(folk)art spotting in Siouxland 4

Vietnamese ritual incense burner, brass. In front of a traditional painted triptych. Shrine of the Vietnamese Martyrs in the Cathedral of the Epiphany, Sioux City, IA.

German Farm Madonna

Painted wood, late 20th century. Cathedral of the Epiphany, Sioux City, IA. It was commissioned in Italy, but she really looks like the local German farmers who settled this region. The infant is holding a pomegranate, a symbol of the early Church. Difficult lighting.

(folk)art spotting in Siouxland 3

Doorknob of the Confessional, forged iron, 19th cent., Cathedral of the Epiphany, Sioux City, IA.

The confessional is an octagonal chapel in the foyer of the church. I couldn't photograph it, but around the corner from the door is a large candle on a tall floor stand, lit when the sacrament of mercy is offered. With the gentle angles of the octagon it's impossible to put your hand on the doorknob without looking at the bright candle.

Golubtzi!

Terrific step-by-step by Sofya Hundt here.

If these got any more delicious, you'd have to eat them with a soundtrack.

(folk)art spotting in Siouxland 2

Mexican plaque of Our Lady of Tepeyac (Guadalupe). Molded natural plaster, painted. Mexico City, 1980. Both Mary and the angel have blush and eyeshadow, not on the original.

(folk)art spotting in Siouxland 1

Above: Mexican painted terracotta on a kitchen cabinet door. 2007.
Below: Mexican bas relief of Archangel Raphael, patron saint of travelers, young people seeking a spouse, and folks seeking their calling in life. Painted papier mache over carved styrofoam. 1983. Brought from Guanajuato, Mexico. The fish and staff are standard iconography, but note the inverted wings. Hung over a crib.

Moody Garlic: happy

Moody Garlic: somber

Bread trough

19th cent. bread trough: East Texas farm. Originally owned by a Choctaw Indian woman who married in 1853. She married into an extended family of Anglo settlers who'd come to Texas in a wagon train immediately following the Revolution of 1836. The Choctaw were peaceful agriculturalists on the Mississippi; it is not known how or where she met her husband.

The trough is extremely smooth. It has straight sides, inside and out, which is probably explains why they were called troughs rather than bowls. One could mix, knead, and rise dough in it without a table, an obvious advantage for a pioneering homesteader. The ends on the underside have shallow nicks that appear to be from a knife tip. I guess the bowl would have been turned over to cover rising dough on a counter and got the nicks that way.

Rice Noodles

Thanksgiving 2000: dawn and dusk

That year Peter Jennings was with us. His charm was like a force of nature. I got to spend several hours with him over the weekend, and he was among the most interesting men I have ever met. Early in the morning, I was in the kitchen and since there was an oven available, threw in coffee muffins while I fiddled with some dough.

After two bites of steaming muffin, Peter came into the kitchen to say, "Madame, these are outstanding muffins!"

"Madame?" someone whispered. Every student in the room burst out laughing.

****************************
So glorious had that turkey feast been that I let the procession of pies pass me by. There were a lot of guests, mostly students' families, but with my husband gone to a funeral I found myself alone in the cottage that evening. I loaded up a tea ball with loose leaves and headed for the Boarding House in search of pie, expecting to find it deserted.

It wasn't. A single student was puttering in the kitchen, a friend since his application interview.

A student by himself is honest in an entirely different way than he's honest while another student is in the room. I saw this over and over again. Getting to talk to a student alone was always terribly precious time.

He was trying not to cry. I listened while the tea steeped in subtle clouds, and said,

"The trouble is that you change a lot in a short time. But your parents don't seem to have changed at all. And that's sad, because it's like you're free and they're trapped, and they don't have to be."

"Yeah. That's it."

"Yeah. I just got off the phone with mine. I'm only ten years older than you."

I don't remember what else we said over pie. I'd like to think I told him it wasn't inevitable or permanent. Did I tell him my mother had had cancer while I was in the Valley and told no one? Probably not. It matters more, I think, that I listened and I was there. We finished our pie dry-eyed, turned off the lights in the boarding house, and went home. He went to the residence, still aglow with visiting parents and siblings. I walked to the stone cottage in the middle and turned on the porch light in case anyone's mother wanted to talk to me. Mostly, I missed all the men who were not there: my husband, my father, my best friend who had left at first snowfall, alumni scattered. Gratitude for everything in that Valley that I wasn't responsible for, gratitude for the beautiful desert and thundering ice.

Thanksgiving 2000: sacrifice

About a decade before coming to Deep Springs, I sometimes spent time with a teaching elder of the Indian Tribe on whose ancestral land my college was built. They had no reservation; the language and especially traditional dance as a form of prayer was how they had maintained their identity. New Agers were not welcome; I was welcome precisely because I was a practicing Catholic and not looking to co-opt their traditions to escape the demands of my own.

There was a small pow-wow every year, essentially a religious event of strictly traditional drumming and no prizes. We honored the flag of the U.S. and the Eagle Feather Staff, honored veterans, did mourning dances with the bereaved and healing dances for the sick. Some were humorous. And at every pow-wow, there were dances to honor the animals who had died and been eaten that day. Everyone who had eaten meat was expected to dance.

At Deep Springs I attended most of the slaughters that took place, often to help in minor ways. Slaughter is very intimate. The first cow I helped skin shocked me with the warmth of its shining, reeking fat. It's naturally honest to call a rectum at such close range an asshole, but I never saw disrespect toward the animal. A couple of slaughters went grievously wrong by accident rather than callousness.

Before coming to the Valley, I had sacrificed plenty of bait fish, little eels, impaled plenty of living shrimp behind their yellow brains. I'd sacrificed some game fish as a result, always with my father. My father's father had been a subsistence hunter and 'though he never explained it, the only acceptable word for making meat was sacrifice; only vermin and roadkill got killed. I pray the Mass in Latin today and study the Old Testament, and even so it's almost impossible to convey the habit of reverence sacrifice carries from the hunters of my family.

And I did want to convey it at slaughter. Whether a mammal or fowl was made our meat, one or two students obviously wanted a larger framework than dinner. That framework wasn't quite big enough to acknowledge that a unique creature became an anonymous pile of meat when it hit the ground. Some of them would have been relieved to dance to sacred drums, which I could not offer. There was only how I behaved myself, when I helped and when I taught.

I learned to draw birds mid-summer from the farm parents of a graduate. It was a terrific learning experience, largely because my friend's father was a natural born teacher, like my father. I knew I'd be teaching others the next time I did it, so I was listening to his pedagogy while noticing that his wife plucked feathers in fast circles.

About the time we sacrificed Tom Hudgens' turkeys, the last farmer in my family put her organic farm up for sale: a small, diversified farm that had never had a drop of chemical agriculture, abutting a National Wildlife Refuge. My husband and I had made the decisions years before that made it impossible for us to buy the farm and it passed out of the family. At least one of the students who helped draw the turkeys quietly hated my guts, but he was the only one I had talked to about the farm slipping away.

Amid the smells of wet feathers and turkey blood, I felt really blessed. I was wearing bonepile clothes, to sacrifice someone else's birds that would be mostly eaten by guests. It was my borrowed farm in a wilderness I knew I'd be leaving. I was very conscious of the gift of good teaching from a friend's father and my own. Everything about that slaughter spoke of someone else's kindness, but I didn't feel poor. Application season had begun, and I was going to get to give away everything. Gratitude.

Thanksgiving 2000: giving thanks

In November the lower reservoir had frozen, and it was roaring for days. Sometimes the ice popped loudly; sometimes it moaned and murmured. On this day it was singing, booming and warbling for seconds at a time. I talked to the Farm Manager a few minutes when he came by. I'd been walking the Valley every day for years, and no one thought anything of me being alone and out of sight. After he left, I went out on the pier to be surrounded by the sound of the pond.

I stepped off the pier toward the overgrown willows, and just grabbed one as I fell straight down. It snapped in my hand with the crack of a gunshot; the whole world jerked up hard. "God, you're going to have to get me out of this" I said before I felt the water. It burned. I couldn't touch the bottom.

And then I was lying facedown on the pier, my clothes soaking but my hair dry. I just lay there a bit, and then realized my leather jacket was starting to freeze. So I got up and walked back to my house, encountering no one. At home I took a hot shower, put on my bonepile socks, and crawled under the covers to sleep off the shock. When my husband came home from teaching, I had already mopped up the melt and spread my Leatherman to dry.

At dinner that night the ranch manager's wife sat down across from me and waited. So I told her, as custom demanded. And she didn't say anything, which I took to be a compliment, in that she trusted me to draw the right conclusions on my own. Then over dinner we talked about calving season. The farm manager talked to me, distraught; later, his wife, too. She said, "God sent his angel to get you out."

The next afternoon I dressed in bonepile clothes and helped slaughter Tom Hudgens' flock of red turkeys for their appointment with the new turkey fryer. Parents of a student had taught me to draw birds at his graduation. I had taught some of the new students, 'though not the one who cut the turkeys' throats.

It was an extraordinary meal, and no menu recitation could do it justice. It was baroque and astonishing: dessert rode out with the Valkyries. My husband had to leave for a funeral, so I ate the orgiastic feast with a Mennonite family. During dinner I learned my student wasn't wearing the Leatherman his younger brother gave him, but the one worn by the student who had died. Their mother asked me, "how do you deal with living in a men's college?" Her older son smiled down at his pie, because he knew the answer but had never heard me say it.

*****
Months later, one of our harrowed alumni came straight home to Deep Springs. I met him on the porch of my house with bottles of his favorite beer, and listened to his tale of malaria and dengue fever. He said he lost his Leatherman right after he got there, stranded and broke in Nairobi. When he stopped, I told him:

"Well, I did something really stupid while you were gone. You remember your Public Speaking story about almost drowning in Alaska? While the lower rez was frozen, I decided to take a walk, and fell through the ice. I remember falling, and the cold of the water, but I don't remember getting out. Walking home, I could feel my clothes freezing, my big leather jacket freezing, and I thanked God for everything--for my freezing clothes, for the sand, for how beautiful the sage brush was. There was no fear, no confusion, just gratitude and knowing I had to keep moving."

I took a sip of beer. I hate beer.

"A couple of days later, I saw that the backs of my thighs had a black and blue line of huge bruises, where I struck the ice going down. If I had hit my head rather than my legs, I'd have been unconscious when I went into the water."

He said my name softly, and we finished our Shiners in silence on the swing.

Then we went to the boarding house and scrounged a plate of leftover Moroccan chicken, and I sat with him at the picnic table while he wept in gratitude for the first meat he'd eaten in months.

Bonepile

It's going to snow, so I got out my bonepile socks. The bonepile was the community clothing exchange at Deep Springs College, an entropy experiment I regularly scavenged. Doubtless I saved them from a life nasty, brutish, and short.

Thanksgiving: Iconoclasm

I love tradition in many ways. I wear a lace veil in church, regardless of what language it's in. I eat lamb at Easter in some form. Every zombie walk should end by dancing "Thiller." But the Thanksgiving turkey & trimmings never made the cut. Last year we had no company, but a ravenous nursing baby, and I had an Angus steak with french fries.

Baking turkeys and pies every day for a catering company the first year of my marriage didn't help. The last thing I wanted to see when I came home from work on my first Thanksgiving as a married woman was another damn turkey, so we had lasagna instead. The cheese was bright green with organic basil from our tiny community garden plot, saved in ice cubes.

We decided that first Thanksgiving together that the best way we could keep the holiday was to cook and eat food that really inspired gratitude in us. We had lasagna a few times, eventually becoming the full Italian soup-to-espresso. We've made Armenian game hens with apricot rice, Lebanese food, tamales, cumin-glazed chicken with chipotle-peach salsa, lamb and shiitake ravioli.

My son asked why we didn't have turkey, when that's what he's learned about at school. This is what I told him:

Thanksgiving is a celebration of gratitude and immigrants. The Pilgrims were merely the first immigrants. They were neither braver nor harder working than those who followed them, and the food that came with subsequent immigrants is fabulous. Immigrant food for Thanksgiving is our tradition. Tradition should always point to truth. We thank God for all our blessings and all the people who've come to this country.

Son: That makes sense, Mom. Can I have Vietnamese food this year?

Me: Yes, dear. That's what we got the ducks for.

Former church, improved

Neighborhood kid: Are you taking pictures?

Me: Yes, just for fun.

Kid: Isn't it cool? It's got apartments in it now. I wish it were my house, 'cause it would be fun to live there.

Me: Yes, I'd like to have it, too. I'd live on one floor, make another floor a school, and make one whole floor a big rink for roller hockey.

Kid: yeah! that would be cool. (leans closer) It's supposed to be haunted.

Eureka!

My point and shoot did this! Gratitude galore to Donna of Funky Junk Interiors for the step-by-step here.

Hat tip (wooden spoon wave?) to Sofya at Girls' Guide to Guns & Butter for inspiring the subject.

This is why I love the Internet, even though I'd still be writing with my fountain pen if I could get ink for it.

***
Navajo rings, Kingman turquiose and onyx, both signed by the same artist. Bought in San Antonio, TX, 1982.

Ironworks

These are all over the Siouxland area. The company began in 1871. A 1923 local business profile lists cistern collars, coal chutes, pipes and manhole covers, building columns, and boilers among their products. The large sewer lid shown above is a few feet from a sidewalk engraved 1905.

The company still exists, with locations in Sioux City and Nebraska. They're hiring.

Whiskey Barrels

Montessori son, Waldorf daughter

Not shown: the careful copying of the recipe and subsequent decoration, and the vigorous circular stirring of that pumpkin/sugar preparation in the same direction for about an hour.

Farm Wife's Shotgun

The tiny shotgun is an old .410 that belonged to an East Texas farm wife. She shot rattlesnakes with it at the woodpile of necessity, and almost certainly ate them in chili or fried in butter. She would go down to the creek ("crik") and shoot water moccasins "when she felt stressed." The state Constitution protected homesteaders, so few Texas farmers lost their farms during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, but times were hard. The same oral tradition that reports her creek forays also forbids counting how many biscuits someone else eats. I think she must have shot a lot of water moccasins.

The top photo shows it next to an older .12 gauge that belonged to a subsistence hunter, just for scale. The .410 weighs about half what the other shotgun weighs. The scrap quilt was made by the same woman in the 1950s from her and her husband's clothes, when she was old and her sight failing. The pattern, "Drunkard's Trail", was a symbol of the Temperance Movement and she had been a Temperance Marcher before Prohibition.

Two of her daughters were also good shots, the farming daughter with her mother's shotgun and the one who became a city-slicker with a Colt .45.

Frosty Thistle

Unraked Garden

Rural Graveyard : fall & winter

Two views taken several years ago, with my first digital camera. Some of the tombstones are older than the church; Catholic settlers relocated their family graves from their homesteads when consecrated ground became available. A number of WWI veterans are buried there, and a lot of infants and children from the early days.

Even though I wasn't really trying to capture this when I took the pictures, I like them together. The winter photo was brutally cold and dark at midday; Vitamin D deficiency (rickets) probably accounts for some of the dead. The fall photo shows the almost unbelievable fertility of the land that the settling families risked so much for. This land was tallgrass prairie before settlement, part of the 19th c. hunting ground of the Sioux.

Rural Graveyard: spring

This graveyard is adjacent to a tiny Catholic church. Stubble stands in the fields all winter. I had thought that might have been for wind erosion--the wind is terrible--but the combines are set to the precise height needed to give shelter to pheasants.

Dusty Miller & raindrops

Iowa in October

wet maple

Lily of the Valley 2