Abandoned Farmhouse

I often photograph abandoned old houses.  I map them in my mind, and the next time I drive by, I always look to see if something has changed.  Every once in a while, I’m enormously cheered to find that someone is fixing up some once-lovely place.  More often, I discover that one wall has caved in, or that someone has razed the place altogether.

A few weeks ago I packed my laptop and my cat into the car and headed to Door County, Wisconsin, for a weeklong writing retreat. I’ve been driving this route periodically for almost thirty years, now. My drive takes me through an area once settled by Belgian immigrants, and I always look for a couple of special houses.  I’m a bit worried about one of my favorites.

This house must have been spectacular when it was new. (Of course, in its own way, it still is.)

A journalist once described the Belgians living in the southern portion of the Door County peninsula as “a quaint colony of jovial people.”   (Milwaukee Journal, May 9, 1926)   They must have been good farmers also, for even with the red bricks produced locally, these homes weren’t quick and easy to throw together.

Whenever I see such a place, I am reminded of the poignant poem “Abandoned Farmhouse,” by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.  I’ll reproduce just the first stanza here:

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

Mr. Kooser interprets his abandoned farmhouse in the same way curators hope museum visitors interpret artifacts carefully chosen to help tell a story.  If you love history but haven’t discovered Mr. Kooser’s work, I recommend Delights and Shadows, or any of his other volumes.

I am interested in historic architecture.  Still, like Mr. Kooser, I think mostly of the people who once lived in these abandoned farmhouses. Who proudly stepped inside for the first time?  What joy and anguish did the house once hold?  How did the last occupants feel when they moved out?  Did they know the house would sit empty, and perhaps crumble into the landscape?

I pass this one when I drive toward Lake Delton. Don’t you love the gingerbread trim?

Say the phrase “historic site” and most of us think first of a place formally preserved; a place we now need an admission ticket to explore.  But historic sites surround us, every day.  All we need is a little imagination to bring them to life.

Empty

A year or so ago, the English department at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville announced plans for an online literary journal.   I submitted five poems to the editor, and was pleased when they were accepted as a collection.  These poems are part of a larger collection I’ve been slowly assembling about 19th-century  immigrant women, and the varied experiences they had in the Upper Midwest.

Publication was delayed—not sure why—and the Driftless Review evolved into a blog, instead of a website.  Nonetheless, I’m delighted to announce that my poems have been posted.  If you’d like to take a look, the easiest thing to do is Google “Driftless Review” and my last name, which will get you to the proper string.

For now, I’ll share one of them here.  “Empty” was inspired by my time at Old World Wisconsin both in content, and in style.  On the surface, it’s the story of an immigrant woman.  But I tried to tell her story with images of her things, and her place, instead of with her own words.  When I was a curator, I might have tried to tell the same story by carefully choosing artifacts, and their placement within an historic structure.

An unidentified woman.

Empty

The immigrant trunk, where she’d tried to tuck
the essence of home—an embroidered collar,
her mother’s prayer book—among the fry pans
and hatchels and sturdy boots.

The cradle, after her daughter died.
Faded blue blanket gone for a shroud,
no lingering scent of urine or milk,
no echo of chortles or cries.

His seat at the table, too, more and more often
as the wheat was devoured by chinch bugs,
so thick on the ground that her boots crunched
as she walked the scoured field.

The jug as well, cast aside on the threshing floor
meant for sprawling piles of golden grain on canvas,
the measured tread of oxen or the rhythmic beat of flails,
baskets brimming with winnowed wheat.

And the cracked blue crock on the pantry shelf
where she tucked coins earned
selling her noodled geese on market day.
Empty now, set a bit off-angle, as if ashamed.

Mark My Words

MARK MY WORDS, at the Pump House Regional Arts Center in La Crosse, WI

When I worked at Old World Wisconsin, I read every account left by 19th-century immigrants to the Upper Midwest that I could find.  These diaries, letters, and reminiscences continued to be relevant (and compelling) after I took a job developing and scripting instructional video programs for Wisconsin Public Television.  Most recently, while writing a novel about Swedish immigrants (The Runaway Friend), I went back to archives and local history collections to see what else I could find.

I’ve been developing a collection of poetry about immigrant experiences.  I was honored to have one of my poems, “Facing Forward,” chosen for the MARK MY WORDS exhibition at the Pump House Regional Arts Center in La Crosse, WI.  The exhibit organizers selected twenty poems and twenty artists, and asked each artist to create a piece in response to one of the poems.

My poem is about a Norwegian immigrant couple starting a new life.  I wrote “Facing Forward” to honor those women who faced inconceivable hardships, but still took joy and strength from Wisconsin’s landscape and opportunities.

Facing Forward

In the old world, Emil muttered prayers over trenchers
of lutefisk, peered at the sky and sniffed the air to decide
when to plant potatoes, counted coins before Rilla shopped.
She tended her hearth as she’d been raised to do, an endless
chain of chores, and worn-fingered women doing them.

In the old world, when the hungry time came,
rye crop blackened with rust, children whimpering,
empty bellies and purses, Emil said We will go.
Rilla wept to leave her mother and sisters, lefse and cod,
smoke-stained village, mossy gravestones, all she knew.

In the new world, walking west, Rilla bore weight:
an unborn child in front, the toddler on her hip, worry.
When the oxen foundered she knotted her mother’s
kale seeds and candlesticks into the shawl
tied over one shoulder, and hefted the rifle too.

But in the new world Rilla walked with a step lighter
than heels rubbed raw, feet on fire, muscles’ ache,
sunburned skin.  She walked toward the prairie,
the unexpected promise of possibility, new grace
in her heart, a life not defined before her wedding day,

while Emil trudged behind, dragging an anvil
of doubt and fear, missing his father,
looking over his shoulder; but looking forward, too,
toward the woman he once knew, wondering
what he’d lost, and how she’d come to find it.

Reading "Facing Forward" at the MARK MY WORDS reception

“Facing Forward” was given to Monica T. Jagel.   Monica, a certified botanical illustrator who works primarily with colored pencils, does exquisite work.  I spent months wondering how she would illustrate a poem that covers travel from one continent to another!

The artist, Monica T. Jagel. What talent!

Last Saturday evening, my husband Scott and I attended the opening reception for MARK MY WORDS.   Seeing my poem hanging beside a gorgeous work of art was one of the coolest things that’s ever happened to me as a writer.

Monica made an unexpected choice.  Instead of simply illustrating my poem, she chose to continue the story.  In her own words:  “Now time has passed, the struggle is over.  The kale seeds were planted and harvested.  Her memories are carved in stone but the future holds possibility.  This strong woman can rest with the warm light from her candlestick that she has carried so far.  She is Facing Forward.”

I love it.

Facing Forward, by Monica T. Jagel. All rights reserved.

If you look closely, you can see a map of Scandinavia “hidden” on the tombstone.  Monica also told me that in order to paint the kale, she called Seed Savers Exchange, ordered the oldest variety of kale they had, and grew some in her garden.

Heartfelt thanks to Monica; also to Lynne Valiquette and the rest of the MARK MY WORDS committee for putting the exhibition together.

At the reception, poets read their work, and artists explained how the poems inspired theirs.  The collaborative effect is fascinating!  The show will be at the Pump House Regional Arts Center through November 14.  From there it will move to the La Crosse Public Library.  If you’re traveling through the area, check it out!

Inarticulate

A cabin at the Hensley Settlement

The southern Appalachians hold a special place in my heart.  A few years ago I finally had the chance to visit the Hensley Settlement, within Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.  This community on Brush Mountain, established in 1904, remained home to two extended families until 1951.   It is remote, accessible only by an eight-mile hike or a guided tour via a small park service van.  Once on the mountain a visitor can look across the way, or out of a cabin window, and see a landscape completely devoid of modern intrusions.

The ranger providing the tour on the day I visited did a superb job of bringing the settlement to life in our imaginations.  I found one offhand comment particularly intriguing, though.  After showing us the trap door to an interior root cellar, she said, “The man who built this cabin must have loved his wife.  He didn’t want her to have to go outside to fetch potatoes in the winter.”

In my motel room that night, I thought about her remark.  How else might someone in this time and place have demonstrated their feelings?  (Authors think about such things a lot, since “show, don’t tell” is hammered into our brains at every workshop and critique session.)

I began scribbling.  The result was the following poem.

Inarticulate, 1908

He never said he loved her,
but he dug a ‘tater hole by the hearth
so she wouldn’t have to go outside.
He split extra rails, and stuffed hay in the deep fence angles
to catch snow before it drifted across her path
when she fetched eggs in bitter dawns.
He ordered a cookstove at the valley store
and groaned it up the mountain
with a stout sled and team of oxen,
and he built a fire at four each morning
so the kitchen was warm when she started breakfast.

She rarely met his gaze,
but she made twelve-layer apple stack cakes
because his eyes crinkled at the corners when he ate them.
She scrubbed sand into wide popple boards
with a break-back broom so the floor
stretched smooth white beneath his boots.
She chopped her own kindling so he’d have time
to play his fiddle on summer evenings.
She saved flour sacks’ shiny blue liners
and papered the wall by his pillow
so the firelight glowed pretty as he drifted to sleep.

They never rose above their raisin’ with fancy talk,
just pondered the night-dazzled skies and knew
she had captured the stars in her apron,
he the moon in his sickle-scarred hands.

(Originally published in Appalachian Heritage)