A flood of engagement and clarity

News flash! Dad is totally on top of the current flooding situation in both the Elkhorn River area of Nebraska, and the region north of Oklahoma City including Edmond and Guthrie. Dad can reel off names of all the towns along Highway 81 near Norfolk, the number of bridges out, and the sandbagging operations. When I fact-check his reports, he has it nailed.

This same dear old fellow couldn't separate news of Israel's Gaza blockade from the depressing reports about BP's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico when I was visiting him. Most days he doesn't bother to concentrate on current events at all. His big challenge is squinting at the digital clock to decide when to start wheeling down to the dining room for meals.

Dad's not just engaged in the news. He has a fresh perspective and sense of gratitude to be "high and dry," and living in a facility that cares for and about him.

I'm wondering just what part of the disasters hook Dad's thoughts and drag them out of the fog. Is it the placenames recalling childhood homes and more recent visits? Is it the Dustbowl Era childhood memories of Nebraska droughts and floods? Is it the tactile experience of his own distant childhood efforts to build little dams on Willow Creek? Or is it a resurfacing of the empathy that often made him contribute to Red Cross efforts during international catastrophes?

I wish I could share with Dad the Google Maps satellite views and YouTube videos, and record his memories of the topography and history of the region. As it is, I'm just enjoying this window of clarity with Dad. I wouldn't wish flooding on any person, home, or community, but I'm thankful for this side effect.

© 2010 Nancy L. Ruder

Painful memories

I just finished shredding all the Medicare and supplemental insurance documents from Mom's illness in 2004 and 2005. I couldn't bear seeing them sit atop the desk in Lincoln, so I brought the stack back to Texas earlier this year. There's really no reason to keep them, so now they are gone.

The shredding reminded me of my intense frustration with the medical profession during Mom's decline. I'm near tears realizing all the invasive procedures she had to endure.

I don't return to this blog very often, as I remember it being about hospitals, doctors, tests, anger, and denial. It's interesting to see that I didn't apply any of those subjects as labels.

I'm still my dad's anchor, and the job hasn't gotten easier. Now being the AnchorWoman includes financial duties and being Dad's advocate in his assisted living facility. We are lucky. He is in a safe, familiar place with good food and caring staff. I am grateful for the evenings when Dad and I have a clear-headed conversation.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Food pyramid topples in Red Willow County

A good story by Prairie Bluestem about her Grandma Violet cooking for farmhands in Gordon, Nebraska, unleashed a vivid childhood memory. My grandmother also cooked for farmhands when my mom was a little girl down by Marion, Nebraska. As far as I know, my mom kept her clothes on, although Genevieve's mom thought clothes should be optional in the hot kitchen.

I always found it difficult to reconcile the grandmother I knew with family stories of her cooking for the farm hands. To me, she lived with my granddad in an hotter-than-hell one-bedroom apartment in McCook, and never did more in the kitchen than set out a "Dutch lunch."

One Sixties summertime visit to McCook our family of five tried to sleep on the fold-out sofa and air mattresses in my grandparents' living room. The sweltering apartment was filled with the smell of overripe cantaloupe and very little sleep.

Last night while I was tossing and turning and worrying that I might have strep throat while hoping it was just a sinus infection, I kept thanking my lucky stars that I wasn't sofa-surfing with cantaloupe in McCook. Some things are worse than strep in August, but not many.

The next day, Grandmother set out the spread of pickled herring, pickled pigs feet, pickled miniature corn, sweet pickles, bread & butter pickles, watermelon pickles, cucumbers and onions in sour cream, sardines in olive oil, sardines in mustard, Club crackers, overripe cantaloupe, salami, summer sausage, cheddar, toothpicks, Fritos, chip dip, and 7-Up. Oh, and some chocolate mints and macaroons for dessert!

Does this skin make me look fat?

The swallowtail butterfly caterpillars on the dill plant would have intrigued Fritzi. They are so strikingly beautiful, and getting fatter by the minute! I'm sure she would agree their graphic colors and patterns would make fabulous swimsuit designs, and never mind the thighs!

Last Sunday's Dillard's swimwear ad looked a bit like a sensuous full-bodied swallowtail caterpillar frolicking in the dill. Frolicking capers inside the adjustable three-panel mirrors in department store fitting rooms were a favorite childhood diversion in the Sixties. It helped pass the time while Mom was trying on girdles, swimsuits, or casual Koret mix-and-match casuals at Miller and Paine or Ben Simons. Mirror amusements were less likely to rile the shopclerks than playing hide'n'seek under the garment display racks.

Realizing the comic strip "Cathy" first appeared in 1976 newspapers, I feel mighty old and irritable today. Maybe my skin is too tight with a full tummy of dill, and it's time to make my chrysalis. Fritzi and I got disgusted with Cathy, her annual swimsuit shopping, her frumpy salesclerk, and her fitting room melt-downs over two decades ago. That was about the same time we both booted Dagwood, Garfield, Ziggy, and Mary Worth off the island, and sent Mark Trail up the creek without his paddle!

If your skin splits, wear it. Molting might be the next major fashion statement. Eat, drink, be merry, and hang your swimsuit out to dry.

Cantaloupe 1971

I'm allergic to pollens of the ragweed botanical family. Bananas and chamomile tea really set me off. I never know if cantaloupe, watermelon, cucumbers, or sunflowers will send me sneezing. I hope not, because I want to know what is different about a Dulcinea cantaloupe.

Kroger had Dulcinea cantaloupe on sale, so I got one. Dulcinea is the name of Don Quixote's envisioned female perfection. Funny that buying a cantaloupe with a brand sticker can send me on a memory trip to 1971.

Fritzi and I had planned to attend the Nebraska Repertory's "Man of La Mancha" together that summer, but she had to have "some female surgery". As a young teen, I had only the vaguest uncomfortable inklings of the complexities of female plumbing. These days my contemporaries have ongoing story sagas with their "female plumbing". Cantaloupe is a memorable scent. So is the smell of the House of Bauer's Bavarian Mints that I took my mom in the hospital.

Dulcinea... Dulcinea... I see heaven when I see thee, Dulcinea, And thy name is like a prayer An angel whispers... Dulcinea... Dulcinea!

PADRE: To each his Dulcinea
That he alone can name...
To each a secret hiding place
Where he can find the haunting face
To light his secret flame.
For with his Dulcinea
Beside him so to stand,
A man can do quite anything,
Outfly the bird upon the wing,
Hold moonlight in his hand.
Yet if you build your life on dreams
It's prudent to recall,
A man with moonlight in his hand
Has nothing there at all.
There is no Dulcinea,
She's made of flame and air,
And yet how lovely life would seem
If ev'ry man could weave a dream
To keep him from despair.
To each his Dulcinea...
Though she's naught but flame and air!


My students are unaware of windmills, and as unlikely to tilt at them as they are to dial a rotary phone. A Bauer's Bavarian mint would taste great right now.


Mom sewed this dress for me that summer.

Peanut butter

Dad and I finally got around to having peanut butter and bacon sandwiches with lettuce and Miracle Whip on whole wheat toast this week. "This is for Mom," I said, and he agreed. The taste and texture sensations were even better than I had remembered.

Old rose ramblings

I wore an "old rose" blouse today. Got it on sale, of course. It has sewn-in darts, woven stripes, and machine-embroidered embellishments. Fritzi would have approved, although she could have sewn a better-fitting one.

Chocolate brown has returned to the little girl fashion scene. My little students are wearing brown with pink, turquoise, or lime green, and it fills me with an irrational hope for the future. The color combo and the floral print corduroy tug deep in my core to a basic sense memory of what it is to be a little daughter safe, cherished, and nurtured.

When my sons were small I read a story written by Fred Rogers, yes, Mr. Rogers, about how our feeling of home and safety is connected with our earliest memories of colors, patterns, sounds, and smells. I've never been able to find the story again. It may be that it is more powerful to me because I can't find it, and therefore keep looking! The story told of a young woman who was seeking a Persian rug for her home. As a very young child she had moved often to places all over the world, but her parents had always taken one rug to each new location. The young woman was searching for a rug exactly like the one she had learned to crawl on as an infant, but she didn't know it. That pattern would connect with her earliest remembered experience of "home".

The annual blouse sale at the Miller & Paine Department Store Budget Shop on the lower level of Gateway Mall in Lincoln, Nebraska, just down the stairs from Kresge's, was a crazy event in the late Sixties. Women would stand in line for the chance to paw through the racks and get into the fitting rooms. The Budget Store was also the place to get day-old Miller & Paine bakery bread, cinnamon rolls, and crumb cookies, and I can smell each of them just remembering! I can also smell the tired linoleum floor tiles and a hint of sizing. The stairwell from Kresge's down to the Budget Store smelled of ancient popcorn, plastic floral wreaths, dirty snow, and parakeet cages.

Going with Fritzi to the blouse sale was an acknowledgment that I was becoming a young woman, which was very scary, uncharted territory. Fritzi wanted me to have new clothes for ninth grade. The blouses I chose would inspire her fabric choices and sewing efforts to create outfits. She would even knit a coordinating sweater vest. It was a heavy burden, given my mother's perfectionism. I knew these choices allowed no middle ground, no enjoyment of the shopping experience for its own sake. This was Red Rover all over again.

Still, I recall each of the six blouses as if the sale were yesterday. The "old rose" blouse was a simple short sleeve blouse with the sleeves folded up. I had never heard the phrase "old rose" before I went into the fitting room, and I was sure I would look like an elderly spinster great aunt. Instead, the color is one of the most flattering for my hair and skin.

My next choice was a delicate, textured pattern of pale yellow and sage green vines on an ecru background of wide seersucker with very full sleeves. Fritzi chose a sage green wool remnant to make a simple button-front jumper with brushed silver buttons. The wool made me itch, but I will keep choosing sage and silver combinations as long as I live.

The third blouse was white with tiny woven stripes of embroidered blue, pink, and yellow flowers. The leaves were pale green, so the blouse also went with the jumper. Thirty-eight years later, I seek out the embroidered fashions. Fritzi also made royal blue culottes to go with the blouse, and I was grateful they weren't wool.

I wore the olive green shirt with the exaggerated cuffs and collar for my ninth grade photo. I tied a paisley scarf knotted like a necktie, and wished I looked more like a Mary Quant/Jean Shrimpton /Twiggy-esque model in my Yardley white lipgloss. There was only so much Edholm and Blomgren Photographers could do to make me look better! The photo shows a ninth-grader far more childlike and naive than most of my current third grade students.

The fifth shirt was a simple warm light blue. The color was so satisfying with the chocolate brown skirt and the brown and white groovy mod scarf around the neck! I was definitely channeling Petula Clark here, and not sleeping on the subway!

In those days I felt the most glamorous in the button-down-the-back peach blouse with the extravagant ruffled neck that made me look like a tropical fruit-flavored signer of the Declaration of Independence. Fritzi created a peachy tweed outfit of pantskirt and long vest with covered buttons. Then she knit a coral sweater vest, and found matching coral tights. How amazing that we dressed so nicely just to crank the journalism class mimeograph machine!

That blouse sale in my Wonder Years still tints my color choices. On some deep level it feels like home, both safe and with psychic baggage.

Backyard visit

Forty-seven years on Eastridge Drive, and I never ever saw a hawk in the backyard. Owls, yes, but a hawk, no.

Dad and I have shared a week of memories and good meals, with Mom always in our minds. Much of the time I sat in her chair looking out at her swing in the backyard, watching the squirrels.

One morning I put disc one of this cd in the player. When a dearly demented friend shared this recording with me, it seemed to give my buried grief a powerful, beautiful escalator to a higher level.
Dad had gone to run errands. My plans to read were detoured as the music demanded my full attention. As the Elgar Concerto for Cello in E Minor shivered my timbers, I glanced up to see a large hawk fly low from around the corner of the house where I sat across the backyard to land on the down-curving branch of the locust tree. Supremely formed and informed in gray feathers with a prominent eyebrow, it glared down at a surprised squirrel in the grass and laser-beamed the cosmic pronouncement, "You are so lunch."

My heart expanded with joy, awe, and a profound connection to my mother. This was her force and focus, her opinion, discerning eye, and discipline. This was the Mom we did not cross or disappoint.



The gray hawk continued to glare as I raced down the hall to get the camera, and just as I centered it in my view finder it took off in a low swoop up the hill into the next yard. My photo is an empty branch.

Later, I got out Mom's bird guidebooks. Hawk, gray, eyebrow, low swoop and perch...Northern Goshawk? Harrier?

The harrier has the uncharacteristic flight: Description - This long-winged, long-tailed hawk is usually seen gliding unsteadily over marshes with its wings held in a shallow V. The rump is white and the wing tips black; the male has a pale grey back, head and breast and the female and young are brown above and streaked below. It is a usually silent bird but at the nest it utters a "kee-kee-kee-kee" or a sharp whistle. Distribution - The Northern Harrier occurs throughout all of North America, breeding as far south as California and wintering from South America to British Columbia. It prefers marshes and open grasslands. Biology - This bird hunts its prey, which includes mice, rats and frogs, by flying close to the ground and taking these small animals by surprise. They lay 4 or 5 pale blue or white eggs on a mound of dead reeds and grass in a marsh or shrubby meadow.


Paul Johnsgard's guide to Nebraska birds keeps me wondering if the bird was a goshawk or a harrier:

Northern Harrier -- Circus cyaneus A common migrant and permanent resident throughout Nebraska. Although in cold winters most birds may leave the state, in most areas and years the species can be regarded as a resident. It is probably most common as a breeder in the Sandhills. It breeds locally almost throughout the Plains States, and is a regular throughout during migration. Migration: Thirty-nine initial spring sightings range from January 1 to June 2, with a median of March 13. The wide spread of the records suggest it is a resident over much of the state. Thirty-six final fall records are from September 14 to December 31, with a median of December 9. Habitats: This species occurs in open habitats such as native grasslands, prairie marshes and wet meadows. Nesting is done in grassy or woody vegetation ranging from upland grasses and shrubs to emergent vegetation in water more than two feet deep. Comments: Northern harriers are graceful predators, that are usually seen sweeping low over marshes and fields, and showing white rump patches in both sexes. Adult males are otherwise silvery gray with black wingtips, whereas females and young males are mostly chocolate brown. Breeding Bird surveys between 1984 and 1993 indicate that the species has undergone a significant population increase during that period.

Northern Goshawk -- Accipiter gentilis An occasional winter visitor and spring migrant nearly statewide. Probably less common now than earlier, but there have been recent observations from Box Butte, Cherry, Custer, Saunders, and Lancaster counties according to Game and Parks Commission records. The only areas of breeding in the Plains States are the Black Hills and northern Minnesota, but it is a migrant throughout. Migration: Forty-eight spring records range from January 1 to June 1, with a median of March 15. Half of the records fall within the two periods January 1-11 and April 14 to May 16, suggesting this species is both a winter visitor and late spring migrant. Twenty-two total fall records are from September 16 to December 31, with half of the records occurring within the two periods September 21-October 17 and December 25-31. Habitats: Throughout the year this species is rarely found far from wooded to heavily forested areas. Comments: The Latin name of the goshawk may suggest it is "gentle", but the name really refers to the royal nature of the bird. The common name goshawk refers to the species' ability to attack and kill geese and similar sized birds. Breeding Bird surveys between 1984 and 1993 indicate that the species has undergone a significant population decline during that period.


A full day later, I realize the backyard hawk was the real life model for the Japanese scroll print that has hung in the bathroom for thirty years. Fritzi no longer frets about the condition of the dark green and peach bath towels and wash cloths. I won't either.

Death of a student

Children die. All over the world. Every single day. From malnutrition, disease, birth complications and genetic disorders. By suicide. From land mines half-way around the globe, and from random bullet sprays in gang violence a few miles from my home. From swim pool accidents in gated communities, and horrifying abuse by mother's live-in boyfriends. They are left in locked cars in the Texas summer, or thrown from cars because they weren't properly fastened into a car safety seat. Children without life jackets at the lake, or active supervision on the playground. Some are attacked by the neighbor's Rottweiler, and some by the neighbor. They find loaded guns at home. They are victims of unspeakable crimes by parents who swear God told them to do it. Not the concern of the current administration, but impacting families every single hour of every single day.

It shouldn't happen. Not here. It shouldn't happen anywhere, but it always will. It shouldn't happen now, but our species is not as civilized as we fancy ourselves. In our fantasy mental version of modern medicine, children don't die. But they do. It's the pits. Life has no pause button and no rewind, and there's no guarantee that it will make sense.

When a child dies, it is "time out of whack" for the parents, my coworker explains. This week has given me cause to consider the death of a sweet, sweet child, of a student, and also to wonder about the siblings of the deceased. That concern for the young brothers has been lurking just off stage in my brain all week. What could I possibly say to the boys after the sudden death of their sister?

It was so difficult reading cards and writing letters when Fritzi died. Conversations were even harder. It didn't make sense. It shouldn't have happened. It hurt, and it still hurts. What helped me? I didn't "get on with life", or "get over it". Mourning is not like that. One doesn't just "get back to normal life."

The thing is, "normal" has changed. There's no rewind or pause. I work to accept the changes in the frustrated person holding the remote control and clicking without results. I am not in control, but I'm less remote.

Writing posts for this blog has helped me find a calm, safe spot. No answers or explanations. Just little hints at finding acceptance for myself, and some courage to explore changing relationships. Tiny glimpses of my life's purpose.

Writing has also been a way to Photoshop the mental images of my mother to find enhanced meaning and resolution. Some images needed to be blurred or to have the shadows softened. Other images needed the colors and definition adjusted. Sometimes the midtones had overpowered the highlights. The saturation levels required fine-tuning. Writing. Writing....

Woke up in the middle of the night knowing what I could tell the young brothers. I could tell them how I wrote stories about Fritzi. I hope I've written the letter in vocabulary the young brothers can understand. I hope they will consider my suggestion that they write stories, or make drawings. Writing has helped me more than I can describe. May these young brothers find a creative way to send their feelings, energy, sadness, creativity, and memory outward in a way that helps their larger family.

Dutch door

Fritzi is in the kitchen now. Her kitchen. She is carefully and skillfully mounting our butterfly specimens on corrugated cardboard. She is concentrating, but also relaxed, in the flow.

The kitchen and the butterflies and Fritzi are all in my memory, but how welcome these images are! I just realized that these are the images of my mother that come first to the surface now, replacing the images of her suffering and illness. This is the Fritzi that I casually chat with about little things while I drive to work or the store, just letting her know how the boys are doing, or the nice lunch a student's mother brought for all the teachers on the last day of class. I know Mom would have enjoyed the tortellini salad and croissants.

I've been looking at photos of my mother in happier times for four months now, trying to reset my memory. Writing about fishing and butterflies seemed to help me over the bump.