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.

 

           

Home Land

Published Dec. 13, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     “I’ll be home for Christmas,” the old song opens, and finishes “if only in my dreams.”  In between the beginning and end, the lyrics describe a peopled place, with weather and vegetation we have to go away to get, sitting here on the Valley floor.  Maybe the Sierra.  Maybe Dunsmuir, on the toes of Mt. Shasta.  Maybe Michigan.

           

     The imagination is a wonderful place.  You can find yourself winging home in a song.  And for most of us, “home” has geographic coordinates, a place on the map.  Thanks to that Mother, Change, we may not actually want to go there anymore, but the homing instinct mentally remains to that place we once called home.

           

     Do the people of Israel feel that way about Jerusalem?  As the site of the Holy City in the Bible, the three thousand years of history as the center of the faith that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed over the weekend, meeting in France with its new President Macron, it’s easy to feel compassion for the Israelites.  Our President has given them a great big Christmas present:  home.  In “their” land.

           

     Unfortunately, they are not the only ones to feel that Jerusalem is home.  That city is still the center of faith for the Palestinians and other Muslims, in that region and beyond.  It is also home for Armenian Christians, as my friend Caitlin Croughan reminded me on the phone Sunday.  She visited Jerusalem last year and brought me an Armenian cross from their quarter of town.

           

     She also raised an important point about political states and religious nations.  Our forefathers and mothers built America on the principle of separating politics from religion as a way of protecting religious freedom.  We believe in that.  Many nation-states do not.  Israel appears to be one of them.  That’s their business, but it surely is not ours.

           

     So why did our fearless leader hand them this gift?  Cait thinks it was actually a gift to Mike Pence and his fundamentalist followers.  Something to do with the Book of Revelations, apparently, which is strikingly clear to some about the meaning of the preceding 65 Books.  I’m not a scholar of Scripture, so I can’t help you out there.

           

     What little I do know about the Bible concerns land, particularly the notion of the Promised Land.  It’s a big topic that was opened by Walter Brueggemann in the late 1970’s, and has continued scantily into the present.  The main concept Brueggemann uncovered (for me) is the idea of Covenant.  The land was promised to the Israelites as part of the covenant with their God.  It was a gift, the gift of sustenance and placedness, but it was His half of the bargain.  Israel’s half, in return for abundance and security, was to love their God with all their strength, soul and might and to keep His commandments, which unfortunately have been broken century after century (especially in the West Bank and Gaza most recently.)

           

     Does Netanyahu remember the teachings about Exile?  How the Jews lost Jerusalem over and over again, and why?  More importantly for the current news, however, is this question:  does Donald Trump even know?

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Trudy Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who stays home for Christmas in Lindsay.  You can send her your home-based dreams c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a comment below.

At the Table

Published Nov. 29, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

           

     Visiting my family for Thanksgiving, we spent many hours at the table this past weekend.  Only a few hours were spent eating.  The table is a place to lay out conversation as well as food.  With both of my parents’ hearing on the wane, the table makes it easier to get ideas across, keeps the words from falling to the floor and being absorbed by the carpet.

           

     At my mother’s table I learned some new things about my grandfather and, accidentally, the geography of her home place.  She spoke of standing next to her dad with her hands in the back pockets of her overalls, mimicking his stance, watching trains come and go from the nearby station.  She asked him once why there were two steam engines groaning in unison on trains headed south.  “That’s to get them over Newaukum Hill,” he answered.

           

     I’d never heard that place name before, though I visited that territory frequently most of my childhood.  So when I got home I went to Google Maps.  There, amidst names I’ve heard for almost seven decades, names like Adna and Littel, Claquato and Napavine, southwest of Chehalis, there was the red balloon stuck on Newaukum Hill, elevation 404 feet.

           

     She also told about her father taking her to see the elephants raise the tents when the circus came to town.  He woke her about 3 a.m. and they went there together to see the feat, which occurred annually on a field next to the station.  My brother and I played together on that field, but I’d never heard about the elephants or the circus setting up there – not until we sat at her table 1000 miles and 85 years beyond that memory.

           

     Not long after that story my mother produced a photograph of her mother holding my younger cousin Teri.  I never met Mom’s mother, their bad relationship keeping them two states apart.  I saw portions of my aunts’ faces in hers, finally placing us within the missing side of the family tree.

           

     At my father’s table the next day, a lot of loose ends were laid out for reweaving.  Some of them have become too frayed for inclusion, but I learned some facts about his father’s time in the Revenue Cutter Service through a story about the recent discovery of one of its ships.  As the story trailed off, Dad said “Now I think I know why Dad and my brother Bill could never get along.  Bill (the first born,) came too soon and robbed my dad of the sea.”  Dad once lamented similarly about my own arrival.  I guess the Wischemann men didn’t know much about timing.

           

     When I’m at my parents’ tables, I have to do a lot of silent forgiving – for inconsistencies, for moral slips produced by their dates of birth, for mangled facts as time works its magic on their memories.  Once in a while, though, the appearance of a new truth absolves them and time both.  May you all be digesting your table scraps and being nourished by them.  Onward – Christmas is calling.

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Trudy Wischemann is a story gleaner who writes.  You can send her your favorite table scraps 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.