The Treasure of Old Friends

I know I have written some rather stark or sad essays lately but I do want to let everyone know that life has not always been nothing but work, struggle and grim persistence. In my earlier yeas, there were a number of friends who were each bright spots and special treasures in my life.

Up until I began 4th grade down at Willard school, I did not associate that much with kids my age, especially girls, since the whole student body at my one room Camp Wood school was boys except for me and my memories of first grade are not a bit happy. But finally at Willard I had a chance to make girl friends.  For the most part, they have all vanished from my life and I have not been able to track them down but I still remember Susan Ragle, Sandra Rhoton, Martha Etcheverry, Ann and Jan Stotts, Diana Metzgar, Della Kallsen and Melody and Dawn Wilcox--who gave me my first dog--with much fondness.

During the four years I was at Willard, we moved from Jerome down to Clarkdale and I lived in a neighborhood with quite a few kids. By chance most of them were younger than I was by a year or more but we still formed friendships that have held for many years even though we went our separate ways and lived very different lives. There I first met Loretta Watson who lived for a couple of years with her father a few doors up the street. She vanished suddenly and I later learned her mother had come and taken her; I am not sure if it was her father or a grandfather she lived with but he was quite elderly when she was nine or ten. She was a slender slight girl with long dark hair and very dark eyes although she did not look Mexican American or even Native American. She was also shy and a bit unsure as I was so we made timid freinds.

Then I met two other girls who lived in the same area, Evelyn Graves and Arlene Blahnik. We were, like most kids in that tween stage back and forth with small feuds and fusses but generally stayed friendly most of the time. I was able to give them rides on some of my gentler horses, made and played paper dolls with them and a bit later read my early fiction efforts, short little tales that grew out of my reading of Zane Grey and similar writers of western adventures and romances. I watched TV at Arlene's house and giggled with Evelyn about imagined adventures and intrigues of her elder sister and her somewhat notorious employer and our crushes on various movie and TV stars and such.

It's been such a great joy to reconnect with them both at High School reunions since the first one I attended in 2003. I've also seen Kathy Feld, Janice Benatz and several other girls I knew and was friends with but not quite as close. My last two years of high school, Evelyn and Arlene were going with their future husbands and the three messkeeteers were not so close. I then found a friend who was also a semi cowboy-girl like I was and we were nearly inseparable until I graduated, two year before she and Evelyn did and for a time afterwards.  I found a Maureen Jewell on Facebook who is involved with horses in Wyoming or Montana as I recall but she did not reply to my message. Perhaps she has forgotten. In that case I was the one who ended up taking a different path.

Early friends are not complete without one more mention. I loved to write letters and became pen pals with two girls through the junior section of Western Horseman magazine. There were more but two remain in contact after all these years. Shirl Atchley, nee Coulter still lives in the Grand Junction area of Colorado and only in the last few years due to health has given up owning a horse or two and riding. We still exchange Christmas cards and an occasional email. Linda Pflug, nee Bush, now lives in Washington state. We met several times but not until years after our initial connection. Until a few years ago we exchanged letters and then emails frequently. Then she had a series of serious health issues and today is bed ridden and in a nursing home due to several strokes and other issues. She cannot write or type much and has some speaking trouble so short of going up there to see her, I cannot do much to stay in touch. This makes me very sad but I still cherish that friendship. I'm sure we will cross paths and connect again in time.

As an adult while working, being involved in various organizations, hobbies and volunteer activities and moving to several places I have made many new friends and now keep in touch with many by Facebook or email, some that I have met and many more that I have not but just share some common interest, passion or belief with. They are all precious and form my essential support group and circle but I have to put my old BFFs at the top of the list. I know I will never forget them and for those who have lost contact or perhaps are no longer on this earth, I hope to renew our ties in some future place and time. Thanks to  each and all of you for being a part of my life and bringing joy and beauty into it.

Evelyn Graves

Shirl Coulter

Maureen Jewell

 

Susan Ragle

Linda Bush

Arlene Blahnik

FIRE!!!

No pictures today. there have been more than enough on TV. My topic today is fire, the destructive and demoralizing kind such as we have witnessed too many of lately.

The latest terrible blazes in California have brought back some memories, made me think and certainly saddened and troubled me.  I’ve abhorred wild land fires for a very long time. The first one I experienced was in 1955 when I was twelve years old. What began as a “controlled burn” on the western side of the Black Hill Range in central Arizona grew to several thousand acres and took out the forest on a good chunk of Mingus Mountain, which was ‘my mountain’ where we rode, hunted, picnicked and cut wood. For a week or so the smoke was so thick down in the valley towns that it looked and felt close to twilight at noon. Of course that made an impression that I have never lost. Nobody died but it was a shock and left some trauma.

Since then I have seen a number of other fires where either an allegedly controlled burn got out of hand or something not too different sparked the destructive blaze. A part of the Whetstones burned in the late 1980s as a result of such a case, mountains the nearest to my home at the time in Cochise County in southeastern Arizona. Since then I’ve seen an ever increasing plague of fires destroying much beautiful wild country, taking out habitat and harming so many wild creatures and in more recent times, threatening and destroying rural homes and even towns.

Of course every person and certainly every faction has ‘the answer’ or at least the cause. It’s climate change; it is mismanagement; it is Divine punishment and on and on. Actually in my none-to-humble opinion we could check all of the above and add quite a few more contributing factors.

Yes, climate change is playing a role. It is warmer and drier the past 25-50 years than it has been at least in the recent past. There have always been fluctuations in climate and there always will be. How else have we had ice ages and droughts and heat waves and floods? The earth wobbles on her axis; the sun gets hotter and cooler; volcanoes throw a vast cloud of ash and dust into the air that limits the strength of the sunlight. Exactly how much of the current cycle is due to human activity I tend to question; surely some but to blame all is a drastic oversimplification. I’m not buying all the scare stories and panic. ‘Nuff said on that.

There is a human factor to the fires, though, a very big one. In about 200 years we have gone from a very few people roaming the land, at least the western two thirds or so of North America, to literally millions filling cities, towns, suburbs and even rural areas. Compare that to wandering tribes of indigenous people—probably no more than thousands in all.

Now these millions go out and recreate in the open and wild places, light and often do not properly douse campfires; ride and drive a variety of vehicles which can shoot off sparks and radiate extreme heat down on the ground when they are parked. They shoot off fireworks and firearms, both of which send heat and sometimes tiny bits of live flame off into the grass, brush and trees. Sometimes they even set fires on purpose either with malice or just being foolish. Power lines can break or be blown over, live wires sparking. The list goes on and on. So yes, there is a huge increase in fires directly or indirectly caused by humans.

Management or the lack thereof? This is also subject to some debate. For a good part of the twentieth century the goal and practice was to put out or at least contain all wild land fires as quickly as possible. We had ‘look out towers’ throughout the forests and as soon as a wisp of smoke was sighted, a crew was dispatched to fight that fire. This generally prevented or at least curtailed most of the huge damaging fires we’ve seen in the last 20-40 years. However it did also allow accumulation of dead wood, brush and litter on the forest and chaparral floor which just lay there, waiting the spark to set it ablaze. That was not good.

Now, in the alleged interest of protecting the wilderness areas, a great number of roads and even trails have been removed. No motorized vehicles are allowed and devices such as chain saws are often banned as well. We don’t go out and cut wood; we seldom camp/ride/hunt etc. We don’t do anything at all but simply let nature take its course. Maybe that is good but when a fire is kindled in such areas, getting in to contain it is very difficult. Maybe we can use aircraft; maybe we can get crews to hike in with hand tools and attempt to make fire breaks or otherwise limit the spread. And maybe that works but often it does not. So in my opinion, management is at fault to a fairly major degree.

I think a moderate mixture of the traditional and the current methods could be applied to some benefit. There need to be some exceptions to the pristine wilderness rules; very carefully planned and contained use of controlled burns may help. Perhaps even let people go out and gather wood for their stoves or fireplaces to clear some of the litter from the ground. Be creative and give more control back to local regions who generally know their area far better than any distantly led organization or government entity who oversimplifies by a one size fits all approach. You think?

Something needs to be done, without a doubt. California has been most in the news and certainly has suffered cruelly but the whole west has been hit very hard for quite a few years now. Perhaps we need to limit the settlements or towns that can grow in the midst of a forest. I think now of Paradise and of a Colorado region called the Black Forest east of I-25 between Denver and Colorado Springs, both ravaged by recent fires. The public needs to be educated much more on how to be safe and fire-wise everywhere they go.

This may not apply so much to city folk except when they vacation in remote areas, but those who live in the suburbs and the rural regions have really got to smarten up! It takes more than raking, heaven knows, but one can protect his or her own property in many ways. Do make a fire break of cleared ground around your yard or farmstead. Do limit the trees and shrubs in places where they can be hazardous and definitely DO use the maximum amount of fire resistant material when building a home, outbuildings or other structures. A good reliable source of water can help plus generally being alert and noticing the small fires before they become huge self-feeding monsters! Things as basic as not burning trash on windy days. This is not exactly rocket science!

Right now my heart goes out to those who have been made homeless, lost property, pets and even loved ones to the recent spate of fires. There is no way to measure, much less assuage their agony. Yet the tragedy of it is that, at least in the bulk of the cases, these horrible things could very possibly have been prevented or the damage greatly limited. That we have not managed to do so is the real tragedy and until we learn how to handle this much better, I fear many more losses are going to result.

There Were Roses

No, not the sad song about “The Troubles” in Ireland from some decades back about the Protestant and Catholic conflicts.  I *will not* start in on religion today. I am feeling fairly cheerful. On to what I want to share. Roses, the flowering kind.

I've loved them for at least 65 years.  As a small child I did not notice flowers much. We lived in Jerome, AZ where for the most part, everything was a mass of rocks! It was a mining town perched high on steep red hills. In our small yard there were a few trees that someone had nursed along to near house-high but Sunshine Hill had few flowers. Then in late 1953 we moved down to the valley and settled in Clarkdale where we rented two small houses, side by side.

The joint yards did boast a few flowers. There was a row of iris growing along the fence between them, all the traditional purple with fuzzy gold inside as I recall. Around the north-facing front steps there were some small viney plants with purple flowers. I think they were called vincas. And there was a rose bush against the screened back porch south wall on the second house which was a storage/shop/office etc. It only bloomed in the spring so since we moved in November I probably first saw those tiny flowers in the spring of 1954, sometime around my eleventh birthday. I was at once enchanted.

I’m not sure now why they came to be precious to me but they did. There were other more common and typical tea roses and floribunda in many yards but ‘my’ rose was special. I now know it is a type called a rambler which is midway between the regular shrub roses and the climbers. My research, conducted the last year or two as I sought to find a similar plant, taught the ramblers have buds and leaves in groups of seven, a unique trait.

This Clarkdale bush was clearly old, very heavy at the base and growing up near the eves of the back porch, perhaps eight or nine feet off the ground. It bloomed in profuse clusters of tiny thickly petaled roses, pale pink that shaded into and then faded to white as they aged. They were elfin or fairy flowers to me, so little, so dainty, so perfect with their thick clustered petals that made them almost little pom-poms. For twelve years or so that bush remained my special charge. I watered and trimmed and loved it.

In 1966, I left home to spend four years in Flagstaff as I went to the university. The second two years I lived in an apartment in an old house on Agassiz St. There was a similar bush in that yard, just to the left or east of the entry foyer/porch. I noted it in passing often enough but it was not ‘my’ rose. There were some others in the yard as well but I was too busy for gardening as I got two degrees in four years.

Finally that time also came to an end. I went to work for the Army at Fort Huachuca and lived in several briefly rented Sierra Vista homes in short duration and then moved to Bisbee, perhaps a fated or at least a pivotal act on my part. A year later I married my new next door neighbor. Before we left Bisbee, I had bought a couple of rose bushes-maybe at the super market since Walmart was not there yet. I remember a dog that adopted us rather trashed one in spring 1973 and I was upset.

Then very late in 1973, we moved to Colorado when I transferred to the Air Force at Peterson AFB. We bought a home in Falcon, about ten miles outside of Colorado Springs. It was then a very rural area where most lots were five acre ranchettes. We had a big garden and I planted roses, a row of six along the east-facing front of the house. They came from Jackson and Perkins and did well enough. I winterized and covered them each winter since at the edge of the prairie the cold and the blizzards could be wicked. Then things happened and we found ourselves moving to California in the late summer of 1977. The first roses to really be mine were left behind.

I worked briefly at Beale AFB near Marysville and the next year transferred down to McClellan on the north edge of Sacramento. Meanwhile we bought a house on the south outskirts of Olivehurst, almost suburb of Marysville. Again I planted roses, only two this time but the area had many. They grew well and bloomed profusely, all season long as hybrid tea roses do. One was deep red and the other a striking red and white. I loved them and often took a bud or two to a couple of special friends with whom I worked.

I was not happy in California. The seasons were all wrong—hot and dry all summer without my beloved desert thunderstorms—and then soggy foggy dismal gray on the backside of the year. I was not really happy with my work either and Jim and I both wanted to go “home” but I promised Jennifer, my daughter, we’d stay until she finished high school.  The last year I began to send out transfer applications and in the late summer of 1983, six years after we arrived, we packed up and trucked back to Arizona. Once more I had to leave my roses behind.

I worked briefly at Davis Monthan in Tucson and the next spring got back to Fort Huachuca where I finished the rest of my civil service career. There were no plantings in our rental in Tucson for we knew it would be temporary. Finally we found and bought the rustic and unique little adobe house in Whetstone which was to be our home for the next two decades. At last I could indulge my floral ambitions. There were some spindly old fashioned red roses already in place. I relocated most of them and worked until they thrived. Then my real rose garden, helped out by a gift from a dear old lifelong friend, came into reality at the north east corner of the house. I established it under a big twisted mesquite tree that had apparently found a good source of water for it had grown a good fifteen to twenty feet high.

Somehow the roses and the mesquite were compatible. The added water and fertilizer made it thrive but the roses did well too. I’ve always been a bit amazed that you can plant a disorder of varied colors of roses close to each other but they never clash or seem not to look ‘right.’ That was the case. I even moved one of the original ones, clearly climbers, and put it right at the base of the big mesquite. It twined up into the tree and the red roses scattered through lacy spring green leaves were very striking!

I had iris too and planted some other bulb flowers like daffodils and tulips. They would go well for a couple of years and then fade out. I never was quite sure why but I kept trying. The iris did well enough and became so thick I divided them and shared cuttings with some friends several times. Along in the early 2000s, possibly the spring after Jim had passed in November 2003, I found a rose at Walmart that reminded me of my old Clarkdale rose. I planted it and now believe it was a Fairy Rose, very like the ones I recently acquired, kin to my old friend but not quite the same. The Fairy is pinker and perhaps not quite as many petals per flower but little and special.

Finally in 2008 I reached the point where it was time to leave Whetstone after twenty five years. Again I had to leave the roses. They were mostly getting old and not as hearty and lovely as they had been a decade or so before but still in place and hanging on. That was hard. For the next three years I was “homeless” until my brother and I left Colorado in the fall of 2011 and I bought this little house in Alamogordo. We intended to stay here the rest of our days but have come to see things we do not like or want to accept so yet another move may happen in the coming year, back “home” to Arizona a final time.

Again I will have to leave plants behind. The first spring I planted four climbers around the covered patio/porch on the south facing back of our house. They have done wonderfully well and bloom profusely in the spring and sporadically through the hot time to give another burst of flowers in the all. The colors are mixed—a pale ivory at the east corner, and then a rosy pink, a red and white and a blaze orange-red around the opposite corner and the west side. Meanwhile I also planted lilacs, probably my second favorite flower, and this last spring some forsythias for I love that very early sunshine bright display they provide.

Late this summer in one of those novelty-type seed catalogs, I saw some tiny roses, like those which I had been looking for half of forever. I ordered them and so as not to have to leave them behind, I planted them in large pots. They have thrived thus far and all three have bloomed. They are brighter pink than I had hoped but I now realize that is typical for the Fairy Rose. In time I may track down one even closer to my old favorite, probably having to order from England since they seem to favor the tiny ramblers more than the US growers do.

For now, I have these and the others as long as I am here and if I have my way, there will always be roses in my space.  Like me they are thorny at times and also like me they are generally tough and hardy, trying to bloom where they are planted and send out whatever beauty and sweetness they can regardless of where they find themselves. The flower for April-born is supposed to be the daisy but this Taurus April girl is all about roses.

Close up-mesquite rose

Whetstone rose garden

Fairy rose-first bloom

Alamogordo rose

Alamogordo rose 2

A Case Study Life

There seems to be a trend now, which I generally applaud, to fling open that closet door and let the skeletons scatter where and how they will. Another aspect is to speak aloud many words, naming issues and illnesses which have been hidden and ignored for much too long. For example, mental and emotional illness and issues, every form and level of abuse and many types and levels of dysfunctional families and lives.

It’s taken me a very long time to get here. However I belatedly realize that my experiences and the things I hid for decades, often even from myself, need to be brought into the light of day. It can be embarrassing, uncomfortable and certainly very difficult but that cannot stop my efforts. If just one person who is feeling alone and isolated due to their early life realizes they are not all alone in the world and unique in their personal tragedies, then I feel my effort worthwhile.

I’ve come across a lot of books, some new and some old, in the last several years and find myself in a peculiar “case study” that combines aspects from them all. First of all, I am an eldest daughter and one who was the only child for eight and a half years. This birth status, even more for girls than boys, creates a unique personality and some traits that seem to be almost universal among that group. ⁽¹⁾ That in itself is not such a difficult situation to deal with and modify enough to get along reasonably well with one’s life. But my case study adds several other matters!

The next perhaps is a fairly new syndrome or phenomenon called “Toxic Enmeshment.” I am sure there are one or more books but I’ve just read shorter essays and dissertations on the subject so far. A search on the term will turn up many of these. This occurs in families where for any of a variety of reasons, individuality is suppressed if not completely squelched so there is group-think, an extreme us-vs-them paradigm and a general withdrawal from outside interactions until no member really knows whether emotions, ideas or anything else is “theirs” or the group’s. Several horrible examples of this have appeared in the news lately where parents have subjected their children to total horrors. The opportunities for all sorts of abuses are completely inherent in this situation.

This usually seems to come about through the dominance of one parent or one member of the family who by the force of their personality and any of many forms of manipulation and coercion such as threats, bullying, or brainwashing binds everyone in a nearly irresistible net. If that person is also narcissistic, seriously unbalanced in some ways or living under various neuroses or psychoses such as bi-polar disorder, various delusions, schizophrenia and paranoia, etc. one has a huge can of wicked worms!

Another similar situation has been identified and discussed at some length. It is called “Emotional Incest” ⁽²⁾ and normally involves a parent and a child of the opposite sex. The child is very rarely physically assaulted or molested but is drawn into a quasi-spouse role where the parent is very controlling, alternatively demanding, abusive, very supportive and complimentary, using sympathy or pitiful dependency and often playing this child against the real spouse in many underhanded and divisive ways. It plays very well in conjunction with the eldest daughter situation.

Another book, Toxic Parents ⁽³⁾ skirts along the edges of these and various other generally very closely held and hidden situations where one or both parents seriously damage their children by neglect, physical abuse, emotional abuse or other warped and twisted forms of family dynamics.

Of course in the case of female children in these situations, there is the added aspect of the last three millennia of male dominance fostered by the major religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam. That sets the father as the primary person of importance—virtually God for his family--with the wife and children as his subjects and property to the point where whatever he may choose to do to or with them is generally condoned if not actually supported. We are starting to come out of this but you cannot reverse and undo a tradition of at least 3000 years in a decade or two.

So there I am, an eldest daughter entangled in a fiercely enmeshed family, locked into a position of emotional incest and living in a state of serious poverty which two college educated and talented adults chose, perhaps not intentionally but through their lifestyle and other actions, to live under for all the years spent in the home by their daughter and two sons.

There is no way I can understand or fully forgive what was done. All three of us suffered damage that cannot be healed. We have gone on to be responsible adults and I believe fairly good citizens who have held mid to upper level jobs, obtained schooling and struggled to create and keep relationships which would avoid the pitfalls we observed in our formative years and sought to escape. Now in our later years we often talk and try to reach some understanding and a degree of healing which has been painfully difficult to find.

The youngest of us, who I often thought had gotten off easy as the petted baby, probably really had it the worst. He stayed at home after we older siblings got off on our own. He felt responsible for and tried to help and support the parents who as the result of their inability to build a solid base and save for retirement were left in a pitiful state. When he finally was able to move into his own life at the age of thirty after our dad’s death, he had to try to leap from a middle teen’s experience and life pattern to full adulthood in a very short time. He did very well, completed college with honors, got his JD degree and went to work joining an established law practice where his expertise in legal writing was highly regarded. Still his struggle finally became too much. I call his death at the age of forty six “suicide by neglect” because he ignored or did not attempt to correct health issues that became fatal in due time.

At this point, I wish I might have opened the door of my mental closet much sooner and started to realize that very little of this was ever my fault or due to any failure or weakness on my part. After I finally divested most of the lingering guilt, the anger and bitterness began to boil up and still catches me by surprise at times. I know I need to get it out and rid my spirit of its corrosive weight but this is a long, slow and often difficult process. My journal helps and sometimes sharing things like this essay in the most calm and rational way that I can.

Perhaps I should have sought counseling but several things inclined me against that. For one, the youngest of us tried that all through the years of his advanced schooling and was not able to find much real concrete help. Also it is really difficult to lay out the whole history in its complexity to the degree anyone ‘outside’ can comprehend the whole picture. Had our family issues stemmed from drugs, alcoholism, gambling or any of those “normal” or common vices and frequent problems, things would be much simpler. The extreme eccentricity of our parents, particularly our father, and our mother’s codependency and almost unswerving cleaving to him and his choices are almost impossible to portray in a simple or direct manner!

Life goes on and we with it. How much longer, I cannot say, since I have both short and long-lived ancestors. Mom and Dad died just short of their 77^th birthdays while paternal grandparents in their sixties/early seventies and maternal grandparents in their ninth and tenth decades. If it is true as many say that we are here to experience and learn from our lives, I hope that what I was to learn will be clear once I have crossed from this realm to the next. Right now I am still searching for those answers but I feel I do learn and find at least one small insight each day.

I offer the books below as starting points if any of these comments resonate with you in some way. There are many more books and journal articles etc. available now and more new explorations are coming to light all the time. My sincere prayer is that in time we can ease many of these patterns and break them by letting people get past their own traumas rather than passing them to the next generation.

Footnotes

1. The Eldest Daughter Effect, Lisette Schuitemaker & Wies Enthoven, Findhorn Press, 2016
2. The Emotional Incest Syndrome, Dr Patricia Love with Jo Robinson, Bantam Books, 1990
3. Toxic Parents, Susan Forward, PhD with Craig Buck, Bantam Books, latest 2002