Ghosts of New Years' Past

Although New Years was never a big photo op around the Morgan place, it was a special time, especially when I was a small kid. My memories begin in our little house in Jerome when I was perhaps four or five and the only child. My parents were still devoted to the music of their younger days, the jazz, swing and big band sounds they had grown up with in the thirties and early forties. Dad had even played a few wind instruments in dance bands during his college years and was a big fan of the Dorseys, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw etc. Since that was what they often played, I became familiar with that music too.

By the time they were parents and had settled in Arizona, Mom's and Dad’s partying days were over. I don’t think Mom was ever into that scene too much but from what he told my brother when Charlie got interested in music, it seems that Dad was. He knew about the long, skinny joints lots of the musicians smoked and other such tidbits. I was never regaled with such tales; I suppose in the interest of preserving my innocence and ladyhood! But that was all in the past even in the late forties when my memories begin.

Anyway, on New Year’s Eve, the radio was tuned to hear the New Year in from coast to coast and to listen to the popular music of the times in various clubs from New York to Chicago or Kansas City, maybe Denver and on out to the west coast. That night I was allowed to come into the “big bed” in Mom and Dad’s room and snuggle under the covers to listen, too. I am sure I fell asleep long before the festivities were over but probably woke up as the local midnight hit. Then as now, some western folks were fond of shooting off their firearms to greet the year, mostly rather seriously intoxicated by that time.

There were also some fire crackers and possibly in a mining town even a stick of dynamite or two! That commodity was pretty readily available as many miners also did some prospecting on the side and some did the assessment work to file a claim on a patch of likely ground. At any rate, there would be quite a pandemonium for a little while. Once that died down, I was carried or urged back to my own bed.

This custom went on for a number of years, even a bit after Charlie was born and grew to a tyke  several years of age. He’d be snuggled in the middle then while I sprawled across the foot of the bed. He was then called Mike since Dad’s name was also Charles although he normally went by Chuck rather than Charlie. My brother was the third Charles Morgan although they each had different middle names. Charlie’s was Michael and he never did care for Mike, changing as soon as he got away from home. I rather did the same, even earlier. Saving that for another tale!

By the time we were too big to participate in this ritual, the music had changed a great deal. That happened very quickly in the middle to late fifties. Jazz was not the big band sound anymore but Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis did their brand and other later versions soon came along, mostly quite different and not greatly favored by our parents. As a teen I did stay up until midnight a few times but since I was not allowed to go out and party, it was not all that much fun by myself and the  house got cold when the fire was allowed to die. Thus it never got to be a habit.

To this day I cannot recall a single time I was out partying at the bewitching hour to whoop and cheer, get kissed or anything else.  Not even in college did I do this though some friends and I might have had a milder version in a dorm room or apartment. Have I missed some great rite or is it really that special? I can’t say, in all honesty. At any rate, I will spend this evening at home as usual, probably watch a bit of the traditional count-down on TV which still keeps a bit of the Dick Clark ambiance despite many more changes in the music that everyone expects to hear.

I confess to having developed a sneaking fondness for eggnog. I had never tasted it until I spent the holidays with my paternal aunts and uncle in California in 1965-66 and attended the big family dinners where I had my first taste of both wine and eggnog. My uncle’s wife at that time was French and was quite amenable to all the kids having a small glass of rose or some other wine with dinner. The kids were her four which Uncle had adopted and the three they produced plus one aunt’s two sons, only a bit younger than I was. I don’t think the eggnog was spiked but I decided I really preferred it, wine being an acquired taste. I enjoy some wines now but that was long ago. These days I prefer my eggnog with a good shot of rum and a generous sprinkle of nutmeg stirred in.  I’ll go fix one in a minute.

Right now I am listening to the bilingual program that is aired five evenings a week on the nearest PBS radio station from the campus of NMU at Las Cruces. I am not too fluent in Spanish but can understand most of what the hostess says in her native tongue before she gives the English version and I’ve always enjoyed all the Latin varieties of music. Later there will be jazz. I may listen to that  or turn on the TV for an hour or two since the news will be a bit patchy among bits and pieces of ABCs special coverage.

As I fall asleep—maybe before the local pandemonium begins but probably afterwards since the dogs will be a bit upset--I’ll think back with a bit of nostalgic melancholy to those long ago times listening to the music of a bygone day in the security of my parent’s bed. If I were an artist, I would paint the scene a la Rockwell; I can visualize clearly but in no way recreate it. So I have to make do with my words: comfort, mild excitement, longing to be ‘grown up’ and party, security and feeling special. The inner child barely stirs with the memories. Perhaps she’s been locked away too long.

Happy 2019 to one and all. May it be better than any previous ones but not quite as good as 2020 and others in the future. Go in peace and harmony!

Ghosts of Christmases Past

Photographs are great memory joggers. That’s one reason why I am so thankful for and cherish the trove of old family pictures I have fallen heir to as matriarch of my clan, more or less. Of course this time of year one tends to look back unless you are still waiting for Santa to arrive. I drift clear back to 1943, my first Christmas.

On December 25, 1943 I was just eight months old so I cannot claim to recall anything about it. The

country was at war and we were living in my paternal grandparent’s home. Dad may have been in basic training as he had finally been drafted but I am not sure. All I have is a couple of photos of me in my high chair beside the Christmas tree while mom hovers protectively close to be sure I did not snatch an ornament or tip my chair!

As an aside, my parents were both very protective of their miraculous first born creation. I think they would have been happy to keep me no more than a toddler for the next twenty years at least. As the first grandchild on both sides, I am sure I must have been spoiled. Am I still? I give my classic southwest shrug ~ and say, “Who knows?”

Somehow there are no pictures from my next two Christmases, 1944 and 1945. The first of those we were in Massachusetts and the next back in Kansas City, just before we headed west early in 1946. So the next documented one is 1946, our first in the little house in Jerome. I recognize a few of the toys I got that year which I mostly kept a long time but I cannot really recall the day. In this one I remember the big baby doll. I had her for a long time and she was the last gift from my paternal grandfather. I also had the little stove Dad had made for me. Somehow holiday meals and such never left much impression with me.

There were others with pictures but I skip ahead to 1951 which was  a very significant and memorable one for me. I was now a big sister! What I found under the tree that year definitely took a back seat to the six-week-old living baby doll I held in my arms that morning while Dad took pictures. I may have been the first but he was definitely proud of his new son who was to carry forward the name and become the third Charles Morgan although all had different middle names.

The 1952 year slipped by, noticed but not really significant.  Then Christmas 1953 found us in a new home. We had moved from Jerome down to Clarkdale, another Phelps Dodge built Verde Valley town in the late fall and were barely settled when Christmas came around. Still, we did not pass the date without due celebration. By now young Charlie, then called Mike from his middle name of Michael, was old enough to get pretty jazzed about the holiday.  Also by then I was doing most of the decorating, a task which I kept up until I left home some years in the future.

I’ll make one more leap ahead to end in 1957, the last of the family Christmases to be properly documented. Others in turn were celebrated but from then on the family’s condition and situation began a gradual but accelerating slide to the final disastrous crash in 1967. There were no more Christmas or birthday photos and holidays were often shadowed by disruptions that still throw some shade on our pleasure in them.

By 1957, I was becoming a young lady or at least supposed to be! I wore lipstick a bit and had developed a figure of sorts although I stayed very slim and slight for a number of years. That year I got a .22 revolver to carry when I went out riding as I had begun to do so by myself and to go increasingly farther on such jaunts. Dad had made a belt and holster for it which would keep it secure even if some of my mounts could get frisky at times. I did feel quite grown up with this recognition which was practical more than flattering or a privilege in all reality. I was fourteen and Charlie was six. He had not been out of his body cast too long following a very severe broken leg, a spiral fracture of the thigh bone caused my mare Tina in a freaky, painful accident. Alex was still two years away from making his appearance into the family.

Later Christmases passed and I kept the habit of  trying to keep them as cheery and fun as I could for Charlie and then for Alex after he joined the family in 1959. At least dad always relented or recovered enough to go get a tree, which meant a lot to all of us. He suffered declining health both physical and emotiona, and things were often far from pleasant. We never had a tumbleweed, but some of those little junipers and a few pinons were pretty ragged, Charlie Brown type trees. Still, once they had colored balls and tinsel and some home made glittery things hung over and on them, they all magically became pretty and special. The last few ended up in the inner corner of my room, which was perhaps intended to be a dining room and served as the hallway from the living room to the kitchen.

Two special later gifts stand out in my mind. We did not have much money to spare at that time for shopping and surprises but mom collected S&H Green and Gold Bond trading stamps and usually put them to good use getting things we kids wanted or quietly hinted for. In our house, one did not make big lists and expound on all the things we expected to receive. We just didn’t; we knew it would not be well received nor would it accomplish anything. But my 18^th Christmas in 1961, I got my first camera, a Kodak “Brownie” which Mom had acquired with trading stamps. I loved that camera and used it for several years, eventually passing it down to Charlie when I got a slightly fancier Ansco camera that even used flashcubes to take indoor shots!

Some special memories were captured by those two cameras. Sadly many are among those lost, at least for now, with my hard drive crash this past summer.  I had scanned the negatives or prints and tossed them—my bad for not getting them moved to safe keeping soon enough.

Then the next year or so, I got a small phonograph. I’d been collecting records for awhile, mostly LPs, struggling to pay for them with a very small intermittent allowance or payment for the work I was then doing and sometimes finding and selling pop bottles. Today’s kids would raise a brow and say I was really lame and pitiful!! Anyway, I had a very mixed collection to which I added as we could all finally enjoy them. Another trading stamp acquisition, that little machine served me well and in time was passed down to Charlie and even to Alex.  Mostly gifts were not a big issue in my Christmas memories but those stand out because they meant so much to me. I never got a dog or horse as a Christmas gift. If I had they would surely be high on the special memory list but that just did not happen.

An Unfinished Story

There may be a reason—well, really there are several—but I became a romance writer because I believe in happy endings. I know life does not always give them to us, but I still believe that sooner or later, they do come.

I know I have mentioned and alluded to “Dusty” a number of times in this blog. I’ve never really shared the story, though. I was twenty one when I met my first love, in many ways the greatest “love of my life.” Sadly that story did not have a happy ending but I call it unfinished because I still believe there is more to be written, though not in this world and lifetime.

At the time I was two years past high school having missed a year as a time out between my sophomore and junior years. I was working long and hard as a real cowboy girl, putting in fifteen or sixteen hour days in the summer and dark to dark in the winter. There were anywhere from 30-50 horses, mules and donkeys mainly in my care. I was responsible for their feed, water, exercise, and stable and corral cleaning as well as breaking and training many of them. It was not an easy life and made more difficult by the fact I was ostensibly working for my dad with whom my brother and I had many issues.

Dad was in declining health both physically and mentally and not an easy person to deal with at his best. There were times he micro-managed, others when he was virtually absent for days on end, and constantly critical, demanding and often quite vicious about it. Nothing we did was ever satisfactory, me especially since I was ‘in charge’ over Charlie, then in his early teens. Our frequent reward was tantrums and lectures.

With 20-20 hindsight I can look back on my teen and young adult years with better understanding and put names on the problems I had to deal with. I was a prime example of the elder daughter type who always had to try to ‘fix’ things, be responsible and attempt to please and placate everyone. Impossible under the circumstances!! That was bad enough, but I was also the child half of a serious case of emotional incest which accounts for the extremely strict and limited social experiences I’d had at that point.  I could not be my father’s sweetie and spouse but darned if anyone else could violate my ‘purity.’ I might as well have lived in a nunnery!

Anyway at that point, major construction efforts were going on in the Verde Valley with the new cement plant being built, some housing and mercantile expansion etc.  Quite by chance I met one of the team leaders and for those unfathomable reasons by which people are sometimes drawn together, we hit it off. For a number of months Dusty and I did nothing except talk; I’d be out riding and we’d cross paths, often on Friday afternoons when they got off early working four ten hour days and a half on Friday.Gradually we learned about each other. He was in his late thirties, a veteran, an adopted orphan, caught up in a brutal custody fight over his eight year old son and hampered somewhat by having quit school to go into the service and not having a diploma. He had also suffered from asthma most of his life but had overcome it most of the time.

I explained some of my circumstances although many I never spoke of and hardly even recognized or understood at that point. I did know trying to get out at night to go on a regular date would be nearly impossible and for awhile that was okay. Dusty would come out to one of the areas where we housed a bunch of stock on a leased place and help me feed, doctor or do repairs some evenings. Maybe we would ride a little while together, still talk or simply share some time. Although raised in the east he had come west young –after one enlistment--absorbing all of the aspects he could and had a secret dream to own a ranch. 

The closeness and respect built gradually until we admitted we were in love. About that time the company moved him to another project but he came back every chance he got to see me. Even though letters and the visits we could manage were our main contact, we reached a point of commitment where we were talking about the rings we wanted to have when we married in a year or so.

Then all hell broke loose. Most of it I did not learn for some time. There was an accident at a work site where some equipment was damaged and a couple of men were hurt. Someone in the higher echelons had it ‘in for’ him and he got the blame. They said he lacked the education and experience and such to manage properly etc.  For the time being, he had also lost the custody issue but still pursued it. All the stress and problems gave him a very severe asthma attack about which I did not learn for some weeks. Remember, there were no cell phones or email in the 1960s and my family then did not even have a regular phone!

This catastrophe was made much worse for me when about the same time my family’s many issues finally imploded totally. My parents’ failure to pay a bunch of bills –there were lawsuits which were always supposed to get the finances back to good again but they never worked--resulted in livestock being seized, a truck repossessed and finally the family being evicted from the rented house they then lived in. By then I had started college in Flagstaff so had most of my personal things with me but was roman riding across two very different worlds. I lost many animals I had loved and labored for, saw my family homeless and dispersed and my father institutionalized for some months with an insanity plea in lieu of a felony conviction for assault. He had supposedly fired several shots into a vehicle that turned out to be a guy delivering newspapers early in the morning. 

Once all that dust settled, I finally learned through a couple of mutual friends that Dusty had been fired and had taken work in California. We kept in sporadic touch for quite awhile but it was difficult. I still held to hope and I think he did too, but then I left Flagstaff after graduation and took a job with the US Army in Fort Huachuca and moved to Sierra Vista. I had no way then to reach him to let him know where I was. He moved a lot in the new job and again, no cell phones.I wrote thru the company but did not hear back for months.  Late that spring I started seeing the man I was to marry a few months later. When Dusty finally tracked me down and called --he had crossed paths with an old frend of mine who knew where I was--I had to say I was days from being married; I know he was hurt and I felt a sharp loss too, but fate had drawn a line and there was no rewind. I had to hurt one person or three including two kids who had only months before had lost their real mom. I've often questioned my choice but I have to think it went as it was supposed to. 

  

It was a long time before I found Dusty again —or rather anything he had gone through between the 1971 and 2003. After Jim died I went on line—oh, if that had only been available forty years earlier! They now had many “people finder” sites and so many other tools. It took some time but I eventually learned he had passed away September 8, 1993, some two weeks after his  August 20 birthday. I briefly contacted his son then but only to confirm that fact. John did not really know me as I had only met him briefly a time or two when he was still a small kid. 

Several years ago I did meet Dusty in a dream. He told me he was not angry or hurt; we both knew we were just not meant to share this lifetime despite our hearts’ wishes. He had remarried after a time and apparently she had been a good person just as Jim Walton was to me. In the dream we parted in peace and calmly.

Then a few days ago I dreamed again—just a fragment came into waking with me but in that bit we had finally gotten back together. We walked into a store selling Indian jewelry and western wear etc.  It was near my birthday and he wanted to get me something for that and an immediate token of our being together again at last. In a display I saw a ring, very similar to the ones we’d talked of in earlier, happier times. I told him that was what I wanted. The clerk took it out just before I awoke, leaving the image clear in my mind.

In the next day or two an ad popped up on my computer. I have bought jewelry items to include some turquoise things from several e-venders so I see such often but this one had a ring—a ring just like the one from my dream and the style with which we had once planned to be married… I ordered it. Oh yes, are there no coincidences? 

I may be a romantic nut-case; in fact I am sure I am! Still this seems like an omen of some sort, a communication between two very connected spirits who currently exist in different realms. I feel it reaffirms a bond that has never truly been broken. If he will have me, I owe Dusty a life—he saved mine several times when I was in deep depression and disarray over things at home—and also the lifetime we did not get to share in this one. I wear that ring now as my talisman, a symbol of my long-ago promise until I can either confirm or release from it. May this story someday have a happy ending in another place and time.

Houses and Homes--part 1

As we all know, a house is not always a home. It may be our domicile but for a residence to be "home" it has to satisfy certain criteria. Some do and some do not. Over the course of my life I have lived in quite a number of different places--sometimes just "camping" with some sort of a roof over my head and other times feeling I had a real home, at least for a time.

1535 75th Street

The first house I came to within a day or two of my birth in Kansas City, MO on the afternoon of April 27, 1943 was the home where my father had lived with his parents and siblings for several years, though not his first home. In my memories, which cannot be anything but the most vague since I never saw it after I was about thirty months old, I see Tara from Gone With the Wind--a great white edifice closer to a mansion than a regular house. That is not quite accurate but it was a large and very nice home located at 1535 West 75th Street in Kansas City. I suppose to some it was home but I don't have that sort of attachment to it.

My parents soon relocated for a short time to small cottage in the general neighborhood and then moved to Cambridge, MA while dad was employed by Raytheon  after a training accident ended his very brief military career.  There we lived in another two story house though smaller than the Kansas City one. This one was located on Edgewater Drive in a Boston suburb and was painted a dark red with white trim. it had what is called a mansard roof and a sun porch--definitely not a Massachusetts Room LOL but nice on sunny days during the chilly winter. From there we went back to Kansas City for a few months in the last part of 1945.

KC cottage

121 Edgewater Drive, Waltham, MA

Early in 1946, mom and dad loaded up in their 1939 black Ford coupe and started off for the long trek to Arizona which was to be their main home for the rest of their lives. By that deed, I came to consider myself an Arizona native since I cannot really remember living anywhere else. My memory starts in a little stucco "company house" on a hill in Jerome, Arizona. Jerome was a Phelps Dodge mining town and many of the residences were owned by the firm and used to house their employees. As Word War II ended, mining started to wind down somewhat and there were vacancies. My parents rented one fora very economical fee. That house was my first real home. For the most part I was secure and happy there, an only child for most of the time and still a bit of a pet or toy to my parents as their first born. We stayed there from about April 1946 until November 1953. So house #164 Sunshine Hill saw me from a toddler of three until I was past ten.

164 Sunshine Hill

From there we moved down into the Verde Valley and took up residence in other company houses, now owned by Haliburton who had taken over the former Phelps Dodge smelter and other facilities in Clarkdale and later built the cement plant which is now owned and run by the Yavapai tribe, sometimes incorrectly called the Yavapai Apache. We leased 409 and 413 Lower Main, one that we lived in and the other kind of office/shop/storage space. I was to call that place home from November 1953 until I went off to Flagstaff to start college in September 1966, or actually part time until the summer of 1967 when a number of issues finally came to a head and the family was evicted. That is a totally distinct tale and much too long and complex to share here. For a number of years that was the longest I had resided in one place.

409 Lower Main, Clarkdale

The photo of the Clarkdale house is from 1989. The trees were not there back in the late 1950s nor was the front porch. The two little houses were pretty ugly and bare while we lived there. I may find a photo or two later but hold little fondness for the place now and call myself gladly gone. It was perhaps a home part of the time; at others just where I lived. The houses there are now privately owned and mostly have been fixed up and remodeled nicely.

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