said – a life long learner.

Lila had five kids, one a year older than me. We grew up together and though we lived on opposite sides of town and attended different schools, we spent a lot of time together. All my childhood Christmases and Thanksgiving were spent at their house. She would often stop on her way home from work on a Friday and take me to her house for the weekend where I would have playmates. Any “vacations” I took as a child were with them – usually to Nebraska to visit family but once we went to a cabin up in the mountains for a week. One summer the boys worked really hard selling  magazine subscriptions  to earn their way to a summer camp. But when it came time to go, they backed out so my niece Kay and I got a free week at sleep away camp.  I’m not sure we really liked it all that much but when we got home we were quick to tell the boys how great it was! 

She got me my first job the year before I started ninth grade – nannying for a friend of hers with five kids under the age of six. She helped me make craft kits and games to play with the kids to keep them entertained. I would stay at Lila’s during the week and she would take me to my job and pick me up and then take me home on the weekend. I don’t know if I ever worked harder at a job in my life. But with my earnings I bought myself a new dress that my mother would never have bought for me because it was so expensive and wore it  to my first day of Junior High and I could not have been more proud.  

When my nineteen year old, newly engaged self announced that I was getting married, my sister Minnie came from Nebraska and she and Lila jumped into the wedding planning – I’m sure to spare my my mother. “Where is the wedding going to be?” they asked. I explained we would be married at the church Paul and I were attending. “How big is it?” Plenty big. “How many guests? Hmmmm, maybe 100. 150 tops. (I think 200 showed up) “Where will the reception be?” The church basement. And this is where the sisters exchanged worried glances and suggested we go take a look. The church basement had a few small Sunday School rooms around the perimeter of a small “Fellowship Hall” that fit maybe 50 people. Minnie said, “Oh, Sherry, this won’t work. Let’s look for a reception venue somewhere nearby.” No. We’ll do it here. There were other suggestions made and I vetoed them all. Then Lila said, “Sharon, we cannot have the reception here. This is not an option.” To which I said, “Fine. We can have it at your house.” And that’s how it came to pass that Lila spent the summer of 1969 repainting, re-carpeting, and redecorating her house. A house, by the way that was NO where big enough to accommodate the guests. If it had not been a beautiful September evening where all the people congregated and mingled outside, I have no idea what would have happened. God bless her. And I’m sorry.

Her legacy

I asked one of her daughters what she thought her mom would name as her greatest accomplishment. “I think she’d say it was raising kids who all like each other and became friends. And her bond with her grandchildren. ” I would agree. I love that every Sunday her kids, even to this day, get together for breakfast. I could wish for no better legacy.

Someone once said to me, “When I watched her with Nick. I was sure he was her favorite. But then I watched her with Ray, and I thought – no he’s the favorite. Until I saw her with Kay or Greg or Mary Jean. And finally I realized – they were ALL her favorite.” I hope somebody will say that about me someday.

She was the keeper (and the maker) of my memories. She told me stories of our family before I was a part of it:  the events that shaped my parents into the people they became and who my father was before he died and my mother before she grew old. She told me stories so that I would know who my siblings were as children and she included me in her own tribe of five, making a place for me and trying to help me find an identity in a family where my siblings were the age of my friend’s parents and my nieces and nephews were more like cousins.

By watching her I learned that it’s not okay to settle. That you have to fight for the life that you want whether it means leaving your small town and striking out for the big city to become a nurse, being a working mom before it was in vogue, or learning to swim and ski after you retire. She taught me that you do the right thing – even when it’s hard or inconvenient: caring for an aging mother, a handicapped sister, a grandchild in need  of a fresh start. She taught me  to embrace tradition and welcome new adventures.

She was the nurse who helped my mother birth me into this world and one who knew my story from the beginning.  And now it is left to finish the story without her.

I Wish . . .

~ Sharon Abbott ~ 1 Comment

We both had red hair – a dark auburn really. Much like our mother’s, I think. She had brown eyes; I had blue. We grew up in the same family; sort of. She lived out her childhood in a family with both a mother and a father in the home, surrounded by four siblings only a few years older than she. From the age of four, after my father’s death, I grew up in a home with a single mom and her:  a sister seventeen years older than me. She was born in the middle of the Great Depression and I was born at the beginning of what some called the Golden Age – the 1950’s.  We shared a home, a family background, and genetics but though I know ABOUT her, I really didn’t  know HER. And that’s on me.

This was the five of them.
And then there were the two of us.

Her name was Lola Irene. I have no idea why she was given that name – maybe because my mother liked the sound of it. I do know that it wasn’t until years later that my mother realized she had done the very thing she disparaged my grandmother for. My dad’s name was Ray. He had a brother named Roy. My mother told me, “I wondered why anybody would be so stupid as to give two boys in the same family such similar names. It led to no end of confusion – for everybody!” Then one day – when it was too late to do anything about it – she realized she had done the same thing with two of her daughters: Lila and Lola. I think after that she always cut my grandmother some slack.

When Lola was five days old she contracted whooping cough. She ran a high fever for days and though my parents prayed fervently, they did not expect their baby to survive. They would not have been the first family they knew to lose an infant to one of the many diseases that every parent of that generation feared. But at last the fever broke; their baby had survived. It would not be until later that they would understand the aftermath: the high fever plus the whooping cough had caused brain damage resulting in permanent physical, intellectual, and developmental disabilities.

As a child, my sister often experienced petit mal seizures, though neither the doctors nor my parents understood what these were. They grew used to her “spells” as they called them: periods of time where she stared into space unseeing and unaware of her surroundings. Nobody thought much of it; maybe she’s daydreaming, they said. It wasn’t until she was 20 that she had her first grand mal seizure and was diagnosed with epilepsy. Though medication (which could have terrible side-effects) kept them somewhat under control for periods of time, these seizures would worsen and continue for the rest of her life and became debilitating and dangerous.

Our older sister Lila had moved from Nebraska to Denver a year out of high school to attend nursing school. There she met her husband and they settled in a town south of Denver – Pueblo, Colorado. I think it was in the fall of 1953, Lila brought her children home to the farm for a visit. Lola was sick and getting sicker every day with fever and terrible muscle aches. Lila insisted they take her to a hospital about an hour away. It was there they diagnosed her with polio and she had her first grand mal seizure which led to the diagnosis of epilepsy. It was a scary time for all of them, but once again Lola pulled through and though the polio left her limbs weaker, she suffered no paralysis. Because we are all shaped by our stories, I think this is the reason that I am a believer in vaccines. My sister Minnie’s husband also contracted polio as a teenager and as a result wore a brace and walked with a cane the rest of his life. Neither the whooping cough nor the polio vaccine were available to them; I’m glad they were for my children.

My sister Lila was home for a visit. My brother was home from Korea and the family wanted a picture. The next day, Lola
( top row far left) would be taken to the hospital and diagnosed with Polio.

I don’t know when I learned all of these details. Somewhere along the way, I’m sure my mother shared them with me to help me understand why Lola needed extra care and why she couldn’t do all the things other grown ups could. Why she couldn’t live by herself or drive a car or get a job. Why things that seemed easy and effortless to me were harder for her. Back then we used the word handicapped. Today we would say disabled, a term I have only recently learned the disabled community prefers to special needs. It’s interesting to me that so often terms that start out as a straightforward definition become loaded and stigmatized until they are avoided altogether and replaced with something new until later reclaimed by the community. 

In 1954, after my father’s death, my mother moved with Lola and me to Pueblo where she could find work to support us while being near Lila. After the first year or so we bought a two bedroom house near the hospital where Mom had procured a job as a cook. My mother and Lola shared one bedroom and I had the other to myself. It never once occurred to me why this was the arrangement, and I never thought to ask. But now I wonder – how did that feel to a 22 year old woman to be sharing a room with her mother?  But I never remember her complaining – though I’m sure if the tables had been turned, I would have raised all kinds of hell.  

This picture had to be taken shortly after we moved to Pueblo. We all have that dear-in-the-headlights look.

I remember there was a period of time when my sister had an unofficial job. She was a companion for a lady in a wheelchair and she would go to her house and fix her lunch and hang out with her so the woman, whose name was Esther, didn’t have to be alone all day. And sometimes from time to time I would go with her and we would put together puzzles and Esther let me use her typewriter and I felt so grown up. Did I ever tell my sister that?  Did I ever tell her I appreciated that she let me do that?  I don’t think I did.

Later she worked at the Goodwill. She seemed happy there. Maybe she felt like it was a real job and she was doing real work. She got a paycheck and money of her own and she made friends. I don’t know how long she worked there or why it ended. My guess is that the seizures made it difficult and my mother was anxious about it. I never asked her and we never talked about it.

The truth is, I don’t really remember talking to her much at all. As I got a little older I think I  felt like we didn’t have much in common.  I had my friends and my life  and her life was so . . .  different than mine. I couldn’t relate to her and I didn’t try and that’s on me.  

I have very little memory of what anyone got me for a wedding present except this:  Lola gave me a little Correlle teapot. She knew I liked tea. I have no idea how she knew that except she clearly paid more attention to me than I did to her. When I got married and moved out, I know that was a hard time for her – not because she missed ME really, but I think she felt like she wanted her own place and she wanted her own life, too, And she didn’t want to live with her mother forever.  My mom knew her daughter could never live on her own and she would not put her in a “home” as she had seen others do with their “handicapped” children. But Lola persisted. 

I don’t know it for a fact but I am guessing that it was Lila who persuaded my mother that Lola needed something different and that she deserved to live as independently as she possibly could. I’m sure there were also hard conversations where Lila made my mother come to grips with the fact that Mom would not always be around to take care of her daughter. . .  and then what?  So Lila started looking and they found a place in Colorado Springs – only 30 minutes away from Pueblo – where Lola could live in a little apartment but there were people there to look in and help when needed. And if the time ever came – which it did – that she needed more care, she could move into another wing where more supervision and care would be provided. It was the right call and even I knew she was happy in this place, surrounded by friends and activities she could be a part of. Lila and her family often visited, and she lived out her days in this way to the age of 60 – well loved and well cared for.

Out of all my siblings, Lola is the only one I ever shared a home with. I should have known her better than any of the others. But I didn’t. I simply didn’t take the time or make the effort to learn about her and her life. And I am the poorer for it. My mother used to say to me, “I don’t understand how she stays so happy and so positive with everything she’s had to deal with in her in life, but she does.” I wish I had asked her about her life and her stories and her memories. I wish I had made the effort to see the world through her lens. I wish I had included her more. I wish I had taken her for a ride in my new car when I came home with my driver’s license. I wish I had asked her to be part of my wedding. I wish after I moved out of state, I had sent her pictures of my babies and called her on her birthday. I wish I had been a better sister and a better human.

Because what I know now as a grandmother of some awesome kids with disabilities is that I am the poorer for not having shared more of life with my disabled sister. She had so much to teach me. And I had so much to learn.

My beautiful, auburn haired, brown eyed sister would be 90 years old today.  Happy Birthday, Sister! 
my mother, my siblings, and me – one of the few photos of all of us
After I moved to Maryland, my mother and Lila brought Lola to visit. She got to fly on an airplane and visit the capital – an adventure she throughly enjoyed!

Lila’s Last Campaign

~ Sharon Abbott ~ 2 Comments

On a hot August day in 1962, my sister loaded up me and her five kids in her station wagon and took us to the District 60 Stadium in Pueblo, Colorado, to hear President John Kennedy speak. I have no idea what his speech was about and the PA system made it impossible to understand his words even if I had been interested, which I wasn’t.  I was twelve years old and would rather be at the pool, but afterwards we got to stop at the A&W Drive-In  and get root beer floats. . . so that was pretty cool.

I’m not sure what her motivation was. Maybe she wanted us to be able to tell our kids that we had been there the day the President of the United States came to our city. Maybe it was because she was looking for something to do with six kids on a hot summer day. Maybe she was inspired by this young, handsome, charismatic president.  Or maybe she believed that citizens should be active in their government and engage in the process and she was always one to teach by example.  Whatever her reasons, I do remember the day and the event and the fact that we were there.  

Fast forward 21 years. Now she is on the front lines of local politics: organizing volunteers to help a candidate get elected to the Pueblo City Council. He is young and passionate and wanting to make a difference in his community and she is convinced he has the wherewithal to govern and help the city so she throws herself into the campaign and learns a lot in the process. Her candidate did not win but he went on to serve his community through his law practice, his election to the Pueblo Water Board, and supporting and working to get other worthy candidates elected to public office, always recruiting the best organizer and recruiter he knew to join in the fight – that woman who had dragged him, his siblings and me to see a president on a hot summer day. A woman whom he called Mom and I called Lila.

Over the years, Lila was a force to be reckoned with. She was an expert at organizing and recruiting volunteers and putting them to work, ensuring that things ran smoothly. She was adept at managing call lists. She and her son worked to elect a governor and when a woman she knew, respected and trusted ran for County Commissioner, Lila and two other women managed a campaign which got her candidate elected.

Fast forward 46 years. The family gathers from near and far – aunts and uncles and cousins and nieces and nephews and children and grandchildren and great grandchildren – to celebrate the historic election and inauguration of Pueblo’s first mayor in over 60 years – Nicholas Gradisar. How happy she would be to know Pueblo is in such good hands. And we say to one another, “Wouldn’t she have loved to see this?!”

But that formidable campaign operative whose first foray into politics was to campaign for her son’s election to city council so many years ago has been gone for exactly six years. And though she didn’t live long enough to see him take the oath of office as mayor of this city she knew and loved and invested in, her spirit hangs in the air and seems to hover over all of it.  

But if Lila is gone, she has left in her stead some pretty good replacements. All of Nick’s siblings have rallied to the cause.  They campaign, they mobilize, they show up and do their part to get their brother elected. His sister Kay in particular seems to channel her mother and has the same bulldog tenacity when it comes to getting it done.  

Kay, still working the phones on inauguration day.
the siblings

After the swearing in, we have lunch and then walk down the River Walk to sit on the bench which was donated in her name to the city of Pueblo and offers a respite for walkers out for a stroll or for exercise. We take pictures and share her stories and say, “Wouldn’t she have loved this day?” 

Mr. Mayor and the First Lady of Pueblo
Family gathers from Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Maryland.

Really, the only thing that would have made that day better is if we had been able to cap it off at the A&W Drive-In and toast this day and her with root beer floats.  So here’s to you, Lila.  Ya done good!

Cheers!

Daily Bread

~ Sharon Abbott ~ 2 Comments

“There are things you do because they feel right & they may make no sense & they may make no money & it may be the real reason we are here: to love each other & to eat each other’s cooking & say it was good.”

It is one of my favorite Story People stories. We have it framed and hanging on our “family wall” in our living room. I think it belongs there because food is a part of every family’s story whether we recognize it or not – or at least it is a part of our story.

It’s the story behind Crescent Rolls and Chicken & Noodles. Canned Jellied Cranberry Sauce and Donuts. Chili and Cinnamon Rolls. Tuna Noodle Casserole and Vegetable Soup. Coconut Pie and Apple Pie made from orchard apples. Bread and Wine.

My mother was the best cook of anyone I have ever known. I, on the other hand, got married barely knowing how to boil water. Paul always thought it was a bait-and-switch:  he came to my house, ate my mother’s cooking and just assumed it was a genetic thing and this is what he could expect when we were eating out of our own kitchen. It was a hard adjustment for him – we ate out a lot and went to my mom’s house once a week for dinner. But slowly I began to take an interest and figured some things out.

Crescent Rolls: On our first son’s first birthday, I wanted to do something special. So I opened my Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook  I had received from my niece as a wedding gift with the inscription that read:  “Dear Paul, good luck.  You’re going to need it.”  I found a recipe for Crescent Rolls. Perfect! How hard could this be. Turns out . . .  pretty hard.  It was a time-consuming recipe which took most of the day, but so worth it! Over the years I tweaked the recipe to my liking and they became a “must have” for holiday meals. The story is still told about the year that “one of us” set his alarm and rose at 5:00 a.m. on the day after Thanksgiving to eat all the leftover rolls before anyone else could get to them – in a big family one must learn to out-wit, out-play and out-last the competition. We’ve had some glitches along the way. There was the year I forgot to set the timer and burned the bottoms to a blackened charcoal on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. So we cut the bottoms off, slathered them with butter and called it dinner that evening. Then I set to work on the next batch which took me late into the night. There were years the yeast didn’t rise because the milk was too hot or not hot enough and I had to start over. But if you come to our house on Thanksgiving or Christmas, you will get Crescent Rolls.

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Chicken-and-Noodles:  In those early years as I was expanding my repertoire I asked Paul, “What did your mother cook that you really loved.”  He fired back, “Home-made Chicken and Noodles!!”  So I made the long distance call to his mother to get the recipe and set out to wow him. I followed exactly the recipe my mother-in-law had copied from a newspaper column decades before. When it said, “Roll the dough very thin and cut into strips,” I labored with my rolling pin, stretching and rolling and pulling and rolling until the dough was indeed paper-thin. It was a labor of love, if a frustrating exercise, but I was determined to replicate his mother’s dish. I sat down to dinner ready to bask in his awe and admiration and gratitude.  “What is it?” He stared into his bowl of paper-thin, perfectly cut noodles swimming in broth. Are you kidding me?  It’s Chicken and Noodles!  “No”  NO??!!   “Well, it’s not my mother’s chicken and noodles.” So I got up from the table to make another call. “I followed the recipe exactly and he says I didn’t get it right?  What happened.?”  I could hear the commotion in the background as she was rushing to get dinner on the table for the six kids still at home. “Read the recipe back to me,” she said over the din of two kids arguing over whose turn it was to the set the table. When I came to the part about rolling the dough paper thin, she interrupted me. “Oh good grief, Sherry!  I never had time to mess with that nonsense. Just give it a few swipes of the rolling pin and call it good!” Okay then.  And so now my own family thinks if the the noodles are not thick and almost chewy with a thick broth and huge chunks of chicken – then it’s not really Chicken and Noodles. Following a recipe can be so over-rated.

Jellied Cranberry Sauce:  As I honed my skills in the kitchen I developed an attitude that “made- from-scratch-is-always-better” and so cranberry sauce should be made with fresh cranberries and a zested orange. Truth be told, nobody ever ate it but me, but that’s how I did it. Then our son-in-law joined the family and when we sat down to Thanksgiving dinner his first year he asked for the cranberry sauce.  It was passed around the table to him. Nope. He was looking for the jellied cranberry sauce that comes out of a can. Now, every year, he gets a whole can of it to himself, and I eat the other.  And everybody goes home happy.

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Donuts:  We were at the beach and Paul and I were headed out to the grocery store.  I called out “Does anybody need or want anything from the store?”  The four year old grandson never looked up from his Lego’s. “How ‘bout donuts!?” he yelled. And now, twelve years and eight grand-kids later, you haven’t been to Nana & Colonel’s until you’ve gone for donuts. The littles always love to hear how, when we were first married, Colonel was the guy who made the donuts at Dunkin’ Donuts and could eat all the donuts he wanted every night. I know, it’s not hard to impress them when they’re young.

Chili and Cinnamon Rolls:  In both our families, the traditional Christmas Eve dinner was soup. At the Abbotts it was Chili.  At the Fletchers it was Chile and Potato Soup and Oyster Stew. At the Fletcher’s it was Cinnamon Rolls and Potica (a wonderful Slavic Sweet Bread introduced to our food culture by my brother-in-law’s family).  At the Abbotts it was Cinnamon Rolls and since I never mastered the art of Potica making, we stick to the Cinnamon Rolls. There was the year that I got distracted in the making and instead of dividing the dough into halves to make out the rolls I divided it into thirds and ended up making more, but much smaller rolls. I didn’t realize my mistake until one of the kids who was home for the holidays said, “It’s funny, when I was a kid these rolls seemed to be so big they filled your whole plate and now it seems like I could eat three of them,”  Yup, pretty much. The year our son was in Iraq we sent a can of Hormel Chili and a box of Honey Buns in his Christmas package.  In some way or another, I think most of the kids have carried on the tradition and live out the story.

Passing down the story from generation to generation.
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Tuna Noodle Casserole and Vegetable Soup:  Like most families, in ours you got to pick the dinner menu on your birthday. When our youngest was little, his favorite meal was Tuna Noodle Casserole. Nobody else really liked it so we rarely had it, but on his birthday he got to choose. One year he was spending his birthday with some family friends because Paul and I had to be out of town. Peggy asked him what he wanted for dinner. Tuna Noodle Casserole – of course!  “Does your mom have a special recipe she uses?” Having five kids of her own she understood the risk of making something that was not like Mom’s.  “Yes, she does. It’s on the back of the box.”  And though her own kids gagged on it, she made Tuna Helper straight from the box and Fletcher was delighted.  Clearly by the sixth one I had abandoned the “made-from-scratch-is-always-better” ideology.  

Tabithas’s request was always Vegetable Beef Soup – preferably without the beef.  The other kids groaned – what kid really LIKES soup?  But that was what we had every March 4th. Even on the years that spring came early and we were eating soup with the air conditioning on. The one thing that redeemed her choice is that she always asked for Boston Cream Pie, and who doesn’t like that?

Pie:  We are a family of pie lovers. Favorites may vary from individual to individual but somewhere in our DNA is a “pie-lover” gene. My mother taught me to make pie crust. To her,  pie-making was an art form. I learned from her to treat the crust gently and carefully – don’t overwork it or the crust will be tough; use only as much water as you need to make the dough hold together and make sure the water is ice cold. She was a master craftsman.

When Fletcher wanted to bring a girl home from college to meet us I told him to find out what her favorite dessert was and I would make it for her. “It’s Coconut Pie”,  he told me. “Wow!  What are the odds?” I asked him. “You really do have a a lot in common!!”  And so every time she came for a visit we had Coconut Pie. It wasn’t until many years later at their rehearsal dinner I learned the truth. Emily’s mom wanted to know what the deal was with Coconut Pie. I explained I made it every time she came since it was her favorite dessert. “Actually, I don’t think she had ever had it before she came to your house.”  As I said – it’s in his genes.  He may also be a little manipulative.

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Paul’s mother made three chocolate cream pies every report card day.  That way if you got good grades you could celebrate. If you got bad grades, you had a way to drown your troubles. My mother made him chocolate pies every time we came for a visit and threatened if there was any left, she threatened never make another one for him. He always rose to the challenge.

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And then there were the Apple Pie Baking Marathons. When the older kids were little, every fall Grandma Fletch would come for a month-long visit. She cooked and baked and told stories and loved us well. One of our days we spent at a nearby orchard. We picked apples – bushels of apples – and returned home to roll up our sleeves and get ready for the days long process of pie baking. She set up an assembly line. Everybody had a job to do:  washing the apples, peeling and coring and slicing, combining  the sugar and cinnamon and then mixing it all together in a big bowl with the fruit. Grandma was always in charge of the pie crust. After several days we would have dozens of pies: baked, wrapped and ready for the freezer. All year long, anytime we wanted a special dessert, we could go to the ancient chest freezer in the garage and pull out a pie to stick in the oven and soon the house would be filled with the buttery, cinnamony, apple aroma that took us back to the way the house smelled on those days we worked side-by-side next to the Master Pie Baker herself and created all that deliciousness. For years after she was gone, we kept the ritual.  We went to the orchard on a crisp fall day, picked the apples, and formed our assembly line just as she had taught us to do. The year we stopped was the day it was time to go apple picking and there were still pies in the freezer. The family was shrinking and we no longer had the mouths to feed or the laborers.  But anytime I smell apple pie, I can still see us all in the kitchen with Hazel, each doing our job.  

Bread and Wine: I have begun to feel that gathering at the table, sharing food and drink and sharing stories is a sacred experience.

When his followers asked him, “Teach us to pray”, Jesus included this:  Give us today our daily bread. Maybe this is about more than just nourishment for our physical bodies; maybe it is also about the table where we gather to tell our stories, nourish our souls and remember who we are.

I am struck by how many stories about Jesus are about the table. He goes to dinner parties with outsiders and undesirables, he performs his first miracle at a wedding feast, he provides a picnic for 5,000 people on a hillside, he cooks dinner for his friends on a beach, and 2,000 years later we are still telling those stories.

And then there is this: knowing he was going to die, he sat down around a table to share a meal with those who had shared his journey and would continue on without him. Because that’s what the family does in such a time. He washes their feet and cares for them with such love and affection. Around that table of special foods filled with such rich meaning, they remember and retell the story of the Jews miraculous exodus from Egypt and God’s faithfulness. But before the meal is over,  he will take the bread and the wine from that same table and use it to explain to them the hard truth of what is to come:  the bread is his body which will be broken for them and the wine is his blood which will be poured out to forgive the sins of many. They had no idea what it meant. Or what was to come.

But we do know. He left us this gift of symbol and remembrance and ritual. And time after time, we gather and remember and retell the story.  “As often as you  do this,” he said, “do it in remembrance of me.”  Jesus, too, knew the power of story, of remembering and of gathering around a table.

Perhaps, in the end, that is the real reason we are here.

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Where I Come From

~ Sharon Abbott ~ Leave a comment

Over the course of my lifetime, I have lived in six states and twenty two houses (not counting various summer lodgings and a brief stint in a ‘59 Ford panel truck), and I  expect that I have at least one more move in me before I land at my final resting place. Sometimes I sort of feel unanchored by my lack of roots or the fact that there is no one place that I think of as “home”.

There is the first house we lived in together as newlyweds and college sophomores. The one with the slanting living room ceiling that went from seven feet at one end to five feet at the other end and where we wore out our Simon and Garfunkle albums on our new hi-fi. Where we fought and forgave and learned to be married.

There is the house where we hung a giant crystal chandelier in the entry way of our our upstairs apartment and drug the table out of the kitchen when we had guests so we could dine under its brilliance.

There is the house with the pine cone wallpaper that shows up in the kids earliest memories. . .  except they all put the room in different houses. But it keeps showing up which makes me think it was ugly enough to leave an indelible impression.

There is the house we rented because it had a living room big enough that we could hold church services there and we shared it with three single women who lived in the basement. It had a little room upstairs lined with windows which is where our first “school room” was and I taught several of my children to read. It’s where I cross stitched the dozens of Christmas tree ornaments with the names for Jesus that still hang on our tree.

There is the house that had an indoor swimming pool where we taught the two year old to swim.  A sauna that she called “the warmer” and a fireplace that didn’t draw so that all of our clothes smelled like  Eckridge Farm smoked sausage.

There is the first house that we bought instead of rented. We were forty years old with six kids and a dog. And now we were homeowners. We lived there for fourteen years, longer than anyplace else we had ever lived. It was a palace to us with a big yard and a deck and a strawberry patch. The walls of the living room were painted a country-blue which was in vogue at the time and I loved it. It had a fireplace and three full baths and five bedrooms. It was in the family room of that house where a little team of people gathered to pray about starting a new church. Before long we turned one of those bedrooms into the “church office” and it  was in that living room with the blue walls that we folded church bulletins every Saturday night and had Women’s Breakfasts every month.  It was in that house that Cedarbrook Community Church was born.

There is the two bedroom house where I grew up – the home of my childhood memories.  There was a rocking chair in the corner of the living room where I did my homework, watched the black and white television with rabbit ears, talked to my friends on the phone, and dreamed the daydreams that young girls dream.

There is the house where we live now – just the two of us.  The one where we asked the builder to take out any walls in the downstairs living area that were not load bearing so as to accommodate the table made to order by Amish furniture makers. The table that would stretch across the whole length of the room and where we could sit with friends and family over a meal and recount the stories that bind us together. The house where we added bay windows and skylights because the more light the better and where, though we had no idea what we were doing, we somehow managed to create this magical secret garden of a backyard.

And yet . . .

Last summer we made a trip to Nebraska to see my family.  It’s where I’m from: this land of wheat fields and sand hills. Of windmills and wildflowers. Of farmland and cattle ranches. It’s where I was born, but I feel no real kinship to this land. I have no memories of it as a child and no real  understanding of this way of life or how it matters to the rest of my family. But as I grow older there is a longing to connect with this past and this place.

I have heard the stories – mostly from my mother when she was living. The stories of how my parents were farmers who had a dream of owning their own place, but it never seemed to work out for them.  Just when they thought they had  saved enough to make it happen the drought would come, or the flood, or the depression, or the war, or . . .  But then when their family was grown (all but the late-comer who was only two and named Sharon) they saw a way. Outside a little town called Wolbach, they bought a farm. This Nebraska farmland had been home to them all their lives, and now they owned a piece of it. My oldest brother Don and his family moved in with us and together, he and my dad worked the farm and when my brother Irvin returned from Korea, he joined them.  It was the family business, this love and care of the land.

When my father died two years later and my mother had to sell the farm, we moved to southern Colorado where I had a sister who thought she could get Mom work to support us. I have no memories of a life before the dessert of southern Colorado and the wild, rugged beauty of the Rocky Mountains that surrounded us. I couldn’t relate when my mother talked about the wheat that looked like copper pennies when it was ripe for harvest.  How the fields were green as far as the eye could see when the crops came up in the spring. How the corn fields marked the passage of the growing season with their changing tassels waving in the summer breezes. And how she could see it all from her kitchen window of that farm house.

She told me once that when she visited my sister in Colorado for the first time (it might have been her first trip out of state) as the bus pulled into Pueblo with its steel mill and monochromatic landscape she said out loud to herself, “Why would anybody want to live in this God-forsaken land?”  By the time I can remember, my mother had made her peace with living in the place that God had forsaken,  though I don’t think she ever stopped missing “home”.

There is no place for me that is like that. I liked some of the places we lived. . .  others not so much.  I have fond memories of some of them, but truth be told sometimes I get mixed up whether such-and-such happened in Kansas or in Illinois or if it was the house on First Street or the one on Columbia Street. It sort of all runs together.

So last summer when we were in Nebraska I asked my brother if he could take me to Wolbach and find the farmhouse. The house was gone, he told me. Had been for a long while.  And he didn’t know if he could remember exactly where the land was . . .  but he would try.  And so we set off on our quest. Getting to Wolbach was easy. . .  it is a booming metropolis of 283 people. But now what?  We started down one road, but it had been washed out by the spring rains and anyway, he thought maybe we should have turned the other direction back up the way. We rode a while longer and came to a farm where a man in overalls stood out in the yard next to the fence, wondering at the strangers in his neck of the woods. We stopped and Irvin explained our mission – “We’re lookin’ for the place that was Ray Fletcher’s back in the early 50’s. I think it was bought by . . . .  and then by. . . .  and then I’m not sure who they sold it to. “Well, what you’re gonna wanna do is go back out this road and go about two miles and then. . . “ and so we made our way down some “roads” that were more like gullies until my brother said, “This. This is it. The house sat back there in that grove of trees.  It’s been torn down now,  but there’s still some of the barn standing. It was right  back there.”

I stood there a long time. Remembering the stories from my mother. . .  like the one about how the goose chased me and I caught my leg in the fence gate which left a good sized scar that I carry with me to this day. Or how my dad would go into town every Saturday and bring back a little brown paper bag with candy in it and would sit at the table in that kitchen and divide it between me and Jolene. And I called back Jolene’s stories about our time in that house. Almost exactly a year older than me, she is Don’s oldest daughter, the one who moved into the farmhouse with us and the keeper of the memories of the adventures she and I shared there. Like the time we escaped from a charging bull by climbing into the corn crib and throwing ears of corn out to him to scare him away, holding him at bay until we were rescued. Okay, so maybe the bull wasn’t raging but rather ambling and maybe he was ambivalent about our efforts to engage him and maybe we were in no real danger. But what a story! This was the corncrib where we had our “playhouse” – where we made mud pies and played away the hours which is what childhood is for. No matter how hard I try, I have no memories of these children or of this place.

The corn crib – our playhouse and refuge from the bull.
The barn -with my father standing in the doorway
The farmhouse.
Jolene, her brother, and me – their Aunt Sharon

In the Celtic tradition, a “thin pace” is the place where the veil that separates heaven and earth is nearly transparent. A place where, for a moment, the spiritual world and the natural world intersect. That day last summer, as I stood on a road, looking over the fence into a grove of trees where you could just barely make out the the ruins of a barn, this was a thin place for me, and if I listened hard I could almost hear the echoes of their voices –  those two little girls in the corncrib, trying to shoo away a bull who had meandered into their story. I can see through that veil the ghost of a woman, staring back at me from her kitchen window. She has the hint of a smile and I recognize my own face in hers . . . the features startling in their similarity.  It is my mother, welcoming me home.

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       A THIN PLACE

A Real Cowboy

~ Sharon Abbott ~ Leave a comment

We gathered from several states and varied walks of life. We came by car and by plane and by the grace of God. For one magical and memorable weekend, we left behind jobs and kids and grandkids and the lives we had built apart from this place.  We came to bear witness, to congratulate, and to be a part of it. But mostly we came to celebrate.  My brother Irvin and his wife Joyce were being inducted into the Nebraska Sandhills Cowboy Hall of Fame and so we came.

His daughters rented the community center for the day  in the little town of Taylor: a place where family could gather before the craziness of the main event that evening. A place where we could eat the lunch they provided, take pictures, catch up and “visit” – which really means “to tell stories.”

He stood up and announced “I have a story I want to tell.”  The room went silent.

And he began to spin the tale which went something like this:

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And they were lined up down the sidewalk – all of them about this high.

When my buddy and I were on the rodeo circuit, one of our favorite places to rodeo was Pueblo, (Colorado) because we could always count on the accommodations at the Bed & Breakfast there – better known as my sister Lila’s basement. We  rolled in there after a rodeo one night in the wee hours of the morning, kicked off our boots, threw down our hats, and collapsed on the bed. Later that morning we saw these little faces peering in the basement window, staring at us with eyes opened wide. And then we heard the voice:  “Just step on over here and take a look at two real cowboys. You can see them, their boots, their spurs and their hats.  And it will only cost you a nickel.” Nick and Ray (Lila’s sons who were about 4 and 5) were selling tickets to see “a real cowboy” and the line went down the block.

And then he finished with this:  So when I heard Nick was coming to town this weekend, I made sure my blinds were closed.

I learned three things from that moment:  (1) My nephew Nick’s entrepreneurial  bent began much, much younger than I realized. (2) I come from a long line of storytellers. (3) Even a quiet man, when given a chance and a good story, will stand in front of a group of people and talk.

The meet and greet for family at the Community Center
From several states and many walks of life – but all family
Irvin and his girls
famiiy through love if not through blood

And through the day and into the evening we watched and we listened and we learned about their lives and their contributions which earned them this honor. The Nebraska Sandhills Cowboy Hall of Fame recognizes those who have made extraordinary contributions to the Western Lifestyle or horse culture in the Nebraska Sandhills in the areas of competition, business, rodeo, ranching, western arts, and western entertainment.  My brother was a rancher and bull rider, an artist who braids leather into everything from bullwhips to jewelry and a mentor to young rodeo competitors. He is a lover of the Sandhills and its way of life. And his wife was there with him in every one of his endeavors. She tells us, “I’m not a cowboy.  I just found one.”  But he couldn’t have done any of it without her.

We go to the dinner and the auction and the induction. We complain about the heat but notice that we are the “city folks” and none of the cowboys  in their wranglers and their boots and long-sleeved shirts and hats seem to be the least bothered by it – they never worked in air-conditioned offices where you have to wrap yourself in blankets to stay warm in the middle of the summer. (Maybe I should have been a rancher after all).  Nick bids on the  rawhide braided hobbles Irvin has made and donated to the fund-raiser auction but they go for over $1300 and he decides it’s too rich for his blood so he lets them go. Besides, he can always just buy another pair from his uncle and pay the $100 asking price. (sidebar:  the next morning several of  the family gathered for breakfast before we go our separate ways. Irvin arrived with a pair of the hobbles for Nick.  He had crossed out the $100 on the price tag and replaced it with this: “One day only: $1300”)

SOLD! to the little lady down front!
Should have bought ’em before he became famous.

When they call Irvin and Joyce’s name we all stand to clap and cheer and whistle and the rest of the room stands with us. When you live and work and serve in the same community for 88 years, people know you.  Together this couple is well known and well loved and tonight they are well-honored.

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Of all the inductees, they definitely had the most people assembled for their group photo  This is some of the Fletchers and Lindermans (Joyce’s family) who cheered and whistled and celebrate their accomplishment.
And what’s a cowboy gathering without some Country Western Music?
What else would one wear to this occasion?
A young cowboy with his mentor.

Of my parents’ six children, only Irvin and I are left.  He was the third born and I am the youngest – a whole two decades younger than he. The siblings who shared his childhood, his stories, and his memories – they are gone. But if you knew what to look for, you could find them gathered around the tables: in the face of the one who looks exactly like her mother, and the one who laughs, just like her mother, and in the voice of  the one who could say, “I remember my dad telling me about the time you and he. . .”  And I was there. I do not share his memories, but I do share his stories, as did we all.  Because in one way or another, all of us who gathered for him:  me (his sibling);  Nick and Kay and Mary Jean and Jolene and Shirley (the children of his siblings); Raeleen, Bobbie, Pat, and Cindy (his daughters ; his grandchildren and his great-grandchildren – we all come from this place and these people. And it was so good to be there. . .  together.

In 1954 it only cost a nickel to see a real cowboy; our tickets  for this event cost us $20 a piece. For that twenty dollars  we got to see a whole room full of cowboys. And more. We heard a lifetime of stories. We laughed and we cried, we talked and we listened, and we remembered again that this collection of people from so many different places and so many different ways of life – we remembered again that we are family. And at the end of it all, we knew that there would never again be a time together quite like this one.

Raeleen and Tom. . . she was his first ranch hand.
Cousins plus one (the one being the aunt in the middle)
Who let the open toes in?
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Once a cowboy – always a cowboy. Here he is, riding in the “Old Timer’s Rodeo” at 45+ years of age. Who does that??!!

tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago. . .

~ Sharon Abbott ~ 1 Comment

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When I was a kid, Christmas meant lots and lots of people – many (most) of them kids. We always had out of town family – at least one of my married siblings and their families would drive from Nebraska to Colorado and then there was my sister Lila and her five kids, my sister Lola, my mom and me. Looking back I wonder if they coordinated the timing (I can’t make it home to be with Mom this Christmas so can you go?), but sometimes they all came. I had three sisters, two brothers, and seventeen nieces and nephews. It was, by any anyone’s accounting, chaos, pandemonium, and bedlam.

Our big Christmas celebration was on Christmas Eve. For the kids, Christmas Eve Day was never-ending as the anticipation and expectations mounted to fever pitch. My mother had to work, but the rest of us spent the day at Lila’s. I have no idea what the adults were doing, but the kids were counting down the hours till we could go through the motions of eating the soups – potato soup, chili, and oyster stew (the idea of oyster stew makes me gag to this day), the cinnamon rolls, and the potica (a Slovenian sweet bread that my sister brought to the family from her husband’s side of the family.  It wasn’t a holiday without potica) and get on to the happy sound of tearing paper – THE OPENING OF THE PRESENTS!  I have no idea what the adults did during the day besides sit around the dining room table sipping coffee (or maybe eggnog?) and visiting and periodically refereeing the unruly mob of anarchy in the family room.ry%3D400

And then one year one of the kids had a stunningly brilliant idea to pass the time (okay. . . maybe it was me. But that doesn’t detract from its brilliance). HEY GUYS! LET’S PUT ON A SHOW!! Of course I would write it, cast it, direct it, and if need be act in it – maybe even in the lead part. I don’t really remember. And so it began: my need to tell stories, to direct theatrical productions, and to be the controlling, bossy one (well. . . maybe that last part didn’t actually begin here). I don’t remember the earlier productions, but I have a clear (and somewhat painful) memory of the year we did “The Night Before Christmas” complete with costumes and little stockings that some of my nieces and I sewed (glued? pinned? taped?) together and “filled” with a couple of pieces of candy which we distributed to the audience (the adults/parents and the younger children who I did not feel were performance ready). And we spent the day, and by day I mean hour-upon-hour, rehearsing. I am quite sure that periodically one of my cast members would escape when I was busy working with someone else to help him “find his character” and try to find a sympathetic parent: “Please!! For the love of all that is holy, get me out of this!!” But I am equally confident that either because my siblings didn’t want to hurt to my feelings or more likely, they were grateful that the kids were corralled (somewhat) and out of their hair for a little while, they would send them back to me and the rehearsals would continue. And then my mother (their grandmother) would return from work and before dinner, everyone found a spot on the floor or a couch, and the production was under way.

After dinner, we would all be rounded up again and a couple of the adults would load up the station wagons with kids and take us out to see the Christmas lights. Of course, nobody wanted to go but this was a required activity and so we acquiesced in an effort to move things along. While we were gone the rest of the adults prepared for Santa’s visit. All of the “Santa Gifts” must be wrapped and tagged and sorted into big trash bags and left in the garage so that when the hired Santa arrived, he could put them into his bag, enter through the designated door (rather than the chimney for which the adults always offered a multitude of excuses) and while his clothes were not tarnished with ashes and soot, he would have a bundle of toys flung on his back and look like a peddler just opening his pack. Let the tearing of paper commence. And this is how it worked . . . for the most part.

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Except for the one year. Apparently Santa had been hitting the eggnog pretty heavily before he made it to our stop and it got later, and later, and later. The kids went from restless to belligerent and word began to spread through the crowd, beginning with the older ones. “I told you this whole thing is made up.” “There is no such thing as Santa Claus. . . it’s just a hoax that’s been perpetuated on dumb little kids.” “I knew this was too good to be true. ” “Face it guys, the old guy is a fraud.”  Some of the younger kids began to cry as hope and innocence were sucked out of their little hearts. So someone had to do something. I no longer remember who it was (but probably Lila) said something like, “Wait, let me check!” And she went into the garage and came back with trash bags laden with gifts. “Look!! I found a note from him that said he was in a really big hurry this year and didn’t have time to stop but he left these for you.” Seriously?  In trash bags no less? But the adults began handing out presents, and I heard one of them mutter under their breath, “I’ll be damned if he gets paid a dime for this fiasco.” Or something to that effect. I think I heard years after that he did show up later that night – His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry – looking for his check, but I doubt that worked out very well for him.

I don’t know if this was the same year as what later came to be known as the great cash register debacle or not but it would make sense that these happened in the same year. My niece Shirley wanted a toy cash register for Christmas. One with buttons you could push and the number of cents would pop up and a button you could push for the drawer to open and it would ring.x354

This was the one thing that her heart truly desired and she asked Santa for it; she was assured by her mother (my sister Minnie) that yes, indeed, she could count on Santa to know exactly what she was talking about. So I don’t know if the tag fell off in the confusion of the missing Santa and then was placed on the wrong package or how it happened, but when the gifts had all been distributed and opened, her cousin Pat ended up with the cash register. Pat was thrilled because until that moment she hadn’t realized how very much she wanted a cash register, Shirley was devastated, and no matter how many different explanations the adults offered (Maybe Santa got confused and forgot you were going to be in Colorado so he left your cash register in Nebraska; Maybe Santa couldn’t read your handwriting; Maybe Santa ran out of cash registers and his elves didn’t have time to make any more; Maybe Santa intended for you and your cousin to share a cash register – this one never had a chance of getting any traction; Maybe. . . ) Shirley never really made her peace with Santa after that.

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Looking back, I think we must have seemed a lot like the Herdmans from The Best Christmas Pageant Ever– and if you have never read that book, you should stop reading this and do that right now! We were a loud and rowdy bunch and maybe just a little bit irreverent and wild – like the Herdmans.  My only regret is that my story takes place in the 1950-1960 time frame and Barbara Robinson’s story wasn’t written until the 1970’s, because had it been around back then, I would have loved to cast it and direct and perform it with my family. On any given year, we had a Ralph and an Imogene, an Ollie, a Claude and a Gladys (and sometimes a baby Jesus). And over the years, as I read this story to my own kids, I could see all of us in Lila’s basement with bathrobes and shepherds staffs and aluminum foil crowns. I knew exactly how I would have cast it.

I knew who would play Imogene. Imogene’s Mary was loud and bossy and fiercely protective of the baby Jesus –“ ‘Get away from the baby!’ she yelled at Ralph, who was Joseph. And she made the Wise Men keep their distance, too.”

I had a pretty good idea of which of my nephews I would cast as Ollie and Claude and Leroy who were more like Wiseguys than Wisemen but were convinced that gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh made crummy gifts to give to a baby so instead substituted their ham from a donated food basket (we might have substituted Potica).

And I knew exactly who would play Gladys: the Angel of the Lord. Gladys, who felt totally free to improvise her lines and I thought pretty much got it right

“Shazam!” Gladys yelled, flinging her arms out, smacking the kid next to her.

“What?” Mother said. Mother never read “Amazing Comics.”

“Out of the Black night with horrible vengeance, the Mighty Marvo –“

“I don’t know what you’re’ talking about, Gladys,” Mother said. “This is the Angel of the Lord who comes to the shepherds in the fields, and –“

“Out of nowhere, right?” Gladys said. “In the black night, right?”

Gladys “with her skinny legs and her dirty sneakers sticking out from under her robe, yelling at all of us everywhere, ‘HEY!!! UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN!!!’ “

As if it were, indeed, the best news in the world.

Yep. It would have been epic!

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True Grit

~ Sharon Abbott ~ 4 Comments

He was a mystery to me when I was growing up. My mother and I traveled to Nebraska every couple of years and we would stay a few days on his ranch in the Sandhills, but ranchers are very busy people and he was a grown up and I was a kid. Besides, I didn’t know him and I would rather hang out with the other kids. He and his wife and four daughters came for Christmas every few years, but he visited with the adults and I was one of the children and that would not change for many, many years.

Many of the stories I know about him came from my mother. In the last few years, as I have gotten to know him, I have pulled some of them out of the man himself and learned about a life, a family, and a brother who was gone by the time I arrived on the scene.

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My parents named him Charles Irvin. Charles for his two grandfathers and I don’t know where the Irvin came from, nor does he. I never knew anyone who called him Charles. The family called him Irvin. Everyone else called him Fletch. My mother always said he looked a lot like my dad and also had his temperament: both quiet, hard-working men.

Our Grandfather Barnes was a trapper. Irvin and his older brother Don thought they would give it a try.  They set traps along the river, trapped  muskrats and sold them (who buys a muskrat and for what?). When the winter came and the weather grew cold, they moved their traps away from the river and set them for other game. My mother used to tell the story about the day that Irvin was sent home from school because he reeked of skunk. They had checked their traps on the way to school and found one trying to escape. “What were you thinking??!” she asked the twelve year old boy. “Why couldn’t you have left it for later?” “Because, Mom, he might have gotten away.” He might have been quiet, but cautious he was not and he loved taking risks.

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Don, Irvin, and Lila

I think they must have been in grade school when the two brothers decided to spend the summer down by the water building a raft and making plans to float it down the river. Our sister Lila, who fell in age between the two boys, begged them to let her help. But they would have none of it – this was a boys’ adventure, pure and simple, and she was not invited. Yet she continued to accompany them down to the river every day and as the craft got closer and closer to completion and the moment of launch was approaching, Lila ran to the house. “Mom!!! Those boys are down at the water and they built a raft and  they are getting ready to take it down the river!!”  She had turned informant. My mother put a stop to the Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer adventure and my brothers learned a valuable lesson – never make an enemy of a potential ally – even if she is a girl.

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almost 50 and still going strong

After high school graduation he stayed on the farm to help my dad, but every chance he got he hit the rodeo circuit – riding bulls and bare backs and livin’ the good life. Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado: wherever he could find a rodeo, that was his real home. And though eventually, as the responsibilities of family and running a ranch kept him out of the arena himself, the rodeo life was in his blood and he made it part of his life’s work to preserve this sport and way of life for other, younger cowboys. Whether it’s introducing toddlers to the Pee Wee Pen or judging, sponsoring, and supporting the high school rodeo clubs, he still loves it all. When they organized the first Old Timer’s Rodeo in 1974, he was back – and he won first or second prize (he would never say which).

He was 22 years old when I was born in March of 1950. By the next October he had been drafted and shipped off to fight the war in Korea. He returned home in 1952 with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart.  I know little to nothing of those years or his experiences of that war. I have read the citation that was given to him when they presented him with the medals, but I’ve never heard him speak with any detail about that frozen tundra and the battles he fought there nor did my mother seem to know much about it.  A quiet man in the best of times, about the war years he is particularly silent. He was in high school when our oldest brother Don was sent to Germany to fight against the Nazis. One day Irvin was called to the principal’s office – his brother was missing in action they told him. You should go home and be with your folks. And though Don eventually did return home, I don’t think my family was ever the same after that. So I don’t know if it was against this background that he kept these stories to himself, or if it was simply that he was such a quiet man. I do know that it had to have marked him. How could it not?

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By the time Irvin returned to Nebraska, my dad had bought his own farm and his son helped him to work the land and care for the animals;  he also returned to the rodeo life.  In 1953, he married a rodeo queen and worked as a hired hand on a ranch – living the good life. By the time I was five, our father was dead, my mother had sold the farm and moved me and my handicapped sister to Colorado where she could find work to support us. So I have no memories of my brother from my childhood other than the visits we made back to see family every few years and the Christmas visits where he would sit in my sister’s dining room and drink coffee with the adults.

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the city slickers on horseback

The summer before Paul and I were married, we went with my mother to Nebraska. Paul had never met most of the family so this was his chance. To say that the city boy was intimidated by the country life would not be misrepresenting the situation. Irvin said, “The girls will take you out and show you around.” By this he meant that we would ride the pasture land on horseback to get the lay of the land. It wasn’t so bad when Raeleen took us (she was 14 and we were 19), but the day he sent us out with the five year old might have been just to get a reaction. And then came dinner. Irvin handed Paul a plate with a steak on it. Just a steak – nothing else. The meat hung over the sides of the plate. I could see the look of panic in his eyes. Paul had always said he didn’t like steak – that it was hard to chew and had no flavor. It didn’t help that his mother, God love her, tended to cook red meat until it was unrecognizable or that any beef he had ever eaten had come from Safeway. But he couldn’t afford to offend his new in-laws even though he whispered to me, “I’ll be here all night getting this down.”  I was grateful that he didn’t ask for a bottle of ketchup. With the first bite, he became a believer. To this day he measures every other steak by that one and few, if any, come close.

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After we were married, we didn’t make many trips back to Nebraska. We were busy raising a family and holding body and soul together. But as the kids grew up and moved away, I had a longing to connect with these roots and the stories of my family. In 1999, when Fletcher was 11 and Joy was 15, we made a trip west and stopped for a few days at the ranch. Irvin was retired by then but still had some cattle, some horses and some wild barn cats. He took our Fletch fishing for the first time. He baited his hook, stood him next to the water, put the pole in his hands and the line in the water and said, “If you feel a tug on the line, just reel him in.” Before long he had a bite. He hollered for his uncle. Irvin yelled, “Just bring him in! Bring him in!!”” Fletch yelled back, “But he don’t wanna come in!” One evening his daughter Raleene came for dinner with her two kids who were about the same age as Joy and Fletcher. Eventually someone mentioned that the kids were missing in action. A search turned them up out in the corral – blowing up cow pies with firecrackers – with the uncle/grandfather leading the charge.

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Years later Paul and I would return to the ranch on our way to Colorado. We sat under the stars which were brilliant in the dark, Nebraska sky with no city lights to dim their light and listened to the quiet. And we went tanking on the Calamus River – meaning we sat in the tank which is used to water cattle in the field and floated down the river. It’s sort of like white water rafting – without the white water and without the rafts. We meandered down the river, we talked to cows, and we ate our cooler full of snacks, and Irvin fished. And of course, before the trip was over, we ate steaks.

And then one day a couple of years ago, Raeleen called me. “I have to be in Washington D.C. and I was thinking of bringing my Dad to visit you. I don’t know if he’ll do it. I doubt he’ll do it. But what would you think of the idea?” To get on a plane and fly to the city? Where there would be crowds, and noise, and concrete? Would he really do this? I wanted so badly for it to happen. She called back to say he would come. And then she called back to say he had changed his mind. “Why?” I wanted to know. “Well, he says he doesn’t have anything to wear.” Are you kidding me?? Put him on the phone, I told her. I assured him his boots and his hat would be perfect, we would meet him at the airport and that we would promise not to let the city eat him.

It was one of the best weeks of my life.

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Sean asked him to bring his uniform. I wanted a picture. But who can fit into something they wore 60 years ago?? This guy. Seriously?

We sat on the deck and visited. We showed him our life here in suburban Maryland and the church we had built and Sean and his family came from North Carolina to visit with his uncle, a war hero from a different generation but one who understood and appreciated his nephew’s military life as only one who has served can do. We ate cinnamon rolls and pie and talked of our parents. He came to church with us and people wore their cowboy boots to show their solidarity and wanted their pictures taken with a real life cowboy.

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Cedarbrook shows up in boots for this cowboy.

We took him to visit the Korean War Memorial. We wanted him to have time there. Time to just be there. To take it in in the daylight hours but also to see it lit up at night. But it was July and I was afraid that the infamous Washington heat and humidity would be miserable and unbearable and take its toll on this 85 year old man. I worried about how far we might have to walk. I worried that the city would be crowded and claustrophobic to a rancher from the Nebraska Sandhills who upon landing at the airport declared, “This place is so different you oughta have to have a passport to visit.” But all my worries were for nothing. Paul dropped us off as close as he could get us and went to find a parking place. As we walked along, I pointed things out to him and when we came to the foot of the Lincoln Memorial he stopped and stared up at the monument. “If the stairs don’t bother you, we could go up a little ways and get a closer look,” I offered. “We have time?” he asked. We had all the time in the world. He was off. I called to him to wait for us and though he claims sometimes that he doesn’t hear well, I think he hears everything he wants to hear and “slow down” doesn’t fall into that category.

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When we walked down into the spot where the Korean War Memorial sits, it became a thin place for him and for all us who were with him. We walked slowly with him, stopping to just see or to read or to pray and I’m sure for him, to remember. To be there with him, haunted by his ghosts and memories, was to be in a holy place. As the afternoon wore on some of us went to find a place to sit and to wait, but he stayed, almost like a sentry standing watch. From our bench we saw a Korean family approaching him, a man with his elderly parents. “Excuse me sir, my parents do not speak English but they wish to know how old you are?” My brother told him, and he translated. “My father asks if you fought in Korea.” My brother nodded. “My father asks if he may shake your hand.” And the old woman bowed from the waist and spoke in Korean. “My mother says thank you for saving her country’.” The war veteran, in his boots and his cowboy hat, walked past us, not wanting conversation or company in what was understandably an emotional moment. But what a gift it was to bear witness to this act of gratitude, of humility, and of grace.

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On the morning he left for home, he came into the kitchen. This man of so few words stood next to me and told me that he was proud of me and of what I had done with my life. “And Mom and Dad would be so proud too. I wish they could see it all.”  Have I ever thanked him for that act of generosity? For speaking on behalf of a father I never knew and a mother who has been gone for over 25 years. To tell me, on their behalf,  “Well done.” For reaching across the generation that separates us and saying, you belong.

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Our sister Lila died the following January, leaving us the last of the siblings.

First there were five.

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Don, Minnie, Lola, Lila, Irvin
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Now there are two.

And then I was born and there were six.

And now there are only two.

I sat beside him at the funeral. This  brother who shared my genes and my story,  who was shaped by bull riding and ranching and war and the Nebraska Sandhills, and I offered a prayer of thanks for this quiet, true grit of a  man  with his courage and resolve and strength of character.

A year ago I went to Nebraska and stayed three weeks with him. We watched bull riding on television, worshiped together at the Easter sunrise service, went fishin’, ate steak, and even trapped us some varmints.  And sometimes he would talk, and I would listen and those were the best times of all.

But next time I’m in Nebraska, could we build a raft and take it down the river?

Groundhog Day and Other Important Holidays

~ Sharon Abbott ~ Leave a comment

It’s an odd holiday, really. No one takes the day off work; there are no special foods associated with the day; though a movie was made in its honor and the news media usually covers it to some degree, it doesn’t really rank up there as one of our favorite celebrations. No gifts are exchanged to mark the occasion and when all is said and done, it’s just sort of lame. Except in my family.

February 2 was always a big day in the Fletcher family. My parents were married on Groundhog Day. At the time, no one really made a big to-do of the wedding. They simply got in a car and drove to the next county to a justice of the peace and said their vows. My mother’s sister Violet went with them as did my dad’s brother Buck. Buck and Vie later married each other, but that’s another story and one which I do not know much about. I don’t think my parents “eloped” . . .  they just didn’t make much of a fuss about the wedding part of it. As Anna from Downton Abbey says, “I’d rather have the right man than the right wedding.” I can so imagine those words coming from my mother’s mouth. So on February 2, 1924, they were married. 

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I wonder about the story behind this wedding announcement sent by mother’s parents to their friends and family. Were they disappointed not to have been included in their daughter’s wedding or had they agreed with her “no-nonsense” approach to such things?
Ray & Hazel Fletcher – married Feb. 2, 1924. We know this picture was taken in 1924 because that year was written on the back. We assume it was taken on their wedding day because Dad is wearing a suit and no one remembers ever seeing him in a suit – ever.

However, an anniversary, though important to the couple, does not usually become a “family holiday”. But wait. . . there’s more. The winter of 1925 was a very stormy one with several big blizzards. The young couple were 30 miles from the nearest doctor and had only a wagon and horses for transportation. When a break in the weather came, Dad loaded his pregnant wife in the wagon and took her to her parents who lived near the doctor, and she stayed with them until Don was born. And  on their first wedding anniversary, Feb. 2, 1925,  my mother gave birth to their first child: it was Groundhog Day.

 The next 25 years would bring the Great Depression, a World War, and many other hardships to this farm family. They would lose their farm and livelihood and struggle to feed their five children and, along with their neighbors and friends, fight to keep body and soul together. They would send that first born son off to fight in Germany and agonize through the days and months when he was listed as Missing in Action and then finally begin to put their lives back together again when he was liberated from a German POW camp and eventually sent home. Life began to return to “normal” and they dared to once again believe in a future. Don married a local girl, their oldest daughter Lila Rae completed nursing school in the big city, married a “foreigner” as my father labeled him (a Democrat and a Catholic), but all in all, things were looking up!  They were even expecting their first grandchild.

Jolene was born on a bleak winter’s day and became the first of the next generation of Fletchers. She was born on her grandparent’s Silver Wedding Anniversary and her father’s 24th birthday. The date was February 2, 1949:  Groundhog Day.

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Hazel Fletcher with her son Don, granddaughter Jolene and father, Charles Barnes

And that’s how Groundhog day became a holiday in the Fletcher family: with special foods, special traditions, and special significance. And if anyone outside the family ever wondered why the Fletchers made so much of a non-holiday that centered around a rodent named Punxsutawney  Phil, they never said. 

Epilogue:
After I wrote this piece I learned that this Groundhog celebration has continued in the Fletcher family into succeeding generations.  Jolene’s granddaughter was also born on Feb.  2 … in 2007.  Long live Punxsutawney Phil.