Welcome to my World

Welcome to the domain different--to paraphrase from New Mexico's capital city of Santa Fe which bills itself "The City Different." Perhaps this space is not completely unique but my world shapes what I write as well as many other facets of my life. The four Ds figure prominently but there are many other things as well. Here you will learn what makes me tick, what thrills and inspires me, experiences that impact my life and many other antidotes, vignettes and journal notes that set the paradigm for Dierdre O'Dare and her alter ego Gwynn Morgan and the fiction and poetry they write. I sell nothing here--just share with friends and others who may wander in. There will be pictures, poems, observations, rants on occasion and sometimes even jokes. Welcome to our world!

Monday, May 15, 2017

Listening to the desert

We often do not pay much attention to sounds except for the irritating ones like noisy cars with blasting stereos, construction machinery close to our homes, or whining kids and the neighbor's barking dogs. That is a mistake. Reading a book about writing memoirs ,I found some reminders abut how much of a trigger some sounds can be.  So I began to think about listening to the desert--the places I have lived and loved for the greater parts of my life and what I heard and filed away, almost without thought.

The wind--it can whisper or howl, sigh through pine trees up in the mountains or whine in the wires as a clue bad weather is probably coming. There can be a few days when the high desert sits becalmed and heat lies heavy over all like a down cover on your winter bed, but that is rare. Much more often, you can feel a breeze and if you listen you can hear it. The gentlest rustle of mesquite leaves, the flutter of cottonwood leaves above, perhaps some twigs sliding against each other. Here it is more often windy--to me anything over 10 MPH is a wind and not a breeze, to heck with what the official designation is! But breeze or wind, it still talks. Fortunately this is not a really noisy place so I can often hear it and other natural sounds.

The birds. Very early on summer mornings almost everywhere I have lived, birds wake at the first blush of light. The sleepy twitters are soft and almost hesitant at first but grow in volume and frequency with the light. Then the doves start. My favorites are the mourning doves with their soft whoo-ooo-ooo, the middle 'syllable' rising a little, almost breathy and yes, melancholy. The white wings sound more like some of the pigeons--I am not a fan of feral pigeons but it is still a coo rather than the burble-barfy sound the pigeons make. Finally an invasive new species, the Chinese ring-necked doves make a coo that almost imitates a distant voice saying, "bravo six", over and over, like a radio call! I remember and especially like the mourning doves. I heard them so much out at some of the leased pastures and areas where we keep livestock which I visited daily for a number of years. The ones here have a subtly different sound but it is still familiar.

I love the quail too. The Gambel's have a very distinct call, mostly the males. In the spring they call a lot until they find a female to bond with, at least for the season. Both parents care for the babies and watch over them closely until they are close to half grown. Sometimes there seem not to be enough hens to go around and the bachelors get hoarse and begin to look a bit derelict in their lonely state for the coveys break up and each pair goes off alone until the chicks are near-grown late in the summer. For a time, the solitary males are very lonely! I expect some fall prey to hawks or other predators due to carelessness. Nature's way, perhaps, of balancing things again.

And there are the Road Runners. They are New Mexico's state bird but also prevalent in Arizona. The male's spring mating call is an odd burbly sound somewhat like strumming a heavy rubber band, stretched tight. I guess the girls get the message for after a bit you can see a male strutting past with a lizard in his beak, taking it back to the nest to feed his lady while she sits on the eggs. To call one another they have low coo similar to the dove but softer. They are in the Coo Coo family and it is a 'coo-coo' sort of sound.

The song birds have various calls, some I know and some I do not. The thrashers have a slightly lispy whistle. The Finches may sing like a canary (which is actually a kind of Gold Finch) and the sparrows just chirp and twitter. The grackles do 'grackle' in a cackly scratchy way, very talkative birds!

Hummingbirds make a shrill little chatter when they are contesting over a feeder or perch plus the buzz of their wings in fight-flight and in the male's display while courting. The Black Chinned males especially fly in huge looping arcs and their wings almost scream as they descend, a very high pitched whistle. I have not heard it here but in Arizona they had a distinct little song for late fall as they prepared to go south, a squeaky, ratchety little tune repeated two or three times.

Several places I have lived, I have to add the sound of trains. While not exclusive to or part of the desert, they are familiar and comforting to me. In the Verde Valley my brother and I looked forward to the arrival of "The Local", a mixed freight out of Prescott that came for one to three times a week. In Flagstaff I lived a short block from the Santa Fe mainline for two years and grew very used to the sounds. Then there was a long time without that sound. I discovered it again in Hurley, NM with another local coming on from Deming, not quite daily but often. My second sojourn in Colorado, we lived about a mile from the main line shared at that time by BNSF and UP. That sound followed us down to Alamogordo where we hear trains day and night, again a familiar and comfortable sound. We are probably a long half mile from the track here, a connecting one between the BNSF route across northern NM and the UP tracks across the southern edge. One grade crossing is nearly due west and they all blow the familiar long,short,long,long warning whistle as they approach it. Then the steel wheels on the steel rails have a totally distinctive sound, not quite a whine or a whistle but unique.

So I suggest you listen--wherever you are, there will be distinct sounds which will come to trigger certain memories and moods. If you can reconnect with those you knew while growing up or at other specific stages of your life it can be pleasant to reconnect with them or at least let them trigger happy memories. I do that often.

Monday, May 8, 2017

More family tree stuff

I missed last week. Sorry. A new friend I met while I was in Alaska in March --we were both Iditarod volunteers--is into genealogy. Over one of our shared meals, I heard about her Welsh great grandfather who was a minister and had written a book in Welsh (Cymric) that she wanted to have translated and then republished.  I mentioned that my paternal great grandfather was the only one of that generation on whom I had no information. She volunteered to do some detective work for me. And that is certainly what such research is. You have to be open minded, follow every faint lead and check the evidence!  All I had to start with was a picture of his gravestone in Missouri with his date of death and that of his wife. My thanks to Celia Schultz --who is a least a good part Welsh regardless of the last name --for her scholarship thus far. We are filling in some blanks!

John King Lawrence Morgan
As it turns out, we now think John King Lawrence Morgan was born in Pennsylvania in 1831 and at age 29 was married to a woman named Sara or Sarah with whom he had probably more than one child. This comes from the 1860 census. Then somehow between then and 1878 when my paternal grandfather was born, he moved to Missouri and met and married a woman named Martha Martin. They had one stillborn baby, a girl, and my grandfather. It is unlikely to impossible that there were two men with the same name and birthdate so I assume now that Sara died and he left those children, perhaps grown or nearly so with relatives or living on their own and moved west. More information may emerge in time but I do have a photo now and my friend, my brother and I all see some family resemblance. It has not been confirmed yet but perhaps he was the son of a Rev. Jesse Morgan who resided in the same area. I'm waiting for more data to emerge there.

On the other side of the family, I can now definitely share photos of my maternal grandparents and their parents, whose names I already knew, when they were young. The first picture is James Weedin Witt with his wife Millie King Witt and several of their dozen or so children. Grandpa may be the little guy on his dad's knee. The other photo is Allen Wilcox and his wife Ann Eliza Stacy Witt with their two youngest daughters. The taller girl is my grandmother for sure. She was always one to stand erect until she was aged and never quite recovered from a broken hip and that stern and determined expression was a feature too.
James Witt family 

Allen Wilcox family 
It does feel good to explore where you came from and get at least some knowledge of the ancestors without whom one would not exist. Oh, your soul or spirit would have come to another infant but that person would not be the "you" who exists in those reality. While nurture and life experience are powerful forces in shaping each individual, those genes are very important as well! I'll also note that as she grew older, my grandmother Witt looked a great deal like her mother in this picture. And that her father died not too many years later of blood poisoning due to a farm accident that caused a wound which became infected.Tetanus may be a possibility also. I never heard so much as a hint of it, but Ann Eliza could have had some Native American blood--the very dark hair and eyes and rather strong features which Grandma inherited.