O Little Town

Published Dec. 20, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     The gingerbread woman reappeared when I opened some boxes of ornaments this weekend.  I wanted to do a little light-handed decorating, at least in my kitchen window, my hearth. I pulled back the tissue paper wrapped around her plump little body, saw who it was, and tenderly wrapped her back up, deciding against that trip down memory lane.  Then I found the little wreath I’d hung to frame her years before, and my hands decided to go back after all, back to the time when she meant something real to me.

           

     I’d written about this cheerful kitchen angel in this column, so I dug up the piece from the notebooks where I’d once kept them organized. What I discovered when I re-read it surprised me.  In the first week of Jan., 2011, I was still in love with my community, tender toward its complexities, not yet tortured by them.  It felt good to remember.

           

     The gingerbread woman reverie was triggered by community pain I was just coming to know thanks to my new job at RN Market.  A much loved woman, Inglatina Huerta, had been killed on her way to work around 5 a.m. on New Year’s Eve Day.  She had a head-on collision with the son of one of Lindsay’s first families, who was coming home from a party. The story I heard is that he was not tested for alcohol.  An Hispanic woman on her way to work, killed by a white boy on his way home from a party and not made to bear any consequences: it was an old story that could have happened anywhere.  People suffered in silence.  That’s how we do it here.

           

     People had just begun to not suffer in silence two months before, when the revelations about high salaries Lindsay’s top employees were being paid splattered against the reality that a high percentage of the town’s residents have trouble paying their water bills.  In mid-October 2010 about a thousand people met in the high school gymnasium for a highly-guarded city council meeting, purportedly to hear their complaints.  At first I was reluctant to get involved, so I simply wrote about it.  The first families fought back.  In the columns before the gingerbread woman, I was just beginning to feel the effect of moving socially from one side of the community to the other, and still holding some middle ground.

           

     That was before the housing fiascos were revealed, and before the effects of Rich Wilkinson’s appointment to city manager could be accumulated.  It was before coming to the podium during public comment period at city council meetings and discovering we had to fight for the right to speak, before the plan to demolish the Citrus Exchange building, and before the lawsuits we filed to try to keep that from happening.  Back then I was afraid of losing my sense of home in this town through the act of protesting. I didn’t know that loss would occur inside of me.

           

     “It’s just love,” the gingerbread woman had told me about Inglatina’s accident and all the pain and silent discord that followed.  “Grief is the price we pay for love,” I’d quoted a fellow Quaker then.  It’s hard to remember.  But as we, against the dark, deck our homes with the lights of life and share our wonder about a birth on the wrong side of the tracks in Bethlehem 2017+ years ago, maybe perspective will come.  All this fighting is just about love for a little town.

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

 

           

The Gingerbread Woman

Published in the "HomePages" column Jan. 5, 2011 in the Foothills Sun-Gazette in slightly edited form


      She’s been hanging in my kitchen window for just a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to take her down.  But I know the time will come, so I soak her up every time I stand at the sink to wash dishes or pare potatoes.  She’s a gingerbread woman, a blown-glass Christmas ornament I found at a 99 cent store last year and brought home to hang in the center of a spare, spruce and holy berry fake wreath I bought there the year before.  And she means something, though I’ve been taking my time discovering what.

           

     She’s iridescent gold with pink crabapple cheeks and an infectious smile, a red ribbon bow at her white collar on the gold dress edged in sugary white, with a green apron tied around her wide middle and a pair of cranberry red boots that might have come from the army but for their scrumptious color.  Between her chubby hands is a string of gingerbread men cookies, an offering that appears to have pleased her as much in the making of them as they hopefully will please the recipients.  Her hair is as white as mine and looks like it’s still up in rollers.  I love this woman.

           

     I think she’s my alter ego, the woman I might have liked to have been if things had been different.  I think in some ways she’s a keeper of the hope, if not the promise, that things might yet still be that way.  She’s the Christmas maker, and I think she stands for the bravery of women everywhere who dedicate themselves to the arts of Home making at this time of year.

           

     I am slow to arrive at the task of Christmas making, and even slower to finish it, reluctant to let go once I have my hands on that plow.  But the Twelve Days of Christmas start on Christmas Day, not end:  they end on January 5^th, the day this issue will hit the stands, something I learned from my dear friend Wendy in Oregon.  In that lovely song, people are still giving gifts through the January New Year doldrums, so I feel quite justified in leaving my red and green decorations in place for yet another week or so.

           

     “It’s not going to be a good New Year,” my beautiful friend Nancy told me in the parking lot of R-N Market as I strode toward her to clock in New Year’s Day.  “Why?” I asked, stopping to listen.  “That woman who was killed yesterday morning, Friday, she was my daughter’s mother-in-law,” she answered, trying not to cry.  “She was always so full of life. . . .”  She told me what she knew about the circumstances of the accident, then we hugged and she left with her trunk full of groceries.

           

     Later, manning register #1 as the afternoon turned to evening on that first day of 2011, I got another glimpse of the impact of this tragedy.  One of the woman’s sons came in with friends and identified himself that way to me, even though I am a total stranger to him.  “She used to come in here all the time,” he mentioned, and I wondered how I would ever be able to identify her in my mind.  He left with two friends and three 30-can packs of Bud, and I called after him to drink carefully.  “I won’t be touching this,” he said softly.

           

     “What was her name?” the other checkers asked, and all I could remember was that it was Hispanic and her last name started with an “h”.  At the market, sometimes we know people by face and personality a long time before we learn their names unless they normally pay by check.  Those who pay cash often remain nameless even if the connection between us borders on intimate.

           

     Inglatina Huerta is the name of the woman who was killed early last Friday on her way to work at 6 a.m. in the dark.  Nancy said she’d gotten the frost off her windshield on the outside, but that the car was fogging up on the inside or something that made it hard to see.  Nancy said she was killed instantly when the car or truck plowed into her head-on, driven by one of Vahn Blue’s sons, Layton.  Despite the fact that the greatest degree of pain is felt through the families of the victim in these situations, I know that the Blue family must also be suffering.  I extend my sympathy in both directions, knowing neither family well enough to say it in person.

           

     After work, I went home and started cleaning up the kitchen, trying to make some peace in the middle of the chaos in my heart and mind.  I found myself staring at the gingerbread woman, still smiling, still offering her cookies and hope.  Still trying to make Christmas last even though the ball has dropped in Times Square and bare, dying fir trees are already lying on their sides in the alleys around town.  What is the hope that drives us, particularly us women, to add the work of making Christmas to our already full lives?  What hope is it that we anticipate breathlessly on Christmas Eve, anticipating that the next morning we will find ourselves transformed?

           

     “It’s just love,” she said, echoing something a man once told me about why he got up at 5 every morning to squeeze fresh orange juice for his two boys.  Just love.  And I imagine it was just love that got Inglatina Huerta up in the wee hours to drive to work on New Year’s Eve day, as she probably has been doing much of her life.  And it is just love that is causing the pain in those families and friends who now have to learn to live without her.

           

     “Grief is the price we pay for love,” Diana Lampen, a Quaker, wrote in 1996, and every time I remember that tremendous paradox, I am comforted.  It is the price we pay for being loved as well as the cost of loving others, because at some point in time all of our lights will go out and the loving we’ve offered and received will pass into memory, become passive rather than active vocabulary.

           

     And some of it may be passed on in strange, invisible ways.  In recipes for cookies and cranberry sauce, tamales and posole.  In wooden toys crafted in Dad’s shop, in doll’s dresses sown late at night on Mom’s Singer.  In saved letters and notes from boxes that arrived in the mail saying “Nothing special – just wanted you to know I’m thinking about you.”

           

     Just love.  That’s what the gingerbread woman is all about.  I’m glad she told me.

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Trudy Wischemann is a remedial gingerbread woman who is grateful to be told people’s stories.  You can send her your thoughts on grief and/or gingerbread c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.