Missouri Trip, Part 2 (16 July, 17 July)

Mama's younger older brother (Bruce), his wife (Martha), and daughter-in-law (Megan) got in late last night. Uncle Bruce has always fascinated me: he wears a leather cowboy hat, is quiet when he's not being hilarious, and is a gifted artist. I'm not exaggerating about the gifted part: his photo-realism drawing ability is astounding, and his cartoons are dynamic and quirky. He plays guitar. He flies really big kites. In high school, his nickname was "Mouse" because he was so small. He's still short, for a man, and has a light frame. He seems self-contained, to me, like an island. But a really funny island. His wife Martha is a little spitfire, her hair in a braid down past her waist. It's my first time meeting their son Jeremy's wife, Megan, and I like her.

Late night cats

Early morning cat

Martha sticks around the house cooking and waiting for Mama's older older brother (Biff) and his wife (Pam) to arrive, while Gram, Mama, Bruce, and Megan and I go into Carthage to see the old buildings and poke around in antique stores. Grampa putters around his garage, I think trying to avoid antiquing and talking to Pam both.

A wall in Grampa's garage

Mama and Bruce

Carthage has a town square, a real one. It always seemed like a folksy turn-of-phrase to me, but in Carthage, it's an actual square-shaped block of buildings surrounding the court house, which sits on a square of green lawn in the center. We don't go inside, but I imagine Atticus Finch would look at home in the courtrooms.

Carthage Courthouse

I love antique stores. I have so many memories of visiting antique stores with my parents as a kid. My dad's parents had an antique store in Illinois, mostly primitives and folk Americana. I grew up sleeping in an antique rope bed, vaulting four-plus feet high each night to sleep. I just love the stuff: the age and the history and the cranky-fussiness of old hinges and wood. Seattle has crummy antique stores, which makes sense for a state that's barely old enough to be qualified as an antique itself. Missouri has 70 years of statehood and another 50 of white settlement before that on Washington. Anyway, that means that they've had time for families to get sick of their old furniture and sell it to us Yankees. And not just the furniture, of course. What fascinates me most are the old photos. Look at these people! Look at what they felt was important enough to document, in a time before the ubiquity of the camera phone.

Good advice

Antique fan quilt, made with black velvet and I believe silk from neckties

First: families; then places, then things. I sift through a pile of more than a hundred portraits, all snapped between 1900 and 1960. The oldest photos are, of course, mostly posed: professional portraits by a studio photographer. The photos from the 50's and 60's are mostly candid, the snapshots you'd find in a family photo album. Kids in front of Christmas trees, a new car, the family dog. I flip them over to read the penciled names. Irma. Judy. Robert. I buy ones that make me happy, and a few that are so artistic, have such perfect composition I can't believe they're "just" a snapshot. I buy one because the back says "Here's a photo of me for you, I'm not as fat as I am in it anymore (thank God)." I buy at least 6 of someone's fat dachshund posing in sunglasses (I make Mama and Gram go back on our last day in Missouri to buy more.) I feel obligated to the people in these photos. As a photographer, I love seeing photographs, and the feel of the old prints. As a museum professional, I want to horde as much history as possible, and first-person narratives are always the most interesting artifacts to me. And as a water-sign on the cusp of another water-sign, I cry when I think about these photos, about how the relatives of the people in these pictures didn't care enough to keep these relics. I have to rescue them.

Old scrapbook

This idiot is the best idiot

The indignities of dachshund-hood

Other items are less charming. The casual racism is in full force, with Mammy and Golliwog iconography in a variety of forms. I understand these items have a historical significance, and I don't think the world would be better off if they just disappeared from the lexicon: I think they're an important reminder of how thoroughly and seemingly easily one race subjugated another. But I feel like their place is in a museum or cultural center, with context clues and explanation. I don't like them for sale as curiosities, as something people buy for in modern times for novelty or collection. Part of my discomfort is how casually stuff like this is displayed by sellers, it's mixed in with the vintage Pyrex like there's no way it could harm. I wonder now about including a photo of some here, in case it's hurtful, or seen as shock-value.

More casual racism

Jason and I tried to get donuts from the Winchell's in Wallingford one night, but it had turned into a BBQ place. I didn't expect to see a Seattle reminder here.

I regret not buying this tiny cauldron

I did buy a new plate, though 

Sidewalk

Back at the house, I greet my Uncle Biff and Aunt Pam. Martha, Gram, and Mama finish up the cooking. After dinner, there are too many people around, and I escape outside. I spend time knocking Japanese beetles off of Gram's hibiscus flowers- they've had a really bad infestation this year. Mama bought two dig-your-own-gem kits from the souvenir shop, and we each dig out a rock from our compressed bricks. I find a desiccated frog corpse, just skin and bones shriveled by the sun.

Lucky supervises dinner-making

Silver, in the window

Feral kittens waiting for dinner

Japanese beetles destroying a blossom

Digging

Desiccated 

By the next morning, our company has all gone back to their homes. Mama, Gram and I check out another antique store in the morning, and then Grampa takes us for a drive. We visit a restaurant built into a cliffside that Grampa wants to buy and turn into a strip club featuring senior citizen dancers. We get lost trying to find the graveyard that has the "mother and father of Pitcher," my great+ grandparents. People have graffitied the small stone building next to the yard and dumped trash in the parking lot. More driving, and Mama and I are tense. Grampa's driving is scary: he weaves, he is apparently allergic to using his turn signal, and he tells story after story using both hands for emphasis. Every so often he drifts over the rumble-strip on the shoulder, and Gram shouts "I don't like that tune, change the radio!" He refuses to let Mama or me drive. When we get back home, we hang out on the porch with the pets until dusk and the mosquitos drive us inside.

Coffin hardware in an antique store

Small town

From Route 66

The Stites'

Hay field

Thinking I have food

Mama playing (Tippy? BB? I can't tell them apart if I can see their tail) through the glass

Nightcall

Missouri Trip, Part 1 (14 July, 15 July)

My family is from the midwest. Mom, Brother and I used to visit  every summer (Dad less frequently), but I haven't been for a visit in at least 12 years. I want to see my grandma again, see her new home in Missouri, visit with my grandpa and any other family that will make the trip to meet us in the middle of the country.

My flight out of Seattle is at 5:00 am, so I have to get up at 2:30 to get to SeaTac on time. Even so early in the morning, Seattle has traffic on the road. Security hasn't even opened yet, and a group of us queue up in a blobby mob. My gate is all the way at the end of the terminals, and I use the moving walkways some of the time. If I step on, I lurch forward and almost fall, so I take them at a sprint to keep forward momentum. I think I look like my kid when he runs bent over with his arms flying behind him. There's a solitary, anachronistic rocking chair near my gate and I claim it, looking like a cranky granny.

I meet up with Mama in the Denver airport, and I love that we pick each other out of a crowd so immediately. I only had a 50 minute layover, so we go right from gate to gate. On this leg of the journey, the ground is a brown patchwork quilt. When we land in Missiouri and they open the plane door we already can feel the oppressive heat and humidity. I haven't breathed this air for over a decade.

A dad and daughter hold hands across the moving walkways

Field quilt

Grandma (mom's mom) and Grandpa (mom's stepdad) pull up in Gram's red minivan. Gram is beautiful as ever, she doesn't look 80 years old to me. I'll compliment her skin later and she'll laugh and say she used to be an avid sunbather so her skin is better than it has any right to be. Mama always gets told she looks much younger than she is, and it's something I hope I inherit. I can see Granpa's older: he's more lined and more stooped, but the lines are from daily work in the sun and I think the stoop might be an affectation so you don't take him as seriously.

We drive from the Springfield, Missiouri airport to their home in the small town of Carthage, Missouri. Sometimes the frontage road that parallels the freeway is part of the original Route 66, and we'll drive sections several times before I leave. I like weird roadside attractions, so we stop at Ozarkland, billed as both a "general store" and the "famous bargain center." Really it's a collection of bad souvenirs and good fudge. It shares a parking lot with a mish-mash of trash and buildings that claim to be the Cimarron Antique Mall & Native American Museum. A skinny, matted Saint Bernard dog wanders up to me in the parking lot. He must be a stray, or else someone dumped him. He's so sweet, and I start to cry because I can't take him home with us.

Ozarkland

There's outright hostile racism here, but it's the causal racism that seems more shocking to me, somehow

Gram has a rangy Aussie shepherd of her own, Lucky, and an assortment of cats. When they moved in, she started to feed the few feral cats that wandered the perimeters of her property. They spay and neuter as they can, but there are to many that wander up from all over the countryside to keep kittens from happening. Right now, a spiderwebed cat family rules the yard and surrounding forest. Three kittens from one of the first litters they had at the property are here: Silver, the indoor female, and BB, the indoor male. Tippy, named for the white tip on his tail, is otherwise physically indistinguishable from his brother, BB. Well, other than his testicles: he hasn't been neutered. Tippy mated with a shy grey cat with a white blaze on her nose. Now she has two or three daughters who look like her, but black instead of grey. From their markings, I'd say Tippy fathered the two recent litters: one with mama grey and one with her (and presumably his) daughter. Tippy is affectionate, and mama grey wants to trust people, but the other cats and kittens are too skittish and scared to be around people. They watch from the porch, though, and will play with fingers through the glass. They wait for Gram to feed them every night. I don't know why, but I'm deeply interested in the cats the whole time I'm here.  

Welcome

King Tippy

Mama grey, with kittens and Tippy watching

Mama grey's mama daughter and kittens

Lucky, who looks like the Human Faced Dogs that used to live next to Selina

I'm sleeping in the basement bedroom, all antiques and no windows. It's pitch-black when you turn out the overhead light, so Gram bought a nightlight at Ozarkland for me. I don't know who thought up this design, but I know several people had to approve it before it went to production and I'm not sure how that happened.

Sock monkey-turned-nightlight

Friday, we get up and go to a cemetery in a nearby county. The Luthers are here: Grandma's mother's parents. Next to them is their infant daughter, Betty Devon. For being an unusual name, we all wonder why Dee Dee (grandma's mom) and her sister Big-Big never mentioned to any of us they had a sister who shared my name. My middle name is for my dad's sister who died as a toddler. I think a lot about these ghosts who share my name.

We drive around the cemetery, which is ringed by an old stone wall. I hop the wall to pee, and realize too late that I'm surrounded by plastic bags full of animal skeletons. Of the skeletons I see, I think they're cats. They're bleached white and picked clean. I'm already unnerved, and a sound from the woods head of me spooks me. I think it's just a bird breaking cover.

It's easy to cross borders here: we're right by Oklahoma and Kansas both. We drive to Galena, Kansas, to an old house that supposedly used to be a bordello, but is now an antique store. A lot of places' claim to fame around here is a notorious history, or that they're haunted, and Bordello Antiques claims both. Some historians have contested the bordello history. All I know is that they had a Victorian settee, chair, and lounge covered with moss-green velvet and only wanted $350 for the whole set. I wonder if I can justify buying it and then renting a U-Haul to bring it back to Seattle.

Welcome to Galena, Kansas

"Stained glass" window in Bordello Antiques

Boarded up old building across from Bordello Antiques

Juvenile

I think we're in Oklahoma, now, near Quapaw tribal land. We're looking for a chat pile, which I always hear as chad pile, left over from the area's mining operations. They dug lead and other minerals out of the ground here, and the left-over gravel has been dumped in huge mounds. In some places the piles look like southwestern rock formations. The chat can be poisonous, but we rock hound anyway. We're looking for selenite, or maybe what we're finding is the harder calcite. Mom points out fossils she and her brothers used to find called crinoids. I thought they were lily fossils, but apparently crinoids are marine creatures that just resemble lilies. I find a few pieces of calcite and some fossils, and Mama finds a big chunk of rock with a dozen fossils and imprints. A blue and black butterfly is so bright that it looks fake.

Small chat pile, about 3 stories high 

Near the top of the pile

From the top looking down into a field

Rock with crystals and fossils (look for the circles and clam shell imprints)

Rock with calcite structure

Blue and black butterfly

Looking in to Oklahoma

A different chat pile, this time looking like a Southwest rock formation

We drive on to Pitcher, Oklahoma. A great-great grandma and grandpa were known as the 'Mom & Dad of Pitcher": she was one of the first women in town, and together they ran a grocery store. They're listed in the Baxter Springs museum's Pitcher section, and Gram donated a photo of them in their mercantile for the collection. We stop at Pitcher's high school mascot, this old concrete gorilla statue. He's been there a long time, and Gram loves him. We pass boarded up buildings and collapsing houses. A huge tornado came through a few years ago and devastated the area, which accounts for some of the ruin. Assholes account for their fair share, too: an old bank-turned-museum burned to the ground thanks to an arsonist. The chimney and original vault remain, but not much else.

Pitcher, Oklahoma

We check out Baxter Springs' museum. It's a labor of love, these small town museums. Most appear to be run by a coalition of strong-willed housewives, all of them hopped up on Starbucks and civic pride. They're doing great things, preserving their community history as best they can on shoe-string budgets. They might not be following museum best practices (acid-free tissue paper is expensive, climate-control display cases are tens of thousands of dollars), but they're preserving and presenting their artifacts, sharing their stories with anyone who stops to look. My favorite thing in the Baxter Springs Museum is a wall in the basement, made with bricks from local foundries stacked so you can see the makers' marks.

Baxter Springs Museum

Makers' marks

Our family's store was the top one: Luther Grocery

We stop at a roadside produce stand on the way home: a folding table and the bed of a pickup truck. Everything but the peaches are local (meaning the peaches are a county or two over, still local in my book). We get corn and tomatoes and a watermelon.