Author: Paul Deaton

LAKE MACBRIDE— Proofreading the newspaper didn’t take long this morning, so after making the smoothie mentioned yesterday, I inspected the cruciferous vegetables and found very few green caterpillars. Either the sunlight chased them away, or they were gone. I picked ten cucumbers, but my focus was on cleaning the garage.

Things had gotten spread out, rendering the garage space unusable. My car has been parked outside since spring began, and nothing seemed in a place when it could be found. By the end of the afternoon, the trash cart was full, there was room for both cars inside, and serious progress was made getting rid of things.

Some sections of walnut tree trunk have been sitting on the radial arm saw for a while— a long while. Time has come to either make something from them or get rid of them. I harvested them in the 1990s in Ames after lightning struck the tree and felled it. I cut them into 16 to 28 inch pieces to haul them around in our Plymouth Horizon. We got rid of the last Horizon in 2002, so that’s an idea of how long they have been in the garage. Too long.

The buckets for gardening had gotten disreputable, so they all got washed. Same for the flower pots and vases. I re-seeded some cucumbers that didn’t germinate in the tray and watered the four trays of seedlings. They will get planted this week.

On a bulletin board near the work bench were pinned a number of magazine clippings of Adirondack chairs. The images were to be the inspiration to build a couple of our own. Like so many ideas, its diaphanous suggestion was torn asunder by a life occupied by a career. I took the clippings down and put them into the recycling container.

With a clean board, I pinned a poem by Wisława Szymborska, translated as “A Man’s Household”— a Polish poet for a descendent of Poles. A few other photos were already in the garage, a photo of our daughter at Lake Michigan, a post card of some textile workers holding a large 48-star American flag, a photo of my father when he was a toddler, a photo of my maternal grandmother and her second husband. It is the beginning of something hopeful— a place to make dreams into something tangible.

LAKE MACBRIDE— Today will be a work day, but before I get to it, there is this image of a fishing trip to South Dakota from the 20th Century. Among the men in the picture are my great, great grandfather, and my great grandfather. We don’t have a lot of photos of them, and this is the only known image of my great, great grandfather. He is seated in the foreground, baiting a hook.

With the explosion of photography, there are too many images to count and assign a meaning. So many people carry cameras all the time, on devices that are more powerful computers than were imaginable during the 1990s when I secured this image by photocopying the page of the book where it was published.
We select and bring artifacts into our narratives, just as this photo is now part of this blog.

Behind every narrative, there are moments in time when they are made, and when they take on meaning. In a consumer society, we can forget where things come from, the meaning of an artifact being the fact of its collection. That someone planned the fishing trip, invited guests and made this image using technology of the era is forgotten.

We seldom see the face of the photographer, but he or she is an unseen part of the narrative, as is the technology and the people who created it. The narrative of our lives is unavoidably collaborative, with people we know and those we don’t.
It would be presumptuous to pretend otherwise.

Today, I feel the presence of so many people who have influenced, fed and nurtured me. Whether they are here or not doesn’t matter. What matters if continuing the search for truth and meaning in the world, and creating a useful narrative out of these moments in time. Something that serves a greater good than a single life on the Iowa prairie.

LAKE MACBRIDE— My grandmother was born on June 24 or 25, 1898 at home on the farm, west of the Catholic church in Wilno, Minn. The official record is unclear as to the precise date, and the clerk in the recorder’s office in the county seat told me that often births were not directly reported, but only when someone from the farm made it into Ivanhoe.

The church records show she was born Salomea Nadolski on June 25, 1898, and baptized on July 10, 1898 by the Rev. J.F. Andesejewski. Her godparents were Ladislaus Kuzminski and Maria Nadolski. I believe this version of the truth is closest.

The certified copy of the birth record I got from the county seat in Ivanhoe listed place of birth in Royal Township, Lincoln County, Minn. as Soluma Nadolski on July 10, 1898. Parents listed as Frank and Katie Nadolski.

Her certificate of death lists June 24, 1898 as the birth date of Mae N. and then Selmae M. Jabus, and those names and date were provided by my mother. The newspaper listed her as Mae M. Jabus in the obituary. Whatever may be official, we called her Busha after our daughter was born.

She told countless stories of life on the farm near Wilno and those stories came to life when I visited the home place, the church and the county seat after she died. If I am a story teller at all, it is because of her.

Her birthplace was still standing when I visited, and the owner kindly let me look around inside. I think he and his wife were looking to tear it down and build a more modern home for their growing family, although he didn’t say it. By today’s standards, the house was very small. There were shirttail relatives everywhere I went, including a gent who lived across the road from our home place. He was not doing well so we chatted only for the briefest of moments. He was connected through my great grandfather.

Like many descendents of Polish immigrants, my grandmother was fully assimilated. She still spoke Polish, but only with her sisters, and to the occasional wrong number who also spoke the language. There are stories about that for another telling.

Despite all the stories that have been and might be, I’ve been thinking about Busha’s life as I knew it the last couple of days. When I last saw her, she had moved to a nursing home where she used to work. She was mentally alert, and worried that the staff was stealing from her, even if there was not much to steal. She fumbled with her hearing aid so she could pay attention to what I had to say.
She got it to work, and we talked as we always had.

It has been 115 years since she was born, plus or minus a day. I feel so lucky to have known her for so long. The memory of so many things we did together persists as the sun sets over the Iowa prairie. I’m glad for that.