MAGPIE TALE: All the Wheat in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

Our contribution to the Magpie Tales series.

Great grand grand father Adelard had no idea he was being painted from the window of the asylum. Some days as he wiped his brow from the summer heat, he would look up at the Saint-Paul Hospital and would see a face peering out at him from a window. Their gaze would be as intent and steady as a cat, making him wonder what was happening with the information sent to the brain by those eyes. Adelard hated being in the range of such eyes, as if they could suck him up from the wheat field and possess him.
And on the afternoon of July 27, 1890, he saw that odd man with red hair and a wound to his head step by his table outside of the Ravoux Inn. He had seen this off fellow around quite a bit, knew he spoke with what he mistook for a German accent and was likely on release or escape from Saint-Paul Hospital. Our Aunt Clarrisse worked as a laundress there for six months, but our family had no other connection. Adelard always wondered why that wheat field stood there between the asylum and and the stone wall that stood between it and the outside world. Who was that wall protecting -- the inmates, those of us on the outside or the wheat?

Wheat was so central to the life of our family. Adelard's hands worked the fields, and the bounty of the harvest nourished his body. The word gluten, which would come to be a scourge in our family in the next century, was a term Adelard had never heard nor understood. When the opportunity to marry Inès Boulliard presented itself in 1893, it was not because of any passion or attraction to this rather plain woman of 24 who had been waiting for a suitor for nearly a decade. It was only because 82 hectares of prime wheat fields and a small vineyard came to him with her hand.

Years later, Inès would educated Adelard on who that "odd little Dutch fellow" was and urged him to sell 12 hectares of the fields to buy a painting. Adelard would hear nothing of it, pointing out that the painting were very poorly executed -- wasting too much paint that was piled on thickly and the man clearly had poor eyesight as well as mental problems because all of his landscapes and figures were blurry and lacked precision.Adelard knew he was much wiser investing in new farm equipment, practical tools that would put food on the table. He would hear no more of these insane ideas of from Inès. She bristled at the word "insane" but would say nothing of it, fearing that Adelard might learn the truth about her sister Jasmine who had been at Saint-Paul since she turned 14. She clung to the hope that her long, near-spinsterhood was not because of her less than stellar complexion but the reputation the Boulliards had gained for being "a bit off" because of Jasmine. She just prayed that it would not be passed down to the next generation they hoped to produce soon. Nearly 25, there was much pressure for Inès to produce heirs while "the field was still fertile" as Adelard and her father would say, unapologetic about putting every situation in to agricultural terms.
A full year and a half passed without any children, and then suddenly they began to arrive. Adelard did little more than to pose in family photos with them. Fatherhood did not suit Adelard , and he fairly much chose to ignore it. Children were there to help him tend the fields in his opinion. But the two boys had no interest in farming, and he daughter had no interest in him or her brothers. She and Inès, however, had a close bond that Adelard always resented. They seemed to speak in their own language, finding refuge from that household of three males, three males who never talked to each other. It was Etienne, the younger son, who worried Inès. He had developed a brooding demeanor worse than his father’s at much too early an age. And she caught him drinking bourbon at the age of 12. Clearly he was following in his father’s footsteps at much too early an age. Adelard’s sullen moods grew darker, and he had gained the nick name of the “grim reaper” as he sauntered along the back trails of the village as he departed the wheat fields at dusk.

Etienne, Inès was certain, would end up in a room at Saint-Paul Hospital before he turned 18, staring out at those wheat fields. Those wheat fields that would turn one more male to madness.

Faultlines and Bloodlines

Some days I am certain I sense my mother's essence, shrouded in the tiny steam cloud dancing above a bowl of miso soup.

Or isn't that the offbeat rhythm of her shuffling house shoes I hear echoed in the strokes of my bamboo tea whisk?

All of the ardent efforts of my generation's attempt to be spiritual not religious can not erase the image of a group of altar guild ladies silently arranging calla lilies and irises, privilege pausing to bow down in awe at the beauty and power of nature -- too transient for them to ever tame and emboss but within their capacity to appreciate yet never fully comprehend.

At every turn there is a new book or other product preaching about the futility of material things and selling a plan that will ensure that you will live in the Now not the past. The past is too brilliant of a dancer to fall for such bunk. Bloodlines of the past hold up a mirror that dares me to look at my own future or at least come to terms with those who have already lived it. Reconcile or forever be locked in this dance.

Silences, especially at night, lead me to ponder the fault lines under my bed. A cracked windshield, spider web smile lines that can overnight become ravines. Silence was the beacon call to sleep when my mother read at my bedside, those commas and dashes that gave her the chance to let her eye glance from the page to my bed to see if I was truly, finally asleep. Even now, hours before I need to rest my head for the night, I can hear the silence and wonder if the next sound will be the page turning or the book closing and the light turned off for the night.

MAGPIE TALE: Spice Interrupted

Our contribution to this week's Magpie Tale.

When Gaetan moved into the little cottage on the edge of the Laurentian Mountains, he welcomed it as a welcome -- and likely permanent -- respite from the excesses and decadence of Montreal that had seduced and grounded him 25 years earlier. Today he took solace in sipping Lung Ching Dragonwell, sketching the local butterflies and birds, and watching the tip of Mount Raoul Blanchard emerge as the morning sun burned off the fog while he worked on his latest article for the Spice Scholar Quarterly.

The spring issue featured his 2,000 word "The Quest for Libyan saffron in the 8th Century" as its lead article, and he was now under pressure to top it with a piece on the stealth trade Melegueta Pepper and Calamus between Marakesh and Timbuktu during the heyday of Taureg cattle cults. Typically hidden beneath camel blankets, there were horrid stories of families selling their children for just a few ounces of these prized spices. Gaetan had employed a small studio of illustrators in Brunei for the accompanying graphics and was toying with the idea of a trip to Bamako to do more extensive research and expand the article to a book.

Just as Gaetan was close completely what he felt was a very effective sentence describing the gait of camels, he spotted a figure in the garden, startling him from his contented morning of productivity. Gaetan let out a disturbed sigh as he spotted his cousin Cedric, who always had a habit of appearing unannounced after months or years of absence and no communication, bring a sense of tension and disarray to the household. He turned off the desk lamp and closed his eyes, taking in a few slow, quiet breaths to summon the calm strength to confront his cousin.

"The persimmons were rounder last year," Cedric said, munching on the remainder of the fruit, juice slithering from his hand and mouth.

"How do you know they haven't been sprayed? Wouldn't you be putting yourself at risk?" Gaetan asked.

"I've put myself at much more risk than a few pesticides, and I know you'd never use them anyway. I think the whole scare about pesticides is overblown."

Gaetan took another breath and regarded his cousin's consistently disheveled appearance -- the mismatched boots, one gray and one brown; his beard that seemed a full inch longer on the left than it was on the right; the cap that seemed to be coming apart at the brim. The order he had worked so hard to restore to his life was about to be blown to shreds.

"There are wild blackberries along the creek," Cedric said.

"I don't remember seeing them. Are you sure." Just as soon as Gaetan said this, he realized that there were never greetings when Cedric returned, just as there were never any farewells. Five years might pass, and it seemed they were picking up their last conversation just where they left it, as if it were a cup of tea Gaetan had kept warm in case Cedric returned.

"Well, maybe they weren't blackberries. But from a few feet away they sure looked like it. I may go back down there this afternoon." With that, Cedric opened the kitchen door, and Gaetan saw him make his way down the hall, to the guest room where he had stayed five years ago, without asking, without explanation.

Gaetan strolled back to his desk, not a word coming from down the hall from Cedric. For a moment he thought about calling his sister Sabine to see if she might take in Cedric this visit, but she always managed to have a way to shield her life of order no matter what hit her. For the moment silence had returned to house besides the muted sound of Cedric unzipping his bag from behind the closed guest room door. With that comfort, Gaetan returned to his article and began working on a lengthy description of the sands of Mali.

Sodium without Fear

Although he prefers to write books with one syllable titles, I hope Mark Kurlansky will consider writing one called "Salad".

Depending on your source, salad was not an integral part of U.S. mealtime until the mid-twentieth century thanks to Lawry's. They claim that they were the ones to introduce it as a prelude to the evening meal at their Beverly Hills location.

My grandfather Ralph considered no meal complete without Lawry's seasoned salt which he always referred to simply as The Lawry salt or just Lawry's.

The Lawry's was always kept on a lazy susan on the table. There were lazy susans in the cabinets as well where there were back up bottles of Lawry's should the one on the table go empty during a blizzard or nuclear holocaust.

Sodium was something we studied in chemistry and did not dread as part of our diet back in those days. My grandfather died at 62, but the impact of Lawry's was never discussed.

I think the orange color on their logo was totally co-opted by MUNI in the 1970s.

Sepia Saturday: Private Life, Family Life

(Our contribution to Sepia Saturday. Check the others here.)

This week I finished Jane Smiley's great new novel Private Life. Besides being a compellingly written story, I was struck by how the life of its central character Margaret Mayfield could have been any number of my female ancestors. Moving from Missouri to California, she suppresses her own aspirations and dreams in order to be a dutiful wife.
In a recent interview, Smiley mentioned that the story was inspired in part by a distant relative she knew little about and ended up inventing her fictional character from that base. I've said more than once that some of the most fascinating family photos are of those I never met and knew little about.

Born in 1874, Lulie Ann Fleming was the youngest of the nine sisters of my great-grandmother Eva Bell whom I chronicled in this post.
Like Margaret Mayfield, she married at 27 in 1901. In that era, I am sure that her family worried that she was on the road to be an old maid. Seen here with her husband Charlie on their wedding day, I can imagine the guests whispering "I was beginning to wonder if it would ever happen," as she walked down the aisles. I am always drawn to the hankie delicately placed in her lap.Although they lived in Kansas, not Missouri, Charlie and Lulie left for California sometime during World War I. I am sure that this was devastating to my great-grandmother since she had no other family there, all the other siblings still in Quebec. This shot is of Charlie on the Kansas farm sometime before their departure to California.
Taken in 1911, this shot shows four of their six children, including the youngest, Bessie, and Lulie's parents Spencer and Elizabeth visiting from Montreal. One son died as an infant, and another was on its way.

This final shot is from 1948 at Knott's Berry farm with Bessie and Lulie. Notice that nearly five decades after her wedding, she still had a hankie in her lap. Having been born in the days of horse drawn wagons as the main means of transport and much of the American west still a frontier, Lulie must have found it bemusing to pose for this re-enactment of it.

Looking at the photos of Lulie, I see so many familiar aspects of her face that remind me of the women in my family -- especially the position of the nose above the mouth. Seeing just that portion of her face, I could think it was my mother, sister, niece, aunt, grandmother and other women in the family. I can even see a bit of it in my own face.

I have never met any of Lulie's offspring, those surviving likely being fourth, fifth or sixth cousins. But I am curious where they are in California, if our paths may have crossed without us knowing it. I know that having these photos of Lulie was a great comfort to my great-grandmother who felt so alone in Kansas, and it is intriguing to look back at them and try to guess the fuller story.

Sepia Saturday: Reunion

(Here is our contribution to Sepia Saturday. Check the others here.)

Memorial Day weekend and June herald the onslaught of family and high school reunions. I won't be attending any this year, but thought I'd feature this one from 1922 of the Biggs family. The older pair on the right are my great-grandparents, John and Mattie Biggs, visiting Oklahoma from Torrance, California. My grandparents, Acy and Cassie Biggs, are the man in the flat cap with the baby (my father who was born that February) and the dark-haired woman in the center with her head turned. I am fairly certain that the young woman in the white hat is my second cousin, Jewell Biggs Castle. I had never met her until last April when she shared her journal from the family's journey from Oklahoma to Los Angeles in 1920 when she was 12. It was a poetically vivid account filled with detailed descriptions of sunsets, the new Broadmoor Hotel where she saw a polo match and the first discovery of the West. She died two weeks later at the age of 98. I look at this photo and feel lucky to so recently had a new personal connection with this group, none of whom are living today but are vividly dancing in my heart and imagination this Memorial Day weekend.

Our Inner Mother and Inner Goldie Child

(After a long absence, we're glad to be back with another Sepia Saturday contribution. Check out the others here.)

Of all the challenges of growing older, I think the most difficult and comforting is dealing with the memories of those we will never see again on this earth and how their memories and presence grows stronger.

It should be no surprise to focus on my mother this week for Sepia Saturday after several weeks "out of the game". The last Mother's Day I celebrated with her was in 2003. She died March 12, 2004.

This above picture of her is from around 1927 with my mother in the center, the "sullen" child as she would sometimes call herself and her younger sister Goldie in foreground on the left. They was barely 16 months between them, and my mother often said that they were the mirror opposites of the greater whole. My mother was the serious, cautious, protective, reflective one -- always calculating risk and potential hazards. Goldie was, quite literally, the Golden Child -- joyous, foolhardy, always running, never afraid, and always singing. Her golden locks brought her the name of her maternal aunt.

My grandfather was the conductor of the Alameda line street car in Kansas City at the time. Goldie and my mother would often ride with him. My mother would sit in an obscure corner with good light and read a book. Goldie would prance into the center of the car, delighting my grandfather -- a huge fan of jazz and the Charleston -- as she sang "Birmingham Bertha" or "Sweet Georgia Brown", hands on her hips and she did pelvic twists wise beyond her mere three years.
Here we see Mother and Goldie in the spring of 1931. It was a rainy, sick season. Three weeks later Goldie died of rheumatic fever. The family never recovered on many levels. My grandfather invested hard earned Depression dollars on tap and voice lessons for my mother, who was clearly a book not stage person. They went to Shirley Temple movies at once uplifted and heart sick as the cheerful singing tot reminded them too much of Goldie. Years later, I remember my mother watching Paper Moon with me, but suddenly running out in tears as Tatum O'Neal's tough cookie preteen in a bowl cut reminded her too much of what her sister would have been at that age. This photo of my mother and her parents from 1937 was often called the "wave shot" for obvious reasons. There is poise and happiness in the three but I also see the pain in their faces from the loss of the fourth family member that should have been in the photo. A few months later, my mother's second sister, Barbara arrived. She was a beautiful woman on many levels but had a strained relationship with my mother and her parents from the start. My mother resented a baby coming into the house when she was about to enter her teens and felt she often played the role of the nanny. My grandparents groomed her from the start as the "new Goldie" instead of recognizing her unique, individual personality. She had an aptitude and competence in music, but it was always an uphill, deliberate skill for her. She feigned an effervescence, always cracking rather awkward jokes and laughing but never taking to it intuitively.

At the risk of this sounding like a morbid and downbeat Mother's Day post, I'll qualify why I have, with the passage of time, have come to love and appreciate my mother even more. Sometimes I think what drew my parents together was that both of them came from households that were tortured by the loss of a daughter at a young age. From the outset, they said that they would raise their children with no expectations of who or what they should be but honor their personalities. I can remember being taken aback in high school when my father told me, "You know, I've never raised a son before, so we're both sort of learning this as we go." As a tot, I had a reputation of breaking out in song at family gatherings or in shopping centers , hands on hips and gyrating as I got wrapped up in my own act. My parents -- and even my grandfather -- looked on with pleasure and no judgment, even if I was singing "The Man I Love" or "My Boyfriend's Back" at pitch volume at the Piggly Wiggly. A bit of Goldie did live on in the family, without pain, and I feel blessed to have parents and grandparents who could embrace it coming from the most unexpected of packages.

Sepia Saturday: Little Mr. and Mrs. Biggs

In one of my first Sepia Saturday posts, I wrote about my paternal grandparents Acy and Cassie Biggs. Acy (above, around 1949) was the eldest son of his nearly dozen siblings but was paralyzed in a farming accident when he was in his 30s and was confined to a wheel chair for the remainder of his life. Like many families struggling through the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, most of his siblings and his parents -- John and Mattie Biggs below on their wedding day in 1888 -- migrated to California.
The two branches of the family -- the large one in southern California and the smaller branch remaining in Oklahoma -- had little connection during the 70 years after the separation began. Although I met a few of them through the years, most of their names and stories were mysteries to me.

When my mother died in 2004, I got an email from a second cousin who said that he had been building a family website chronicling the history and that he wanted to connect the Oklahoma and California branches. I was the living bridge, a member of the Oklahoma branch who had been living in California for ten years. Slowly, I have had the chance to meet more and more of the California cousins and have learned first hand stories and histories that had been vague memories and legends up to then.

The cousin who contacted me, Mike, has the diligence of a reporter, reaching out to many long disconnected family members, and the site he built is quite detailed and organized. One of the most interesting tidbits is that although I am a bit over six foot two, I am the exception to my namesake, and my great grandfather John stood just under five feet, often referred to as "Little Mr. Biggs". I've since had the chance to visit the neighborhood in Torrance where the family settled. Ironically, one of my closest friend's family settle just a few blocks down the street, having migrated there in the 1940s from China.

Sepia Saturday: Saved from the Flames

(Our contribution to Sepia Saturday #13. Check out the other entries. Above is our subject unenhanced and below with a bit of tinkering.)

"I hope you're not planning to pull those out of there."

"I certainly hope you weren't planning to throw them into the dumpster."

"Why not. We don't even know who they are."

That was the dialogue between my aunt and me some 35 years ago as she was sorting through boxes in my grandmother's house shortly after she died. It doesn't take much guess work as to who spoke which line.
Well, I still don't know who these are but have some hunches. We have a photo in a similar frame of my Great-Great-Uncle Will who fought in the war with a Union regiment from New Jersey. He died around 1914, and his wife, Carrie was sort of a family legend whose story was often shared at family reunions. She was often called a "Civil War widow" even though she was only four when the war ended. However, when she was 14 and Will was about 35, they married. It was a second marriage for him since his first wife and their baby died during the birth.

My mother had tales of Carrie coming to live in her household in the mid-1930s when she was likely in her late 60s -- considered incredibly ancient back then but about the same age as Barbara Streisand today. Carrie was described with the catchall phrase of the era of being "senile" or "eccentric". But in an era where Social Security was just a germ of an idea, it was not unusual for the "senile widow" to go live with extended family. Carrie had been widowed for at least 20 years by then, and she lost her only child 35 years before that. Who knows if these events led to her declining mental capacity, but I remember my mother telling stories of how she and her friends made the best of the elderly woman who came to share their household.

"I know it sounds horrible, but my friends and I would play dress up and then go ring the doorbell and tell Carrie that we were some of her old school mates," my mother said. "She would be so excited and would prepare tea and pull out the most fancy cookies that our mother wouldn't let us eat. Then when our mother came home, Carrie would tell her about the wonderful visit she had from her old chums. Mother would look at us as if she knew the real story but never took us to task."

There were also stories of Carrie clutching the drapes and wailing during the fireworks on the Fourth of July crying, "The Confederates are crossing the Potomac! They're going to take Washington!"

She was also a night wanderer, and in that day of no one locking their doors, it was not unusual for the neighbors to be startled in the middle of the night as they saw Carrie at the foot of their bed. They would put on their bathrobes and politely escort her back home.

Could that be Carrie and one of her sisters in the photo? Since it was in the same box as Will's photo, I want to believe it is, making it likely from the late 1860s of early 1870s. I'll probably never know, but even if it's a mysterious stranger with no link to our bloodline I am still glad I saved it from the flames.

Sepia Saturday: The Merging of Fact and Fiction

(Our latest participation in Sepia Saturdays.
Be sure to check the link to other great posts.)

How much of our family history is fact, legend or pure fiction? I've learned that mine is a pretty wild mix of all of that, and some of the "narrators" of our family's journey have been of varying reliability. Yet, I know that there is some truth embedded in some of the most outlandish tales.

The above photo is of my maternal great grandmother Eva Bell Cheuvront Coddington Cain and her son Claude, taken around 1891 with her son Claude. Here are the facts that I do know about them. She was born ion Montreal in 1867, the eldest of five children. In 1886 she married a man named Frank Coddington and moved with him to Mankato, Kansas.
This is the only photo I know of them as a couple. Their son Claude was born in 1889. They divorced shortly afterward, one of the first in the young state's history. Why they divorced has always been murky, but my grandmother always described Frank as a man with a reputation of being "dangerously handsome and downright dangerous when he was angry, especially when he was drinking".
Being a divorced, single mother with a strong French accent, no alimony and hundreds of miles from home must have been a daunting prospect. But Eva took solace in her "little prince", books of Plato and Baudelaire and memories of home.
In 1900, she remarried a man many years her senior, Maurice Cain, who had also arrived on the US prairie from Quebec. Together they built a new life that included my grandmother and three other children.

Being a dozen years older than the new brood of children, Claude apparently always felt in an awkward role but was especially admired by the three women of the household, and I always heard stories of his amazing singing voice and love of poetry and art. Sadly, none of his work was ever passed down through the family. My grandmother spoke of his dreams of going to New York or even Europe, but he only got as far as Kansas City where he worked as a streetcar conductor until dying suddenly at the age of 29. It was an event that forever shattered Eva. When my mother looked at the photos of the beautiful, poised young Eva in Victorian finery, my mother said it was hard to recognize her as the grandmother she knew -- a hunchbacked woman with goitre, half her teeth missing and smoked a corn cob pipe. Years of hard farm work and dashed dreamed took their toll on her.
My grandmother and her sister would sometimes speak of Claude in hushed tones, his life as what they termed a "confirmed bachelor" and the night he drowned in the Missouri River. As a child, I always wondered why he would go swimming at night. Only towards the end of her life did my grandmother share that he jumped into the river but would then refuse to share more details. When I pressed for answers, she would either turn silent or my parents would tell me that I was being rude.

My instincts and imagination have filled in what I think might have been Claude's story. I don't know how much is fact and how much is fancy. I've long wondered why I he has held such a fascination for me. Other ancestors have had more heroic or dramatic histories. In fact, he is only my "grand half uncle" though I can see a shared bloodline when I gaze on his face in the above portrait of him in his uniform. There is a familiar mix of grace, arrogance, melancholy and longing for what is beyond the immediate horizon. Was he composing a sonnet in his head as the shutter snapped or dreaming of what was beyond the flat Kansas landscape, envisioning himself dancing somewhere in a salon in Paris?

What is most perplexing is that I think I may be the only living person who knows that Frank ever existed or possesses photos of him. Even my sister, who is dedicated to preserving family history, can't remember hearing stories about him. I've asked extended family members about him, and they don't even seem to know that our great-grandmother had a first marriage.
The video below is something I created a few years ago, my imagining of what Claude's story may have been. I know that I probably got several of the facts incorrect (he died in 1918 not 1912 as stated in the video and some of the names are changed), but I hope it honors the truth of his life. I want to believe that this lost soul is not forgotten and that the sweet young prince that brought solace to his mother more than a century ago left behind a wisp of poetry on the prairie, still floating in the cornfields of the sunflower state.

Sepia Saturday: Reunions in Sepia

There is nothing remarkable about the above image of my paternal grandparents, Acy and Cassie Biggs, on the left and right, and an unknown women in the middle taken in 1924. However, how it came to me is one of those things that makes me think the internet is not as evil and useless as I sometimes think.

My grandfather, born in 1885, was a child of the Oklahoma Territory land run of 1889, and my grandmother was born the following year. After marrying in 1910, they had a first daughter, Ruby Lucile, who died suddenly in a household accident that haunted them for the rest of their lives. Part of their recovery was having three sons, my father being the youngest, born in 1922. By then my grandfather, whose parents were something of drifters and always lived on the edge of poverty, was one of the most successful farmers in the county with over $50,000 in savings, a remarkable sum in that era.

One morning in 1925, he was on his way from the farm to the bank in town with blue prints of the family dream house he planned to build complete with three fireplaces, an enormous wrap-around porch, a smokehouse and turrets and dormer windows. Just as he pulled his horse drawn wagon out onto the road, the wagon tipped and trapped him under one of the wheels where he was not discovered for more than two hours.

The next five years were spent on futile trips to Mayo Clinic, an odd form of electroshock therapy intended to restore use of his legs, and countless specialists who all confirmed that he would never walk again. They were correct, but the family savings were depleted by the time the 1929 stock crash hit and teh Oklahoma dust bowl followed.

That era was difficult for an able bodied man to survive in Oklahoma, and most of his siblings were part of the mass migration to California. Several stayed in touch, but the separation was difficult as was their feeling that his physical challenges made it impossible to make the journey with them. My grandmother, my dad and his brothers managed to run the family farm through that horrific period and slowly inched their way out of poverty. My grandfather died in 1952.

When my mother died in 2004, I got a mysterious email from a man with my last name in Riverside, California, who said he was a second cousin who was intent on documenting the extended family, especially those who it seemed were "lost" seven decades after the mass migration West. He had made a habit of searching any obituary with the Biggs last name, and immediately connected the dots back to his grandfather and mine. We met a few months later for the first time, and over the course of the past six years, more of the family members separated by time and thousands of miles have also met and exchanged many photos and stories.

A couple of years he sent me the above photo saying that he knew I probably had several copies of it but that I might enjoy having an electronic copy. I let out a small gasp when I opened the file. Before my father died in 2006, as his confusion grew greater through Alzheimer's, he repeated that it was becoming harder for him to remember his father standing or walking since the accident happened when he was only three years old. And while we had many pictures of him after his accident, we had only a few of him before. All of them are either portraits or shots of him seated. While father and I both stood over six feet, we knew that his father and grandfather both stood at just over and just under five feet respectively. There were stories of them both being called "little Mr. Biggs", a name neither took to very kindly.

So finally seeing a shot of my grandfather standing was bittersweet since it came a year or so after my father died. There was some solace in finally seeing what I had never seen and what my father feared he might forget

UPDATE: And here is a video I did about much of this same story. I appear towards the end -- the little kid in glasses and the sock cap with my sister and cousin Glen.

Sepia Saturday: Reunions in Sepia

Among the many things that could be said about my maternal grandfather pictured above, one can not be debated. He was precise on any matter or task he took on. Whether it was use of the English or French languages, pruning cherry trees, playing a game of Yahtzee or the care and riding of horses.

Although some of his older horses came to live on my parents farm, I never gained great confidence or skill as a rider. I did, however, have decided awe and respect for both their grace and power. The fact that each had a distinct personality and sense of humor added to their mystery. There wasn't that much riding of the horses after my grandfather died, but they lived out comfortable, labor free lives, all of them passing the age of 35 or higher.

As a middle schooler, being 35 was an age I couldn't even wrap my mind around and the amount of life experience surrounding it. It came into focus years late when a distant cousin -- whose father raised one of the now elderly horses as a colt -- visited our corral and raced toward the red maned quarter horse that approached her with joyous gallop I had never seen him exhibit before. I remember tears streaming down her face as she fed him sugar cubes and it seemed they spoke in a silent language of memories that only the two of them understood.
Indeed it was easier for me to wrap my mind around the copper plated horses that adorned the flagstone fireplace mantel of our farmhouse. They were always there on the lower left shelf of the mantel, even though pottery and flowers changed through the years on the other shelf. I never knew their provenance, just that they were always there.

When my parents sold the house in the 1980s, I felt certain that their pack-rat sensibilities meant they were still with us. After both parents died and my sister and I were dividing the estate, it was this type of solid memory that we valued more than real estate or stocks.
So there was a mix of excitement and mild disappointment when we discovered two of the copper horses in a box in an obscure corner of the basement. I was certain there were three, but I was pleased to reunited with these two, thinking of my cousin years earlier visiting the old quarter horse.

Last Sunday while strolling through Alemany Flea Market seeking dusty treasures, a dimly gleaming object caught my eye three stalls down. Lying on his side was an all familiar copper horse. I knew in an instant that he was not a duplicate of the two I had at home but the long missing alpha to tower over the other two. He was even missing a front leg like the other two.

I sent off the above image to my sister with the subject line "Missing family member discovered in California".
She sent back a message and the attached photo. While she was pleased to know about the reunion, the picture confirmed that there had originally been four horses. There is clearly a fourth head on the far left. The quest continues.

Sepia Saturday: The Maternal Line

For sepia Saturday, I hope it's not illegal to "recycle" past posts, but I'll share this post I did back in December 2006 after making a series of short slide/music shows for the holidays about different branches of the family. It came at the end of a two year stretch of much loss (both of my parents, my aunt, one of my cats, a few friends.) Knowing that those memories were still there, and looking at relatives lost even further back and seeing them so young and stylish is reassuring.

The pair above are my maternal grandparents, Ralph and Nancy Polley, on their wedding day in 1923. I've always loved this photo since it has such a F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald feel to it, and I love the photo of them on their roadster while taking a vacation in the Rockies. That's my mother peering out the back window. My favorite part of this photo is the technical "flub" of the shadow of the photographer at the bottom. Who is it? Another family member along for the ride? A mysterious stranger who kindly took the shot? The outline of the hat adds to the mystery, though I can't confirm if it's a man or a woman. A couple of Christmases ago I had this photo transferred onto a tin box which was a real hit with the family members who received it. They didn't complain about the toffee inside either.

Uncanny

We're still not sure if Alton and Dalton Yowells are twins or just brothers. Do you have a thought?

In the meantime we visited Twinish.com where even if you don't have a biological twin you can find your doppleganger. Now, they do qualify their matches by percentages, and I have yet to find a 100% or even 90% match, but the following are intriguing.

So I just couldn't resist running a couple of my mug shots through to see who turned up and thought you'd enjoy the results. The resemblance is uncanny, no?

Now tell me, if you saw Mr. 78.44% and me walking down the street side-by-side, could you tell us apart?

87.33%

82.14%

78.44%73.83%72.41%

68.94%

66.34%

63.31%

61.37%
57.61%