Maxine Lee is grandmother of our good friend carterzest. We will continue to share the narrative of her family’s history as presented in the book she published in 2005 entitled Some Assembly Required.  The gathering of her stories in the book was a result of her dream “to leave a printed account to my family, of my beginning, my birth place and childhood, and a few of the lessons life has taught to me.”  Thank you, Maxine, for sharing with us what you gathered for them.

Links to previous posts in the series will be shared at the end of each Sunday’s post.

Schools and Books

The first school I remember was located three miles from home. My brother was in first grade and brought home his books, See Jane. See Jane run. He read to me and soon I was reading better than he was. I loved to read and was so frustrated when I couldn’t make words out of the funny looking characters which I had not yet learned. As soon as I could read, I was hooked. I read everything that came my way. Right there and then I decided that some day I would have my own library.

The second school I remember was the most outstanding. My brother was always into mischief and had a mischievous glimmer in his eye. When we had a new teacher, it was his personal calling to drive her over the edge. I remember one in particular. I can still see her chasing my brother with a book in her hand, ready to beat him on the head with it, while he was quietly laughing to himself. The teacher had a big nose, huge feet and a boyfriend, which provided my brother with lots of ammunition to annoy her. It petrified me. (more…)

Maxine Lee, today’s guest author, is also the grandmother of our good friend carterzest. Please make her welcome! Over recent days it’s been my pleasure to visit via email with carterzest and Maxine and get acquainted with two very special people who are part of a large and loving family – a family with full hearts who certainly do have a story to tell.

Maxine was born in 1929 on the South Dakota plains and published Some Assembly Required in 2005. The gathering of her stories in the book was a result of her dream “to leave a printed account to my family, of my beginning, my birth place and childhood, and a few of the lessons life has taught to me.”

Her faith is part of her story and she says “Since it was my privilege to put together some slices of life with spiritual applications, for my church and since I had lots of stories of the past to tell, I included a section of those essays. There is much of my history in those stories.” One of these essays is included in today’s post as well.

Today’s post is Maxine’s opening narrative from her book –  Part One – In the Beginning and also includes an additional word picture, We’re Moving Again, as the extended family narrative begins to unfold.

Part One: In the Beginning

It all began somewhere in Sweden from where my great grandmother and family came to this country. I never knew them. Their family name was Matson. One daughter was named Ida who had a brother, Olaf and a sister, Sadie. I remember them only vaguely. There were others whose names I do not recall.

These newcomers to America built simple homes in an area between South Dakota and Minnesota, where many Swedish and German families had settled. When my grandmother Ida was about sixteen, she fell in love with a Jewish boy whose last name was Stanhope. She was soon expecting a child. However, it was against the young man’s religion to marry outside his faith, which left my young grandmother in a sad predicament.

To have a child out of wedlock in those days was an utter disgrace. So my Catholic, Swedish grandmother agreed to marry a German man, by the name of Chris Lenz, a widower with five children who needed a mother. This marriage of convenience produced a dozen more children. (more…)

Consider the poem
that carries the
same title as the
march.
  

The Stars and Stripes Forever

    Let martial note in triumph float,
And liberty extend its mighty hand,
A flag appears ‘Mid thund’rous cheers,
The banner of the Western land.
The emblem of the brave and true,
Its folds protect no tyrant crew,
The red and white and starry blue,
Is Freedom’s shield and hope.

    Other nations may deem their flags the best
And cheer them with fervid elation,
But the flag of the North and South and West
Is the flag of flags, The flag of Freedom’s nation.

    Hurrah for the flag of the free,
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The Banner of the Right.
Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor,
Proclaim’d as they march’d to the fray,
That by their might And by their right,
It waves forever!

    Let eagle shriek From lofty peak
The never-ending watchword of our land.
Let summer breeze Waft through the trees
The echo of the chorus grand.
Sing out for liberty and light,
Sing out for freedom and the right,
Sing out for Union and its might,
Oh, patriotic sons!

    Other nations may deem their flags the best
And cheer them with fervid elation,
But the flag of the North and South and West
Is the flag of flags, The flag of Freedom’s nation.

    Hurrah for the flag of the free,
May it wave as our standard forever,
The gem of the land and the sea,
The Banner of the Right.
Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with mighty endeavor,
Proclaim’d as they march’d to the fray,
That by their might And by their right,
It waves forever!

(more…)

Have you ever had a dish of peaches and cream?
Not half-and-half. Not Cool Whip. Cream.
The thick cream from our cow’s milk would be called whipping cream in today’s check out lines but it was just every day cream on the farm, kept in the cream can in the fridge.
The cream can was galvanized tin and probably held something over a quart. It had been re-purposed from some grocery-store purchase, perhaps orange juice since fresh fruit wasn’t available in winter. Juice from cans like that always had a metallic taste. The paper that announced the original contents had been stripped off and sharp edges around the edge ground away and the shiny can is now, forevermore, the cream can.
There was another cream can made of sturdier stuff that stood about three feet high. It held five gallons accumulated over a period of weeks in the cool basement before it would be taken to the train depot where it was put on the next freight to Williston. It was delivered to the creamery where it was combined with hundreds of gallons from other five gallon cream cans, bottled and delivered to all the grocery stores in the same towns from which it had come, and then returned as an empty on the same freight train westbound. My father always got the very same can back because it had a metal name tag with our rural route box number in raised metal letters, attached with a small wire to the handle.
Some of it became became homemade ice cream on a hot July Sunday afternoon- in the shade of the old porch on the north side of the house – the one that always had daddy long legs spiders under it.
Those daddy long legs were a favorite weapon in the hands of older brothers. It was routine entertainment to pick one of them up by one or two legs and toss them toward any girl in the vicinity whether she be sister or the sister of a friend.
The boys threw the spiders and the girls dodged them, yelling a bit as they did.
The very quiet girls who were held up as worthy role models (for the consideration of those of us who were not quiet) seldom had spiders thrown at them. I still think the reason is that the boys were afraid they’d start crying, instead of yelling like we did just before we started planning some harmless revenge.
But I digress – back to the warm-from-the-cow cream and the peaches. (more…)

– from Mere Christianity

“I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.”

That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.

He would either be a lunatic – on a level with a man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the devil of hell.

You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.

But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.

He has not left that open to us.

He did not intend to.

 

I got acquainted with Dan this past Thursday.
I had taken our son and grandson to the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum at McMinnville a week ago yesterday and that day I purchased a membership so that I could go again and again and again during the year. Thursday was my first again.
Dan is a national treasure and a new friend. As we wrapped up our thirty minute conversation he offered me a home phone number for himself and his wife of sixty-seven years (V) in case I had further questions about the P-38.
Dan was only twenty-two in the winter of 1944 when he was working as a ground mechanic on the P-38s based in England, stripping them of their armaments so they could be effectively used for photo reconnaissance flights deep into territory controlled by German forces, five months before D-Day.
As I understood the nature of the mission he was describing I asked with some astonishment, How on earth did they carry out such missions?? His answer – very carefully. (more…)

For recent new readers, here’s the how and why that the Mailboxes and Old Barns weekly post got started over three years ago:
Mailboxes along the roads and old barns set back in fields overgrown with weeds often served as landmarks that told us where we were and how far we had to go in the high dry prairie country of northeastern Montana where I grew up. Sometimes the mailboxes signaled “home” and the end of the road; at other times, barely visible through swirling snow, an old barn told us we had miles to go. When I started compiling word pictures of those times a few years back, I realized they were like those mailboxes and old barns–still identifying important places along the road, still signaling where I am and how far I have to go.
Today’s MBOB is a wandering-around-the-Treehouse-trails-visit – coming as it does on the heels of a two month hiatus for me.
(more…)

There’s a call to action that thrills the hearts of skilled canoeists and kayakers. It’s the initially distant but distinctive sound of a Class IV or V rapids.  The one who hears it first may call for silence and a momentary stilling of the paddles. Sshhhhh! – Hear that?? Yes! Rapids ahead!

http://www.paddling.net/guidelines/showArticle.html?67
Essential Boat Control describes 3 important principles for whitewater kayaking: balance, speed control and direction control. These principles are applied to the paddling techniques for entering eddies and exiting eddies. Essential strategies for kayaking in and out of eddies: posture, controlling turns, controlling speed, vision, navigation timing, eddy turn variables, edging, front & back leaning, maintenance strokes, enhancement strokes, linking maneuvers, and boofing.

What was a distant sound begins to dominate the senses and they look intently forward – looking hard – for ripples, patterns, angles, entry points.

• Where are the standing waves?
• Where are the visible rocks and perhaps more importantly, the invisible rocks?
• What route to take? For how long?

The knowledge gathered from experience or scouting takes second place now to the imperatives and choices which will determine the outcome of the run. A refusal to paddle with all their strength will pretty much guarantee capsizing – so they paddle.

The unfamiliar waters move faster. The noise builds. The intensity of effort increases. PADDLES IN! And now they are fully committed – even if they do go over, even if they do make mistakes, they will simply get through the best they can.

In November Sundance described the white water we were facing –

You are going through a journey of profound loss…only one of you will be returning to ‘this old place’ upon completion.  (When you return) it will be different than when you left…. so different, so brutally different, you might not want to return. But return you must.

It’s not safe to drift when you’re in white water. PADDLES IN!

(more…)

From a very young age I remember my family heating with wood. Our house had a masonry fireplace. And later a wood-fired boiler.

 Early Memories

Up through my early grade school years my father owned his own construction company. Business was good and our heat came in the form of saw logs delivered, for a fee, from a friend at a tree service company. I remember some of these maple and oak logs being larger in diameter than I was tall. The log trucks would drop them right in the drive way and we would turn them into cord wood. I was not allowed outside while dad was bucking logs, but I spent a lot of time watching through the window that over looked the driveway. He had a McCulloch 10-10 saw with a 20” bar. Even from inside the house that saw was painful to the ears. I can’t recall if it had a muffler. If it did, it wasn’t very effective. I’m sure the neighbors were pleased… (more…)

About four weeks ago it occurred to me that my husband and I must sometimes look a bit like those kids tucked into the back seat of the family car heading out to an unfamiliar destination – back in the day.

The youngsters are surprised at  being on a trip that they knew nothing about the day before but they find ways to make the best of the unexpected outing on an unfamiliar road. By noon, however, the sense of adventure wears thin and the question(s) began floating up from the back seat to the authorities in the front seat.

Are we there yet? 

He’s not staying on his side.

How much farther is it?

I see a house! Is that where we’re going?

….are we there yet?

Deciding ahead of time what we can stand. Trying to make sense of the turns and the shifts.  And thinking that accepting the inevitable will allow ease in the interim,  we immediately forget that the unknowns are unknown at all times.

Not knowing what we don’t know has become home port.

Like Alice in Wonderland we walk bravely at full height on the surface in the sunshine of the woods, but then our struggle to comprehend shrinks in direct relation to the querulous question that we try not to ask again at three in the afternoon of this long, long day as we realize we are falling, falling, falling.

Are we there yet?

No. (more…)