Looking For A Sign

Whenever I'm in the car, I look at the signs in front of churches.  Some of them are humorous, some are serious, some are double intendres. All of them catch my interest.

In the dreadful heat of this summer, I saw a sign that read, " If you think it's hot here, you don't want to try Hell."  Well, no, I sure don't, and years ago, I made sure that Hades wouldn't be my permanent resting place! Another on the same subject said, "Stop, Drop and Roll" won't work in Hell.  Now, those are what I call 'heavy' messages, and serious ones, at that.  Hell-fire for all eternity is not my idea of a joke.

A sign, relating to the fierce heat of our area, gave me a chuckle. It said, "Come inside. Our church is 'prayer conditioned.'   Cute, and hopefully, true!  Another let me know that, "God answers Knee Mail".
And then, there are those that use abbreviations, followed by meanings, such as "ATM inside...Atonement, Truth and Mercy."   Another says, "P,U.S.H... Pray Until Something Happens."

There are various other messages pinned up on the signs outside of the churches everywhere.  I'm sure they strike people in the same ways people do when they hear a verbal message.  If they have a sense of humor, they will smile or laugh at the comical. If they are very serious, they will relate more to the less funny words. If they are hard-hearted folks, they won't want to respond at all, or at least not in a positive manner.  I guess, some of us will allow the opinions and messages of others to affect us  and  others will not.

As for me, I'm always looking for a sign.

The Man Clan

When we moved here, there were a number of guys in the neighborhood who would come by whenever they'd see Mike in the yard or on the front porch. He couldn't get a lot done, if he was attempting to shovel or rake or weed or mow. Mike was brought up to believe that you should look at someone when they are speaking to you, and pay attention, so if someone stopped by, the work stopped.

It wasn't long before I pinned a nickname on these buddies. "The Man Clan" is what I called them. Sometimes they'd sit on the porch for hours with Mike, chattering and laughing. As frustrating as it was that our landscaping wasn't getting done, I was glad that the guys were getting to know Mike and he was making new friends. You know how it is...when a new person moves into the neighborhood, everyone is curious about them.  In a subdivision that's brand new, noone knows anyone, so they make a point of trying to get to know their neighbors, at least that's how it happened here. Things have settled down a bit, and the neighborhood has had some changes. Some people have already moved out, due to loss of job or other changes in their lives. New people have moved in, but the newness has worn off. The Man Clan has slimmed down to a few and their visits are less often than they were, with each of them settled into their own life's business and work.

This morning some of these guys are off to have breakfast together. Every now and then, I wish I could be a fly on the wall!  What do they talk about? Do they gripe about us wives, or maybe they praise us? Or do they talk about other people in the neighborhood? Sports?  What do guys talk about?!  I try to disappear when one of them is around, other than to say a few words of greeting. After all, guys need their time together, just as women do. Sometimes when there's one of them on the porch, I'll hear them comparing recipes like two old women! They sometimes rib each other about something. Sometimes they are seriously discussing politics or a show on the history channel or some local news story.  Depending upon who it is, there might be the tossing back and forth of military experiences.   I guess that's what they talk about...'guy stuff.'

I hope The Man Clan will enjoy themselves this morning. It's a good break for them from their routine lives of family and work. I tease them all about their comradarie, but they know that I'm just razzing them. I'm really blessed that they have each other.... just as I am to have the women friends I've made.

It all comes down to this, people need people  whether the relationship is called family, friends, acquaintances or 'The Man Clan."

Thankful...

My blogger friend at  Blessing the Elements invited us to blog about something for which we have Gratitude. If you are interested in her blogs, see my followers and click on the one which says 'Blessings of a Wildflower" as her name on the picture. It'll carry you to her blog.  Here is my offering:

Is my heart full of gratitude? For sure!   'Why?' you might ask. I can tell you, quickly...and with certainty, if you've got a moment.

I am flooded with gratitude when I think about the fact that I am alive and well. Years ago I was sick, for nearly a year, and no tests results had a cause for it. To this day the only thing they've come up with was 'you must have had a pelvic infection, at some point, leaving the web of scar tissue that caused you such abdominal pain."  I've learned to live with the unknown cause and the vague diagnosis.

But, because of all that testing and mystery of cause, I saw one doctor after another, finally seeing another gynocolgist who took a fecal testing. Never before had I had the painless test, but I'm glad this doctor did it. I had occult blood in the sample.  From there, I was sent to a proctologist for a discussion and a scheduling of a colonoscopy. (yeah, I know...such fun.)  Actually, the prep drink was the worst part of it, and the test was a breeze, sleeping through the procedure, and waking a short time later with no after effects.  The doctor's news wasn't wonderful, however. I'd had a couple of  polyps, which were removed and one was sent for biopsy. It looked as if there was a small, new cancer growing on one of them.  When the word came back, that was exactly what happened.

It wasn't a problem. It was so new that it hadn't had a chance to grow into the intestine or cause any trouble. With the polyp removed, it wouldn't cause me any, but I was told to be diligent in having routine colonoscopies in the future.  So,  another appointment was made for three years later. That one came up free of any growths of any kind.

Since then, I have followed Dr.'s orders and have had my colon scoped on schedule when they tell me I should. If no polyps are found, it's every 5 years. If there are polyps, they are removed, and I return in three years.  All is well in that area, and there's been no more cancer scares.

So, I have a heartful of flowing gratitude. I am grateful for the year of abdominal pain, because it led me from doctor to doctor, until I had a test that saved my life.  I am grateful for the medical technology, invasive and otherwise that finds and saves lives.I am thankful for the prayers of many friends who took my name and my mysterious ailment before the Throne of Grace.  I am grateful that God watched over me and kept me safe, and I am thankful that I am here to tell you this story, so that you,too, might heed a warning and have your testing done. I am grateful that you are reading this, and hopeful that you will run, and not walk, to your telephone to arrange for your appointment. The life you save may be your own!

Great Grandma Rackett

Again, I write about a woman whose blood flows through my veins. This time it is my maternal Great-Grandmother.  She was born in Nantucket, Mass., the daughter of Henry Fisher and Maria Chase. She met Clinton Rackett, who was a fisherman from East Marion, Long Island, and moved to that little community in New York state.

I think of what it must have been like to move away from all she knew, to begin a brand new life as a young wife in a new area.  There must have been a strong resolve and an even stronger love for the man, to leave everything behind. East Marion might have felt somewhat familiar to her, since both Nantucket and Long Island are surrounded by water, and in those days, many of the men worked the sea as a way of life. The air in both places would have smelled salty, and weather conditions would have been somewhat similar as well.

There are photos that show the home that was built by GrGrandpa Rackett, for his family. I'm not sure when it was built, but it stood fairly early in their marriage. It stood close to the Community church, but across the street on the Main Road. It was taken down many years later, but I never had the chance to see the building.  I'm told that GrGramma Rackett kept an immaculate house and yard.  Even the outhouse had starched and ironed white curtains hanging in the window!  There was a garden, a cherry tree, a picket fenced yard.  My Grandmother was married there, in the garden.

Not only was GrGrandmother a woman who took good care of her home and four children, she was also a good business woman, I'm told.  Her husband died in the early 1900's, leaving her alone to raise the youngest child, my Grandmother. She took on the his fishing fleet business, keeping it running in fine order.  How these female old timers got all the household chores done and ran businesses to support the families, is beyond me.  

I was a working woman, but my housekeeping was none too good. I gave up my baking, except for an occasional batch of cookies. I had to let some things go and organize other things when I went to work. But, the women of old couldn't do that. Baking, sewing, laundry, mending, gardening, cooking, canning, cleaning (including beating room sized rugs!), etc. could not be not be overlooked. They didn't have take-out food or frozen, pre-made meals to pop in the oven. They had   to do that work.  Taking on the bookkeeping, records, payroll and other matters relating to running a fishing fleet was a time consuming endeavor. I don't know how she did it.

GrGrandma's obituary tauts her as a 'pillar of the church'. I know she was a woman of faith, but apparently she was quite involved in the women's ministries of the time. I'm sure that involved meeting the needs of other women, widows and orphans. Besides muscle and determination, she apparently was blessed with a compassionate heart. Perhaps it was her faith that gave her the strength she needed to keep going and to accomplish all that she did.

Our ancestors were not wimps. They were hard workers. They knew there was nobody to do the work but themselves, and they did what was necessary.  We could learn much from these family members. They were pretty good examples.

Sometimes it pays to look back so that we know how to move forward.

'Don't Air Your Dirty Laundry'

How many of us have heard that line in our lives? It seemed to be the mantra of those who went before us. Today's generations seem to live their lives without any thought of what others think, but there was a sense of shame in our elders. They were telling us to have a conscience about our mistakes and to keep them covered so that people would look upon us as 'decent' adults.

A friend and I were discussing that very thing this morning. We're both investigating our families histories and we got to talking about 'skeletons in the closet' that have been discovered. He wants to share them, but not for three or four generations, when those who did the deeds are long dead and buried, and relatively unknown.  I don't know how he'd go about hiding things that long, should he write the tales.

Things are often so well-hidden that we never stumble across them. Not so in another friend's life. He recently visited a cousin in another state. He and his cousin were discussing their individual searches of their ancestries, when the cousin laid out a huge family tree.  He pointed to a name and said, "See that guy? That's your brother."  After some discussion, it turned out that the named brother had been born some years before my friend had, and had been surrendered to an aunt and uncle of the mother to be raised. The mother went on to live her life, marrying and having other children, never mentioning that there was another family member!  Can you imagine my friend's shock ?! At sixty years old, he had an older brother he knew nothing about!  He has since contacted the man, and the two plan to meet in the coming months. 

I'm not sure what the reasons were for hiding that sort of information. In many ways, I feel that it isn't fair to siblings to be denied the chance to know and love those born of another father or mother. My own husband was denied the opportunity to know his own father, due to a nasty divorce when my husband was a toddler. An entire family was eradicated from my husband's life!  There was something within Mike's mother that felt her son should not know there was a living being on his paternal side. She would not speak of any of them right up until she died. She'd have been horrified to know that, as I dug for information on his ancestors, I discovered that Mike's great-grandfather was alive and living in Casper, Wyoming up until Mike was fifteen years old.  His grandparents both died in 1965, as did Mike's Dad. Though he'd spent very limited time with his father during his up-bringing, he'd never really gotten to know him. That caused Mike to 'idolize' his Dad.  He didn't get to meet his grandparents, though, or the half-brother who also died in the 1960's in a car accident.

They say that you don't miss what you never knew. Seeing my husband's responses to each of my discoveries of his 'lost' relatives, I can't agree with that statement.  But, for whatever reason, his Mom thought it best to keep them all a secret.

I suppose there are things that people would want to keep hidden away, and if I should stumble across anything in our family, I will honor those words not to 'air the dirty laundry.'  However, the long and short of it is, things happen. People you are related to, are still related to you, even if they've done something horrible.  It can't be changed or erased, but if families want to hide it, it's important to them for us to keep it buried, at least until enough time has passed so that the person is 'just a name' to those who discover the secrets of the past.

Great Grandmother Case

There is so little that I know about her. She was born in 1860 and passed away in 1947, a few months before I was born. I have two photos of her, though, and a small glimpse into her life come to me via various relatives.

One picture shows her as a young woman, with a serious expression dressed in a dark frock, surrounded by nine of her gaggle of eleven children . I look at her, and think she must have been of strong stock, though she looks thin and small. She left her hometown of Newport, RI and moved to New York state, to a small island off the eastern end of Long Island.  How did she meet the Shelter Island man she married and who lived with there? How did it come to be?  If he had been a mariner, I would imagine that he'd gone to the R.I. port, and they'd met there, in some way.  But no, he was a carpenter, and so far as I know, was not a traveler. How then, I wonder, did she make her way to Shelter Island?

As frail as she may appear in the photograph, she managed to give birth to all those children in a few years. That alone, in her day, was no small feat. Many things might occur in a natural act of child bearing, and medical methods were no where near as advanced at that time as they are these days. She achieved the goal of safely bringing forth her brood.  But that was only the beginning of her work. As any mother knows, it's not an easy task to raise even one child to adulthood. I can only imagine what her life was like.

Think of the laundry !  There were no machines to help her as she kept her family in clean clothes. She would have had to lug the hot water to the wash tub and then scrub each item on a wooden washboard, probably rubbing her knuckles raw at times. She'd have to wring out each item after rinsing a few times, and hang it to dry from a rope line in the yard.  There would be the folding and putting away, and I'm sure, some ironing as well.  That might have required the heating of a sad iron on her wood  cook stove, being careful not to burn herself.  I wonder what her hands looked like after strong soaps (perhaps she even made her own lye soap), washboards, scalding water, and possible burns from cast iron stoves, irons, and the pots she cooked the food in. Not only did she have to wash the clothes for the large family, she had to mend them and make them all, probably on a treadle sewing machine.

I know, from stories told by my great-aunt, that GreatGrandma was, indeed, a hearty woman. Her husband, Willard, had met an untimely death in 1903 when he fell from a roof, landing first on a scaffolding, and then falling to the ground, breaking his neck or back.  Many of  the Case youngsters at home, and they had to be cared for and fed. Great Grandmother opened a boarding house in the large farmhouse where my grandmother was born.  I'm told that there were some nights where thirteen or fourteen people sat at their table, served a hefty meal by Great Grandma.  Did she raise the food in the acreage behind the barns?

It is my guess that she did.  She would not have had the funds to purchase the vegetables and meat to feed such a crowd. I can assume that she and her sons ...and maybe the girls,too, worked in the garden in the summer...and at harvest-time, they gathered their crops. Then mother and daughters would gather in the large kitchen to prepare the peas, string beans, corn, and other vegetables for canning.  That would require hours on her feet, in front of a hot stove, cooking the vegetables, placing things in the mason jars,closing them, boiling the products in the jars in big kettles, until they safely sealed. When they'd cooled, they'd be set in the pantry for use until the next garden was ready to eat.

Think of the work involved in just one day! Without a husband to instruct her sons, she would have had to instill all the things they would need to know as adults. She would have had to teach her girls the skills involved in homemaking.

Because I know so little of truth about Great Grandmother, I have had to guess about a lot of things. The mid-1800's was not an easy time for most women, and my Great Grandmother was not living a life much different from others of her day. When I think about her, and all those other women, I feel admiration. If there was a need, they met it. They didn't have the choice. I don't imagine they complained about the tasks at hand, either. They just did what needed to be done.  Perhaps they bartered with others. Perhaps they sold their eggs, or their seamstress abilities, in order to buy what they could not do. Or perhaps they just did without.

Whatever is the actual story of my Great Grandma Case, she survived it all, living as a single mother for forty-four years. She became the old woman with gray hair, in that photo, who sits in her rocking chair on the porch. She was proof that a little hard work never hurt anybody.

Who Were They?

One of my friends writes a daily blog, and sometimes she hits so close to home that I need to write my thoughts on her subject. Today her wondering was about who her ancestors were and what were they thinking when the photos were taken.

She was so right!  I don't know how many times I've looked at those old sepia or black and white photos and wondered just what was going on in those lives at the time the photos were taken.  There are some stories that swim through my mind, perhaps not exactly the same as I'd heard them originally, and some that are lost for all eternity because the teller is gone, and I didn't listen well enough at the time to retain it.  My grandfather was the best at telling family stories, and unfortunately, in my young years, I thought to myself, "I already heard that story" and I shut off my hearing. Now, at my age, I understand that it was important for him to tell those events. He needed to remember them, and he wanted me to know those folks he spoke of.  It's too late now....and it saddens me.

My mother, as sharp as she is on a lot of things, has faded memories when I ask of things. However, if I just start a subject and let her ramble, often I'll get a new clue to something that went on in her youth.
Her mother, who passed away when I was expecting my second child, probably had a million thoughts and stories of her East Marion,NY family. Unfortunately, she'd had a series of small strokes for years, and it affected her speech. She was a quiet woman, anyway, but after the strokes, she often would say the wrong words, and she knew it. It frustrated her, so she tended to become even quieter.

 Her father owned a fishing fleet, passed away when Gram was about ten years old, and her mother then took over the running of the business. Later, Gram's brother ran it...into the ground, from what I heard from another relative.  Those are things I want to know details of. I want to know if the picture I have of my young grandparents is a wedding picture...it seems that it might be, but Mom doesn't think so, 'because that's not Gramma's wedding dress.'  I want to know about the wedding, which was held in the garden. I want to see her dress, but it's gone 'where moth and dust hath corrupt.'  I want to know who those ladies were, in the tremendous hats, sitting with Gramma and eating Nabisco shortbread cookies. (I can see the label on the box in the photo!)

 I want to know so much. I was able to tape a 90 yr old sister of my paternal grandmother shortly before she passed away. She was as sharp as a tack and her sense of humor hadn't waned one iota. She was a Shelter Island girl, and had been raised by a mother who hailed from Newport, RI. She carried some of that New England accent in her voice, and was such fun to listen to. She told of my grandfather,  'Ahtha' (Arthur) when he 'courted' Maud. He'd hide his 'courtin' duds' in the bushes, and 'afta werk, he'd go inta the woods 'n change outta the werk clothes and inta the courtin' clothes.'  They'd sit on the front 'pahtch'  'n Ahtha would sing in his beautiful singin' voice.'   I'm blessed to have that tape.

I also went to visit an old cousin of my father's over on the Island. He was known as Shelter Island's historian. He was a character, to be sure!  He told me a few tales...some I suspect were pretty 'tall' ones!  Eben had a way of embellishing to make the story interesting. I've yet to know if there's any truth to the story that my GrGr Grandfather Case truly did hang himself in the back shed... or if  his wife really was so mad at him for doing so that she buried him in his 'every day wig instead of his red Sunday one.'  (that story is published in a book about the Island, with Eben's name attached to the telling of it.)

The loss of our history has been a lesson to me. This blog has many offerings of family tales, and I'm hoping to add more, so that my children and theirs will know something of their forefathers and mothers. I need to keep going...they just may want to know one day, when they've turned on their hearing ears again.