I am so boring I post about weather (and I've thought a lot about it)

One thing I love about reading Hannah's book (which I'm reading at what you could call a leisurely pace) are the casual comments about the weather. Of course, for farmers in those days the weather was not very casual at all--but the thing I love is that every year Hannah notes that the weather is different. Some winters it hardly snows at all until March; sometimes it's too warm in the spring or too wet in August; sometimes it's oddly warm in January here but there's a historical storm on the East Coast. These things happen. They always have.

Don't you sometimes envision every Christmas of yore to have been white and then for winter to have the dignity to stay snowy until the March thaw, followed by April showers and May flowers? It's a pretty rigid standard to hold our dear old girl Weather to, especially when she's never shown any desire to be strictly orthodox in following the annual guidelines anyway. Let's all give Weather a break, I guess, and let her do her capricious thing.

This picture from Ada Stricklan's collection was captioned, "So, everybody had a bad winter," though I don't know whose house this is or when, or what was so bad about it. This looks like perfect snow for winter fun to me.

"Winter 1982-1983" Such snow is not to be found, at least in these parts, this year

games for kids from one to ninety-two

It's not that I love puzzles, but putting about ten pieces of a 1000-piece puzzle at Christmas--yelling BINGO each time one fits--is not something I want to go without. It is one of those traditions that I'm glad has remained in the family, despite most of us being (outwardly) less than enthusiastic about pulling out the card table and opening the puzzle box every year. My dad is the puzzle-meister, and I don't know if it's the BINGO that he likes the most or just making sure we have a low-stress excuse to sit together for a few minutes at Christmas, but he hasn't given up yet. And aren't we glad?

I think the puzzles started in American Fork; I was probably about 10. We even pasted "my" puzzle onto cardboard one year, framed it and hung it in my room for the next 8 years. (It was a sea turtle scene.) I'm pretty sure my dad intended each kid to get one pasted and framed, but the messy glue and the...moderate enthusiasm for puzzles assisted that part of the tradition to end. And that's ok. The puzzles have persevered and will continue to. Even Andy participated this year, even though he was home in Logan and the padres have moved to Las Cruces, by sending this scene of Provo, Utah. I think this gift sort of emphasizes the family support of the puzzles; we'd all like to be involved, and if it's from a distance, even better.

A looser tradition surrounds Tripoley in the Peterson clan. It's not technically a holiday tradition, but it is a game that it is tradition to play as a family once or twice (or thrice) a year--passed down through the generations. My first time playing was Thanksgiving 2008 with Nate's Peterson Grandpa. We can't play it every Sunday like Pictionary or Catch Phrase because it would lose its magic. It is a production of sorts; sorting and counting the chips, getting out the board, refreshing our knowledge of the hierarchy of poker hands, getting out the board. We have to play long enough to make it all worthwhile, and also there's the pretend gambling. These once- or twice-yearly games often occur near the holidays because we gather around the table after we eat, and playing Tripoley prevents us from staring dumbly at the ceiling or having to rely on intelligent conversation.

Some people call it Michigan Rummy, which I think is the name Grammy's mother (Grandma Christa) used for it. Grandma Christa was an earnest Tripoley player. She hand-painted a big wooden board (as opposed to the felt or plastic boards we usually use) with a big pretty cat in the "kitty" space. That is Nate's Clark/Christensen side, and his Peterson side also had a big player too, in Grandma Hazel. If you know me, you know those great-grandmotherly traditions are hard to resist so I bring up the game at every few family gatherings to make sure we all carry it on.

Mayflower ancestry and what have you

Today I finally had a moment to satisfy the vague curiosity I had been feeling about my Mayflower ancestors in anticipation of Thanksgiving. My Pilgrim line and Nate's both come from the same child of Elizabeth Tilley and John Howland, but I couldn't remember exactly which child or how it came down to me. I knew the Howlands came from my mom's side, and I thought through the Eppersons, but there are still about 14 zillion possibilities of direction even within those parameters. It's times like those that this blog really earns its keep. Its keep is exactly zero dollars and minimal effort, so you should be pretty relieved that it's worth it. 

I clicked on the Mayflower label, my Mayflower post came up, and I refreshed my memory ever so slightly. That Mayflower post was worth exactly the zero dollars it earns; it was so sketchy about the directness of the line that it took me about twenty minutes of looking at my family tree to find the link. But I found it!

See that Ammi Chipman in the very bottom right? That is the brother of Nate's ancestor, and their dad was the Howlands' grand-something-son. It is because the daughters of that line are my ancestors that I couldn't find the line. They turn from Chipmans to Simmonses to Atkinsons so fast I missed them the first few times I looked. Eventually, as I mentioned in the Mayflower post, my great-grandma Irva Shurtleff Epperson was born. 

Funnily and strangely, as coincidences are, I found a John Carver in my line during my search who was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1661. (Cue the laugh track.) It's funny because John Howland, my Pilgrim man, came on the Mayflower to Plymouth as a servant to the Governor named John Carver--the guy who wrote the Mayflower Compact. They came (as you will remember or Wikipedia will remind you) in 1620, so this John Carver I'm related to is clearly not the same John Carver, and it's really not remarkable since both those names were fairly common in England just then (and now, and always, I assume). But it is a fun coincidence and it gave me a couple minutes' research to do.

The moral of this story is, what's the point of all this? I know, that's not even a moral! I can't remember who came from where and when, and I mix up their stories, and I forget which pioneers came from which pilgrims, and I get confused when Swedish ancestors move to Copenhagen, Denmark before the emigrate (that one sent me on a convoluted tangent today), and to make matters worse, it all comes out a little confusedly and boring when I write it up here. I think I should take a writing lesson from Bill Bryson on how to relay lots and lots frankly useless facts in a way that makes them sound amusing and even potentially worthwhile. Now, now, don't worry; the actual reason I do any research into my family history is just for my personal edification. I like doing it, and to be honest I am a little embarrassed to even say it's "research," because I don't uncover anything new. It's interesting to me, even if there is no visible point to it. It's better than building ships in bottles or giant lego cities, right? (Correction--building ships in bottles is awesome and now I can't stop thinking about how much I want a ship in a bottle. Maybe a mini Mayflower, for the Howlands sake!)

hard times

On February 26, 1922, Hannah wrote in her book, "Oh yes I must not forget Ostlin came in early Friday morning to tell us a boy come to their house. All getting along fine. That is our 13th grand child good luck to him." Sadly, all were not fine after all, and the mother, Mary Marinda Johnson Hanson, died on March 4th, just a week later from complications (probably blood poisoning, guessed Hannah).

Hannah said, "We are all broke up," and took into her house Ostlin and the three girls: Ada, my grandma, age 5; Connie, age 4; Leona, age 2. The baby boy went to live with the maternal grandparents. Hannah doesn't even mention his name, come to think of it, but she says that the girls went to visit him often on Sundays. (His name is Kenneth, by the way.) About a month later, Leona came home from Grandma Johnson's with this cut-out baby head and said it was baby brother. Hannah thought it was sweet and pasted it in her book. I am home from church with a sick baby today who looks an awful lot like that, too.

Throughout her entries in 1921 and '22, Hannah lists the prices of potatoes, hay, butter and eggs. Eggs go from $.40/dozen down to $.16 the day of the baby head picture, and then back up to $.30 later that year, and by selling that and butter they get along, but just barely, since I think potatoes were their main crop, but there were too many potatoes and no one to buy them. She says they have enough to eat and "ware," but no money. "Taxes & interest are killing us," she scribbles in the margin at the end of an entry. " Her sons are off working elsewhere, too. "We will all have to leave the farm to work for wages, for anything is better then farming but I don't think it can stay that way for people will have to eat," she foresees, being both pessimistic and optimistic as I guess you had to be as a farmer.

It is easy for me to romanticize the past; it is what I do, it is why there is even this blog. Of course, though, I know it was not an easy life. I know our 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom, air conditioned house would seem like a luxurious vacation to Hannah. But here I am, and I wonder why we can't seem to acquire funds for a house with a better layout, where the table doesn't have to be in the living room and with a dishwasher that doesn't roll. I wonder why Nate's parents could buy their first home for $40,000 and sell it for twice that just a few years later, when our house would probably not sell for a dollar more than we paid for it four years ago. I think our times have got to be just about the worst. Insurance prices are ridiculous and it doesn't even cover doctor visits anymore; after four years we have barely made a dent in our principal balance for our mortgage because of interest; our kids will wake each other up all night long because of sharing a room. And of course, in the most cliche way, reading the old journal brings some good old-fashioned perspective right back to me.

However, I must honestly tell you that even with this refreshed perspective, I am not 100% convinced that it is better to live in this absurdly comfortable era. I have half an idea that if I could, I would jump into the pages of Hannah's book, roll up my sleeves, and help her put up 500 quarts of berries.