Edge of the Frontier

 Click here for this and more of my books

                                             https://bookswelove.net/waldron-juliet/
 

                               "Red and White--at war in her world and in her blood."

Colonial America's early history tells the story of the--at first gradual, and, finally, as Europe burst figurative banks, the enormous wave of "people from over the sea" washed into what is today the U.S. 

I first became of aware of this history of colonization when I was seven, after a move from Ohio to New York State.  Mother relished history and so when she and my father house-hunted, she wanted to find as old a house as she could. I don't think Dad got much say in this, because he was all for "modern" anytime he could get it. Having been a teen through the Depression era had convinced him that electric lights, a furnace and flushing toilets were all desirable things. 

The house we moved into provided all that, although it had been originally built, near as anybody knew, a decade or so before 1800, probably during the time when newly independent Americans were spilling onto lands that had once belonged to the local and now dispossessed Iroquoian tribes.  Our house was small, a style that today is commonly called "Cape Cod" but it also had Dutch doors equipped with heavy iron hinges and which were locked with a bar. As this was near the Mohawk Valley, that the builders were Dutch and had been there before the War of Independence did not seem improbable. There was even a story about Indian attacks during the early days of the house, one which the restless spirits which we encountered almost as we took up residence did nothing to disprove. 

I recently took a New England trip to see an old friend and we decided to go a few miles north to Deerfield, to visit the National Historical site there. When I first saw those carefully preserved Georgian era Colonial houses along the main street, it seemed to me that this would be just another Tory New England town, one which was once filled with dour Calvinist merchants and landlords. I soon learned that during the Revolution, this town had remained loyal to the Crown. 

There were many reasons for this, one of which was that the original terms of the Massachusetts Bay colony. That stipulated that these Dissenters, freshly kicked out of England, could run the territory as a kind of fundamentalist kingdom, as long as they remained loyal and sent plenty of young men into the King's army whenever called upon to do so.  In this Puritan theocracy, citizens could be whipped (15-20 lashes!) and fined for not only more obvious Puritan sins like adultery and/or drunkenness, but for not attending the obligatory, (and endless) Sunday services. In many ways, however, in this period, local government was had many admirable qualities. The towns were administered by Selectmen, and legislation was by consensus instead of majority rule.  

          The minister's house, one of the largest in Deerfield, built for him by his flock.

When white immigrants first explored that area, they found an Algonquian tribe living in a stockaded town, while farming the rich bottom land around the Connecticut River. These were the Pocumtucks, and they lived (mostly) in harmony with their Algonquian relatives. At this time, European diseases, smallpox and measles, were already killing many Indians, while fighting over control over the fur trade increased every year, because those fabulous goodies like metal farming tools and cook pots, guns and wool blankets, etc. brought by European traders had opened a new world to a stone-age people. By the 1630's, these foreign trade goods were becoming indispensable.  

The Iroquois, fierce warriors, were "the enemy" for both the Algonquian tribes and the new immigrants alike. Their confederacy (Seneca, Onondaga, Cayuga, Oneida,) occupied New York State, but their war- path reach extended right across the Connecticut Valley and into Abenaki lands as distant as Maine. The Iroquois were always in the middle of any land or trade agreement, whether you were Algonquian, Dutch, French or English. They made war frequently in order to take captives, preferring to take children who could be assimilated easily. European or Indian, at this time you had to take the mighty Iroquois into consideration.

For a time, the Pocumtucks were able to deal with the whites, who were, initially, seen as just another "tribe" looking for land. Eventually, however, the Pocumtuck angered the Mohawks by killing one of their chiefs. After one swift punitive strike from the Hudson Valley, the Pocumtuck and their town by the river were no more.  

It did not take long for the land to be resettled, this time by an English plantation. Good farmland could not long be ignored by the settlers, but the site seemed cursed. Settlers were just eking out a living when King's Philip's War erupted. This conflict would be the last stand of the eastern Algonquian tribes against an overwhelming white incursion. 

An attempted retreat by the people of Pocumtuck, carrying away their newly harvested corn, ended in a massacre at a place now called "Bloody Brook," and made infamous by Puritan writers. Poor preparation by the militia contributed greatly to the disaster. The town of Pocumtuck hadn't even bothered to build a stockade, so the town was easily destroyed. During this war, one hundred and forty-five men were killed in the northern part of the valley, most of them settlers. Four other towns in the Connecticut Valley were also completely destroyed. The remaining five towns had all been attacked and raided for their corn and cattle. It must have been a grim winter, with families broken and famine on the horizon. 

It would take more than a decade, but the old Pocumtuck land would be resettled, this time called "Deerfield." The new settlers built a stockade. Farmers came to land, younger sons from towns like Northampton, Hadley, Hatfield and Springfield, all places south along the Connecticut River. 

Time would pass while the town grew again, but peace broke down easily. There were always inter-tribal wars as well as wars that originated in Europe to cause Indian raids, rustling and murder among the outlying farms. In the early 1700's, what is known as Queen Anne's War* broke out. The French joined forces with the Caughnawaga and Mohawk, raiding into northern New York and down into New England, even into Halifax near Boston. The Connecticut Valley became a battlefield again.

Deerfield begged for help with troops and arms, and a little arrived in late 1703. Deep in winter of 1704, a group of two to three hundred men on snowshoes came south from Montreal. Among them were French soldiers, coureurs de bois, and Indians, many of these refugees from King's Philips' War, the one that had broken the New England tribes. 

Drifts of snow helped the invaders scale the stockade while the watch overslept. Soon "they were fireing houses, killing all they could that made any resistance, also killing livestock." The Reverend John Williams who lived through a subsequent captivity to tell the tale said: "by their violent endeavors ... broke open doors and windows, with axes and hatchets..." His pistol misfired and he was quickly captured and bound. He watched the murder his youngest two children, a toddler and a six week old baby, as well as the children's black nurse. He and his wife (who would be killed at the start of their march) and five children were carried into captivity.    On the terrible winter march north, Williams would watch nine more people die--the young and the old. 

The sack of Deerfield had ended when men from Hadley and Hatfield arrived on the scene. Early on in the fight, a young man, John Sheldon, after binding his feet with strips of his nightshirt, had managed to struggle almost naked through deep snow for many miles in order to give the alarm. 

Of the 291 people who had gone to sleep in Deerfield that fatal night, only 133 remained alive the following day. Beyond the 109 people captured, 44 residents of Deerfield had been killed--ten men, 9 women and 25 small children. Seventeen of forty-one houses were destroyed. Reverend Williams would survive his captivity and eventually redeem four of his five children.* 

Driving through bustling Connecticut and into Massachusetts today, I can barely imagine this totally urbanized/suburbanized landscape as a frontier, one every bit as wild and dangerous as our more well-known "wild west." The early period of colonization was complex, filled with wars between Indians as well as wars between various groups of colonists as well as the more often remembered wars between Indians and Europeans. 

At the end of the school day, my friend and I paused in our visit to watch Deerfield's streets fill with BMW's and Mercedes as parents arrived to retrieve their children from the exclusive private prep school that shares grounds with the historical site. It was hard, watching that scene, to remember what a hard-scrabble, cold, tough, dangerous place the early New England world truly was.  

~~Juliet Waldron

Historical Novels may also be found here:

https://www.kobo.com/us/en/search?Query=Juliet+Waldron

https://www.smashwords.com/books/search?query=Juliet+Waldron

http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004HIX4GS

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Juliet+Waldron?_requestid=1854149

* The North American part of the European War of the Spanish Succession. .

* You can read about it in The Unredeemed Captive. Eunice, the youngest survivor of the Williams children, would become Catholic and marry an Indian. Reverend John Williams himself wrote the first text of the tale, the one upon which modern books on the subject are based.   

Take the Taconic

 All my books at these links:

Kobo

Smashwords

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

All my books at Books We Love

Fly Away Snow Goose - Amazon

Fly Away Snow Goose at Kobo

Fly Away Snow Goose at Barnes & Noble

Fly Away Snow Goose at Smashwords

Driving solo is not something I grew up doing. My teen path did not take me down automobile alley, like so many other American kids. I learned to drive only after I'd become a mom. I was a fairly timid driver for many years, but that wore off quickly after dementia began to hunt my own mother down, necessitating frequent 400+ mile round trips to southern Ohio. I drove the PA Turnpike to I-70, close to Dayton, before turning south and driving through farmland. 

Going through the little burg of Enon, just south of I-70, in need of psychic help before I arrived to face whatever age-related catastrophe awaited, I'd momentarily abandon my goal and  divert to the tiny residential loop of '50's houses that encircle the sacred space of a lone Adena Mound. The place still has some Mojo left, though, and a few moments of contemplating it always gave me strength. 

Those earlier anxious journeys were how I learned to drive alone. As everyone knows, you've got to keep your wits about you on an interstate. Out there are all kinds of people, in vastly different mental conditions, hurtling along at the speed limit or better--mostly way better--and you have to watch your back, as well as pay attention to the road ahead. To paraphrase the old maps and their dragons: "Here there be Potholes & Folks with Anger Issues."

I went to see an old friend in Western Massachusetts recently. We usually drive a route that we've been using since we left the Northampton area. This involves driving east from Harrisburg, up I-81 into coal/fracking country, with heavy truck traffic--no tolls on this road--toiling up mountains and then braking down into the narrow upstate valleys lined with old mining and rail towns, everyone trying to get something going again in those semi-moribund cities and jamming the Eisenhower-era roads to the hilt. A sharp turn south and you hitch yourself to I-84 East, which bangs and bumps it's way into New York State, crossing first the Delaware and then the Hudson at speeds that were, 100 years ago, unimaginable. 

                                                            The early 60's bridge at Newburgh

Instead of enduring the increasing congestion and insanity of I-84 as it roars into Connecticut, this time I took an alternate route north, an old FDR era road, The Taconic Parkway. This is narrow, twisting, and, in places, raggedly patched, parkway was engineered for 45-55 mph, and is crisscrossed by (often) blind side roads. In the late '30's, the Taconic was a wonder, however, allowing people from southern NY/NJ to easily drive north into Northern NY vacation-land, to escape the heat and crowding of a big City. The "Parkway" designation meant there are no trucks, an added benefit. Lots of us oldies remember standing, gripping the back of the front seat, peering over the driver's shoulder while our car and a line of others dragged along on a single lane road through hilly country, behind loaded trucks which didn't have the engineering to allow them to hold their pace when climbing.

                                                                     Figure this out...

 The Taconic was a progressive model of a public work created for the benefit of a rising urban middle class.  The road was originally carefully landscaped, but time and funding have by-passed it, and now  woodlands encroach from every side, making those green alleys a dangerous choice during twilight when the deer are moving, or after dark or in bad weather. Night driving there, I've read, can be fatal, especially when the inebriated or the just-plain-confused enter the Parkway and do unexpected things like driving South on a north bound lane. I can't imagine much worse than popping uphill while taking a fun curve on your motorcycle or in your small European car and being surprised by van headlights accelerating toward you.

Despite all these scary what-if, my Taconic drive was a relief. It felt to slow down, mind the speed limit in light traffic while having time to notice the September blue of the sky and see little flocks of  compact clouds racing west.  After a long hot summer, a Northern High had come to bless my journey. The weather was clear, breezy and cool. Each mile I drove North, I felt better, and this feeling buoyed me through the post-stop-to pee+ lunch-break stupor which my metabolism decrees will follow. 

Besides, I was getting closer to be with my friend, closer to the end of the journey, toward a warm welcome and a flood of cheerful reunion talk. It was a  pilgrimage, too, in a way, back to a once beloved landscape where my children were born and where 20 year-old young married adventures were had, there on the purple skirts of the Berkshires. 

The Taconic ends abruptly, linking me via plentiful signage to I-90. Not many miles east, I was on the Mass Pike, heading toward Boston.  After the long stretches of the morning, I soon found myself hopping off into what used to be a scattering of woodlots and farmland. Sadly, this has become, in the last two decades, strip malls, warehouses, gas stations and housing clusters.  There was stop-and-go traffic on the roads we once used to bicycle. At last, entering a network of roads, now paved, once improved gravel, I wound over steep short hills and into narrow creek-side valleys, houses now everywhere across those once-upon-a-time cornfields, hunting cabins and forests of maple, oak, and pine. 

The house is 50 years older now and the bright golden logs are muted. There is still woodland between my friend and her neighbors. When she and her husband built their log cabin--mostly just the two of them, with pauses for her to nurse their new baby--there were farms and forests and a dirt road. Like some once wooded parts of Pennsylvania, however , this area is pockmarked with houses, and  developments are popping up connected by actual paved roads upon any acreage that is left. 

 

Steps down to the garden, covered with sweet-smelling lemon thyme. Everything you see done by hand.

My friend is there still, getting older like all of us. She is a little younger than me, but she's had a physically hard life. For years she was a cook for years in a busy sea-food restaurant, working long hours in heat amid the constant roar of industrial fans. Now she's deaf, and medical conditions hamper her movements and threaten her balance. The last time I visited, three years ago pre-Covid, I would also take time to visit my friend Kathy in Connecticut. Losing her earlier this year demonstrated to me that while I can still  manage to travel to see friends, I had better do so. 

I met her in the late '60's, when I was twenty-one and already had a "spring off." My husband and I were present at her wedding, when she was 19 and her husband, like mine, was twenty-one. He was my husband's best friend from High School and I remember well the sight of the new couple's knees shaking as they stood in front of the preacher.  Now we are all moving toward 80 at a rapid pace. 

"When I'm 64" is far behind us, although we remember singing along with that one, imagining that we would live brave new lives and never grow old. One thing hasn't changed about my friend--she still has a magnificent head of hair that falls all the way to the back of her knees--even though it's not easy for her now arthritic fingers to braid it. She is wiser than ever, though, and a bright soul and a sense of humor still shine through her eyes. 

My friend and I have a lot to catch up on, and so we talk a blue streak. She has, like the rejoicing family in the Bible, "killed the fatted calf" for me and I am honored by her kindness and generosity. We will feast on mushrooms and good steak one night and the next day go out in the middle of the afternoon for lobsters straight from Maine, the first I've had since visiting here three years ago. We hit the intriguing used book stores in nearby college town Northampton. On on the way there, I admire all the dispensaries Massachusetts residents may enjoy, anchoring many of those new strip malls. We buy fresh off the trees local apples, a crunchy Macoun/Honeycrisp hybrid and drink local cider. We took a drive upriver to visit Historic Deerfield Village on the National Register of historic places, where my friend gamely climbed steep staircases to see where the humble servants and boarders slept, in rooms with no heat.   

 

When we said "good-bye" at the end of our time together, we both hoped this wouldn't be the last time visit, sharing stories and memories, though, we both know all too well by now that change is the only constant. 

~~Juliet Waldron

All my books at these links:

Kobo

Smashwords

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

All my books at Books We Love

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

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

Five Canadian Novels by Aboriginal Writers

 

Canada has a rich tradition of Indigenous writing, with a strong record of support for both writers and publishers of such literature by the Canada Council for the Arts. That movement has blossomed in recent years, as more Aboriginal voices have found space in Canada’s literary and social consciousness.

Aboriginal writing has attracted many awards and prizes in Canada over the years. A few of these include the Governor General’s Award, awarded to Katherena Vermetter for her 2013 collection of poetry, “North End Love Songs.” Another award winner is Lee Maracle’s novel “Ravensong,” which won the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal in 1993.

 

Here then, are five highly-recommended novels by Canadian Aboriginal writers:

 

“Shi-Shi-Etko” and its sequel “Shi-Shi-Canoe” by Nicola I. Campbell. The first novel details the story of a young girl when she discovers that she is to be taken to a residential school in four days. The second novel details Shi-Shi-Etko’s experiences at the school and her joyful reunion with her family. The second novel won the prestigious TD Canadian Children’s Literature Grand Prize.

 

Richard Wagamese’s “Indian Horse” details the life of Saul Indian Horse, his experiences in the Residential School system, his career as an ice hockey player, and the eventual reconciliation with his past. It won the 2013 Burt Award for First Nations, Metis and Inuit Literature.

 

“Legacy” by Waubgeshig Rice. The novel describes the violence against an Indigenous woman and the effect it has on her and her family. Another one of his novels, “Moon of the Crusted Snow,” offers a dystopian vision of surviving postmodern civilization. The New York Times described him as an Indigenous writer “reshaping North American science fiction, horror and fantasy.”

 

 

Eden Robinson’s “Son of a Trickster” humorously details the life of Jared, a sixteen year old Aboriginal boy who constantly gets into trouble, his suspicious grandmother and his balancing Indigenous beliefs with dysfunctional family dynamics.

 

“Fly Away Snow Goose” by John Wisdomkeeper and Juliet Waldron. The book follows the trials and travels of two young Aboriginals from Nunavut and the Northwest Territories as they are taken forcefully to a residential school, but yet begin a journey to return to their homes.

Mohan Ashtakala (www.mohanauthor.com) is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy and "Karma Nation," a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

For Kathy

KOBO

Smashwords

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Smashwords

Booktopia / Australia

This weekend is the Memorial Service for fellow author, Kathy Fischer-Brown. Every evening, as twilight falls and the July fireflies rise from the grass, I realize that her phone number will never again appear on the caller I.D. 

It's important for some writers, many of whom are, by nature, rather solitary creatures, to have another confidant in the same odd line of work to talk to. I'd never had a friend like this before Kathy, so had not realized that I'd like one until I met her. In fact, Jude Pittman, our publisher, got us together, as she'd noted our similar late 18th Century interests. 

It turned out we shared a great deal more than just research and a common interest in the American Revolutionary & Colonial Period, something we only gradually realized.  She was younger than me, and had more of academia than I did, therefore our childhoods and twenties did not occur at exactly the same time or contain the same experiences. It turned out not to matter much, in the end.

I was not able to attend the Memorial Service, so I wrote this for her, kind of drawing a line under the loss, I guess. It's the kind of thing that you experience more and more of as you get "to a certain age," and it seems to me that poetry is as good as any other way to cope.   

 For Kathy

Fireflies rise, cool sparks 

Glow against the black tree silhouettes.

With a glass of Malbec at hand and a phone,

We're off again, sharing visions of the Revolutionary War,

Whether those characters should wear coats of red or blue or green,

Criminals, heroes & villains alike 

Standing on the backs of strong women 

And slaves—

Wild, Wild East of history, both genuine and fake,

Where, beneath trees older than Genesis, 

The First People still told of Thunderbird and the Three Sisters, legends of

Earth Turtle and Beaver, of Brave Muskrat and Trickster Crow.

After a summer supper, calling from the porch,

“How ya Doin’?” she jokes and I laugh at her puns,

Baseball mutters in the background, and

She shares today's vision of a fox, how it paused and

Stared from the green slope of the lawn, down toward the on-again-off again creek.

We discuss fireflies and how,

When we were children,

So much was different; 

We mourn a natural world lost, a place with Monarchs and tadpoles. 

Sometimes she shares memories: 

Our 60's: hers of Baez, Civil Rights, of plays and performances,

Of academia, of camping at Woodstock--her friends had never expected THAT--

And her Mom and baby days, birth stories and death stories, so poignant.

I learned about her research and dreams,

Her quest for recognition a.k.a., The Same Old Writer’s Blues, 

Of Revelations at reenactment nighttime campfires, under a country night sky,

Full of stars dancing,

About working for her father, of jumping into the 'Net in the 90's, and of 

Friends and treasure troves of history found in virtual space-- 

As well as how to cook a duck and create a holy Passover supper. 

Together we nodded, two gray women, agreeing about

The complex knots that tie families everywhere.

Tonight I watch fireflies rise in hazy twilight,

And once more I’ll miss your rambles through Past and Present,

My Dear Friend, 

Your husky voice in my ear, your laughter and sophistication, your wit, 

A delight for all too brief a time.

~~Juliet Waldron 

7/21/21

Kamloops & Fly Away Snow Goose

50% off at Smashwords, beginning July 1

Smashwords

Amazon

KOBO

Barnes & Noble

Two hundred and fifteen small bodies were "discovered" in May at Kamloops. I use brackets because everyone in the 1st Nations already knew what would be found in that field near the site of the old residential school.  

When children fell sick at these residential schools, they often died. There were many reasons for this mortality, which can be summed up in two way: inadequate diet and poor living conditions.  (Another surely must be the cruelly severed connection between them and the family that loved them.) Some died in accidents like fires, as it was customary practice to lock the children inside their dormitories at night. 

Some children were even subjected to experiments. 

In one cruel instance, supplements necessary to maintain good health--vitamin C and calcium--on the limited residential school diet were given to some, but not all  children. One group received bread made with whole flour, others were given only white.   These children, left in the care of Church and State, were being used as human subjects, guinea pigs to provide data for nutritional scientists.The children didn't understand what was happening to them and certainly their parents were never told. 

In these schools there was, besides a lack of food, a daily ration of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The survivor stories I've read are not for the faint of heart. 

The part that remains most incredible to me is that the parents of these little children were not told what had happened to those they'd never see again. Instead they were lied to by people who made a great show of their religion. Parents were often told only the their children "had run away." It seems unimaginable, that the Church was eagerly assisting the government in their campaign to destroy the history and traditions of an entire People.

There are more, always more of these stories, as haunted survivors come forward. It all sounds like something out of the Middle Ages, not an an evil perpetrated here in North America in the 20th Century. From what I've learned, the residential schools in the US weren't better.

Now, First Nation's People are walking, across Canada, one group marching the 1200 miles from White Horse in the Yukon to Kamloops in B.C., in order to honor the memory of those children who did not survive. One image said it all--a young woman, a daughter of a survivor and her child, holding a heart-shaped sign in memory of her mother's little sister, Denise Boucher, aged seven, who died at the school to which the girls had been taken. 

Shoes and toys at a memorial for the lost children.

In this excerpt from Fly Away Snow Goose. Sascho, the young hero, has hunted all day without much to show for it. He encounters an Esker, a long snaking glacial deposit of gravel. By a grave site for a family who perished here, he remembers once making ceremony in this place with his teacher, his Uncle John. He thinks about the kwet’ı̨ı̨̀, the white people who are so busy changing the land and killing the animals, always taking and taking, and never giving thanks for the bounty of the land.

Sascho had seen the northern mines when he’d gone with his Uncles two winters ago on a journey to Sahtı̀, The Great Bear Lake, which lay at the border of Tłı̨chǫ land. His elders had shown him disturbed and ruined earth from which the spirits had fled. They’d explained how the water too, and the fish in these places, had been poisoned by kwet’ı̨ı̨̀ diggings. The creatures that had once made Sahtı̀ a rich hunting ground had grown few and wary. Even the caribou had changed their ancient paths in order to avoid these places.

Would his people succumb to kwet’ı̨ı̨̀ ways? Some already had. These men disrespected and ignored their elders, abused their wives and neglected their children, drank and stole, and brought shame—and the Ekw'ahtı (RCMP) —into their camps. Others, like his family, had tried to stay as far away from the kwet’ı̨ı̨̀ as possible. They, like the caribou, sought new paths. They learned to avoid the fouled ponds where the poor beaver lost his hair and the fish were filled with horrible ulcers...

~But where could we go, if we are forced to leave?

His Uncles sometimes spoke of this. Now, Sascho tried to push this unhappy future away. To leave the Tłı̨chǫ Dèè was unimaginable.

~We are part of this place, woven into the land like quills ornamenting a pair of moccasins. We are like the moose, the lynx, the beaver, the muskrat, the wolf and the raven, and all our brothers and sisters who live here.

Linked to the earth through the soles of his feet, Sascho’s spirit rose up and poured out in prayer to the blue immensity of heaven...

When John Wisdomkeeper and I wrote Fly Away Snow Goose, it was to honor John's personal journey. He was spared the horrors of the orphanage or the residential school, but only because he was part of the "sixties scoop" a decade when First Nation's children were removed from their homes and given to European adoptive parents.  He has searched in vain for his birth mother, who may have been forced to relinquish him. He has spent a lifetime finding his way home to the traditions of his People.

~~Juliet Waldron

All my historical novels may be found @

Kobo

Smashwords--50% off all beginning July 1!

Amazon 

and more about them all @

https://www.julietwaldron.com

Two recent sources:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/26/world/canada/indigenous-residential-schools-grave.html

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/whitehorse-kamloops-residential-school-walk-1.6081975

Old Friends & Flowers on Memorial Day

 

Juliet Waldron's website

Books @ Kobo

Books @ Smashwords

Books @ Barnes & Noble

Books @ Amazon

Where to read Mozart's Wife

Perennials are my favorites. I can't claim to be a master gardener, but I do love to put my hands in the dirt and grow things.

Walking around the yard this spring, I'm pleased with all the color. We're past even the latest daffodils here in PA, but it's Memorial Day now and so the peonies are going great guns, as well as the irises and various other plants whose names my brain has misfiled. Perhaps I have forgotten the names, but I know that they come back reliably this time of year and that they have a delicate fragrance that I enjoy when I'm sitting on the porch. 

Many of my plants were gifts but ever so many of the givers are now dead. Each time I gaze at those  plants, blooming away with all their might, I think of the nice folks who shared them with me and I am grateful. 

Emily was one of the prolific givers. An athletic, charismatic red head, she and her equally good-looking husband Ray had a lovely down-a-country-road property. Over the years, Emily, who undertook nothing she did by halves, had turned their surroundings into a show place, with a stellar Koi pond surrounded by and ornamented with plants. There were the expected cattails and water lilies, but the papyrus she brought home from the nursery was a revelation, as I'd never actually seen a living breathing specimen before.

Over the years all the local wildlife found the pond, from deer to leopard frogs and tree toads. These little guys hatched in the water, then climbed, for the next part of their life cycle, into the nearby trees. They filled spring twilight evenings with their sweet quivering choruses. Herons came too, enraging Emily because they didn't just eat the frogs out of the pond, but her enormous Koi. 

We were visiting one night, enjoying their company on the deck--they worked together in their auto dealership and had a big supply of "people are crazy" stories--when suddenly Emily shouted, leapt up and ran, an Amazon screaming curses, towards the pond. It was all explained in a flash, when an enormous blue heron, his long, yellow landing gear still dangling, executed an emergency take-off. I'd never seen one of these big birds so close, and certainly never one with a large, flapping red and white Koi in his narrow beak!

                                                

These peonies came from Emily, who told me a long story about her favorite Aunt Pard, whose flower garden and warm presence she remembered with equal pleasure. These were the old-fashioned kind of peony, no ginormous blooms, but, instead, a fragrance you don't often find in modern cultivars. These peonies were not happy in her yard, but, for some inexplicable reason they loved mine. Consequently, over the years, I've split them many times. Now they perform their brief, bright celebration of May in many groupings all over my yard--and they do smell sweet! 

Today, enjoying the flowers, I remembered this couple, their out doors parties--blazing fires under 60 foot oaks, and barbecue-potlucks that lasted all night, their hunter's venison feasts and the annual trout opening day Bacchanalia begun before dawn, just behind their house on the rushing, brown Quittaphilia. So many laughter-filled, good-company evenings with them! 

Now, astonishingly, these active, vital people are both gone. Like many long-married couples, Ray followed his Em to the grave within 6 months. Although they are no more, I have these lovely peonies to always remind me of them both.

~~Juliet Waldron

Where to buy Mozart's Wife

Walpurgis Nacht

 

                                                                        Smashwords

  Roan Rose print @ Amazon

Barnes + Noble

Kobo

 

@

itunes

Walpurgisnacht is said to be named after an early Christian woman (Saint Walpurga, 710-779) who was missionary to the Black Forest German pagans. Like most saint's stories, I take it with a grain of salt. 

More likely, Walpurga was a wise women or, perhaps even a female divinity of place. If you can't at first get rid of those old gods and their generosity with a good time, the early Christians soon found that these local holidays were easily co-opted. Taking over a night of bonfire and dancing is not too hard, but you have to discourage (first with threats and then by fire) the far older fertility rites of liberated sex in the woods. (Imagine! Women running wild!) Among the English, you'll family names of Robinson or Green or Grove are common, and are often said to have had their origins in babies born after a spring fling in the forest. 

This is one of the stories within Roan Rose, whose heroine is born into the just such a peasant community.

Barnes + Noble

Kobo

Amazon Kindle

For humble farm folk, the older traditions often quietly continued. After all, the New Religion allows you to repent whatever indiscretions you've committed during the night at the next morning's Saint's Day Mass! Alcohol, a good party and warm weather are stimulants to the young who, in all ages, are universally singing "Born to Wild" after any big celebration with the opposite sex present.

This Walpurgisnacht, or Hexennacht, ("witches night,") falls midway between the summer solstice and the equinox and were therefore once commonly named "Cross Quarter" Days. Like Samhain (Halloween/Hallow's Eve) May Eve is considered another "time between" when the "veil between the worlds" is thin. So, besides a party--if you were inclined to celebrate--you might have a picnic or leave food for the spirits of place, or "bring in the May" by decorating your home with flowers and greens just as my mother showed me long ago. These quieter alternatives to that blow-out bonfire are more in order where I live and to the state of my elder body. However, from sundown on April 30th until sunrise on May 1st, the old rule, bar the caveat "'an you harm none" was: Do what you will!  

While researching the habits of 18th Century Vienna, I learned that there, Saint Brigitte was the proper Lady to celebrate on May 1st. The similar name indicates that she may be a form of Brigid, the ancient Celtic triple goddess of artistic creation, rebirth and renewal. In my reading I learned that so many tried to leave the city for picnics and flower picking in the surrounding fields and woods on that day, that there were, by the late 1770's, traffic jams. Once, I read, the Emperor Joseph himself could not get out of town on one particularly carriage-clogged May Day because he did not drive out sufficiently early in the day.  

In My Mozart, the teen heroine has a name day on April 29th. She attends a fateful party in the Vienna Woods with the louche fellow players from her new workplace, a Volksoper, where she dreams of the blazing kiss of Orpheus.

                                                                           Smashwords

                                                                                Kobo

                                                                               Amazon

In Zauberkraft Black, the hero, a little drunk and sorry for himself, stumbles upon just such a party among his tenants the first night of his homecoming from the Napoleonic Wars. He finds a great deal more is going on there than simply drinking and getting lost in the new green woods with a willing farm girl.  How little, this gentleman will find, he has known his own peasants!

 

at Amazon

Smashwords

Kobo

Barnes & Noble

It's probably pretty clear by now that I love this holiday and still keep it with flowers, new loaves of bread, and a of wine. On Saturday too I will pick up a few more native plants from a local Conservancy group--all very formal this year because of Covid--and bring them home to my yard. (Please grow, My New Darlings!)

  Welcoming spring and giving thanks for the seasons while whispering a few prayers for a bountiful harvest can't, at any time or place, be a bad thing. These days, Mother Earth is in need of all the good vibes we can send to her.

~~Juliet Waldron

Julietwaldron.com

All my historical novels may be found @

Kobo

Smashwords

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

   

Revolutionary War Rambles

Barnes & Noble

KOBO

Smashwords

Amazon

Fellow BWL author Kathy Fischer-Brown and I took several trips into the rich historical area of upstate New York and one into New Jersey. I had seen re-enactments before, but Kathy loved these events, and being with her and therefore in good company, it made these experiences even more fun than before. As Kathy is gone now, and taken all her knowledge and wit with her, I'm dedicating this blog to the fun we had -- not to mention all the discomforts of travel on a shoestring -- we shared together. 

If you are into the Revolutionary War, all these photos are of places and things that set a writer's historical spider-senses a-tingle. Re-enactors are an amazing source of period information. These are the kinds of touches that can truly flesh out a story, if only you take the time to ask questions and then listen while you trudge through roasting summer days, wondering at how our linen and wool-covered informants aren't fainting.

This is Kathy at the front door of the Schuyler Mansion in Albany, NY, where the Schuyler sisters grew up. I found those fascinating ladies back in the 90's when I wrote my Hamilton & Eliza story, a Master Passion.

Put brackets "" around mansion, though, as any number of modern monster McMansions are larger. Back in the 1770's though, this home was an outpost of Europe, with linoleum "rugs" over the wide board floors, as well as woolen carpets and ornate wallpaper imported from France. This house sat on the edge of a still truly primeval forest, filled with wolves, bears, beaver and many tribes of First Nation's people.    
 

We thought he was amazing! Anyone who writes novels in this time period, even with the slightest brush of the romantic, has imagined this fella and his well-behaved palomino. I will admit that we waved and called to him hoping he'd wait for us so that we could take his picture. He was most gracious, even though women had probably been harassing him all day.  :)

Here's an operation I wish I'd known about earlier, simply for the colorful language. These artillery people are engaged in a hither-to unknown (to me) operation called "puking the cannon." Cold water is poured down the hot barrel after a fight, to be sure it's clear inside and not accumulating gun powder residue. Sure enough, the cannon hisses and then "pukes" out a long jet of scalding water. Now the cannon is cleaned and we also know that it has not cracked. Cannons blowing up was part of the hazard of the artillery companies. As Hamilton spent the first years of the Revolutionary War as a humble artillery captain, this would have been a familiar duty. 

 

The inadvertent humor of re-enactment, present all the time, is in this juxtaposition of 2015 and 1776. The macadam, too, is often a reminder of where you really are, no matter how hard you are exercising your fantasy bone. 

 

Kathy and the surgeons, British camp. These gentlemen showed us their instruments and we talked about wound care and the damage a pistol's .54 caliber ball could do to a leg bone or a chest. 

Inside Fort Ticonderoga with an officer with whom we "held discourse." Another memorable horse, very patient and obviously used to this kind of all-day nonsense.  The green jacket on the officer makes me believe he was playing a Tory officer, a British loyalist, but Kathy can no longer tell me of  what regiment. She had all that kind of information on the tip of her tongue.  Her "The Serpent's Tooth" trilogy draws a great picture of the divided loyalties of American colonists of the time.

That's me, tactlessly wearing an Alexander Hamilton t-shirt into the grounds of Fort Ticonderoga's  "King's Garden." I got called on this a lot, especially when we were visiting the Royalist encampments.  

Magnificently terrifying Iroquois warriors, speaking with a soldier at the British market.  

Ticonderoga cannons, overlooking Lake Champlain. Both of us lugged our cameras and water bottles.

Here is Kathy with a friend. Jenna, a marvelous teacher, and is also an 18th Century seamstress, making period clothing for both men and women. She also made stays, which is, as it was then, an expensive clothing item, very difficult and time-consuming to make. Jenna's friends were also talented seamstresses and dedicated to the re-enactment life. I adored seeing their little ones, all dressed up and quite ready to join in the camp out game their adults were playing. 

Here, we got a talk on the progress of the battle--back at Saratoga again--which was a three day affair with weeks of skirmishes both before and after in the countryside near Albany. Some of the young men were,, in their modern lives, historians, teachers or in forestry. Others were employees of the the Park Service.

Here's Jenna again, playing another role, as sutler, vending produce to the army. Many of these veggies ended in a big pot at the fire for re-enactors' suppers.  Camping is a big part of the experience.  

Mom and a pair of siblings. Big sister is an invaluable help corraling the little one! Here the women are portraying "women of the army," soldier's wives and children, who always slogged along in the baggage train of 18th Century armies. Women had no other option than to follow their husbands. Any army of that period had children in the baggage train too. The women worked as laundresses and cooks for the troops. Wives got a soldier's half ration and the children were allotted quarter rations. You can imagine how hungry--and ready to join up--the teen boys were! 

Saratoga cannon appreciation.

Bullet making

Officer and wife have a confab. 

Below, we're at Monmouth, where young men were cooking in an earthen oven. They are also baking salt rising bread in this interesting construction, which was dug into the soft sandy soil of the site. The fire was in the largest hole with separate tunnels dug to direct heat onto other pots set above ground. Monmouth Battlefield that day was a period correct 90+ degrees.  Kathy and I were sweating in our t-shirts and shorts and constantly wondered about how the re-enactors were faring inside all that wool. More soldiers, I've read, died of heat stroke at The Battle of Monmouth than died from wounds. 

Here's Kathy, speaking with a charming doctor and surgeon at Fort Ticonderoga. Here's how I will remember her, asking questions, talking history and, if questioned, citing sources, holding her own with these equally history-drunk gentlemen.   

Kathy Fischer-Brown's author page