handstories

spooning stories

    This is a Twin Star pierced spoon.  Isn't that lovely to say?  Isn't it a beautiful spoon?  As a child I imagined stardust and fairytales pouring off of it.  I have loved this spoon most of my life.

 

 

    It is part of the silverware I grew up using.  The first place settings were slowly collected during a crime spree carried out by my mom and her mother (Grandma got a kick out of the scheme).  During Mom's last years in high school, about once a month, they would go to a local diner for a cup of coffee.  The restaurant served up orders with a mishmash collection of utensils.  If there was a piece of Twin Star at their table (or on one within reach), a single piece would be taken to add to Mom's hope chest. 

    By the time she and Dad got married there were a couple of place settings worth.  The set was filled out over time with Betty Crocker box-top coupon points that Mom collected and mailed in for the missing pieces, including the magical serving spoon.

 

 

    Sometime during my high school years, Mom had saved up more points and ordered a whole new set of silverware.  It was not Twin Star.  I was not happy.  The Twin Star set was moved out to the motorhome to be used for camping trips.  A few years later, when Dad left, he took the motorhome, cast iron skillet (that's another story), and the Twin Star with him.

 

 

    While over at Dad's house a couple of years later, I spied the serving spoon, and began plotting how to get it (I am my mother's daughter).   While I didn't have to resort to thievery, it did require spending time alone with him (in a post-bar state), listening to unwanted advice and comments about me and my life, but I left with the spoon.

    I love this spoon.

tear drops & trees

   Blue turned 22 yesterday.  We haven't been with him on his birthday since he went off to college four years ago, but this year found me a little sadder than usual about it.  Moon and K. tip-toed around a bit.  K. sent capital lettered texts to Blue saying his mama REALLY needed a photo of his WHOLE face (she did), Moon decided to JUST DO the schoolwork his mama asked him to, rather than argue that she hadn't asked him to (she did).  I cried a little while singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" during the zoom practice with our group last night (fortunately there are sixty of us and our images are too small to notice dripping faces).
   On a cheerier note, last week I cracked about social distancing, texting, screen time, missing time with women, etc.  A good friend heard my meltdown via texting, cursing and silence (this is not the cheery part), and had the brilliant idea of a picnic.  With our own food, wine bottles, blankets, and six feet between our lawn chairs, we spent the evening in the front yard under the Japanese maple tree.  We're hoping the weather holds for a repeat tonight.  It's great to have something to look forward to.

    The pages are going even slower than last week, just like me, but I'm so glad that most of them resemble the things they're meant to represent.  This photograph was a gift from K. years ago.  It still makes me take a deep breath with it's fairytale magic when I look at it, I'm sorry I don't know who took it.

    There are fifty-eight squares of quilting left.  This is a photo of the other side.  I don't remember dyeing this piece of indigo, or how those little flower shapes came to be (beneath the big blob of white), but I like them and used pale blue threads here to keep them as visible as possible.
        And a bobbin of spinning was finished up, and I surprised myself by still being able to spin a balanced yarn (not too much or too little twist in it).  If I stop and think about it, there's lots to be glad about.  I hope you're finding spaces of happy, too.

to draw & to the draw

    These weird blurry days.  Has it only been a month?  I'm doing stuff all day long, and it seems nothing much gets done.  Things seem endless, and at the same time the days fly by.  There are weekdays and weekends.  The difference is that K. is downstairs on weekends, during the weekdays he's mostly up in the makeshift office he's set up in Blue's bedroom.

    (172 169 squares to go)

    Moon has torn down the rotting deck (the one I fell through last summer).  New lumber arrives arrived today.  K. and I both come from people who know how to fix and build things, yet neither of us have much know-how.  Moon has confidence, K. has a friend available for video consults, and I'm just trying to stay away from the whole affair. 

    Seventeen masks were made using Dee's links and tips.  The tailor finishes one in a minute and a half, I've got it down to 13.  Some were mailed off to friends in Chicago and here in Washington, including one to my therapist, because goodness knows I want her to keep safe!

    I don't know if it's this strange time in the world, or if it's from reading Rosee's letter, but this new book is meeting the recent urge to document things.  It was made using the next Peg and Awl tutorial (dinner was late that night, gosh, I love process). There had been attempts at writing, but focus with words is just hard right now.  So now, each day I'm drawing and watercoloring something I love into it.

    It will be interesting to see if skills improve, I hope so.  If the good pen is ever found, maybe some words will be added. The much loved wishing star from Jude...

    Rosee part 4:

    "Somewhere in ’35 Stew had a burst lung. Needless to say, none of us knew it was a burst lung. He just doubled over and started getting blue in the face. I grabbed the telephone and squalled at Dr. Randall across the street that he was dying on me, and Dr. Randall came tearing over and we loaded him in the car and they stampeded to the hospital where Dr. Randall stabbed him with his clothes on. He came back and told me he’d never had such a thing before but he’d read about it in a medical journal a long time ago and guessed right.

    Stew was quite a celebrity for two weeks. Doctors came from all over the state to look at the burst lung. They’d never had one before. Dr. Randall said I’d probably saved his life by calling him so quickly or he’d have died.

    Then I remembered that his life line stopped at 35.  That’s the trouble with my fortune telling, after it happens and then remember that I saw it.  He’s 65 today and still going strong. This was kind of a blow to my fortune telling, but maybe he was destined to die with his burst lung and the fast thinking of Dr. Randall beat the fates to the draw."

tax man & some trees

(Some unfinished spring thoughts.)

    It's so hard to focus on anything these days.  Just doing what needs to be done, when I remember to do it.

(The "Story" blanket is worked on every morning, half-way done.)

    I'm very glad for this blanket's bigness.  There's an endlessness to it that I'm grateful for, unlike the other eternity that seems to be going on.

(At the window, seen through the blue cloth other side.)

    It's generally ok here, sometimes I'm even grateful for the some of the calm that it's brought into the house.

(The first layer of some trees.  They don't look like this anymore.  I'm kind of sorry about that.)

    And then, there are other days, when someone asks "What's for dinner?" and I throw a recipe card at them.

(Another sign of spring.  This is the second year we've seen rabbits in the neighborhood.  They're braver this year, hopping by in daylight.)

    I can't wait to go somewhere, and even more, I can't wait for the guys to GO somewhere for a day, or a long road trip.

    Things with Rosee's letter get confusing at times.  Sentences that don't quite make sense, words I can't make out, and punctuation and capital letters being used as an art form.  I'm trying to leave some of it be, but there are limits...

    Rosee part 3:
    "I forgot to record my chat with the Income Tax Collector. He wanted to know, in a nice way, how the sole owner and proprietor of two bakeries at Roundup and Miles City could live on $300 a year. I explained that he slept upstairs and we had to pay the rent on the bakery and ate day old rolls that we threw out and fed to the bums anyway. And all I could find that he’d spent was $300. He wanted to know what the $300 was for and I told him whiskey.

    Tommy P., the little Bulgarian that Stew had hired when he came to the back door and fainted from hunger (he took it upon himself to drag him upstairs and put him to bed. Otherwise, I just dusted him like a piece of the furniture).

    When Stew came home clean and sober, he immediately took over all the purchasing again and I became the retail clerk and bookkeeper he’d hired me for. One day about the first of 1936, I noticed we had enough money to pay the rent. I said, “Stew we have enough money to pay the rent.”

    He said kind of quiet and still. “Did you say we had enough money to pay the rent?” and I said, “Yes.” He said, “Let’s pay the rent.”  I wrote the check out to our unhappy landlord and said, “Here you shall have the honor of signing it. You’ve sweat more blood about it than I have.” Stew signed it then he said, “Rosee, I’m going to carry this letter proudly down to the post office and put it in with my own lily white hands. Three years worth of rent."  And he did.

afternoons

    The weather has been really weird this week.  Pouring pelting rain at the window, sunny the next minute, hail so loud you have to yell to be heard over it, and lots of gray skies in-between.  It suits these strange days.

    Using this video, I made a little book with one of my cards, and then filled it with swashes of paint.

    Pages were pressed together to make a print on the opposite page.

    And some daydream doodling- pink crystal waterfall, rooted heart, sparkling goose, and a home built on strong clouds and stone.  Time goes along. 

    It did for Rosee, too...

    "About a month after he left, a traveling salesman came breezing into my lair and asked where Stew was.  I said I didn’t know, he’d just gone away for a while. The salesman wanted to know who was buying supplies.  I didn’t know.  He said “Look, you lovely lady, you can’t make bread without lard and sugar and stuff.  Somebody will have to buy them.  I said wait till Mickey the head baker comes on tonight and we’ll ask him.  Mickey was a great help.  He bellowed, “I’ve never bought anything, Stew always handled it!  All I do is bake!”  We stood around swilling coffee and looking stupidly at each other for a while, and then they both pounced on me.

    "Miss Rosee O’Neill, we now elect you as purchasing agent for the Blue Ribbon Bakery as of now."  I lit out a wail that I wouldn’t know how much to buy or who to buy it from. The Salesman, being a patient soul said, "Get all the old bills out of the flour barrel and order what Stew bought last time.  Then this stupid Irishman can keep track of what he is low on, and, well, purchase that.  See, here are the bills from my company stretching back three years, so you can go ahead on that."  We did.  When the bread paper man came, we did the same thing.  Everything went nicely.  On the first of the month I’d trudge up and down main street getting everybody to make a payment on their bills.   None of them actually paid up, but me and my seven bakers were still getting paid. 

    Then the flour man came and announced that it was time to contract for a carload of flour.  He sat down and patiently explained, with papers out of the barrel, that it was done that way.  I made him wait for Mickey again.  Buying sugar and spices for a couple of hundred was one thing, but contracting for a carload of flour for $1,000 was something Rosee O’Neill was not going to sign.  Again, Mickey argued me into it, and I sat and wrote a check for $1,000 signed Blue Ribbon Bakery by Rosemary O’Neill.  Then I just sat there and looked at it.  Me getting $18 a week.  There was something about it that gave me the willies.

    One day, a smart salesman came in with a bread wrapping line of paper Stew had never bought, and I turned him down cold.  Nothing doing, if there wasn’t an old account with the company in the flour barrel, I wouldn’t touch it. 

    Of course, I got to use my Newspaper Institute of America writing those clever little ads in the Miles City Star every week.  

    One day, about a year later, we were all gathered around the coffee pot with the girls from the beauty shop, who always joined us in coffee and rolls, when someone said, “Hello” and we looked around and there was our lost employer- sane, sober and clean.  We were all so glad to see him that none of us ever told him how frantic we’d been when he was gone.  We didn’t even know whether he was alive or dead till a counter check showed up at the bank about six months after he disappeared. That night I waited till the bakers came to work to show them we still had an employer somewhere."

maelstrom

    "Story" goes along.  Stars fill gaps left by wayward stitching.  I look forward to working on it every morning, rushing to get showered, oatmeal and tea made, so that I can settle into it.

   It was a happy surprise to flip it over, after days of not looking, and find a whole other story going on.

    This chart was made on a day it felt like I wasn't getting anywhere, to document and see progress.  Each day is a new color, except for that big blue space that was the first accounting of finished squares before Tuesday.

    Tuesday was a crazy bad day, in lots of directions.  Including a meltdown while trying to dismantle and pack up as many games, puzzles, etc. to send to Blue, who had asked for them, and I was so glad there was something I could do for him 2,351 miles away, but not so glad that it meant a trip to the crowded post office, which stressed me out. 

    And then another in the car when I couldn't release the emergency brake Moon had set as hard as he could. 

    And another upon returning... just because. 

    The last one included a word that Moon has never heard me use before... which sent him into his own meltdown.  We were all like a whirlpool, with everything being sucked down to the bottom of the ocean... sea, sand, ships, and great whales of emotions.

    And then morning came... with that after storm stillness, everyone treading lightly, checking the weather.  The sun came out, and everything has been very peaceful since (knocking on wood)!  Clearly I need to swear more often!

    As for Grandma Rosee, when last we left her, she had just gone to work for Stew, the baker.

    "I told him I knew shorthand and bookkeeping, and he said he’d never done any bookkeeping because all he had was bills, and it was less discouraging to just throw them in a flour barrel. However the Income Tax man came along and requested a report. Stew said he’d give me $5.00 extra if I’d clean out the barrel and put it in a ledger, which I proudly bought. At last I was going to get to use my Business College that I’d taken four years ago in Seattle.

    When I got all the bills and nasty letters recorded, I found a blank space under rent. Nothing but nasty letters and threatened legal action from the landlord in California. I asked Stew why we never paid the rent and he explained that he’d either have to lay off a baker with a family to feed or pay the rent, so he hadn’t paid the rent for three years. That was the picture all over the United States in those days.

    When I’d been there about three months, with Stew sleeping and swilling whiskey in the chair beside me, he came down one morning and said, “Rosee, I’m going away for a while and someone has to sign the checks, so come down to the bank with me and I’ll authorize your signature.” That was all the authorization I ever had and he was gone for almost a year."

    To be continued...

rows & rows & Rosee

    Different day, different squares... (these few are from Jude and a trip to London).

    Routine helps me.  So, I'm trying to stitch in the first half of the day, lunch, and then afternoons are for computer things, reading, housekeeping (once in a while), trying to pry Moon away from his phone... doing anything that needs done (today it was a search for the eggs K. couldn't find at the store last night.  A dozen was scored, but there wasn't a grain of flour to be had...another day.).

    These papers are also becoming a piece of the days.  The manila envelope that's held them for decades was uncovered last week.  Forty some pieces of onion skin paper, written on the fronts and backs by my Grandma Rosee.  I think I was in high school when she wrote it for my dad and his sister.  He had handed it to me saying I should type it up before it was lost.  So, forty some years later, at last, it's happening.

  It begins with...

            "This is the story of my life. You might be interested and you might be bored, but it gives me something to do and I’ve never been home to tell it to you."

    Way back on the blog I wrote this about her... "Rosee was Montana born and raised as a cowgirl.   She was a palm reader for a while in Alaska, while Grandpa was out at sea fishing, during their early years.   She hung her shingle outside her door on the building, the building that also housed women who were frequented by the fishermen.  She was schizophrenic, heavily medicated, wore bright red lipstick, loved her Harlequin romances, and would lay on our couch when she visited once a year, with an ashtray balanced on her chest.  She would only get up for food, cribbage or to read our palms- never sugar-coating what she saw in your hand."

    Since then, there have been family discussions about whether or not she was schizophrenic, or misdiagnosed and misunderstood?  She was in and out of the state hospital for most of my dad's childhood.  There were shock treatments and lithium, which left her flat and mostly silent.  So it's great to be hearing her expressive, funny and sarcastic "voice" in her writing.

    The first fourteen pages told about the animals of her childhood on the ranch.  She described the personalities of eleven horses (Tablespoon, Dainty Boots, Silver, Star...), a sheep named Popeye, and Puppins and her puppies.

    Today her story finally left the ranch...

    "I was one of those suckers that never could pass a fortune teller without shelling out a dollar to have my fortune told till I finally got disgusted and sent to Montgomery Ward for a fortune telling book."

    She goes on to tell about educating herself in palmistry and numerology, reading more and more books.  When a text didn't match what she had already learned, she would heave it into the stove and buy the next one on her list.

    "This was in those deadly depression days when I couldn’t get a job. I took a correspondence course in news writing but I found out I couldn’t write anything unless I had first lived it myself.

    In 1934, I’d had all I wanted of O’Neill, Montana, so when Peggy (her sister) got ready to go back to school. I said I’m going with you and hanging out my shingle as a Fortune Teller in Miles City, which I did. An ad was placed in the Miles City Star and I waited for customers. All the teachers in her bridge club and all the beauty operators where we had our hair fixed bought a fortune. One day one of the girls in the beauty shop said the baker next door wanted a fortune so I went next door and read his hand, and he asked me if I wanted a job as a retail clerk in his bakery. I almost climbed his frame with joy. It actually paid $18 a week. That was the end of my fortune telling career."

    It wasn't the end, I know she read palms later in Alaska, but I'm not reading ahead.

    Until next time...

just when you think you've got nothing...

    A new place to wander.  Summer's indigo scraps and a ThreadCrumb moon (about 13 x 13").

    There's been a lot of forehead furrowing by K. and I about Moon's future plans.  K. keeps telling me to not say anything, that it will push his heels deeper in, but I can't seem to help myself.  So, the other night, jokingly, I suggested a different idea.  When he didn't react, I stepped out onto the ice, slowly and carefully saying some of the reasons why I want this to happen for him.  He seemed to be listening, so, bravely (or foolishly), I kept going... 

    "I just want the world for you..."

    Finally, I stopped, held my breath and hope that I hadn't cemented the deal for his original plans, and turned to busy myself with making dinner.

    And then...

    "Mom, I love you, too." 

    I managed to keep the happy cry in in until he left the room.

    And, he's looking into and considering our idea.

moon mulling

    Yesterday had some parenting moments...  

    Blue has been offered a job upon graduation this spring, and it's across the country.  Whether he'll accept it, or not, is still up in the air.  Either way, it was a realization that he may never live here again, which is good, how it should be, and... sigh.

    Last night, I yelled something at Moon out of exhaustion and exasperation.  It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't kind.  I said I was sorry, and again this morning, and I am.  He's seventeen and thinks he's ready to be on his own, which is normal, how it should be, and... sigh.

    In trying to think of something to write here, I drew a moon mind-map, writing down moony thoughts- a page of golden round words and moonlit memories of childhood- both mine and the boys'...

    Traveling to the moon and stars with my brother in our imaginations and rocket ships (lawn chairs), growing up with a woman named Mooney across the street, and being told (and believing) I could live on the moon when I grew up.

    How Blue chose Moon's middle name because there was often a full moon on the evenings of our midwife appointments. "Look at the moon, Mama!" 

    Standing outside, huge-as-moon pregnant, days overdue, trying to convince Moon to come out and see the moon for himself, and finally, on the porch a couple of days later, showing him the moon on the night he was born.

    Writing a little Zoom to the Moon book for four year old Blue to read.  Putting together that wonderful "Over the Moon" play with his second grade class, which included bits of the songs "Blue Moon", "Moon River" and more.  

    And that night sky song that I hummed to my baby boys, while slowly twirling around the front room, trying to dance them to sleep (click here for a lovely listen).

        Well, this turned into an unexpectedly long lingering...

    "A Golden Making" and a few more starlit story cloths will be in the shop tomorrow morning.

waves of things

    Family gathered at the Oregon coast this last week to put Dad's ashes into the ocean.  The four of us siblings, partners, and a few of our next generations.  

    Jude's comfort cloth came along in my pocket, it was held, clenched and washed in the sea.

    The day was stormy.  We laughed at the thought of what Dad would've said about us all standing there precariously on the wet rocks, wind whipping, rain soaking us through.  I'm sure it would've included a muttering of  "bunch of goddamn idiots".

    A bottle of my brother's homemade blackberry brandy was passed, and the rest poured in after the ashes.  They had planned to share it on their next fishing trip.

    There weren't a lot of words, all of us stood there with our thoughts, memories and emotions.

    The thirteen of us were in a big house with an amazing view.  It's been more than a decade since we siblings have stayed together.  Among the various breakfast makings, one sister made a pot of oatmeal each morning.  Seeing that the four of us all scooped up a bowl, was oddly comforting.  Moon commented that we all had the same sense of humor, and was a little taken aback (but enjoyed) the brashness of most of my family.

    A sock was started on the drive down, and finished during hours of watching the waves.