Earth Walker

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A powerful connection to the earth is a common theme among all 1^st Nations’ people about whom I’ve read, whether they live north or south of the arbitrary lines European colonists drew upon their home land. In every story I read written by 1^st Nations’ People, there is a recollection of a childhood where adults have carefully fostered a deep consciousness of what European culture commonly puts in a generalized lump called “Nature.” It’s that experience with which we European moderns, the “come heres” of the western hemisphere, are -- every day-- less and less familiar.

Football with my cousin, 1950's

Instead of gazing at screens all day, most folks my age (+70) remember playing outside regularly, especially during school summer holidays. My house was near a dairy farm and the surrounding fields were in hay and alfalfa. The farmer didn’t care if my mother and I roamed across them, or if I went by myself to a wonderful pond adjacent to a woodlot. In the spring it was full of tadpoles, crayfish, and blue gills. Later, in summer, it was full of multicolored frogs. Butterflies and dragon flies sailed above muddy flats, and floated over flowering plants, whose names I did not know, although I much admired their bright colors and floating seeds.  

Sometimes I’d see rabbits, fox, or woodchucks, or come across deer at their midday rest.  Red-winged blackbirds nested among the cattails; purple martens performed their fighter-pilot maneuvers over the pond.  At home, we even had a mud nest of barn swallows every year on the far end of our porch—off-limits to us until they’d finished rearing their adorable, plump, dun-breasted family.

For several years as a young teen I was sent to a summer camp--my parents' were fighting their way toward a divorce--for the entire three months. This particular camp was truly rustic, with unheated cabins, water you carried in buckets, and a bunch of retired police horses. These days it would probably be closed down as unsanitary and unsafe. You could take a bath--if you were willing to go to the owner's house--once a week. Otherwise, you "bathed" in the farm pond in the afternoon.

Some water came into it from chilly springs , but a creek flowed in at one end and over a dam at the other, so it was constantly in motion. The pond had been part of the original farm for years, so it was established. Water snakes cruised among the lily pads and cattail beds. While those reedy spots were green and inviting in the slanting afternoon light, we stayed as far away as possible, treading water and playing mermaids in the middle with friends.

It was, among us campers, a badge of honor to never go to the big house and take a bath. How humiliating! How sorry we were for the girls whose parents insisted upon it! The rest of us washed our bodies and our hair in the pond. We floated bottles, half filled with air and half with shampoo, as well as cakes of Ivory soap on the surface beside us. After a day of playing games, hiking in the woods, riding and grooming horses, and entertaining ourselves with marathon games of jacks--we dismantled the ping pong table to use the smooth wooden surface--everyone was ready to wash off the sweat before dinner.

When I returned home at the end of August, at my mother's insistence, I marched straight upstairs and ran the bathtub full. Standing naked before the mirror, I could see the brown dirt residue left from three months of "bathing" in a silty farm pond. The swim suit outline was shades darker than my suntan.

Many years ago, my granddaughter was taken for a walk in the woods for the first time when she was around two years old. Her entire experience of "outdoors" up until then had been playing in groomed suburban yards, or passing through parking lots and shopping malls with her Mama. After a first walk with her daddy on a nature trail, she haughtily pronounced the leaf and stick strewn paths “messy and uneven.”

It’s a funny story, but it’s also sad, as it shows how limited a modern child’s experience often is of this world in which she lives.  Fortunately for her, Dad got the message. From then on, he spent time with his girl out-of-doors, so she wouldn’t suffer from what I’ve come to look upon as Nature Deprivation. She can now out-walk her Grandma any day.

Snow picnic, 1970's, at a favorite spot

When she went to college, this eighteen year old was surprised to find "Walking" was a physical education course. As phys. ed. was required of freshmen and sophomores, she signed up, and then she was again surprised by the exhaustion and pain of which her classmates complained.

Considering all this, I guess it’s no wonder that so many people today are disrespectful of the earth, especially if shopping malls, macadam, and the virtual world are all they experience. It’s not only a great emotional and spiritual misfortune for them personally, but I believe this disconnection is the root cause of our civilization's current mega-scale disregard for our only home, our birth mother. 

Pipeline explosion

I’ve been reading To You We Shall Return by a Lakota author, Joseph Marshall III. This is part of an ongoing attitude adjustment exercise, as I hope to broaden my outlook and see the world through another cultural lens. (The one with which I was raised seems to have ever so many blind spots.) From that book is a Traditional Lakota Prayer to Mother Earth: 

 Grandmother,

You who listen and hear all,

You from whom all good things come,

It is your embrace we feel

When we return to you.

~~Juliet Waldron

All My Historical Novels

Genesee's story:

 Red men & White, at war in the world and in her blood.

Housewives, Traditional Sex Roles & Mopping the Floor

Alexander Hamilton & Elizabeth, A Master Passion

Amazing how much time housewives spend pondering their floors. You may think that such a preoccupation is a sign of not much going on in that life, but from a "housemaid" view, the state of the floor is a re-occuring issue. Worn board floors, where cat fur accumulates in powdery drifts after a mere 3 days, or the kitchen linoleum which desperately needs waxing, they all cry out to me. I might fancy myself in an observatory, pondering the gravitational fields of Trans-Neptunian objects, but math always evaded me. --Or maybe I was just a typist at heart.

Gravitational studies do have a small place in the field of housecleaning.  A bit of cat fluff falls at the same speed as the toast crumbs my husband sweeps absently from the table onto the floor. This practice of his used to make me see red. Sometimes he'd do it even while I, rag in hand, was on my way to tidy that exact surface. These days, however, I pick my battles. He doesn't seem to realize that things on the floor immediately become my problem. Or--more darkly--maybe he does.

Most likely, he doesn't think and then multiplies this by doesn't care, because really scratch the surface and most men don't think much about women's work, especially if they have a "proper" housewife in residence. 

This blog is from an elder's POV, one from the "baby bust" cohort. As a female of that era, I was trained to domesticity in the traditional mode by a mother who wasn't much for housework herself and maybe figured such a virtue would eventually help me out in the marriage market. Back then, the deal between the sexes was: The Man performs the work he does in field or office, factory or machine shop and in return, Woman cooked, cleaned and helped to tend the green square surrounding the house, as well as being MOM to the kids. If you were a farmer's wife, you had an extra task in the form of poultry. 

Prehistorical Digression:

Imagine a Cro-Magnon a.k.a. EEMH "European Early Modern Human" woman (perhaps an Aurignacian, the ones with the great wall "posters") cleaning out the clan cave. Gotta take out the garbage you know, or you'll attract all kinds of unwanted guests, like the cave bear who used to live here, the local wild dog pack or the saber toothed tiger, the old one who can't chase faster prey anymore.

This old tiger may be a bit lame, but he's fast enough the dine on you, monkey.

Better to get the tell-tale odors away from your front door. You could simply heave the gnawed bones over the edge of the cliff. If you weren't lucky enough to have such a handy disposal area, you had to laboriously dig a hole with an antler pick and bury the stuff. And just about the time you'd get the place cleaned out, I'd bet dollars to donuts that the men would be back with a new carcass and all jazzed on fermenting grapes or something vegetative and disorienting they'd eaten in the woods. They'll just want to barbecue and party. If that's the case, tomorrow will just be same another day of taking out the trash.

Thank heaven EEMH men did "bring home the bacon," because women were incredibly busy. Either pregnant or nursing, chewing great swathes of hide to soften it sufficiently to sew, or gathering firewood and water and scrounging about for roots, nuts and berries, while trying to keep the older children from falling over the edge of that room with a spectacular view.

Years ago, post climbing the ladders to the dwellings at Mesa Verde, my first question was  how did they raise any kids up there? Or did they tie up toddlers  like backyard dogs until they'd acquired complete balance skills and some judgment?

So now, considering what housecleaning used to be like, I don't consider my modern housework all that hard. When I wrote Mozart's Wife I imagined Constanze's trials when the money ran out--which it often did--and how often she'd find herself doing the chores. Hand-scrubbing those lace cuffs and cravats and undies in a world in which there was no decent hand-cream for winter cracked skin! Soothing ointments? Another item for which you'd have to track down the ingredients and then concoct a cure yourself. Worse would be dishes in a world with no indoor plumbing. The Mozart's, like many today, ate a lot of take-out when they could no longer afford an apartment with a kitchen and/or the requisite cook and scullery maid to staff it.

Mozart's Wife

Personally, mopping floors has become a creative driver. Versions of this housewife's trance work often appear in my stories. The Cinderella-like tale of Genesee, where a Metis girl is demoted from beloved daughter to servant, or Elizabeth Hamilton's strategy in A Master Passion to "encourage" her husband to accept the gift of a housemaid from his in-laws, or  Angelica in Angel's Flight, attempting to settle her nerves by scrubbing the steps at her Uncle's Hudson Valley house on the eve of a British terror campaign .

Genesee

~Juliet Waldron

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"Thou dost appear beautiful on the horizon of heaven... "

(From the Hymn to Aton by Akhenaton "the Heretic")

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"Rockin' Robin" & the Derecho

Derecho! It’s a terrific new scary weather word, just entering our vocabulary, thanks to Climate Change and our meteorologists. It’s a straight line thunderstorm, the kind they speak of as showing a radar “bow echo.” The eastern seaboard recently experienced a knock-out punch from a big one. We here in south central PA took a sideswipe from the big storm, the same one which disappeared the electricity from millions of people, in a swath which ran from the Alleghenies onto the coastal plain of Virginia.

I woke in the night to hear it coming. At first, I thought it was just Norfolk Southern, whose trains power up and down our valley all night, but I grew up in western Ohio, near Xenia, in fact, which blew away in the great tornado outbreak of 1974, so that kind of noise makes me anxious. When I got up, wind was roaring through the open windows, and the night sky looked thick, like a rushing wall of dirty water. Lightning came blasting in, then pouring rain—time to stop staring and run to see if Bob was at the door, looking for sanctuary. Next, run to close windows. Then it was time to get the heck away from those windows, because, along with the lightning and roaring wind, limbs were crashing down, things were striking the siding and there was a series of huge cracks and house-shaking thuds. Someone’s trees—maybe mine—were going over.  

Now, I’ll walk back a step. All summer we’ve been serenaded from the neighbor’s fine tall Norwegian maple by a catbird. IMHO the catbird is the true subject of the old song—sure, you know the one. “He rocks in the tree tops all the day long, huffin’ and puffin’ and a singin’ his song…” All members of the mockingbird family are genius jazz musicians, riffing on their own—and everybody else’s songs. I’ve even heard them do crows, as a sort of end of set caw-da-boom. They take the “catbird seat” to best show off their talents, which is the highest tree or pole or, in days of yore, TV antenna on the tallest house they can find. 

Our storm came hard and fast and left the same way. At 5:30 a.m., the light was just coming up and the sky was clearing. The neighbors, I could tell, were out walking around.  When I came out to join them, I was shocked by the damage. Three large, beautiful maples on the street were ripped apart, looking as if a big hand had come down and yanked the limbs off. Only shattered trunks remained. Enormous branches, leaves, dead wood, siding and kid toys were everywhere. Across the street from me, where the shapely old Norwegian maple had been, was only the shattered stub of trunk. All the branches now lay on the roof of their house.

On the broken tip of the tree sat the cat bird, as he’d done since spring. He kept moving around on the raw wood, gazing at the leafy paradise in which he’d once lived, now on the ground below. He tried to sing once or twice, just a few grace notes, but his heart wasn’t in it. The green shade world in which he’d lived, loved and rejoiced was gone forever.

http://www.julietwaldron.com

The Character who Keeps Coming Back

The character who keeps coming back; most writers have them. The book that can’t or won’t be finished--there's at least one on every writer’s hard drive. My particular dark horse always returns in the first warm weather, this year occurring in March. Her sweet German nickname is Blumchen and she’s here again, sucking up my waking hours. Needless to say, I’m reediting and reimagining scenes and conversations I’ve visited many, many times. I’ve journeyed to this imaginary world regularly, at least once a year, since 1986.

A complete reworking doesn’t take place every year, at least not since the first decade. Blumechen's is the first book I ever completed, although a satisfactory ending, I think, still eludes me. Like Constanze of my Mozart’s Wife, this young heroine insists on speaking in the first person, which both narrows and deepens her POV. It’s like writing pinned inside her dress. What's more, she belongs to the cast of characters already familiar to readers who are interested in Mozart and his circle of musicians, dancers, con artists, noblemen, Masons, and various stage-struck hangers on.

I’ve heard authors talk about having a “channeling” experience with their characters. There are many tales of automatic writing and spirit dictation, which sounded at first as if they should be taken with great handfuls of salt. However, after the experience I have had in writing this old and perhaps never-to-be-finished novel, I know channeling does happen. Ordinarily it takes a period of work to make your character dolls start moving independently, but in this case, it appears I was the vessel chosen by a voice from the past. She wanted me to tell me about the events of a single, intense summer, and I've tried to give her my attention.  She came at night, during a time when I was still working in an office, and kept me awake for most of the night. As you can imagine, this eventually lost me my day job, but that's all water under the bridge now.

So began this tulip-time, and now we're into green May and Blumechen is back again, stamping her little foot and calling for rewrites and editing. She insists I do my best work, despite the fact that the story is a humble “historical romance.” I hasten to add that it’s "romance" in the original sense of the word, in the way Romeo & Juliet or The Scarlet Pimpernel  or Wuthering Heights are "romances." I’m not using the modern commercial sense of the word with a happily ever after ending . I’m using the old-fashioned bloody insanity of a love affair, the madness which can so easily end in tragedy. IMO that's the true nature of the beast, and exactly what makes completing a tale of a hopeless passion so very, very difficult.

--Juliet Waldron

 http://www.julietwaldron.com/

Juliet Waldron is the author of several historical novels set in the erotic, exotic18th Century:

Mozart's Wife

Genesee

Red Magic

All available from BWL