From Insects to Prohibition

I’ve had a fly in the house for at least two weeks and no matter how many times I’ve tried to smack him, he gets away. Finally, I googled how long house flies live and learned it’s 28 days. At least I won’t have to put up with him much longer. I don’t like killing things but there are two more critters on my hit list if they don’t find their way out from between my window pane and screen soon. One is a daddy longlegs and the other is an inch long beetle. They are in my view whenever I’m at the computer and they’re rarely more than five inches apart. They’re like the neighbor you don’t know but you’d notice if he changed his routine, a stranger that makes you feel less alone because you can see him across the street doing similar things that you’re doing on your side of the street. Ohmygod, am I so bored that I’m making up back stories for insects trapped by my screen? I wasn’t sure if they’re buddies or if one was stalking the other for dinner. I got my answer yesterday when the beetle was half hidden and the spider walked over top of the beetle and they both lived to tell their friends about it. But the drama of watching that happen was a nail biter.

I miss seeing birds outside my window. I quit feeding them last spring and won’t start in again this winter because the seeds falling on the ground were attracting mice in the basement. Knock on wood, I’ve seen no signs of them moving in this year. I’ll put out my heated bird bath soon, though,  with hopes that I’ll wake up some morning to see a pair of mourning doves sitting in the water like they’ve done every winter since I’ve lived here. 

I’m sitting here looking at a tin sign on my kitchen countertop that says, “Keep and enforce Prohibition.” I don’t have a lot of prohibition memorabilia to sell on e-Bay---a few pledge cards not to drink, a box of pinbacks that proclaim things like: My vote goes wet, Vote Dry Vote Yes, No Saloon Vote No, California Dry, Ohio Dry and I’m Against Prohibition. I have always loved our prohibition collection that also includes a full bottle of Temperance Beer which is actually a ginger drink, non-alcoholic from the turn-of-the-century. That whole era of our history is fascinating which is the reason why people collect Prohibition stuff. The federal law against making, selling or transporting liquid only lasted from 1920 to 1933 but the campaign to get that law passed in the first place started way back in the 1800s with groups like the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other zealous religious groups. As far back as 1851 they actually managed to turn Maine dry for a few years. So many interesting things happened during and/or because of Prohibition---the speakeasies and underground tunnels connecting them, the Age of Jazz and Al Capone, the beginning of the Great Depression to name a few. 

A lot of the same women who fought for Womans Suffrage (our right to vote) were also involved in the temperance union. Like Susan B. Anthony. I stayed in the very room she stayed in at a Bed & Breakfast in my favorite town on Lake Michigan. How's that for my meager claim to fame? She led a group of women up Main Street who were determined to close down the bars (and did for a day). It was an impromptu march. She was staying at the inn because she was giving a suffrage speech the following day in the town where I live. I often wonder what it would be like to be my age and have a life-time of dedication under my belt to a passion project like she had. Was she sad that by the time she died, women still hadn’t achieved her goal? She came close, she died in 1906 and the 19^th amendment giving women the right to vote was added to our constitution in 1918. But did she see it coming that soon, or did she feel she'd wasted her life on an impossible dream? History always tells a story that the present can’t possibly do.

I guess we all can’t be leaders in a cause that’s near and dear to our hearts. Some of us have to be the foot soldiers, the water boys, the ones who keep the home fires burning. And some of us have to be the storytellers and documentarians who write the folk songs and tell the stories to remind us all to respect the accomplishments of past generations. And the value of remembering the past is to give us the patience and strength we need to continue to fight today for what is right in our moment on the timeline of history like environmental protections or sensible gun control or whatever else is calling your name today.

Okay, for all the non-collectors who might still be reading this, I hope this post gives you some understanding of why a framed, I-will-abstain-from-the-use-of-all-intoxicating-liquors pledge card sat so long on my bookcase. It’s more than a piece of cardstock, it’s a storyteller’s queue card. All collectibles are story queues whether in homes or museums, they are objects that spark conversations and, hopefully, an interest in learning about the past and the people who lived there. ©

Up Date: I wrote this over a week ago and had it in my scheduler. Since then the spider and the beetle disappeared when it snowed. Don't know where they went or if they'll be back. It's one of life's little mysteries the occupies a bored mine.

August is Coming and I've Got Places to Go!

I need a name for the community I’m moving to. I’m thinking of calling it The Lake Apartments. Its actual name is _____ on _____ Lake which obviously I'm not sharing with the blog community because that’s just the way I roll here in cyber space. I share a LOT but not my name, rank and serial number so to speak. Nothing that would help the trolls track me down. Anyway, the Lake Apartments people have get-togethers for those of us who signed up early. They call us---the first 45---the Admirals Club but that sounds so pretentious, I don’t like using it. It makes us sound like we’re a bunch clueless yachting types like Thurston and 'Lovey' Howell on Gillgan’s Island. 

Yesterday I got my second Admirals Club invitation in the mail…. a cocktail party in August before a classic car show that is taking place on the grounds around the lake. Then later in August they’re having a fashion show. I haven’t been to a fashion show since the ‘70s but I’ll play the game---can’t wait to see if it will be age appropriate clothing. No cut-to-the-crotch play suits for me! I’d be over the moon if it turned out to be a trunk show of muumuus and bathrobes, and sweatsuits for more formal attire. They’re also putting an email list together for those of us who want to stay in contact in between these planned events. I’m guessing they’re doing all these things to keep us in the basket labeled “Still Enthusiastic.” With so long to wait for them to break ground on building the place it would be easy to get impatient and start asking for our sizeable deposits back to go elsewhere. So far, my enthusiasm isn’t waning. But I wish I could fast-forward and get past the downsizing, get past selling my house, get past the physical move and just be free to start anew. 

Speaking of downsizing---yes, I know, that’s all talk about lately---I found three manuscripts in a box of creative writing box and I made the mistake of reading the first chapter of one of them, however I stayed strong after that and I ripped the rest of my book up. But bless my self-indulgent heart, I’ve decided to copy the first page into my blog to preserve the story-line somewhere other than inside my flaky head. It started like this:

“Katherine Abbott sat in the back row of the packed auditorium fidgeting with the braided trim on her wool traveling suit. Lord, there would be hell to pay if her father finds out she’s in a town fifty miles short of where she was supposed to get off the train, let alone at a Woman Suffrage meeting, of all places! He’d be so angry he’d pop the buttons off his waist coat ranting and raving about how a woman's brain is too small to be burdened with the task of entering the political arena. He's just like the anti-suffrage people handing out tracts outside the auditorium, she thought, and the longer she sat there the more she regretted the split-second decision that brought her to the meeting.

“With a round of applause from the few gentlemen in the crowd, a sea of white handkerchiefs waved in the air as the black-clad speaker crossed the platform to take her place behind the podium. It was a silent tribute to the illustrious Susan B. Anthony from progressive women who all across the across the country have come to believe that hankie waving is a far more lady-like greeting than loud hand clapping. (Inserting a 2019 edit here to cut out a bunch of bull crap about Katherine’s frazzled nerves and naiveté, both of which were annoying me.)

“Leaning against the side wall of the auditorium, Thomas Whitmere’s face split into a wide, devilish grin. His hands were tucked in the pockets of his finely tailored frock coat and his long, sinewy legs were crossed at the ankles. He’d been watching the prim little morsel sitting in the back row for the better part of an hour. When he’d first noticed her she was shut up tighter than a jar of jam sitting on a cellar shelf. Now she was perched on the edge of her seat completely captivated by the words coming from the platform. ‘Miss Anthony,’ he shouted in a tone his friends would recognize as teasing. ‘I’ve heard it said that if a woman had a ballot she’d sell it for a bonnet. Is that true?’

“’Perhaps,’ the speaker shot back. ‘As my good friend, Anna Shaw, so aptly once put it, a new bonnet is a fine thing, and most women hanker after new bonnets. But a good bonnet costs more than a glass of whiskey and that, sir, is the market price of male votes nowadays.’”

Well, that’s enough of that. Fast forward to the end of my manuscript and be assured that the guy gets the girl and they lived happily ever after, but all the details in between are headed to the paper recycling center. Mostly what I got out of reading that first chapter were good memories of how fascinated I was by researching the Suffrage Movement and that explains why my library is still filled with women’s history books some forty years later. My heroine was not atypical of historical romances back then but I doubt I could write a silly, afraid-of-her-own-shadow type woman today. Not that I’d want to try my hand at writing fiction again. I’m perfectly happy being a blogger who blogs slice-of-life Seinfeld style who is also looking forward to August. But be forwarded, I did set aside some of the poetry I wrote back before menopause and a few of them might make it into my blog if my 'slices of life' get too thin.  ©

The Widow's Vacation in Saugatuck

This woman has been on vacation! Yes, a genuine, long-overdue vacation where I packed my bags, put the dog in a kennel and took off for some R & R. I didn’t go far. My niece and I checked into a Bed and Breakfast in my favorite tourist town along Lake Michigan. I’ve been going to Saugatuck since my teens but I’ve never stayed overnight unless you count the times in my late twenties when my husband and I brought sleeping bags over to the beach and fell asleep under the stars. Those were the good old days when we were carefree and didn’t worry about getting caught with our pants down. Literally. (Raise your hand if you think I’ve shared too much information here.)

Our B & B had nine bedrooms with private baths and it was the oldest continuous use residence in town. My room had its original horsehair plaster walls and polished plank flooring with square, blacksmith-made nails and it was named after Susan B. Anthony. She stayed in the same house 136 years ago while she was in town to help organize a local Temperance Union and to give a speech on woman’s suffrage. The local newspaper of the era said “she succeeded in closing six of the fourteen saloons” and “that was a testament to her persuasiveness and organizational skills.” My niece and I tried to find a bar to have a drink in one evening and we only found two open, neither one enticing enough to draw us inside. Susan would be proud that we choose, instead, the only other business open that late---a chocolate and ice cream shop.

We packed a lot into our vacation. After a leisurely breakfast each morning, seated on miss-matched oak chairs at a long farmhouse-style table, we’d take off to do things like: walk the beach, drive the shoreline of Lake Michigan, visit a neighboring town, and browse a few antique venues. We also walked along the marina, strolled a few residential blocks with gardens you can’t truly enjoy just driving by, and we even visited the place at the shore where we spread some of Don's ashes. One night we went to a summer stock production of First Date, a musical that was so funny I had tears running down my cheeks; another night we went to an outdoor concert in the park where we perfected the fine art of people watching. One afternoon we toured a restored 1920s, twenty-five room mansion with a third floor ballroom that was built by the inventor of comptometers, the first commercially successful mechanical calculator. His story was fascinating. Where the lumber industry clear-cut the woods along the lake, he managed to restore the land, stabilizing the shifting dunes with carefully chosen vegetation and now the property is a deep woods again. I wouldn’t have thought that was even possible.

Our Meals: When we first got to town we had lunch at a store-front restaurant with Andy Warhol style murals of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean on the walls. The next day we ate at the oldest structure in the county, originally built as a hotel for traders and people in the lumber industry. I lost my ‘fish tacos virginity' at another place across from where the ferry operates. But my favorite meal of all was when we decided to have dessert instead of lunch at a large pie factory-restaurant. It’s out in the boondocks---in the middle of apple orchards, wine vineyards and blueberry farms. They’d taken a page out of a near-by winery's book and had a pie sampler tray on the menu---various, warm pies served in squatty jelly jars with vanilla bean ice cream on the side. Then there was the day we had ice cream cones for lunch. Yup, I was a bad influence on my niece. But so was she on me. Did I mention her stop to purchase a couple of bottles of wine?

Saugatuck is a town with a history rooted in boat building and lumbering and it’s often called the Art Coast of Michigan because of its 100 year old, 115 acres art colony with ties to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The town is a mecca for people from Chicago who spend the summers or boat over on the weekends. A high energy town with a wintertime population of around 1,000 that swells to 3,000 in the summers. My niece and I wondered if my great-great grandfather could have lived in town during its boom town days when he was known to have made his living following the lumber industry around this part of the state. We romanticized him living in our B & B when it was a boarding house for lumberjacks or eating at the hotel where we had dinner. Using our imaginations doesn’t make it fact, though the idea could be an interesting, family genealogy ball to chase for a tenacious researcher.

However, we did get a heavy dose of family history while we were on vacation. Sorting boxes in the basement the week before our trip, I had found six cassette tapes made of my mom and dad talking---circa the early 1970s through 1984. My niece and I listened to half of them in the evenings while drinking wine and munching popcorn. It still blows my mind that tapes made thirty and forty years ago could so clearly bring my parents back into focus. At one point we laughed so hard I actually thought I’d pass out from lack of oxygen; I could feel my face turning red. I suppose you had to be there to understand the humor in hearing my folks say long good-byes to their two dogs. They were dropping them off for me to babysit while they spent the winter in Florida. My niece started prompting them to include me (their daughter) in their “good-byes” and I started prompting them to say “I love you.” The tape ended with me singing a 'lullaby' to the dogs, which reminds me I should erase that embarrassing section. 

It was a vacation filled with quality time and memorable moments with one of my favorite people in the world. I crossed a few things off my Bucket List but believe it or not, there are still things on my ‘Saugatuck To-Do List’---like take the chain ferry across the river, ride the paddle boat, visit the art colony, walk the entire length of the boardwalk and I can’t believe we forgot to go to the kitchen gadgets store! I love that place. But for the bonus point of vacationing, when I picked Levi the Mighty Schnauzer up from the kennel it was reported that he had a wonderful time playing with a puppy during the puppy's daycare/socialization sessions and taking part in group obedience classes at night where he was pronounced to be "well behaved and sweet." Levi came home as tired and happy as I did.  ©

Main Street, Saugatuck

Our Bed and Breakfast

The Susan B. Anthony Room

The Felt Mansion

The Marina

The pier in the distance, Lake Michigan. The photo at the top was taken looking in the other direction.

This is an elaborate set of brand new steps and wheelchair ramps at a county park leading down to the beach. Don would have loved it!