Craftsman At Work

 Our hearth is going in today and the master mason has left the exterior work above the roofline to others while he brings his talent inside to create the hearth. It is fascinating to watch him working out the math, the mass, the material, and the aesthetics of this. 

To complicate his life, we have a vintage slate surround that will be mounted to his brickwork and so he has to keep that in his mind as he works out dimensions and cuts. To further complicate his life, we are having our cat, Dolly's, cremains placed in a niche and the hearth will be built around her. He is being so sweet and kind about this, making sure she is as close to the firebox as possible, and front and center for every fire this fireplace ever sees.

I really admire the talent and care he is using, and it makes me happy that this is the energy that is being built into our hearth.

More Than a Fireplace

This is the year we took the leap, and tackled some long overdue massive projects at our house. Both were exciting, but the project that is the most emotional for me is replacing our pre-fab Heat and Glow zero clearance fireplace with a real masonry-built fireplace.

We are on day seven of active building and the firebox is complete, today the hearth goes in.  To these men building the fireplace, this is a job, and while it is clear to see the pride they take in there job, to them this is just another fireplace, and just another day at work.  To us, it is so much more than a fireplace.

Our fireplace is truly the heart of the home. It is where we gather, where we dream, where we rest.  It is the center of our family life, and a source of comfort in times of sorrow or stress.  It is where we hang our stockings at Christmas, carefully toast marshmallows for s'mores, toss foil-wrapped potatoes to roast. Our cats stretch in front of its warmth and dream of the hot sun of Summer. Our child perches on the hearth after a shower to dry off and stay warm. It is the background to a thousand memories and more.

These men, craftsman that they are, are building us something so much more than "just a fireplace."  They are leaving a small part of themselves behind in the mortar and will become part of everything this fireplace means to us.

I've heard them today talking about being disrespected and called "just a bricklayer" but I want to call out and tell them they are so amazing BECAUSE they are bricklayers and build homes and hearths that shelter and warm us. Their work is so much more than bricklaying, or maybe bricklaying is so much more than work.

The Difference 21 Years Makes

 It was April 20, 1999.  I was working at a local middle school as an Interventionist, basically a hall monitor/lunch room chaperone/student outreach staff member. It was a pretty mundane day at work, but when I got home and turned on the television I learned that in Columbine, Colorado two boys had spent weeks plotting and planning a massacre at their school, Columbine High.

Fifteen people died that day, 12 students, 1 teacher, and the two perpetrators.  Twenty-four were injured.  The world watched as children fled the building, hands on their heads, streaming past armed police.  The news was full of footage of parents waiting anxiously to find out if their child was safe. There had been school shootings before this one, but at the time this was  the deadliest, and the planning and preparation was terrifying.  

The next day I screwed up my courage and headed to school for work. To say that the mood was tense and muted would be an understatement. Mid-morning the fire alarm was pulled by a student and we nervously evacuated the building.  It was a poorly timed prank, we got the all clear and went back into the building.

I finished the school year at the middle school having lived through a bomb threat between April and the end of the school year.  As I walked out of the building the last time, I had a job offer in my hand to teach at a high school in the Fall.

I spent a week in August setting up my classroom and thinking about Columbine.  I assessed our fire drill route, where my class was assigned to stand, what my classroom looked like, and how would I keep kids safe if a shooter came to our school. In the end, I came up with a plan that would leave my classroom locked, looking like we had evacuated out the windows, with all of my students hidden from the view of the classroom doors.

School started and in late September, I decided the day had come to talk to my students about my plan and to practice it to see if it would work the way I thought it would.  Each class that day walked in and we talked about safety, Columbine, and then I explained my plan, assigned students to open the windows, turn off the lights, overturn desks near the window, and showed the students where and how we would hide by pressing up against the wall of the classroom between the two doors. I always taught withe the classroom doors shut and locked during class.  

Each class practiced, discussed, and by the end of the day I was pleased that I felt like I had a viable plan, just in case.  As I was cleaning up and getting ready to leave, the assistant principal for my area of the school knocked on my door. I let him in and he said that he was concerned to hear about my activity that day.  He asked if I knew what he was talking about.  Since the shooter drill was the primary activity in each class I replied that I guessed that was the cause of concern.  It was.  he said that he felt it was too alarming to the students and other teachers and I should cease this activity.  If I did it again, I would likely be fired.  I promised not to drill again, but by then I was sure that if the worst should happen, my kids would know what to do.

That was 21 years ago.  Now we have live action shooter drills in kindergartens.  Children learn how to hide silently in dark closets, shelter in place, evacuate with hands on their heads. Teachers are given emergency kits with evacuation routes, class rosters, and Sharpie markers to write names on students injured or dead.  Sometimes the children are not warned it is a drill and they have to hide while listening to actors roaming the halls "hunting" them.  

I think back to my innocent little plan, which I repeated in the next school I worked in.   I was going to make sure I had a plan to do my utmost to keep my students safe. I had parents complain, I had administrators caution me, but I persisted.  I wonder how many people remember the reaction I got to those drills and wish it were that simple now.

The Vanishing

My dad is dead. He's been physically dead since 9:30pm on April 6, 2020.  He died of Covid19 in the nursing home he had been in since October 16, 2019.  It was not the end I wanted for him, not the end he ever imagined.

While he physically died in April, I can say that he had been disappearing for a few years before that.  The father I knew began to fade and be replaced by a man who didn't make sense, became more and more unhappy, became unable to drive safely, work on cars with sense, began to fall for no real reason.  His ability to communicate constricted to a litany of complaints and paranoia.

It was hard to be around him and yet we had to do it nearly every day as he needed the grocery store, a doctor's appointment, the bank. Just keeping him feeling as in control of his life as possible after he wrecked his car in late 2016 and we had to find a way to make sure he never drove again.

I can't go through the litany of all the things, events, and moments that led to him being placed, against his will, in that nursing home.  I've done it in other, more private places.

What I will record here is that my father didn't die as much as he vanished.  First he faded and grew transparent in the world, then he faded more in the SNF, and finally, when Covid barred us from the SNF he just drifted away to a place I can never visit. 

I have to remind myself frequently that he is dead, not just sitting in his wheelchair in F3A, Greenbank Wing of Brandywine Nursing and Rehab on Greenbank Road in Wilmington, DE. He died in his room, alone. He was removed by our funeral director and cremated. I never saw him.

In a "normal" death there are rituals. We attend our loved ones as they die, we hold their hands, we stroke their hair. After they die, we wash their bodies, hand them over to the funeral home.  We have funerals, wakes, gatherings. We mourn in a collective, supporting each other and grieving together. There is a scattering of ashes, a burial, a stone, flowers.

In this, there is none of that. We were not allowed to be with him as he died. Didn't view his body. There was no funeral, no gathering, no wake, nothing.  A couple of weeks after his death we went to the funeral home to sign paperwork and pick up his ashes.  A quick drive home and now he is in my guest bedroom, waiting.

And so we wait. We wait for the pandemic to pass, though it feels like that is never going to happen. Should it pass and we can finally gather, he will be released into the Brandywine River, where he once fished, as he requested.  Further on we will have a memorial stone placed in the family cemetery in VA, but that is a long way off.  We sit in suspension, in the vanishing.

When It All Changes

When you do genealogical research so often it becomes like collecting sets of inanimate objects, like salt and pepper shakers.  You always want "the complete set," you need the person, their date of birth and death, who they married, their dates, if they had children, etc.  You want to look at a generation in your tree and see it full and complete.  It feels like an accomplishment, and it is.

Then there are those moments when you look at all those names and dates, lines and boxes and you start to hear whispering from  them.  Soft voices call out to be recognized, to be seen, to be known.  Some are more insistent than others and you begin to pursue the person behind the data.  You might look for pictures of the houses they lived in, pictures of them, newspaper articles that may reveal moments of their lives, mentions in books, anything to give you the chance to put flesh on the frame.

The most haunting pursuits are when you find an ancestor living through a life changing moment, probably one that led to your existence and you can't stop thinking about the emotions and the color behind that paperwork you have. What did that 13 year old girl feel when he feet touched the deck of the ship that would bring her to the New World in 1638? How did he feel as he walked through the gates of Point Lookout Prison Camp, sick and knowing the South was losing?  When the curtains caught fire in the Iroquois Theater, what thoughts ran through her mind in the last moments before mass panic?

Frequently even the mundane catches my fancy- Did they curse?  What was their favorite food?  Were they happy? Did they ever play in the rain? That whole crazy, messy, wonderful thing that encompasses a human life draws me in.  I want to know MORE than "this is my 4x great grandfather and he fought in the Civil War."

Lately I have been spending lots of time thinking about my great-grandparents, Jacob and Alvina. I had the good luck to have known Alvina, Granny to me.  She died when I was 9 and I have a handful of memories related to her in the last years of her life.  All my life their story drew me in.  They were born in Latvia, one of the Baltic countries that was under the control of the Soviet Union when I was a child.  They came here to the US in the early part of the 1900s in the great way of immigration that came through Ellis Island at that time.  They were in that tide of "tired, poor, tempest-tost" immigrants the Statue of Liberty stood as a beacon to.

That story in itself was amazing to me.  I was the granddaughter of an immigrant, my grandma Senta was 2 1/2 when they left Latvia.  In my growing up, it was a country which had gained and lost its independence but remained resolute in its identity.  We were LATVIANS, not "soviets"or "Russian."  It seemed a magical and haunted place that still resided in the hearts of my immigrant family.

As I got older I got more details around the departure of our family, more of the whys.  In 1905 workers across the Russian Empire rose up to revolt against Russian rule.  In Latvia they marched in the streets of Riga, demanding freedom and reform. There were riots, people were killed, Russia fought back to crush the revolt.  In the end, Russia prevailed and Latvia was once more under the control of Russia. For my great grandparents, this made life perilous because according to family lore, my great grandfather, Jacob, was among those fighting for Lativan freedom.

In May 1906, My great grandfather boarded the ship Northwestern and left his homeland for the very first and very last time.  He arrived in Philadelphia in early June of 1906 and stepped off the ship to create a new life from the wreckage of his old one.  The following year, my great grandmother, her mother Dora, and my 2 year old grandmother and her 4 year old brother, Roman, landed on Ellis Island and were met by my great grandfather, who by now had settled in Wilmington, Delaware and was working as a finish carpenter for the Rail Car Shops of Harlan and Hollingsworth.

Those years, 1905-1907 have been populating my thoughts quite a bit lately.  To be truthful, 1897-1907.  That would cover the time between when my great grandparent met, married, started a family, fled their home, and started a new life.  Not much, really?

I have a studio portrait of my granny taken in Riga in 1897.  She is in the center of the picture, flanked by two other young women.  It is labeled in my grandmother's distinctive hand, "Mom (center) and two friends." Just a wealth of information, not.  So there she is, my granny. Not the 90 something woman with braids wrapped around her head, a bowl of sour balls on the table beside her, and time to amuse small children that I knew, but a 20 year old girl with her friends. They are lovely, their waists fashionably pinched in corsets, leg o'mutton sleeves floating above their shoulders. Her hand delicately holds a card as it rests in a shell held up by a cupid statue, her other arm rests on the back of the chair one of her friends is sitting in.  Each of her friends look lik
e they have rings on indicating they may be married, but granny is 3 years from her marriage date.  All three girls are looking in different directions. One girl looks directly into the camera, granny to the left and above, the last girl looking directly off to the left, like someone has caught her attention.  I can see details- an errant wisp of hair, a peep of shoe toe, a faint herringbone pattern in the fabric of granny's dress. It's a moment in time and I almost feel like I am there.

She's so young, so beautiful and so on the cusp of an incredible decade.  She's going to meet and marry the love of her life, have two children, watch her life in Riga explode into uncertainty and leave her home to start a new life.  What was she like?  What did she think?  How did she feel?  So many questions.  I need to walk away for now, but I'll be back to write a few more posts related to this one.  In the meantime, here she is, on the cusp of when it all changes..... 

Mother's Day

This weekend is Mother's Day.  It is a day to honor, celebrate and spoil the mothers in our lives.  Those mothers may be birth, adoptive, heart, or ourselves.  Whatever the source, I say CELEBRATE the mothers in your life.

For me, 364 days a year are about my family, my home, my community.  You might find me covered in garden dirt, glue and glitter, tie dye, flour, or cooking grease on any given day of the year.  My hands are strong, my heart is true, my spirit is given in service to others.  Truly, it is difficult for me to think about myself before those I love, the causes I find worthy, or the help I can give to those with needs greater than my own.

Mother's day is one day every year when I can "force" myself to allow myself to be spoiled and cared for.  Instead of spending my day in the service of others, I can relax and allow myself to be served.  This year, I remind myself, and all mothers, that there is no selfishness in allowing yourself to be cared for, spoiled, gifted and loved.

Happy Mother's Day to all the fabulous and giving mothers I have had the pleasure of knowing.  Whether you came into my life as a mother figure, or an inspiration, thank you.  Moms of the world, let the world love you with all the love you show it on a daily basis.

Frazzled and Scattered

It's early January.  The holidays are over and all the rushing and flurrying is over. We only have to put away the tree and decorations and settle in for the Winter slog.  I'll admit it, January to March are about my least favorite months.  I don't like the cold, the stress of worrying about the oil in the furnace tank the icy roads, the bitter cold punctuated by the Spring-like teases.  If I could hibernate like a bear I would gather my little family around me and hunker down for a long Winter's nap.  Sadly, that is not possible.  So I am left frazzled and scattered.

I will spend January tackling large cleaning and organizing jobs I have put off for months because it was too hot or too busy to manage.  February will find me looking for more to do.  By March I will cheat Mother Nature and build a mini greenhouse for my front porch in the hopes of fresh greens for St. Patrick's Day.

The cold and isolation of January, February, and March leave me feeling restless and unsettled, frazzled and scattered.  Maybe this is why my grandmother spent so many hours with garden catalogs, notebooks, and seedling trays during this time.

sigh.....