Thirty-One Thresholds – Memories of Ginger Cookies and Grandmothers

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Making Cookies © 2014 Bo Mackison

I started a new photo/travel project a few weeks ago, a project, called Thirty One Thresholds.

Quite basic in its undertaking, the project encourages me to get out of the house. (A coping method when life gets a bit overwhelming, I morph into a hermit!)

Once out of the house, I go somewhere, almost anywhere, camera in tow, and consider the many thresholds I cross – literal or metaphorical…  Not a lot of rules. Keeping this low pressure and easy…

As I wrote in the first post when exploring the start of this project, I’m not sure what nuggets of wisdom I’ll discover or exactly what  I’m looking for… but I’m willing to believe I’ll find what I need to find — or it will find me!

Since I began on December 1st, I have visited a Mustard Museum (for fun and amusement), a tropical paradise in Madison’s Olbrich Gardens (for the illusion of summer and warmth), a walk in the neighborhood (which is as far as I could make it that day!) and a state capitol building (in search of spaciousness and the grand gilded art of an earlier time in architectural decor.)

Fun. Warmth. Tiny steps. Space. Art. A good start!

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Gingerbread Cookies © 2014 Bo Mackison

Last weekend I went to Old World Wisconsin, an outdoor history park that offers a glimpse of Wisconsin life — historic farms, artisan handcrafts, heirloom gardens, daily routines in rural Wisconsin in the mid to late 1800s.

A docent was baking gingerbread cookies at an old wooden table, the surface scattered with flour, a treasured rolling pin, cookie cutters hand fashioned from scraps of tin, and dark gingery dough! Though the time period was off by a few decades, the ginger cookie baking scene was reminiscent of the countless days I spent baking with my grandmother and great-grandmother.

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Keeping Warm © 2014 Bo Mackison

What a perfect threshold to walk across.

Hands warmed by an open fire. Hearts warmed by memories of the best of childhood times. And, as a bonus,  just-baked ginger cookies to enhance the memories.

6th Annual Photo Alphabet – Elephants to Highways

E is for Elephants.

Magic Kingdom

Flying Elephants © 2013 Bo Mackison

Realizing a dream can be as unlikely as seeing a flying elephant.

Once upon a time, I used to ignore the elephant in the living room. Eventually I accepted the elephant, figured out what needed to be done about its occupancy, and I did the work.

Now I go in search of flying elephants.

And, once in a while, I find one!

~~~

F is for Freedom.

Pelicans in Flight, Kure Beach North Carolina

Free Flight © 2013 Bo Mackison

“. . . as we fly, we still may not know where we are going to. But the miracle is in the unfolding of the wings. You may not know where you’re going, but you know that so long as you spread your wings, the winds will carry you.” ~ C. Joybell C.

There is a certain freedom that comes with spreading your wings and taking flight.

Whether that flight is to a new country, a new home, or a new idea, embarking on a new beginning has a freeing quality. One can never leave the past entirely, but dragging it all along makes for slow travel. Leaving the baggage behind makes it easier to let “the winds carry you.”

~~~

G is for Gifts and Grandmothers.

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Grandmother © 2013 Bo Mackison

I grew up in a house filled with grandmothers.

Or so it seemed to me. There were two grandmothers – a grandmother and a great-grandmother.

I do not remember playing with either of my grandmothers.

But I do remember being unconditionally accepted, appreciated, and deeply loved by them.

I remember learning to be of help. If my grandmother was sewing – she was a seamstress, a business woman, a solopreneur  in the middle of the last century – I was given the job of sorting thread by color or winding yarn or finding a dropped needle. If my great-grandmother was making noodles, I cracked eggs and kneaded dough. My grandmothers usually included me as they went about their work.

One of my earlier memories was after dinner, when the family gathered to relax and read the daily newspaper. I always impatiently waited as they slowly read each page, every column, every want ad.  Then they discussed the news in detail. But once my grandparents finished with the paper, they would call me.

“Dear, I circled a letter for you in this headline. Do you know the name of the letter?”

“Yes,” I’d eagerly reply. ” A ‘P'”.

Then I was given a colored pencil and told to circle as many ‘P’s’ as I could find in five minutes. When the timer buzzed, we’d count the circles together, and I would proudly write the number on the kitchen wall calendar. No pressure, no goals, just a loving, learning practice.

Routines, rituals, traditions. Another way to express love.

This October, I became a grandmother. What an amazing experience. As I look into the eyes of this three-month old baby, my heart swells with love.

It is my hope that I offer my granddaughter a fraction of the gifts my grandmothers gave me.

~~~

H is for Highways.

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Desert Highway © 2013 Bo Mackison

Nothing heightens my anticipation and excitement more than a road trip.

I love following highways, especially the kind that zig around mountains, pass through open spaces – desert, prairie, grasslands. This year I discovered that I love driving the open road, solo. Stop wherever I want, photograph whatever and whenever for as long as the subject holds my attention, take a detour just to see what is beyond that next rise in the road.

Traveling cross-country from the Southwest to the Midwest this past spring was ten days of delight.

Only once did I question my sanity — when driving on a 12,000 foot peak in Colorado, negotiating hairpin turns with no reassuring guard rails. It was  the first spring snow melt which scattered mini-avalanches of snow and tumbled rock on the road. But even that turned into quite the adventure. Once I descended the celestial roads, I knew I’d negotiated those roads with care and good sense, and conquered my fear of mountain driving on the outside lane.

I took my time, pulled off at the designated places for plenty of calming and rest, took a few photographs, had a snack and a drink. I gave plenty of space to the passing timber trucks, whose drivers had much more experience on these roads than I did (or so I hoped), and I planned my route so I was settled in a town by evening.

I acknowledged my limitations, and appreciated the skills I possessed.

~~~

Want to read Part I? Here it is — Arizona to Desert

Coming tomorrow, Part III : Invitation to Labyrinth

Memories of Grandma’s Pie

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Grandma’s Pie © 2013 Bo Mackison

“No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers.” ~ Laurie Colwin

I remember the tiny dough birds.

It was a grand day when I was big enough to stand on a wooden chair and reach the work surface of the kitchen counter. I was perhaps 4 or 5. As my great-grandmother rolled dough for her pies, she would give me bits of pie dough and I would make tiny sculpted birds. Then we’d bake my dough birds on a small tray, next to her fruit pies.

Whenever I make a pie crust, I make a tiny bird.

They were a bit grimy from being shaped and re-shaped, and they certainly were not flaky, considering a light touch is necessary for a light crust. But they were delightful treats, especially when shared with my grandmother.

Simple activities filled with kindnesses, a patient teacher, and lots of loving – memories.

Claiming My Lineage – Grandma Prudie

Remembering Grandma

Remembering Grandma © 2013 Bo Mackison

A grandmother is a little bit parent, a little bit teacher, and a little bit best friend. ~ Author Unknown

*** In Jen Louden’s TeachNow course, each participant is “invited to become a story gatherer and story creator,”  and to “claim and own our authority and lineage” in order to better step into the teacher we are (or are becoming). In order to claim my lineage, I recalled past teachers in my life – childhood, youth, student, adult – and identified those people, places, books, experiences — positive and negative — that were influential in shaping the person I am today.

This post is the second in a series on gathering stories and claiming my lineage.

I rocked hard in Grandpa’s rocker as I watched the kitchen clock. The minute hand barely moved. I’d waited nearly an hour. My Great Grandma Prudie had promised we’d pull taffy that morning, but the day was half over. Prudie kept her promises, so I practiced an uneasy patience.

We had watched The Lawrence Welk Show the night before – Prudie, Grandma, Grandpa, Dad and Mom and me. After the show, Prudie had looked at me with her trademark pixie grin nearly hidden in her wrinkled face.

“Bo, let’s go in the kitchen and check out the pantry. Let’s cook tomorrow.” I was always game when Prudie began a kitchen project which mostly involved satisfying her occasional sweet tooth. Prudie at eighty-one no longer cooked the family meals. After 60+ years of kitchen responsibility, she’d handed her apron over to her daughter, grand-daughter and great-granddaughters. But she occasionally enjoyed a kitchen adventure with me.

My unusual family living arrangement was one of my childhood blessings, and surely is a part of my creative lineage. Prudie was my mother’s mother’s mom. She lived in the first floor apartment with my Grandpa and Grandma, although her bedroom was in the back of my family’s upstairs apartment. My mother, father and I lived in an apartment on the second floor, and my bedroom was carved out of an attic space on the third floor. The spaces were a mix and match affair, few doors, no locks. I wandered freely from adult to adult, and learned by watching and doing the things they were doing — sewing, gardening, knitting, woodworking, cooking and baking. It was an endless potpourri of activity.

Prudie was a storyteller, and as long as my mother and grandmother were out of earshot, Prudie discussed any subject that came to her mind.  My mom and grandmother often forbade me to listen to Prudie’s tales, but Prudie only waved her hand at them in dismissal. “Pshaw!” she’d mutter, and then laugh.

Prudie thought children should learn about “real living.” She talked about life, even when life didn’t include Princesses and Prince Charmings.  Especially then.

She told me about marriages that were not the “happily ever after” kind. When Prudie was only nineteen, she’d married a railroad man. It was 1900. My grandmother was born a year later. When baby Pearl was a week shy of her first birthday, her father left for work, saying he’d be gone a fortnight, but he never returned. Family life wasn’t what he’d envisioned.

So Prudie and Pearl temporarily moved in with family while my great grandma took a practical nurse’s course by mail. She memorized two medical texts and some practical nursing books. Then she worked as a licensed practical nurse, caring for people in their homes, until she met the man she married when my grandmother was in high school.

The medical textbooks she studied from in 1902 lined the shelf of her bedside table throughout my childhood. Prudie let me page through the books whenever I wanted, never censoring the content. We would page through her Human Anatomy book as casually as we paged through my Little Golden books. The diagram of the body’s circulatory system in red and blue ink was equally as interesting as Brer Rabbit’s adventures.

“A child’s curiosity is a good thing,” she would say. “Children should be exposed to ideas, even ideas that are out of the ordinary or strange. Life is strange.”

We discussed women’s rights in detail. (“Women are just as smart as men, we can do anything with our minds they can do. You remember that. You wait and see. Your world will look a lot different from the world I grew up in.”)

We discussed education. (“You keep to your studies. That’s your ticket to the big world. No one’s ever gone to college in our families, but that’s no reason to stop you from stretching your wings. You go to college. Learn something you really want to learn.”)

We discussed relationships. (“Don’t ever stay with someone who doesn’t respect you, who doesn’t treat you as an equal. There is no shame is leaving a marriage if it’s not a good marriage. No shame at all. Better yet, marry a man who respects you. A good marriage is more precious than a pile of money.”)

We discussed beauty and art as she arranged garden flowers in vases or copied drawings from the Garden Extension pamphlets onto the backs of envelopes or brown paper bags that she then pinned around the hallway mirror. We kept warm under quilts that she pieced and sewed by hand and she taught me to crochet doilies by the dozens. (“There isn’t any excuse for a home not to have a bit of finery. It makes a person’s heart glad.”)

We discussed the importance of play and friendships and she allowed me to enter the world of her grown-up playtime, if only to serve the cake and pour the coffee. (“If I didn’t have the ladies over to play Pokeno and brag on my cake once a month, I’d grow up to be a cranky old woman.”)

I no longer have any interest in crocheting doilies or piecing quilts by hand, but I o remember the nuggets of wisdom my great-grandmother freely dispensed. I learned to value her opinions on women’s equality, education, relationships, and the arts. I learned to model her love for head-on living.

And I am grateful that she thought it only natural to feed a child’s insatiable curiosity with knowledge and hands-on experience.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is exploring her lineage with Jen Louden and other TeachNow participants.  Memories of Bo’s grandparents are in her thoughts often; she mentions them frequently in her gratitude journal.