Had a delicious lunch today in the middle of a farmer’s field. Ate food just in from the garden

Our motto: cherish every minute and do not talk about your aches and pains.

This morning, the Writers’ Almanac wrote that today is Hemingway’s birthday. EH once wrote,” Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” One of those sentences read, “I have stood on the crowded back platform of a seven o’clock … bus as it lurched along the wet lamp lit street while men who were going home to supper never looked up from their newspapers as we passed Notre Dame grey and dripping in the rain.”

I contend that he, like Joyce, mostly just wrote one run-on sentence after another and they were true.

I was inspired to write something in that style:

I have stood many evenings looking out my upstairs window and watched the light of the already-set sun hit the mountain in the east and turn it orange and then pink and then go dark and wonder why everyone does not say goodnight to the day like this.

There was an article in the Salem paper this morning that “they” will be looking into possible mass burials at Chemawa Indian School here in Salem and other schools since some were found in Canada recently. This federal investigation has been ordered by the first Native Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland.

I taught at Chemawa in the 90’s and I have always felt sure that there must have been “group burials” out there.  I did a lot of exploring when I worked there and have an idea where they might be.

In the earliest days, one of the goals of Indian boarding schools was complete separation of the children from their parents so they probably didn’t even keep good parental records to notify families when epidemics swept through and numerous children died at the same time and there was no effort to find families.  It probably wasn’t even considered important. Imagine measles or mumps in a dorm of totally vulnerable children.  I have explored the little “official” cemetery there many times and have noticed that numerous children seem to have died at the same time, and there are individual graves and tiny markers there for them.   But there aren’t any graves marked before about 1900.

 
Anyway, I decided to drive out there today and snap some new pictures of the cemetery and the area around it.   Amazingly, signs were already going up all over the place saying, “Federal Property.  No Trespassing.” And there were a number of federal cop cars.  I’m sure remains will be found, and then what?

 I am remembering Meg’s college text book:  Education for Extinction.

I believe Papa, my maternal grandfather, a proud Choctaw, attended Jones Academy in Hartshorne, Oklahoma.  And I think when he turned 16, “they” signed him up for WWI and he was shipped out to Vladyvostok.  I could be wrong, and there’s no one left to ask now.  I do know that at Mother’s there’s a very colorful vase that he supposedly brought back from Russia. 

With my daughters’ generation, his family will be extinct.

I won’t be so bold as to say I am like Alice Waters. But I just read her answers to some questions.

I am, a bit.

Most loved thing: her daughter

Most over-rated virtue: moderation

Lowest depth of misery: hunger

Most treasured possession: the redwood tree in her backyard.

Meg’s Facebook post today reminded me of Tennyson’s poem. I used to use it to teach the power of poetry to kids. I had them look up dictionary definitions and encyclopedia entries about eagles and then see how much more poetry can tell. I often think of this when I’m on the river (the wrinkled sea) and I see an eagle spot a fish with his eagle eye. “Then like a thunderbolt”!

The Eagle
BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.