Land Blesses and Embraces Sister's Ashes

On August 16, 2004, my sister Julia Ann Thompson was killed in a car crash, at 61.

On August 30, 2004, 6 p. m. friends and family held a memorial service of overflow proportions at the First Unitarian Church, Alton, Illinois, and there was a later service in Pittsburgh.

Julia's 65th birthday is March 13th, 2008.

Julia has been lightly resting in a family linen closet during the intervening years, something like three and a halfish years.

Today, we bury her ashes on the land where she grew up. Her remains will rest in place...on the place where she rode horses, walked, laughed, loved, cried, wrote poetry and physics formulas... she will rest, most beloved, and yes, in great natural peace.

Julia was a worldclass physicist who taught at the University of Pittsburgh and was known as a great innovator there. She had been principal investigator on experiments at BNL, CERN, Fermilab, and Novosibirsk. She also founded Research Experience for Undergraduates—Focus on Minorities--to encourage minorities’ participation in science. The Julia A. Thompson Memorial Fund, Associated Bank, 104 Homer Adams Parkway, Alton, IL 62002, supports increased participation of minorities in the sciences.

Evergreen Heights, our ancestral land, founded by my renowned horticulturalist greatgrandfather Riehl in the 1860s, nurtured all three of my father's children: Julia, Gary, and myself (Janet). I rejoice in the feeling of the land now embracing my sister's ashes and nurturing her as she goes where we cannot.

Rest in Natural Great Peace, my dearest heart.
Rest and reach into the great beyond.
Reach, and find, and rest again.
Rest again, and again, and again in Natural Great Peace
my dearest heart
and find solace in all these places of land and of sky
find solace in the places which cannot be named or known before time.

Marj Casswell's "A Place to Come Home To" Articulates the High Cost of Settling

Humans, even nomads, are settlers at heart. We want a place to come home to, a hearth to warm our hands around, and other humans to love us. Marj Casswell in "A Place to Come Home To" tells a story of these ordinary yearnings and the high price they exact from us.

In the opening frame of the novel a 40-year-old woman returns to her father's house where in her girlhood their rich Virginia tobacco farmland stretched in every direction. Time and change have intervened. Her mother and the land are gone, but six diaries from the year she was ten call out to her when she revisits her old room. The ending frame ripples through the years between ten and now, interpreting her life through the insights gained in her reflection the diaries have brought.

While the opening and closing frames give us a sense of context and the passage of time, the guts and heart of the book lie in the 38 chapters between these frames, as all revealing photographs do. Each chapter begins with an excerpt from these diaries written in the summer of 1956 when everything changed and the gravel pit came. The diary excerpts serve as epigrammatic themes for what lies ahead in each chapter. I read the book twice, and on the second reading, I began to title the chapters to keep better track of the ebb and flow of the book's action and interludes.
"A Place to Come Home To" is both a coming of age story for 10-year-old Meredith (Merri) Coopersmith and a losing of an age. On an intimate canvas Casswell paints the sweeping story of the loss of the family farms and the end of an era. No more will there be a time when the small family farm is a viable way of life.

Both within the Coopersmith nuclear family and extended family we see how land exerts its pull on some and how the pleasures of the city call others. Yearning, hard work, and even strategy cannot save the farm or even the innocence of the community. The gravel pit opens its gaping yaw and swallows up farm land that later will, in turn, be swallowed up by housing developments.

Casswell shows the turbulence inside normalcy. As the world around her changes, the rules around her change, curtailing her adventures on the farm. But her curiosity cannot be held in check. I feared something terrible would happen to Merri in the gravel pits.
Instead, we're shown in delicate and realistic detail the emotional and spiritual development of a young girl facing family and community conflict and dissolution of life as previously known. We are let inside the interior world of her imaginative daydreams and fantasies. Her parents love her and take good care of her, yet in spite of that, she feels the tension present in their marriage and wants to make it better for them in order to stabilize her world. She carries an adult sense of responsibility that alters her childhood, in spite of her Aunt Elizabeth's efforts to give her a childhood without cares back to her.

A thread of settling runs through the book--both the positive and negative conations. Merri's ancestors come to the land as settlers and set up a lumber mill. But, in a kind of fall from Eden, the first settling occurs: "they had to sell off most of the land with trees...because they needed money to live. That's when they went to growing tobacco. Everybody around here was [growing] it," her Uncle Lowell (who carries the spirit of the land) explains to her.

This selling off the resources of the land for cash becomes a precursor for the gravel pit contract that brings evil things into a young girl's world. Each generation has struggled with how to make a living off the land. Arguments have sprung up in each generation. There are those who want to husband and steward the land and those who are just desperate to make a go of it. As a result there's a slow decline of the land, and a sense of decay and struggle, despite the wish to restore what's been lost and the honoring of hard times to save a legacy.

The tension in the Coopersmith marriage between Ted and Ellie springs from these differences, as husband and wife want different things. Ted, working a job in town so he can stay on the farm, is sober and focused on labor. Ellie, a good mother, but a city girl at heart yearning for music, dancing, flower gardens, and good times. She's a city girl transplanted to the country, and the transplant didn't take. She's lonely. Ellie finds her husband boring, but has settled down into the marriage, if restlessly, and after a costly error. In this case she settles for a lack of vibrancy in relationship in order to avoid divorce and dies six years later. And Ted settles into his workshop, a world where there are things he can fix and do something about.

Casswell writes of subtle shifts through thematic explorations more than a novel driven by action and plot. This is a quiet, thoughtful and reflective story punctuated by lyrical passages of the workings of nature and a child's delight in the freedom of exploring the outdoors.
"A Place to Come Home To" gives us a big story in a small package. Its over-riding theme is that time moves on and we must change with the times.

Visit Janet Grace Riehl's blog "Riehl Life: Village Wisdom for the 21st Century" at http://www.riehlife.com/ for more thoughts and information about making connections through the arts, across cultures, generations, and within the family. You can also read sample poems and other background information from "Sightlines: A Poet's Diary" on Janet's website.

Excess Bounty

My morning walk reminds me that my front yard is looking like a blowzy lady after a hard night. The lavender is swollen and huge, the blooms finished but the but the spikes still raised to the warmth. As the sun creeps over the fence, a few bees visit to savor the last opportunities before they move on. The other plants, the blooming potentilla, the heather, the daylillies are all spread in an unrestrained sprawl. At the foot of those, the ground cover is blanketing the ground, some growing right over the top of it's parent plant.

The back yard is no different--the dahlias in bloom crowding the shrubs, the squash tendrils exended over the onion rows and under the fence, the strawberry runners spilled out over the raised walls of the bed and the tomato plants extended far beyond their cages. This mild summer has outdone itself in abundance, making it impossible to believe the part of my surroundings I'm responsible for will ever bear a semblance of neatness again.

My neighbors with their manicured lawns probably shudder and try to imagine what I find attactive in an abundance of plants, blooming or not. Soon I'll need to get busy and trim everything back but for a little while I can pretend I live someplace else, with fewer rules and less restrained.

www.Jo-Brew.com http//jo_brew.blogspot www.thecreswellchronicle

Crossing a wolf's trail

Earlier this month, as my husband, Richard, and I headed north down the Blue River from Silverthorne, crossed the Colorado and passed through Kremmeling, and then wound up Muddy Creek toward Rabbit Ears Pass, I was thinking about wolves.

We were crossing the likely path of one of Colorado's most controversial recent immigrants: Wolf 293F, born in 2003 to the Swan Lake Pack in northwestern Yellowstone National Park and killed in June, 2004, while crossing I-70 west of Idaho Springs, some 420 miles from her natal home.

What was she doing? Searching for what drives us all: love and fortune.

Wolf 293 was just a pup in January, 2003, when biologists attached a radio collar to track her movements. She spent her first year learning wolf ways with her siblings. She was a year old when she was last located by radio telemetry near Mammoth Hot Springs in January, 2004. After that, Wolf 293 vanished from contact until she was found dead in Colorado nearly six months later.

Apparently, Wolf 293's natal pack had no room for another potentially dominant female, so in her second spring, she struck out to find her own space - a territory and a mate.

Before Wolf 293 ventured into central Colorado on her quest, the last known wild gray wolf in the area was killed in the Conejos Valley in 1945, the victim of a culture that fervently believed that predators like wolves, mountain lions, and grizzlies were evil, symbols of a wild that needed to be tamed to make the world safe.

We still fear wolves, even though for the past century, no cases of healthy, wild wolves killing humans can be substantiated. That they will kill unattended livestock is no question, but then, so will domestic dogs. Wolves are in fact the ancestors of the pet canids we dote on, from teacup poodles to Great Danes. Some fourteen thousand years ago, we befriended the same wolves we now abhor, offering them space at the campfire and scraps in return for companionship and devotion.

Unfortunately, our "tame" companions are not as discriminating as their ancestors: our pets kill an average of thirteen people and untallied numbers of livestock each year. What does it say about us that we harbor pit bulls, but we cannot tolerate wolves?

Like them or not, we may need wolves to restore the health of our landscapes. Without wolves, elk populations have exploded, stripping ecosystems bare as they eat themselves out of house and home, destroying habitat for trout and songbirds and cattle as well, and setting the stage for devastating epidemics like chronic wasting disease. In the decade since wolves' return to Yellowstone National Park, elk populations have stabilized, cottonwoods, willows, and aspen have re-sprouted, and landscapes are healthier for all. (And they've spawned a boom in tourism: wolves are the number one species visitors to Yellowstone ask to see.)

I imagine Wolf 293 on her journey, trotting steadily south along the flanks of the mountains, edging around open basins, and stopping each evening on some ridge to broadcast her yearning calls. She stands, tips her muzzle to the sky, and hurls that rich, full-throated howl across the landscape: "Ooooooooooooooooooo!"

Then she listens, ears pricked forward, swiveling to catch any response. But there is no answering call.

She trots on, hunting, resting, but driven to search for more: home and family. Finally, she is hit crossing the river of traffic on I-70. She drags herself off the highway and dies, still alone.

As Richard and I wound through the sagebrush-clothed hills of northwestern Colorado, I thought about Wolf 293 and her quest. And I wondered what it would take for us to welcome wolves, and the wildness they represent, back into our lives.

A longer version of this essay was published as "Wolf 293" in the anthology Comeback Wolves.

Susan J. Tweit
http://communityoftheland.blogspot.com
http://susanjtweit.com

The Morning After

A night time thunderstorm, one with a deluge of rain, cooled and cleaned our air, giving us a morning when we can draw in deep breaths as we gaze at the clear blue sky broken only by the occasional puffy cloud. No haze yet.

It's said Native Americans did not live in this lush valley of the Willamette River but in the hills above. They visited to hunt and fish but didn't stay. They understood the illness that came from the stagnant air filled with pollen and moss spores but we assume we are somehow able to survive the breathing problem. There are a lot of other benefits to making our home in this moderate climate of abundant growth.

My home place in Oregon is in the valley of the Willamette River as it makes the long curve out of the mountains and begins the journey north to join the mighty Columbia River on the Washington State line.

Our valley is fertile and green with a rich variety of crops. Heading north, the freeway passes through hay fields, past pastures with grazing cattle and sheep, and along hillsides covered with vinyards. On picturesque old highways covering a similar route, a passerby would find truck farms, hazelnut orchards, mint fields, nursery stock and huge fields of grass being grown for seed to supply golf courses, ball fields, and lawns everywhere.

Those are the fields surrounding the newly built mansions of the grass seed farmers. The young men who own their own airplanes and lease the land from the family farmers who can no longer make a living.

Yesterday they began to burn their fields, an annual event that goes on for weeks. It's true, they aren't allowed to burn as many acres as they did a few years ago and it can't be at their convenience but it only takes a slight shift in the wind to leave nearby communities gasping and choking for all the weeks of the burn season.

This was the year our legislature made huge strides in coloring Oregon green, requiring our three largest utilities to obtain twenty five per cent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025 with emphasis on solar. (We have the perfect place for solar in the lava waste lands of the eastern part of the state.)

They passed a basketfull of other bills, updates of the bottle bill to include plastic, an incentive package for develpment of alternative fuels, increased funding for the Envioronmental Protection Agency to monitor water and air pollution, a moratorium on drilling for oil, gas, or sulfur off the Oregon coast, a program requiring manufacturers to provide free recycling for computers and televisions and last but not least, authorization to clean up toxins in our Willamette River.

A good start, long delayed. To my dismay they stopped just short of eliminating the grass seed field burning. Admittedly, not as important in the big picture as the steps they did take but miserable for the unwise humans who have made their home here.
www.Jo-Brew.com

Stewardship

I've been thinking lately about the concept of stewardship, specifically stewardship of this benighted and beautiful blue planet. What does it mean to be a steward of a place, a community, of this planet?

According to the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the word steward comes from the Old English words for ward or manager and house. A steward is thus someone who manages or tends a house, and stewardship has its roots in caring for home. If we think of Earth as the home of our species - and it is in fact as far as we can tell the only home our species has ever known - then how we manage or tend that home is a critical factor in the survival of our children and their children, of the genes that carry our species into a future we won't know. That makes stewardship pretty important.

But what is it? How can we be good stewards of our planet? Stories about being green are all over the popular media these days and web sites from Live Earth to Audubon and even Oprah have sections with tips on how you can be "part of the solution." Changing your household lightbulbs to compact fluorescents will indeed save energy and that means less CO2 added to the atmosphere, a very good thing. Driving less is good too, both for you and the planet. But it seems to me that stewardship is more than just buying new lightbulbs or walking more. As the original meaning implies, it's a commitment of sorts, a commitment to managing our own lives' and our species' impact on Earth.

I think stewardship is based on sharing. It means acknowledging that there are a lot of us humans and our impact on our home is huge. And it means having a new vision for our lives that springs from making space for the other lives around us, whether we ever see those lives or not. It seems to me that stewardship means joining the community of the land, the web of living beings who together green and maintain the ecological and spiritual health of our home, this planet.

When my husband and I adopted our 2/3 of an acre of decaying industrial land on the wrong side of the former railroad tracks in our small town, we vowed to restore the native mountain bunchgrass prairie. Ten years and lots of weed-pulling, spraying, and burning later, our new house looks out on a front yard awash in scarlet, blue, yellow, and purple wildflowers and buzzing with the wings of hummingbirds, butterflies, and native bees. (The same bees that pollinate the heritage tomato plants in our kitchen garden, ensuring huge yields.) We'll always have weeds to pull, and we'll also always have the joy of knowing we took the place in the first photo and turned it into the second photo.

Stewardship is about nurturing the community of the land, not just one species. It's about belonging to this blue planet with every fiber of our being, every choice we make in our lives. Welcome to life on Earth!

Susan J. Tweit
http://susanjtweit.com
Read the whole essay on my blog, The Community of the Land at http://communityoftheland.blogspot.com

Our Home in the Ozarks

There are plenty of things we can all do to preserve this precious land that nurtures us. We're doing our small part, as best we can.
Those of us who live in Arkansas are considered southern. We are also western because of our history (Judge Parker's Court and the new U.S. Marshals Museum soon to be built in Fort Smith) The history of the Cherokee, Marcy's trail drive and cattle drives also qualifies us as western. Not to mention the Butterfield Overland Mail Route that cut through our corner of the state. And, oh, yes, there's Jesse James and Belle Starr, stage coach and bank robberies. And the men wear Stetsons and jeans and boots and drive pickups.
My husband and I own ten acres 21 miles south of the booming NWArkansas metroplex that I'd gladly put a stop to if I could. I suppose it's good for this impoverished state because there are jobs galore. Land values have soared and that's making it hard on the natives who've owned land here for generations. Thank goodness property taxes for owners over 65 have been frozen or we might have to give up this life we treasure.
The new Interstate is six miles west of us. Both out of sight and out of mind. We have a live creek that runs through the lower six acres of property far from all that hubbub. A few winters back a family of industrious beavers decided our creek would make a good home. We were treated all that winter with their antics as they harvested many of the small saplings and built a dam. It grew until quite a lovely pond backed up behind it. Since the creek is in the low point of the property, these little beavers created a deep hole of water. I remember one cold day, when glistening icicles hung from bare branches, we made our way down to take a look. It was truly a wonderland, the bright sunlight reflecting in the ice and the crystalline water. That spring heavy rains came, as they often do, and soon washed away the dam. But for a short time we were privileged to enjoy watching these little animals do what they do so well. We do have hay cut off this six acres. In the valley a deep well drilled down into an aquifer supplies water for two households.
Our home is on the opposite side of the road, halfway up what we Ozarkers refer to as a mountain, on another four acres. Behind our house, the land climbs and butts up against the Ozark National Forest so a great quantity of wildlife often strays onto our place. We do keep a lawn mowed around our house, a buffer zone of sorts against rattlesnakes and copperheads. A short walk through a stand of tall pines is my daughter's home, but in the summer the house isn't visible because of the trees. Where the property heads up the mountain out back, we've left it wild. The terraced incline is covered in shaggy bark hickory, walnut, oak, and some cedar and pine as well as an abundant undergrowth which is a fine habitat for birds and small animals. As a result, of course, we have occasional visits from small black bears, plenty of deer and coon, possum, armadillo and the like.
Once we kept a few head of cattle and hogs, butchered our own meat, milked our favorite old cow daily and I kept a Tennessee walker for riding. We grew a big garden and canned and froze most of what we ate. My health will no longer allow that kind of labor, but I still miss it. I am grateful for the modern conveniences that allow us to remain here on our land where I can listen to the songs of birds and watch squirrels frolic through the trees. Where I can write in a serenity only the country can offer.
The photo is the beaver pond looking toward the creek down below the dam.