In the Kitchen

Published in slightly edited form Nov. 22, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “A woman’s place is in the home,” was an old saying trying to die as I was growing up.  Where we lived, few women worked outside the home, for someone other than husband and family.  Few women brought in a paycheck.  Instead, they served on school and church committees or watched each other’s kids during the day.  But come the end of the afternoon, where most women could be found was in the kitchen.

           

     Serving neither husband nor family, I still find myself most at home in the kitchen.  It’s a kind of command post, the central hub where the food half of home is directed.  The rest of the house serves as “shelter,” but unless the kitchen is functioning well, I might as well be sheltered elsewhere.  The whole sense of home dissolves when the kitchen is a wreck.

           

     At Thanksgiving, when we focus on what comes out of the kitchen and winds up on the dining table, I find myself most distressed.  I’m not a pro in the kitchen, or much of an eater, either.  I prefer my food plain, not glamorized.  I prefer to remember its source at Thanksgiving:  the land and God.

           

     That being said, a woman’s place is still central to most of our Thanksgiving celebrations, whether that be deciding whose table will bear the kitchen’s products, who will be invited to share our kitchens’ bounty, where the money will come from to buy the groceries, and when the whole production will start.  After the feast, when the men and kids retire to the television set to nap off the heavy work of eating, the real hangover of Thanksgiving sets in:  cleaning up the kitchen, putting away the food, distributing leftovers on take-out plates for the visitors, cutting the pies for round two.

           

     In truth, my actual memories of those kind of Thanksgivings are good.  My mother shined, even when the pie crust didn’t turn out perfectly or the turkey browned too soon.  With family around her and other women sometimes joining her in the kitchen, her role as the family’s center was clear, and her ability to perform it well was evident.   I think Thanksgiving seems painful to me simply because I have chosen a different role.

           

     For those of you women who now perform a double role, bringing home some or all of the bacon and then having to cook it, I offer my profound admiration.  It’s what needs to be done, and you do it.  The world is still home as long as our kitchens are functioning.  For those of you who have been joined by men in the kitchen, I am thankful:  equality of the sexes actually begins in that small room, not the one with the bed in it.

           

     For those of you – of us – who still suffer inequality of the sexes in the workplace, I offer my sympathy.  The current flurry of news about politicians and other celebrities addicted to that inequality is only a reflection of everyday reality for many of us.  I think women who still punch the time clock, regardless, deserve our admiration.  But remember whoever is in your kitchen this holiday season, and give her (and/or him) thanks.

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Trudy Wischemann is a picky eater who writes.  You can send her your holiday food encouragements c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Home Itself

Published Nov. 15, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “Home is where the heart is,” a friend tells me.  We are talking about where home is for each of us, which naturally involves WHAT home is.  I counter his definition with Valley author Gerry Haslam’s favorite description:  “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

           

     Both of these descriptions implicate people, describing home as a social environment.  There can be no doubt about that aspect.  All I have to do is be around my mother, bless her heart, for five minutes and I’m mentally back in kindergarten.  This aspect of home is what many of us are facing as the holidays approach, with its mixture of blessings and re-livable curses.

           

     But for me, the word “home” always involves a physical environment, with specific climate, topography, vegetation, wildlife, even geology.  This is to say that home - for me - is also geographic, with a historical context that I have in some way participated.  It is a permanent place where people come and go.

           

     And when I go home in my mind, it is to a specific place where I never lived, but visited often.  When the homing instinct bears down on me, I fly back to the “ranch” in western Washington where my Aunt Hazel lived the best years of her life.

           

     It helps that she often said she bought the place for us, her youngest sister’s offspring, so we would know what it was like to farm.  It helped that what little farming she did made her exquisitely happy, but it was more the life she lived there on that place than any one activity.  She loved harvesting the apples from their little orchard and making pies and ‘sauce, as well as watching the deer come down from the forest above to harvest their share.  It was fishing in the creek and frying trout for dinner. It was baling hay and putting up oats for winter, watching cats in the barn catching mice.  And it was photographing all of it that made for peace in her life.

           

     That place is home for me, I realize now, because there is where I learned the basic truths of my life.  That food comes from the land, and shelter as well.  That contentment is achievable and worthy of pursuit.  That I am an outdoor person at root, and curious about the natural world, fascinated enough to learn from books and from my own observations.  That intimacy with a place, a little piece of land, is priceless.

           

     They say you can’t go home again.  I’ve never believed that, though for most of us over 40 the places we once lived are unrecognizable now.  We destroy home for ourselves every time we obliterate bird habitat, push out olive groves, level fields for development.  But if, as I feel now, that home is an intimate relationship between people and place, there certainly is room for us to come home.  May the pending holidays help us stretch in that direction.

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Trudy Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who writes from home in Lindsay.  You can send her visions of your home place c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

Paul's Camera

Published Nov. 8, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Two weeks ago I wrote about the loss of a camera that had been given to me by Paul Taylor 35+ years ago.  I called it “Dorothea’s” camera because I believed it had belonged to his wife, Dorothea Lange.  It matched photos of one she used in the field when the two of them documented the stream of immigrants into California who’d been displaced from their land in the Dust Bowl.

     The camera was returned to me last week, intact.  The story of how it was returned will have to wait until the case of the other missing items is resolved, but it’s one I will chalk up to Lindsay’s inherent goodness when the time comes.  Our town is still a place where love can do its work.  Make no mistake about that.

           

     Before it reappeared, I was searching for people who might be able to ID the camera and establish its worth.  I found Elizabeth Partridge, author of Restless Spirit:  The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange (1998).  She’s also the daughter of Rondal Partridge, who had been Dorothea’s field assistant.  When the camera came home, I saw that it was a Zeiss IKON, not the Zeiss Jewel shown in her book.  I emailed her to report the distinction and the good news.

     She wrote back instantly on her iPhone, but referred to the camera as “Grandpa Paul’s.” Then she reminded me of his photographic work before he met Dorothea:  “Paul’s early work, though no great shakes in terms of beautiful photos, was so brave and thoughtful of him to dare to do.”

           

     The revelation that it might be Paul’s camera rather than Dorothea’s riveted me.  It sent me back to the one book I own where his photographs are shown, a book of farmworker photographs by Ken Light, Roger Minick and Resa Tansey called In The Fields (1982.)  Paul had written the introduction with labor historian Anne Loftis and included some of his photographs from his extensive study of Imperial Valley farm labor conditions in the late 1920’s.  But they also included a shot of a billboard for Tagus Ranch advertising for cotton pickers in 1927, just five years before the cotton strikes in Pixley and Corcoran. Paul had been here in our valley, too.

     What was really brave about Paul was not so much that he took and used photos, but his whole approach, which could be called “ethnographic” in academic terms.  Economics, his field, was becoming so statistical that it is almost unrecognizable as a social science today.  But Paul asked questions of the people he studied and wrote down what they said, and he photographed the places they lived and worked, a form of shorthand notetaking that carried these conditions 90 years into the future.  His economic analysis of the Imperial Valley is now highly esteemed.

           

     I’m keeping Paul’s camera with me until I’ve finished the work he sent me to do.  Onward, friends.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial researcher who writes to stay sane.  Thanks to John Kirkpatrick for his sympathetic phone call last week.  Send your favorite camera stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247or leave a comment below.

 

 

Thicker than Smoke

Published November 1, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Through all the national emergencies of the last three months – hurricanes, shootings, fires, more hurricanes -  I’ve found myself focused on the aftermaths.  In the midst of the terror of “the unthinkable” actually happening, we inevitably discover something beautiful in its midst: human hearts and spirits responding in what often seems superhuman ways.

           

     My sister works in Santa Rosa, lives in Windsor just north of the hottest tongue of fire that snaked down canyons from Calistoga three weeks ago.  She is the family’s anchor, and (with her stalwart husband) was preparing to accompany our 91+ year old mother to Maui for perhaps her last trip.  Despite all the potential disruption to that plan, they made it to the airport 6 days after the fire began, while it was still uncertain when containment could occur.

           

     The fires were out when they returned, but restoration efforts had barely begun.  I gave her a few days, then emailed her to ask how her trip had been and if she’s getting caught up at work.  She said no, she won’t be caught up for a long time, but “I have a home to go home to and we’re all safe, so that’s all that matters.”  Then this:

           

     “The trip was ok but not the best trip we’ve ever had – I experienced some form of PTSD/Survivors guilt and, combined with the exhaustion from the week and the horrid winds that followed us to Maui that felt like the same winds that burned my beloved town….I was not sleeping much.  The only thing that made it ok was that Lisa, Vince and John were safely ensconced in our house and it felt like sanctuary for them so that was good.”  Lisa, Carol’s lifelong friend who just remarried, was away the night the fire started.  John, Lisa’s son, had driven through flames to wake Vince in their new home, which burned to the ground not long after the two men escaped with their lives.

           

     “Jordanna’s job at the County Assessors office brings her in contact with everyone who’s lost everything; she’s holding up ok but it’s hard on her, especially to hear the stories of the old people that perished.   Santa Rosa smells like wet ashtray, some of the smell lingers in the office as well and the drive between downtown and Windsor is just devastating to see the wicked and wild path of the fire – what it spared and what it took.  Every day is a fresh reminder of what happened, what we’ve lost and the long and arduous road we have ahead of us.   #theloveintheairisthickerthanthesmoke”

           

     The love in our hearts is thicker than smoke, stronger than a rain of bullets, bigger than the largest tropical storm system.  I think our world would be a safer place if we learned to count on that fact of life.

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Trudy Wischemann is a resolute rural writer who works in Lindsay.  You can send her your heart-in-action stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

Dorothea's Camera

Published in edited form Oct. 25, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

"I had to get my camera to register the things that

 were more important than how poor they were -

their pride, their strength, their spirit." 

    

Dorothea Lange, as quoted in Elizabeth Partridge's book

Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange, 1998

     “Do you know my wife, Dorothea Lange?” the old man asked me in the present tense, although the woman, best known for her Dust Bowl portrait “Migrant Mother,” had been dead more than 10 years.  It was the summer of 1976.  The man was Paul Taylor, professor emeritus of Economics at UC Berkeley, and I had walked across campus to his office with him at his request instead of studying for a meteorology midterm.  When I said “No,” he began showing me her photographs that he kept in his file drawers.  Thus began my lifelong relationship with Paul, although he has been dead now for almost 35 years.

           

     One Sunday he called me to come to his home in the Berkeley hills.  I was preparing to update the Arvin-Dinuba study originally undertaken by one of his graduate students in the 1940’s, Walter Goldschmidt.  Paul had supervised the original study and kept it alive by citing it continually in his efforts for enforcement of the acreage limitation provisions of federal reclamation law.  An update was overdue.

           

     When I arrived, Paul handed me a black leather box that, when opened, contained one of Dorothea’s cameras.  The lens slid out on a track followed by accordion-like bellows attached to a square box which she held while she squinted through the rangefinder on top.  When it wasn’t mounted on a tripod, she balanced the extended camera on her knee.  It is the camera most often shown in the documentaries about her career, which started in the bread lines and street protests on San Francisco’s wharf during the Great Depression, moved to the streams of migrants coming into California from the Dust Bowl, then the evacuation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II.

           

     That her hands had made use of this camera to capture what her heart and mind saw through her eyes was powerful, even a little intimidating.  I protested, knowing I would never have the nerve or the expertise to use it.  He insisted I take it.  That camera, and the memory of the gift, have kept me inspired over the intervening years, when I might have allowed doubt to wipe away the importance of the work Paul and I did together.  I have long thought it was the most important possession I owned.

           

     A couple of weeks ago I heard myself think that I didn’t need to keep it with me anymore.  Now that I’m finishing the book on Paul’s contributions, I realized that I might be able to give it to a museum where others could be similarly inspired.  Just days later, on the weekend of Oct. 7-8, it was stolen from my house, along with my flute and autoharp, my jewelry box full of earrings from Long’s Drug and some family treasures, as well as my HP All-in-One printer that I bought at Target on sale for $35 four years ago.  They took all my other cameras as well, including my grandfather’s Brownie and my Aunt Hazel’s Argus rangefinder in the red plaid camera bag she loved.  It was painful.

               

     But, in looking for the proper description of the historic camera, I found this quote of Dorothea’s, one she used often.  “The camera,” she said, “is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.”  Dorothea’s images have taught us how to see for years, and continue teaching us today.  That camera did its work well past its useful life.  I just pray that it’s somewhere teaching someone to see again.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial documentary photographer who writes.  You can send her your favorite camera stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

 

 

 

 

Coming Back

Published Oct. 4, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

     I was coming back from the Fresno airport last week when I ran into a pocket of despair.  Sometimes it takes a while to come back from hitting one of those.

     I took the long way home, the back roads angling through vineyards and orchards, alternating south, then east along the diagonal front of the Sierra foothills.  Section by section, mile after mile, there were signs of dissolution of the very web of our valley’s life.  Normally I am revived by this drive, encouraged by the sight of one fruit-farming family’s place after another.  But the families are disappearing, leaving trails of abandoned equipment and empty barns, houses removed leaving squares of bare ground behind.  The agricultural landscape of Fresno County’s Kings River fan is beginning to look like ours.

     I hadn’t realized how much the reshaping of our agricultural landscape has been depressing me until I saw the disease spreading north.  Some lines from a Tom Paxton song showed up: “Are you going away with no word of farewell?  Will there be not a trace left behind?”  Then the songwriter brings us home:  “Well, I could have loved you better, didn’t  mean to be unkind; that was the last thing on my mind.”

     My despair at the loss is amplified by knowing that my small attempts to prevent it have failed.  I don’t know what can be done to turn around the trends leading us to rural depopulation and cultural oblivion.  Here in the citrus belt the packinghouses are mechanizing right under our noses, eliminating 75% of the jobs that feed our towns, but nobody sees it coming.  The small farmers are being vanquished by Cuties and Halos.  The flow of incomes from the land have moved from trickling up to trickling down.  The costs of the so-called economies of scale will be borne more and more by our communities and countryside.  Lord.

     The only hope I find comes from the experience of some friends who worked in the Tulare Lake Basin restoring wetlands for migrating waterfowl.  Based in Alpaugh, where hope is a little hard to come by, they worked through BLM (where hope is also a little hard to come by) and built ponds on retired farmland with water purchased from Alpaugh I.D.  They had no way to know whether the provision of this habitat would help the declining numbers of birds, but they did it anyway.  In the first year there was a small increase, but each year thereafter, the increase was astounding.  “We had no idea the birds would come back so fast,” my friends said.

     You could call it an experience in loving better, in stopping being so unkind, even though the unkindness of eliminating bird habitat to plow soybean fields is totally accepted in this culture.  The acreage in new ponds was a tiny fraction of the habitat that once was there, but still, it helped beyond their wildest imaginings.  So it seems to me that we could love our lives here a little better, stop being so uncaring about the outcomes of these trends on our neighbors and our communities.  Perhaps they’ll come back faster than we can imagine - if we just try.

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Trudy Wischemann is a rural advocate who writes.  You can send her your small farmer sightings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.