The Joy of Picture Taking

    I paid one dollar for my first camera. (I was about twelve.) The negatives were the size of my thumbnail, and the black-and-white prints were less than 2 inches square. Light often leaked in and fogged the pictures. I loved photography, even as a young teen, and was thrilled to have a camera of my own. But to develop the pictures cost money and often I ended up paying for a set of blurred, streaked, unusable photos. That camera was more toy than instrument of art.

    My senior year in college, I acquired a real camera, a Yashica twin-lens reflex. I used it to take color slides which I shared with the children in my classroom when I began teaching. My husband didn’t take many pictures, but he liked cameras and for years kept us supplied with the latest in technology. When he passed away, I stayed with my tried-and-true film camera, years after everyone else had gone digital.

    But when my old Rollei showed signs of aging, I gave in and bought a Panasonic digital. I love it! Taking good photos is as easy as learning to use the dozens of menus in its little digital brain...well, that part’s not really easy. I haven’t yet learned all it’s programmed to do. But it takes good pictures. And when coupled with my computer, the sky is the limit as to what I should be able to do with my photos.

    Yesterday was February 1...as far as I’m concerned, the first day of the last month of winter. The sun shone, a good reason to declare a vacation day. Hank and I tossed the camera bag and tripod in the backseat and set off to see what the Skagit valley had been doing over the recent long stretch of rainy weather. The flat green farmlands of the delta are at sea level or maybe lower...we could see the waters of Puget Sound beyond the dikes. The soil is so saturated the rainwater can’t soak in, even though farmers plow drainage ditches across their fields, so the water sits atop the ground like a sopping washcloth on a countertop. Everything glistened. A good day for picture taking!

 Here’s a Great Blue Heron looking for something to eat in one of those fields.

And here’s one of the many eagles we saw, posing for photographers.

    This is the Lutheran church near Edison, with Mt. Baker watching over the valley.

Before Welfare

    Poverty is a serious topic for a blog called “Sun Breaks,” but a friend posed a good question the other day. This blog is my attempt at an answer.

     “What did people do before welfare?” she asked. “Was living so much easier in the ‘olden days” that people didn’t need it?”

Disaster upon disaster...when the fields blew away

    Her question brought to mind a story my eighty-year-old father told some years ago.  When he was a child during the Midwest-Dust-Bowl and Great-Depression years, his family worked as tenant farmers. He loved his mother–my grandmother–who was ill with a neurological disease. The doctor often came to attend her, even though the family had nothing with which to pay him.

    Then one day Grandma suffered a serious nosebleed that could not be stopped. Grandpa told my father to hurry to town for the doctor. Tears trickled down Dad’s cheeks as he told how he ran for miles across the prairie, only to be told that this time the doctor would not come unless he paid in advance. Even though his mother pulled through, the humiliation and sorrow of being unable to help her still broke my father’s heart years later.

    No, living wasn’t easier in the olden days.

    Many factors have always operated to plunge people into poverty. In the early years of our country, people learned their trades by apprenticing themselves to employers, with the expectation of being hired at artisans’ wages when their apprenticeships were complete. Often, when the training was finished, employers fired apprentices rather than pay full wage. Unemployed apprentices and adult workers usually lived in small communities where available work was limited. Since most had no transportation besides their own two feet, many people had to leave their home and families behind as they wandered to other areas in search of work.
   
    The industrial revolution played a part in the disruption of how people earned their living. The threshing machine was a reason for my grandparents’ descent into poverty. Prior to its invention, farmers needed many hands to flail out the grain. But a threshing machine could do in minutes what formerly took hours of human labor.

     My grandparents lived on their own farm until a fast-talking salesman convinced Grandpa to invest everything he had in one of the newfangled machines. “You can hire out to the neighbors and easily make the payments,” he said. But the salesman convinced so many other farmers in that part of North Dakota to make the same investment that Grandpa couldn’t find enough threshing to pay for the machine. He lost the farm and everything they owned.

    Most common labor in the early years of our country took place out of doors, but when winter weather closed down work on canals, roads, and farms, workers had no way to support themselves. Often they had to go to poorhouses, bleak and dreaded institutions meant to care for poverty-stricken people but also to discourage dependence upon public welfare. In the late 1800s, every county had a poorhouse. Usually, a farm was connected to it, where the occupants were required to work to help pay for their upkeep. Rules were strict, and care was minimal. Many elderly people, who had no relatives or friends to look after them, ended up there, as well as children with or without their families.

A County Poorhouse With its Residents

    Periodic economic depressions also plunged people into poverty, just as is happening today. Throughout the Great Depression, when a quarter of the workforce in the United States was unemployed, hundreds of men rode the rails in search of something–anything– to work at.

    In 1935, the US Congress passed a Social Security Act, which provided a system of Federal old-age benefits and set the basic framework for our present system of social welfare.

    When my father married and brought his wife to Washington State, his aged father and invalid mother came too. Grandpa could no longer work, but the Social Security Act now provided assistance which people called “relief.” It wasn’t much, but it helped with rent and food. It took a long time for the United States to climb out of the Great Depression.

    My father never considered asking for public assistance during lean times when I was growing up. He worked hard when paying work was available, and when it wasn’t, we lived on limited unemployment compensation. He made and sold cedar shakes for roofs and found other ways to supplement unemployment payments. Like many other people, we raised and canned much of our own food, made our own clothes, and lived frugally. We didn’t consider ourselves poor.

    Everyone has an opinion about the safety net we today call “welfare.” I think of Jesus telling his disciples, “The poor you will always have with you.” That’s true, but we can all be grateful for the abolition of the poorhouse and the assistance that is now available for those who truly need it.

Going on Hope and Not Much Else

Migrant Mother and Children

Speaking of Dolls...

Me with Virginia, sister Lois, and cousins

In my last post, my Minnesota “sister,” Donna, told a touching tale of a depression days Christmas and the refurbished doll that became her most prized possession.

I, too, had a baby doll that I loved with all my heart. I’d named her Virginia, the most elegant name I knew. Virginia’s molded composition head, legs and arms were attached to a cuddly cloth body. Her blue eyes opened and closed. In my first memories of her, her eyelashes were already worn away, like Donna’s doll. When I tipped her forward, she too cried “Ma--ma.”

By my fifth birthday, her dress was faded and torn, probably because it was also used to dress my unwilling kitty. Aunt Mary, still in her teens, sewed Virginia a whole new wardrobe as my birthday gift that year. I especially loved the ruffled dotted Swiss dress with matching bonnet.

I thought my doll beautiful, but a few years later, when my sister received a doll with curly, shoulder-length hair, I looked at Virginia’s molded hair. The paint had rubbed away in spots. My doll needed real hair too, I decided. So next time my mom gave me a haircut, I didn’t ask her advice. I just coated Virginia’s head with rubber cement and pressed the clippings into the glue. I let it dry, but the results were not what I’d envisioned. Poor Virginia...the worst bad hair day ever!  Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it all off. So I took some brown enamel and painted over glue and remaining hair. When Virginia wore her ruffled dotted Swiss bonnet, she looked beautiful again.

As little girls do, I grew up. Virginia lay packed away with a few other treasures, growing older the same as me. I got married and had a child of my own. One day I rediscovered my old friend. Fine cracks now marred her painted complexion. And when had the tips of fingers and toes worn away? No matter. Little boys could play with dolls too. I gave my doll to toddler Robbie. Virginia had a fine time, riding on his Tonka truck and watching as he built a house of blocks around her. I heard Robbie’s squeal of delight as the blocks went flying, but thought nothing of it.

At cleanup time that evening, I found Virginia lying amidst the blocks. She’d suffered a fatal injury to her head. It was broken in three parts. I said a final goodbye to my old friend, but not to the memories.

Taken before I owned Virginia. Kitty made a patient baby.

A Doll for Christmas

Little girls and their dolls have always been the best of friends.

My dear friend and Minnesota “sister,” Donna Gilbertson, shares this story just in time for Christmas. Thanks, Donna!

“I was born during the Dust Bowl years, while Daddy and Mom were ministerial students at Wessington Springs, SD. Just before graduation, Mom became very ill with a neurological disease. They left school and returned to Iowa where Daddy took any job he could find so he could take care of me and my helpless mother.

The Christmas I was eight, my friends were all hoping for baby dolls that cried ‘Mama’ and opened and shut their sparkling glassine eyes. I, too, wished for a doll like that.

On Christmas Eve, I hung my stocking near the evergreen branch “tree” tied to our stair banister, even though Daddy told me Santa wouldn’t bring much this year because times were tough all over the world, not just at our house.

In the morning, I awoke early and slipped down the stairs to see if my stocking was full. It hung from the banister just as limply as when I’d hung it there. Sadly, I turned to creep back up the stairs. Just as I reached the top, Daddy called from the bed in the living room where my parents slept: ‘Donna Mae, maybe your present was too big for your stocking. Maybe you should look around better.’

I went back and looked toward their bed. Nothing there. Nothing on the dresser at the foot of their bed. I pivoted to face the stairs again, silent tears running down my cheeks. Mom’s wooden wheelchair sat beside the stairway, near my stocking. In the wheelchair sat...my doll!

She had hair, and eyes that opened and shut. When I picked her up and turned her over, she warbled a week ‘Ma..Ma.’ I wiped my tears away on the sleeve of my nightie and took her over to my parent’s bed. They made room for me between them and there I cuddled, perfectly happy and content.

My doll’s hair was not perfect, her dress didn’t fit too well, and one arm was a little loose. Her eyes were no longer shiny and the eyelashes surrounding them were gone. That didn't really matter to me. She said ‘Ma..Ma’ and that was enough.

Later I learned that my daddy had walked up the railroad tracks in the falling snow to reach Riceville’s dry goods store before closing time. There he had found my doll, a reconditioned toy contributed by some family, and purchased it for one dollar. In those days one dollar might be a day's wages when he cut wood for someone's fireplace.

That’s why, when people said, ‘You were the apple of your dad’s eye,’ I could really believe I was loved. My daddy died of cancer in December of the year I turned ten. A year later in December my mom died of the disease which had attacked her when I was a toddler, and I went to live with an uncle and aunt. My doll became one of the most precious possessions I owned.”

A Christmas Greeting for You

What do Christmas angels do when no one's watching?

Click to find out:  http://www.jacquielawson.com/viewcard.asp?code=2007134554829&source=jl999

Candles on the Christmas Tree

Celebrating the Gift

  When we Rawlins children were young in the 1940s, money was scarcest at Christmas time. With five children in our family, close as stair steps,  frugal meant making do.

  Excitement built as we threw ourselves into holiday preparations. We memorized songs and pieces for programs at school and Sunday school. Giggles and shushing came from various corners as we children used our imaginations and household scraps to fashion gifts for family members. Mama’s treadle sewing machine clacked downstairs at night, and Daddy worked in the garage behind closed doors.

  We snipped white-paper snowflakes to decorate the windows. Mama pulled her stash of already-used wrapping paper from the far recesses of the under-the-stairs closet. Lois and I heated flatirons on the woodstove and ironed the creases out of the paper. We cut some into strips to make colored chains for the tree, fresh from the woods , damp smelling and spicy.

  David and Patty, our youngest siblings, festooned the lower boughs with clumped tinsel. When they weren’t looking, Mama thinned the clumps, hanging the strands higher and more evenly until they glittered in the Aladdin lamp’s light like rain falling through sunshine. The beautiful cardboard angel in her cloud of spun glass soared from the topmost spire. The colored coating inside the old glass balls and blown-glass ornaments was flaking, but we noticed only if we looked really close. The finish on the blue and red and purple clip-on candleholders showed the shiny metal underneath, but who cared?
  
   None of our town friends had candleholders. They used strings of big, glowing colored lights, but electricity hadn’t yet come to Robe Valley. The holders held candles about five inches high, twisted in pretty spirals. Keeping a bucket of water nearby in case of fire, we lit them on Christmas Eve and turned the lamps down. We sang a carol and watched the points of flickering light. Then we blew the candles out, to be lit once or twice more before the tree came down.

(From A Logger's Daughter: Growing Up in Washington's Woods)

Decorating for Christmas

Recently we've been going through some of those deep waters we human beings find ourselves in now and then. My writing time has been sharply curtailed lately, but I'll grab a quiet moment this evening to share with you a couple of scenes Hank and I passed in our neighbor's yard one foggy October morning. Doesn't it look like the spiders were getting in the Christmas mood?