The Art Class, Rosie The Riveter and a Great Netflix Movie

Happiness comes in many forms and it was delivered this week with an art class that lit a fire under my pot of stagnant creativity. The three part class is being taught by an award winning college professor who is teaching the class as a favor to our resident, retired art professor. This summer the instructor is taking these same workshops to Europe to teach what she calls Handmade Artist's Books. I guess it's a popular fad right now and there is plenty of evidence online to back up her claim. When it's all said and done we'll have a book of abstract art pages that we'll embellish with whatever pleases us and what pleases me is I'm going to turn the pages into a poetry book. Since moving to my continuum care campus I've written fifteen poems about various aspects of living here in my eight's and I've been wanting to do something with them. 

The class was advertised as "experimenting with art materials" so I had no idea we were going to be taking a large sheet of rag paper and act like kindergartners slopping watercolors every which way, then turning it over and doing the same thing on the back side. Our next class we'll be learning to cut and fold the sheet of paper to form a book that opens up accordion-style. The third class will be the embellishment phase, which to me looks more like scrapbooking than art but, of course, those judgments are always in the eyes of the beholder. All I know is that since the first class and now I've also finished up a paint-by-number I started working on last fall and lost interest in and I've stretched a canvas to use for another customized paint-by-number that I promised to my oldest niece. Plus I dug out my folder of poems to print and use as embellishments, along with a few photos from around the campus.

I also took a trip to JoAnn's Fabrics going out-of-business sale, bought some heavy paper I planned to print the poems on and prompted screwed up my printer trying. It took me almost two hours to get it working again because the paper not only got stuck but it caused the ink cartridges not to read anymore and I had to change them, clean the nozzle and preform all the set up/alignment stuff I did when I first got the printer. Won't be trying to put heavy paper through the printer again. Now I have to dream up another project that will use fifteen pieces of great quality scrapbook paper bought at the ridiculously low cost of twenty-five cents each. I have always loved and lusted after good paper. Back in the days when all I thought about was art I had a great collection of handmade paper samples, I even took a papermaking class in college and just now I realized that the blender I donated to Goodwill a month or so again could have been put to use turning my junk mail into homemade paper. Oh well, I don't have time for all the could have/should have ideas that flit through my head.

Change of topic: If you live in Michigan and get a chance to hear a lecture about Rosie the Riveter or the Willow Run Bomber Plant given by Clarre Kirhn Dahl, don't pass it up. She's a retired history educator specializing in Women's Studies who spoke for an hour and a half on our campus without notes or missing a beat. She had us spellbound and laughing and so pumped with pride in the 269,0000 women in our mom's generation who worked in the factories during WWII building planes ships, jeeps, guns, bullets and making uniforms. Many of us had joyful tears in our eyes when she was finished speaking. She's part of Michigan Flight Museum  (an affiliate of the Smithsonian) and is an official 'Tribute Rosie' who dresses in the iconic look made popular by Norman Rockwell magazine cover and she crisscrosses the country to tell the stories of the American home front during the war and along the way she locates and documents as many the still-living Rosie's as she can find. I had an aunt who was a Rosie. Her two kids lived with us and their mom would visit when she could. For a few years I thought I had three brothers instead of just the one.

If you like Women's history another fascinating and inspirational thing I saw this week was a netflix movie that tells the true story of a black unit of the Women's Army Corp during WWII called The Six Triple Eight. Like the Tuskegee Airmen, an all black unit that served during WWII, it took decades to get the recognition they earned and deserved only to have Musk, this week, use his chainsaw crew to remove their records from military archives as being too DEI. Anything related to Black History month got removed. Even famed baseball player, Jackie Robinson's military recorders got scrubbed. Thankfully, there is an effort to restore the damage these clearly unqualified "Musk's DOGE kids" did purging and attempting to white-wash history. History is history! It can be disturbing. It can be inspirational. It can be a lot of things but what it can't be is changed into something it wasn't. And yet here we are….  ©

One More Thanksgiving on Widowhood Lane

Like so many of women’s contributions to our country they usually got omitted from the history books in past centuries because the publishers, back then, were an all-boys club and they didn’t play fair with women and people of color. For example did you know that we can thank a woman---Sarah Josepha Hale---for the entire United States celebrating Thanksgiving on a fixed date? Before her forty years (yes, FORTY YEARS) of lobbying politicians including five presidents, each state celebrated Thanksgiving on a different date between October and January. Finally, she persuaded Abraham Lincoln that a national day of thanksgiving would foster a sense of national unity. Thus he proclaimed it so and we’ve all been celebrating Thanksgiving on the last Thursday in November ever since. 

Sarah was an American writer and an influential editor of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine but today, unless you’re a women’s history buff, most people might only know her as the author of the nursery rhyme, Mary Had a Little Lamb. If you’ve dug deep into the history of the Bunker Hill Monument you might also know that Sarah was instrumental in its completion by organizing fund raisers and using the power of her pen to raise $30,000 to make sure the 221-foot obelisk got built when the men in charge ran out of money. And if you’re a stalker-like women’s history aficionado you might even own a bobble head doll created in her likeness by the New Hampshire Historical Society. Give a woman a century or two and maybe she’ll get the recognition she deserves. 

Three of my grandparents were dead before I was born and the forth one died a few years after so I don’t have memories of going, “over the river and through the woods, now Grandmother's cap I spy! Hurrah for the fun! Is the pudding done? Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!” My memories of Thanksgiving don’t come into focus until the ‘60s when I was in college and we’d all gather at my brother’s house in the country for a the traditional celebration. He and my sister-in-law had three small children and it was easier for them to host than to bring the kids into town where our parent’s house wasn’t big enough to fit everyone around a table. I never had much interest in helping in the kitchen and by default I’d be the one to take the kids outside to play while the “women’s work” was going on. If there was snow that meant sledding, if not there was a woods in their back yard and forts to build.

Over the years families and traditions change. By the time my brother and wife divorced, my parents had remodeled our cottage for year-around living and it became our holiday destination until my mom died in 1983. After that, my husband and I were anchorless for a year or two until Don’s sister-in-law’s started including us in with her large family and I shared Thanksgiving with them right up through my first Thanksgiving after Don died. That was the last time they all got together as one cohesive family. As a widow I got a few invitations in years two and three post-widowhood but I turned them down because they would have made me feel lonelier eating with mostly strangers. This year I’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner at my youngest niece's house on a lake. Her two year old grandson and my brother will be there and as the second oldest in attendance I won’t be allowed to help much in the kitchen. It feels a little like I’m coming full circle. My niece always loads me up with left overs when I go to her get-togethers so I will have turkey sandwiches in the days that follow and that hasn’t happened since my mother died.

Coming full circle isn’t, of course, the same as going home again. Thomas Wolfe was right, we can’t do that. Even if the same houses are there to go to, families are fluid. People die, babies are born. Some marriages fail, new people come into the fray and new traditions evolve. But there is one thing I hope doesn’t become a tradition; this year, I’m hearing people online say that because of the election they aren’t looking forward to Thanksgiving. So If you need a bit of trivia to change the topic of a conversation that's heading toward fisticuffs at your dinner table, try sharing the story of Sarah’s forty year campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday. But you might want to leave out the fact that you learned about her from a Born-Again Feminist lest the snipping and sneering starts in all over again. Feminist get a bad rap in some circles. ©