Walking the Berkshires

"Seagulls Sing Your Hearts Away"

"Bring tea for the Tillerman
Steak for the sun
Wine for the women who made the rain come"

The grand encampment of Barker and Ogden kith and kin over the 4th of July weekend at Windrock involved so many friends and relations one needed a scorecard to keep track of them all.  Fortunately, my cousin John's wife Megan used her graphic design skills to collect and display two family trees with names dates and thumbnail photographs for practically everyone in 5 generations from my maternal great grandparents on down to a baby on the way.  Several of us provided the genealogical data and tracked down needed images, but the end result allowed us all to puzzle out such things as who went with whom and what a 2nd cousin once removed looks like.

I took fewer photographs of the festivities than I had intended, or rather I focused on recording certain stages while actively participating in others. I have no pictures of the extraordinary drip castles on the unexpected sand bar revealed by an unusually low tide, nor the swarms of children who helped to construct them or dig quahogs rooted out by searching toes.  I did not get pictures of the intergenerational baseball and soccer games that sprang up on the lawn.  I had many conversations with wonderful people, and so have no regrets on that score.

"Seagulls sing your hearts away
'Cause while the sinners sin, the children play"

There were some things that defied photography, like the phosphorescence that made the still waters glow for midnight swimmers, and the fireworks that erupted up and down the shore on both sides of the bay and behind Great Neck. 

No one, I believe, wanted any pictures of the most dramatic and terrifying event of the weekend, when the Angle of Death dipped so near we could feel the beating of its wings. My cousin Colin broke out in hives and soon went into anaphylactic shock in the water where quick heads, sound medical knowledge and other people's EpiPens kept him alive until the EMTs arrived.   My cousins John and Margaret happened to be with Colin when he collapsed and pulled him to shore, and they were outwardly shaking (as were we all inwardly) for hours afterward.  In our number there were an EMT, a doctor, and the head ER nurse at the local hospital (who as it happens is also Colin's mother).  My cousin Jay and my cousin Leila's husband Pete the EMT together had three EpiPens and it took two of these to have any effect.  But for them and the grace of God, we would have suffered a terrible tragedy.  The next morning when Colin walked toward us like Lazarus with his family as we laid my grandmother's remains in Earth, he was greeted with shining eyes and a round of spontaneous applause.  There was even more joy and thanksgiving in the church that Saturday from this largely secular family as we celebrated my Grandmother's life and our personal Passover.

"Oh Lord how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day"

There are three stones where my grandparents remains reside.  One of these is the veteran's stone that acknowledges Grandpop's service in the Pacific during WWII.  There is now another paired with it that lists Gran's full name and the Hebrew word "Mizpah", with which she used to close many a letter to loved ones away from home.  It may be translated:

"May the Lord watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another."

The third stone comes from Windrock itself and is newly etched with her first and maiden names and years of birth and death.  It says Barker on another of its faces, and on the top are two words - "Gone Fishing" - which are less irreverent than they seem.  My Uncle Rob, when a young boy, learned about the water table in school and decided that when people are buried they could go fishing there.  This so tickled my grandfather that he said he would like those words on his tombstone, and this was remembered many decades later and dutifully done. 

Those two inscriptions are fitting bookends for these two extraordinary lives, the earthy and the ethereal, and are streams that run deep in all of our veins.

"Oh Lord how they play and play
For that happy day, for that happy day"

                                  - Cat Stevens

Catching a Glimpse of the Soul

Chet Raymo's wonderful Science Musings Blog considers a John Singleton Copley painting of a young boy and his pet flying squirrel and asks;

"How is it possible that mere oil on canvas can capture the ineffable thing that separates us from brute creation?"

Read the whole thing.

Carnivalesque XXXVIII (Early Modern) Tabloid Edition

Welcome, lords and ladies, to April's bimonthly "Early Modern" edition of Carnivalesque.  The Early Modern period, as all good historians know, refers to that glorious span of three centuries (1500 - 1800 CE) during which the English learned to appreciate the many virtues of vegetables:

Before: "Beware of green sallets & rawe fruytes for they wyll make your soverayne seke." - Boke of Kervynge (1500)

After: "Then, says she, I believe there is a piece of cold buttock and carrot which will fit you - Nothing better, answered Jones, but I should be obliged if you would let it be fried.  To which the landlady consented, and said smiling, she was glad to see him so well recovered: for the sweetness of our hero's temper was almost irresistible, besides, she was really no ill-humoured woman at the Bottom..." - Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)

There is a profound difference, I am sure you will agree, and no doubt the English and Film majors among you caught Fielding's consummate metaphorical pairing of food and sex.  Those were the days.  The Swiss perfected martial arts for the masses and Henry VIII wore a codpiece.  This is not dry, academic bunk, friends; this is hot and heavy history, with content good for a1,000 hits an hour, or at least another bodice-ripping season of The Tudors.  Why everyone doesn't blog about this stuff is beyond me.  It's all in the delivery.  "Give me my long sword, ho!"

This was also a period of profound climate change, during which the "Little Ice Age" in Europe put an end to medieval wine production in southern Britain, with winter carnivals on the frozen Thames cold comfort in exchange for frequent crop failures and advancing glaciers that swallowed alpine towns.  It was a time of adaptation and expansion, when new world tomatoes forever changed Italian cuisine and London had to burn to save it from devastating plague.  Pop music, then as now, was hardly children's fare, as witness this charming bit of ribaldry by Orazio Vecchi (1550-1605), reintroduced to modern ears by the great (though alas, presently scorpion-stung) Richard Thompson in his 1,000 years of Popular Music:

So ben mi ch' à bon tempo
Al so ma basta mo'
So ben ch' è favorito
Ahimè, no' l posso dir
Saluti e baciamani
son tutti indarno a fè
Passeggia pur chi vuole
che 'l tempo perderà

Take my word for it [those of you who do not read archaic Italian]; for all the cheatin' going on, this could be a Country and Western standard.

Axis of Evil Knieval, chronicler of disasters and folly most foul, commemorates the death of Rene-Robert Cavalier De La Salle in 1687, slain by his own men in a murderous confrontation over bison meat. 

Dear old Isaac Newton was a something of a bloodthirsty rogue, or so inquires The Inverse Square Blog, asking; "did Newton take pleasure in the deaths he triggered?"

Not to be outdone, Executed Today offers up Major Thomas Weir, who "had had a distinguished military career and an exactingly pious public life among Edinburgh’s strictest Presbyterians. So it came as something of a surprise when, after being struck by an illness, he up and copped to a lifelong sexual relationship with his sister Jean … and a lifetime of hitherto unknown black arts, powered by a Satanic walking-staff. He was so far from being suspect that town elders at first thought him daft."  This prior pillar of society was ultimately strangled and burned at the stake in 1670.  Elliot Spitzer, on the other hand, will probably get a book deal out of his double life as "Client 9", or at least his own talk show.

Speaking of witches, Intute: Arts and Humanities Blog calls our attention to the recent discovery of a cauldron, swan feathers, dead birds, human hair and fingernails from the 17th-18th centuries unearthed in a pit in Cornwall. According to The Times Online;

"Human occupation of the site dates to prehistoric times but some of the activity uncovered was more recent. A stone-lined spring that may have been a “holy well” was full of offerings from the 17th century, including 125 strips of cloth from dresses, cherry stones and nail clippings.

There was evidence that the well had been filled and the site destroyed to hide what went on there.

Each of the feather pits, which are“ about 40cm square by 17cm deep (15 by 6in), have been carefully lined with the intact pelt of one swan and contain other bird remains."

In other neo-pagan news, CLEWS: The Historic True Crime Blog reveals that modern descendants of accused Connecticut witch Mary Sanford (who may have been executed in 1662) are looking for a formal apology.  And there is more at Women of History about the quest for absolution for Connecticut witches.

The Jungle Trader, a favorite source for the bizarre, the macabre, and the downright diabolical in man and nature, notes that only the second mass grave ever discovered from the 30 Years War has been unearthed in Bavaria.

Natalie Bennett of Philbilon delights in the harmonic convergence of three of her main interests - women, nature and history - in Sylvia Bowerbanks’ Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England.  Quoth she; "this is an impeccable well though-out, academic book, that examines its characters in the terms of their own time, while applying understanding and research of the following centuries."  High praise indeed.

Serendipities finds another great read and exploration of Vision in Early Modern Culture in Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford University Press, 2007).  "The book argues that contrary to what theories of the rationalization of sight and the invention of perspective suggests, vision came to be characterized by unreliability and uncertainty in the early modern period."

We are not required to limit our inquiry to such impeccably credentialled sources, of course.  You can learn  a great deal about the Wild Geese - the Irish Abroad from 1600 to the French Revolution from the war gamers at War and Game. 

Soobdujour described the 15th and 16th tactic of swarming on the ocean;

"The Portuguese were well aware of the precariousness of their situation. Their technology – fortifications, weaponry, and sailing ships armed with artillery – was of little advantage in African conditions. In confined coastal waters and on rivers, the sailing ships were vulnerable to concentrated attacks by large war canoes and often fell prey to determined African parties. Metal armour was a torment in a tropical climate. The late 15th and early 16th century firearms were often too clumsy to have more than a psychological effect against small or moving targets. While the Portuguese certainly could look after themselves militarily, African weaponry and tactics were still highly effective against them, and poisoned arrows caused horrible damage."

Cardinal Wolsey's Today in History tells us about Henry VIII's dockyards and shares a great source for information about the history of British ports.

Although the early modern period in Japan has a different chronology and influences all its own, this post by Pink Tentacle struck me as worthy of inclusion in an Early Modern Carnivalesque, and not just because I am also the progenitor of the Cabinet of Curiosities blog carnival, where anything that has to do with mythical 16th century disease critters would surely find a home. 

J. L. Bell of Boston 1775 takes advantage of HBO's John Adams miniseries to ask; "What's missing in the John Adams household?"  Hint:  Some of the same stuff that was inexcusably whitewashed in The Patriot.

The Early Modern Whale poses the deliciously rhetorical question; How could a parrot NOT love the Baroness of Grosbeak?  How indeed?  And also shares with us the tale of a 12th night abomination.

Commercial break -

• Follow the Knox Trail - This web site contains a page for each of several dozen locations along his journey through NY and MA where bronze plaques were installed in the 1920's. Parochial plug:  Knox and the boys slogged through the southern Berkshires on their way to Boston.
• This June is the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Carillon.  1,000 reenactors can't be wrong. See you at Fort Ti.

And now for something scatological from Baudrillard's Bastard.  Or rather ureaic.   

Investigations of a Dog delves into the historiography of the English Revolution as seen through the lens of the far Left.  Read the whole thing, especially to get to the coda: "Seventeenth-century England was so far from consensus that even the weather was ideologically contested."

Mercurius Politicus delves into the the Character of a Cavaliere: Roundheads beware!

The next edition of will be of the ancient/ medieval sort at A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe.  Be sure to submit your finest for May's edition, and if you like you may use the handy submission form.  Bon Appétit!

The Quaker Connection to Client 9

In all the horror show of the unfolding Eliot Spitzer sex scandal, one minor detail caught my eye.  The  disgraced Governor of New York allegedly used the alias "George Fox" when making assignations with a high-end prostitution ring.  The press makes the connection to a hedge-fund director and personal friend of Spitzer's of that name, but I believe this blog is the first media outlet to publicly make the connection to Quaker founder George Fox (1624-1691).  I will leave it to others trained in psychoanalysis to speculate what this may signify, though I cannot refrain from commenting that the Society of Friends is used to turning the other cheek.  Had Spitzer used the alias "John Wesley" or "Joseph Smith", I would have expected his stock to plummet with Methodists and Mormons...

"Memory and Denial are Kissing Cousins"; Talking with My Dad about God and Race

Writing this series of posts on race and responsibility came on me quite unexpectedly, and I am not at all sure where it may lead.  I wanted to talk through some of what it prompts me to think and feel, and so I called my father. I wanted to ask him about one of his experiences during the Civil Rights era, when he was an Episcopal seminarian in Massachusetts and one of his activist classmates was murdered in Alabama.

Religion is not a regular topic of conversation in our family.  Both of my parents came from families of faith, and yet neither my sister nor I was raised in a particular denomination, or even went to a formal church.  I attended an Episcopal boarding school and a Quaker college, but in neither case were these decisions based on their religious character.  Today Dad composes and orchestrates choral music that reflects a deeply individual and organic faith.  I have vivid childhood memories of the Martin Luther King service he would hold in the school chapel, back in the days when he was a headmaster and before there was a National Holiday, that featured Stevie Wonder's Happy Birthday and my father's clear tenor singing Abraham, Martin and John:

Anybody here seen my old friend Martin?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young
I just looked around and he's gone.

Dad holds a B.D. from what is now Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, but chose not to be ordained at graduation.  I asked him if his choice was influenced by the death of his fellow seminarian and what he drew from that experience.

My father replied that the decision not to get ordained was made practically before he went to Seminary.  While a Yale undergraduate, he studied religion and was a deacon with chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr.  Bill Coffin was Dad's lifelong mentor, and the one who encouraged him to apply for the seminary fellowship because it offered the space to engage with the very questions of spirituality and social justice that made my father question whether he should become a minister.  Dad went on to say that the murder of his classmate in 1965 "confirmed in my mind that the church had to get out of its sanctuary and that as a layman I could do more...and people should speak from the position of faith to do so." 

Dad describes his own growing activism and the late night conversations with his fellow seminarians in which "we were honing our positions and our hearts on what had to be done."  He remembers his classmate Jonathan Daniels as a complex man, and totally non-violent. "I was in a very different place than he was, in terms of active activism and spirituality" he told me.  "In his liturgical way he could sing the Magnificat and feel as if that was his calling, a true Epiphany, and I wasn't there yet.  I was studying religion rather than living it the way he was.  I was much closer to the activism, on the verge, but there were too many easy rationalizations for not going down to Selma.  They weren't about self-protecting - I was not as concerned about personal harm, though perhaps I should have been - but felt I had obligations at school...When he went to Selma with the 1st wave, a couple of seminarians went with him..."

Jonathan Daniels responded to Martin Luther King's March 7th, 1965 call for clergy of all faiths to come down and support their efforts of voting rights marchers in Alabama.  Realizing that a brief visit by outsiders was not a sufficient expression of solidarity, he and fellow seminarian Judith Upham returned to Cambridge only long enough to request permission to return to Alabama for the rest of the semester.  After taking his exams in May, Daniels went back a third time to continue his work integrating a local Episcopal church, living with a black family while he tutored school children and helped register black people to vote.

He and a group of nearly 30 protesters were arrested on August 13th, 1965 while picketing white-owned   stores in Fort Deposit, Alabama.  All but five juvenile members of the group were held in the Hayneville jail for a week in incredibly cramped, fetid conditions until they were released but without transport back to Fort Deposit.  Daniels, along with a Catholic priest and two young black women, walked down the street to Varner's Grocery Store to get soft drinks, and were met on the steps by Tom L. Coleman, a state highway department engineer and unpaid special deputy who confronted them with a shotgun.  According to one of the young women with them, Ruby Sales, Coleman shouted at them;  "Get off my goddam property before I blow your goddam brains out, you black bastards!"  He then leveled his shotgun at her, and Daniels pulled her aside as Coleman fired, killing him instantly. Priest Richard F. Morrisroe grabbed the other two young people and ran, taking a second blast to his lower back which critically injured him.

The killing shocked the Episcopal Church.  It came two weeks after President Johnson signed the National Voting Rights Act into law, and just days after the Watts Riots in Los Angeles that officially left 34 people killed (28 African Americans), 1,072 people injured, and 4,000 people arrested.   Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes record a conversation he had with his chief civil rights aide Lee White about a request for assistance to help the Daniels family bring their son's body back home to Keene, NH.  My father was a pallbearer at the funeral on August 24th, and recalls linking arms along with Stokeley Carmichael. 

Dad told me that he remembers preaching at chapel that fall - by then the killer had been acquitted of manslaughter - and that his sermon grew out of Matthew 10:34 "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword."  Dad called it "the hard realistic message that change would not come not without sacrifice."  Peace and social justice work continues to be a central part of my father's life and a formative example for my own.

This conversation was a great gift to both of us.  We got into some of the racial themes I've been exploring these last few days, and particularly how we remember and internalize the past.  "Memory and denial are kissing cousins", said my father.  He said the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel are embedded in his heart:

"In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible." The difference between guilt and responsibility is a key distinction for me.  I believe that is where we will pick up the thread tomorrow.

"What God Has Joined Let No Man Sunder": Divorce and Spirtualism in the Family Tree

One never knows all the challenges that another person faces, and certainly there are at least two sides to every conflict.  The genealogist that pokes about in ancestral closets should not be surprised to find skeletons there.  Family researchers frequently uncover intimate details about their very human forbears that require sensitivity and clear-eyed objectivity when exposed to public view.  Some day, no doubt, some of the less savory details of my life will turn up in some sterile database and I would hope that any descendant of mine who stumbles upon them would bear in mind this favorite quote from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself:

"Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

Now here is my Great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Barker Sr. (1817-1900). Emigrating from Bramley, Yorkshire in the late 1840s and a pioneer in Ohio and Wisconsin, he remains as enigmatic and indistinct in family memory as his faded photograph.  Until my cousin Karen shared with me a few pages from a family history produced by descendants from the first of his four marriages, the only side of the story that was passed down in our family came from his estranged 2nd wife Sophronia (Judkins) Carr and her son, Samuel Barker, Jr. (my Gr-great grandfather). 

That tale is one of hard-hearted abandonment, of Sophronia and her two teen-aged children ending up in Cleveland, Ohio with but 25 cents to their name.   As Sophronia's grandson, Raymond H. Barker recorded in a typed family record he compiled in 1932; "The home life of my grandparents on my father's side was far from happy as is evidenced in a few letters written back in the year 1865."  He then transcribes one I have shared with you before, in which mother accuses father and half-brother of conspiring to deny mother her rightful property in a letter to her son.  Heavy stuff to lay on a child far from home, and heavy stuff to find in the family archive.

The Barkers pulled themselves up in Cleveland, and Samuel Barker, Jr. became a successful printer who built a family business that continued for generations.  The senior Samuel Barker was absent from their lives, and even when on a family trip taken across country in the 1892, stopping in Wisconsin to visit with the half-brother, they appear not to have sought out the estranged patriarch.  This may have been the reason why Samuel Barker, Sr., drafting his will three weeks after his son's family passed through, left the children of Sophronia Barker $1 each out of his estate of $5,000, while the children of his first marriage received $700 apiece.

Samuel Barker, Sr.'s side of the story emerges in the family history compiled by the descendants of Elizabeth Ann Barker (1844-1916), a daughter from his first marriage to Sarah Lawson (1814- ca 1846/47).  It tells of a man who married for love and was disinherited, but also appears to have married for paternity, given that we have a marriage record of May 20, 1839 and a first child born September 30th of the same year. This Barker history also records; "The legend goes that at first Sarah said she didn't want to leave England, but when Samuel said if she didn't go he would find himself another woman, she changed her mind."  Both she and his infant namesake died very soon afterward, leaving her husband with three children under 10 years of age and living near Youngstown, Ohio.

Samuel Barker, Sr. married Sophronia (Judkins) Carr (1817-1885) in the last days of 1847.  They had two children - my Great-great grandfather Samuel Barker Jr. (1848-1903) and his sister Eva Barker (b. 1854).  In that year they moved to Dane County, Wisconsin.  In the census of 1860, Samuel Barker, Sr. is listed as a laborer at the State Mental Hospital in Westport.  Three years later, Sophronia sued for divorce.

There are many reasons why marriages fail, though divorce was much less common in the 1860s than it has since become.  Until I have the opportunity to locate and read the actual court filings, I can only rely on what the family record of the descendants of Elizabeth Ann Barker has to say:

"From family letters it is known that Sophronia and Samuel, Sr. were not getting along in the early 1860's.  Sophronia had become interested in spiritualism and held seances at the Barker home.  Sam heartily disapproved of these."

There was a strong spiritualist movement underway in America during the middle of the 19th century. It was popularized by clairvoyants such as Andrew Jackson Davis, "The Poughkeepsie Seer", and became associated with abolitionist and early feminist movements.  According to Mary Margaret Benson in a 1989 Library Journal review:

"Spiritualism claimed, through contact with the dead, to be a scientific investigation into the immortality of the soul. The movement was associated with free speech and the abolition of slavery. Because it maintained that divine truth was accessible to any individual, female or male, and thus was accessible outside the male hierarchies of family, church, and politics, it became associated with feminism as well; many early women leaders in all three movements were also spiritualists."

Whether or not Sophronia Barker was a proto-feminist, her involvement with seances clearly seems to have upset her "staunch Church of England" husband. 

The date of Sophronia's divorce from Samuel Barker was May 23, 1863, and it was officially filed a year later. The court found in her favor and that her allegations were proved true.  Her husband was ordered to pay an unspecified amount plus costs, and Sophronia's letters in 1865 refer to disputes over the funds owned her.  That same year she and her two children resettled in Cleveland, but that was not the end of the matter.  In 1867, Samuel Barker, Sr.  brought a counter suit against her in which he charged her with willfully deserting him for one year prior to her divorce suit.  Once again the marriage was ordered dissolved, in a judgment dated November 20, 1867 and recorded in Judgment book November 15, 1869.  By that time, Samuel Barker, Sr. had once again remarried.  It is unclear whether Sophronia ever received her settlement after the second divorce case was concluded.

The author of the family record has this to say about Samuel Barker, Sr.;

"We shall not attempt to assess the character of our great-great grandfather, Samuel Barker.  From details found in the many papers and from reading between the lines, he emerges as a strong personality."

Indeed, neither he nor his estranged wife Sophronia can be known and understood as anything other than two people struggling with their own burdens and aspirations who were unsuccessful doing so together.  One can surmise much - poverty, gender, the status of half-children and step-parents, religious beliefs, temperament - but one can also look in the mirror and know from intimate experience how inscrutable our own relationships may be to another.  Perhaps I shall one day leaf further into the court records that dissolved - not once but twice - the marriage of these ancestors, or perhaps I shall leave them be.  Not every rock requires upending.  There are plenty more near at hand.

Curious Stuff to See If You've a Mind To

Seven more wonders...

The Jesse James Feather Duster of Death

The World's Largest Sundial

The Lethal Chandeliers of Ružica Church

The Underwater Lost City of Dunwich

The Malevolent Mermaid of the Buffelsjags River

The Mangrove That Ate San Diego

The Bowes Silver Swan (and Mechanical Fish)

"God Bless Us, Everyone."

Father Christmas visited Apamama Atoll in 1944 when my grandfather was stationed in the South Pacific as a navy surgeon with Marine Air Group 15. In the middle of the war, just below the Equator, they mustered up a tree and tinsel and a red suit that while a little short in the sleeve was long on holiday spirit.

Blogging will be light between now and New Year's, and I wish you all, dear readers, all the blessings of the season.

The Halls are Decked

We are between snowstorms here in the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills, so today was the day to seek and find a noble fir to grace our home.  This is the first year in a very long time I have done so without a truck.  It was surprisingly easy with our old Subaru sedan to select and retrieve a glorious tree. 

I love hunting for the perfect Christmas tree, which from my perspective should be fresh cut and preferably by me.  For several years after we bought our home in Connecticut, our Christmas trees came from the back yard where a previous owner had planted firs willy-nilly.  On a 1/4 acre lot these were in the way so down they came.  I can also remember walking out into the woods at Windrock, looking for an overgrown Douglass fir among the scattered hemlocks and white pines in my grandparents' forest.  When I have the choice, though, I prefer balsam fir: all sweet smelling and soft needled and reminding me of Maine.  For that, the children and I drove up to Great Barrington today and out to Seekonk Tree Farm.

We trudged in the snow and quickly found a beauty, well formed and about 6' high, which is the perfect size for 3 strands of lights (large ones, with some blinkers and about 10 bubblers interspersed).  In no time at all it was shaken, baled, and strapped to the roof, and in this compact condition was a cinch to bring inside and set upright.  There is no tinsel on our tree, but twists of silvery metal that reflect the light like icicles.  Tomorrow the ornaments will go on, and meanwhile there are holly boughs on the mantle and a dozen other things to unwrap and spaces to find for them to occupy.  The holiday glasses, the corn husk nativity, the Christmas Rhino...any number of curiosities unique to this family's traditions await our attention as the morning snow swirls outside the window.

Over the Rainbow

I've been finding treasures in the family archives: photographs of my Grandmother Athalia Ogden Barker that are new discoveries.  They are even more meaningful since her recent death at nearly 97 years of age.  Here she is in two photographs that took a great deal of retouching, spotted and faded and brittle with age. 

At right, Athalia Barker poses for what I believe is a senior year portrait, Smith College class of 1932.  Poised in pearls and spit curls, she is a vision of loveliness.  It is an elegant sepia-toned portrait, but sepia is for Dorothy's Kansas and not the glorious world beyond the rainbow.  For that, you do not always need color, but it does require a radiant smile, and this my grandmother possessed her whole life.  It animated not only her but everyone around her, and its wellspring was a seemingly irrepressible optimism and unremitting love.

This second photograph captures it perfectly.  It was taken by her husband Bob, who took up new interests from time to time, one of which was photography.  He built a darkroom and made enlargements on card stock.  Most are underexposed or have badly faded, but a bit of digital manipulation brings the image and the delighted smile of my grandmother to life.  Here she is, newly married and deeply in love. 

Although there would be years in her life when it was hard to keep on the sunny side - alone at home with three little girls while her husband was in the Pacific during WWII; losing him a piece at a time to Alzheimer's; overcoming alcohol addiction - she never lost the sweetness and the light.  She took comfort in a favorite quotation that the family deeply associates with her;

"The soul would have no rainbow had the eyes no tears."

How I miss her, and how I hope she is in that place in which she firmly believed, with her beloved Bob, over the rainbow.