zeptember

I was excited when the parents came home and I got out of work before the sun set. I was even more excited when I realised that ten minutes to 6pm, it was still twilight outside. I got home for the first time in months before it was pitch dark outside.

People might laugh when I say I have the winter blahs and I’m depressed, because we’ve got nothing but sunshine and 70°F (21°C) weather. But I realised by my second year living in California that Seasonal Affective Disorder/Winter Blahs does not originate from being below zero temperatures outside and snow piled high. It all has to do with the shorter daylight hours in the winter.

On top of feeling like the day is over once the sun sets, and becoming depressed, there really is not enough time in the day anymore. I get up before dawn at 5:40am, drive an hour and ten minutes to work, where I watch the sun rise from the San Mateo bridge as I drive, and then I work nine hours. During those nine hours, I have up to two and a half free hours total while the baby naps (up to one hour each time, sometimes going for an hour and a half for morning nap). During those free precious minutes, I go to work at my second job, which is unpaid - researching all things endometriosis and autoimmune, and sharing what I find on my website and public forums. I do this because I want to learn more about my illness and how to combat it, and I want others to be able to access my knowledge so they don’t have to duplicate such tedious work. It’s rewarding - I’ve had people tell me on no less than two occasions now that I’ve made them cry because they were so relieved to see someone on youtube telling the world exactly what the illness does to a person and what it feels like. They cry because they are relieved to be able to show this to loved ones, doctors, friends and say SEE? I’M NOT ALONE.

But holy shit does all this research and keeping up on forums wear me out. I’m registered on three endometriosis forums right now, and I’ve already let one go by the wayside - the very first one I ever joined - because it doesn’t come via LiveJournal or get delivered to my inbox like the other two, so I keep forgetting about it. I’m overwhelmed as it is with just the email list I’m on, jeezus over 40 emails crossed the wire today alone and I’m 350 behind.

After work, I have an hour and ten to hour and a half commute home, beginning around 5pm. I usually see the sun set as I walk out the door. It’s a blessing and a curse. A blessing because I work right on the ocean and it’s a truly beautiful view. A curse because the daylight is gone and I’m immediately depressed because the only daylight I regularly see is sunrise and sunset. I don’t often get to take the baby for stroller rides during the day because we’ve both been sick a lot over the past two months. Hell, the baby just got strep throat over the weekend and is on antibiotics again. I thought for sure I was getting the flu yesterday, cuz yesterday I was feeling achy all over, my head felt swimmy, I was super tired, I felt nauseated, weak and shaky. I napped with the baby yesterday, thereby cutting some of my research time out of the picture.

In the vein of not enough time in the day, I’ve been meaning to chronicle the financial collapse which began last autumn. I have so many urls it’s not even funny, and I probably can’t even access the stories behind the urls anymore because it’s already been five freaking months. Note that my lack of time coincides with getting married and going back to work full time!

But though I rant, I’m feeling mildly accomplished. I got home from work and just stood in the hallway with slumped shoulders, not wanting to do *anything*. Then I put myself on autopilot, hooked up the spectrum light for backup, and set to my chores like a drone. I did a load of laundry, gathered up the food recyclables, gathered up the trash, cleaned the catbox, took all garbage and food recyclables out to their respective bins, made enough turkey meat, shredded almond cheese, and guacamole for dinner tonight and lunch tomorrow, made enough breakfast berry mix for two days’ worth of yoghurt/granola/berry (I would have made more but I’m running out of yoghurt), and sat down to empty my head so as to feel better through journaling. The food prep took up the bulk of my time and is what I dreaded most next to laundry. But now I am done and happy that I don’t have to go to bed hungry, nor do I have to eat freezer food for lunch tomorrow.

Another nice thing I’d like to end my post with - I am locating more and more of my cousins on Facebook.com. It’s so weird to see them all grown up. Last time I saw most of them was 1987. Last time I saw some of them was 1997. I saw a very few of them at grandma’s funeral in 2003. If I were paying attention, I’d have gone home for Christmas in 2007 so I could say I see all my cousins every ten years. Ah well. I’m very happy to be finding them online, even if some of them are carrying on the christian fundamentalist family trait to an alarming degree. They’re still my family and I feel less vulnerable when I know the family is out there.

It’s nearly 9pm now. Time to shower, then bed.

Md. plantation attic holds 400 years of documents
By KRISTEN WYATT, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, June 22, 2008

(06-22) 07:38 PDT Centreville, Md. (AP) –

For four centuries, they were the ultimate pack rats. Now a Maryland family’s massive collection of letters, maps and printed bills has surfaced in the attic of a former plantation, providing a firsthand account of life from the 1660s through World War II.

“Historians are used to dealing with political records and military documents,” said Adam Goodheart, a history professor at nearby Washington College. “But what they aren’t used to is political letters and military documents kept right alongside bills for laundry or directions for building a washing machine.”

Goodheart is working with state archivists and a crew of four student interns to collect the documents, which were found stuffed into boxes, barrels and peach baskets.

“Look at this: ‘Negro woman, Sarah, about 27 years old, $25,’” Goodheart says, reading from a 19th century inventory. “It was as though this family never threw away a scrap of paper.”

The documents include maps, letters, financial records, political posters, even a lock of hair from a letter dated Valentine’s Day, 1801. There’s a love poem from the 1830s (in which a young man graphically tells his sweetheart what he’d do if he sneaked into her room on a winter’s night), along with war accounts and bills of sale from slaves and crops.

The papers come from several generations of the Emory family, prominent tobacco and wheat farmers who settled here on a land grant from Lord Baltimore in the 1660s.

The former Poplar Grove plantation is still in family hands, though the mansion now is used only as a hunting lodge. The documents were moldering in an attic until students touring the house started sorting through them this spring.

“I don’t believe any of us knew these papers were there,” said Mary Wood, an Emory cousin whose son inherited the plantation in 1998. “We didn’t go there all that often, and when you do, you don’t go up in people’s attics and look around.”

Washington College has had access to the plantation for years, but Goodheart said he assumed the papers in the attic weren’t old or important.

They aren’t in any particular order, and some are mouse-eaten tatters that look like something out of “The Da Vinci Code.”

“You really get a sense of the range of America through these papers,” said Edward Papenfuse, director of the Maryland State Archives, which will eventually house them.

Perhaps most strikingly, letters tell of a family’s torn allegiances during the Civil War. The Emorys lived on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, across Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore, where the plantation economy of the South ended and the abolitionist industrial North began.

It was a conflict the Emorys catalogued, anti-slavery petitions stacked alongside records of slaves sent to Natchez, Miss., and a packet of letters, still tied in silk ribbon, titled, “Correspondence with W.H. Emory and wife in regard to his resignation from U.S. Army, 1861.”

The Emorys owned slaves, but some signed an 1832 petition to the Maryland legislature calling for the gradual eradication of slavery.

One family member, William H. Emory, was a colonel in the U.S. Army when the Civil War began. He wrote out a resignation of his post, then changed his mind and fought for the Union.

Two sons also fought in the Civil War — one for the Union, one for the Confederacy. Bundles of letters from all family members detail their divided feelings. The family kept not just personal letters, but political posters about the conflict.

“These are things that usually do not survive,” Papenfuse said, pointing to a broadside blasting then-President Martin Van Buren for favoring voting rights for “every free negro.”"After the heat of a campaign, this printed matter was thrown out or put to other uses, including the outhouse.”

Not so at the Emory house, where even small scraps of paper were kept alongside military uniforms and other family heirlooms.

The collection also includes notes on an aspect of slavery historians know little about: the practice of renting slave labor to neighbors and plantations farther south.

“Scholars have not paid a great deal of attention to it, but this is something that helps recreate and draw back together the lives of these people who were considered chattel,” Papenfuse said.

Relatives are also curious to know what historians find.

“I can’t believe they didn’t throw this stuff out,” Wood said with a chuckle. “I mean, it’s kind of weird. It’s fascinating, though. I can’t believe that something might come out of it.”

I want to smack Ms. Wood upside the head and say, “Of course something will come out of it, you dolt!” Look at what Edward Papenfuse, director of the Maryland State Archives was quoted in the article as saying. Sadly, Ms. Wood is representative of the mindset of most people. Historians are a rare breed. I’m glad to be one of them.

This story makes me fidget even more about all the history that is living in the attic of our family farm in Kentucky. Uncle B is still holed up there, trying to protect the property from being strip-mined by his brother. Uncle B is still dying of emphysema. He’s still on the oxygen tank and he still smokes. I really wish I had the money to go down there NOW with our laptop and scanner, and start preserving some of the family’s history. Even our family has ties to the slave trade. The family used to be wealthy because of the slave trade, and lost their fortunes with emancipation. This is significant, because as I was remarking earlier about Ms. Wood, my family is no different. They cry on about how poor they are to this day, and wonder what Gawd did to them to deserve this.
It’s not so hard to look back into our own history to find out what our family did to deserve this. It’s also not hard to pull oneself up by the bootstraps and get on with life and try making one’s fortunes back again without destroying the lives of others. But no. My family is full of fatalists. They fall down and just lie there moaning for someone else to help them. And people, and history, pass them by.

Even I still have this trait. It still comes out strong from time to time. But you know, I’m one of less than a handful on that side of the immediate extended family (including aunts, uncles and cousins) to have either gone to college, moved away from the home state, traveled, changed careers, or all of the above. The only other relative on that side of the family that I know of for sure is my cousin C - he moved to Illinois and as far as I’m told, has a family, a job and a home all on his own. He’s disowned the rest of the extended family. I hear about him from time to time from his brother - my cousin D.

Nearly two weeks ago, I was talking with a friend about my plans to try to incorporate wedding traditions from both my mother’s side of the family, and my father’s sides of the family. My mother is 100% Appalachian, her father from a line of farmers in Tennessee and her mother from a line of coal workers in Kentucky. Her parents married and settled in Kentucky, where their first two children were born, before they moved up to Detroit to have the rest of the family. But to their dying day, my mother’s parents had thick Southern speech and ways. About half of their nine children carried on the Southern ways; I have a three uncles and two aunts who talk Southern, who have a modest living, and they listen to country music. One of my uncles lives on the family farm in Kentucky to this day.

Since I spent most of my time with my mother growing up, I got to see a lot of her family. I was a country girl descended - I romped in the forests and I climbed 50-foot and higher pine trees and climbed atop garage roofs. I was a total tomboy. Later in life, I learned to be a hard worker like my Ma; when I was a teen she taught my brother and I how to lay carpet, how to build closets, how to create door and window frames, how to lay insulation into the walls and attic, how to hang drywall, how to plaster and patch and paint walls. All of this in a little one-story depression-era ramshackle house my Ma bought in 1983 because we could no longer afford the two-story home with basement and upstairs, and two-car garage that my Ma won in the divorce from my dad.

I got to see the family farm in Kentucky for the first time in 1989 when I was 17 years old. Grampa was dying. We went down to visit him in the hospital, which he always called ‘the vet’, and said they’d prolly treat horses better than people there. I had just graduated high school. He passed away about five months later, in November of that year, and for the first time in my life, I got to see the family torn apart like the Hatfields & McCoys. I never knew such greed from my uncle - he swooped right in and tried to make gramma sell the property in Kentucky so that all the kids could rise up and have better lives. Gramma was making a tiny amount of money every year from the state, who tapped natural gas on her 50-acre property. This wasn’t enough to spread over nine kids though and gramma knew it. But my uncle had bigger plans in mind; he wanted to strip-mine the property and make bank by selling off the natural resources. He reasoned that natural gas wasn’t the only thing in the ground, and he didn’t want the state taking from the family for peanuts any longer. He wanted to be in control of the family fortune, he’d said. This set off a huge family feud, and eventually gramma was deemed too fragile to stay on the farm by herself any longer. None of her nine kids wanted to go to Kentucky to stay on the farm with her and care for her. Gramma went to live in Florida with her eldest daughter. It was then that her youngest son ran for the family farm and holed up there as soon as gramma vacated the property, because he said the eldest son would be on his way to steal the property and strip-mine it and keep all the profit to himself.

On many occasions, the greedy uncle went down to the farm to threaten his baby brother, and he waved a gun around. The baby brother waved a shotgun back and stayed put, all these years. No one is taking the family farm and destroying the property. It’s a family heriloom, he’d say. He didn’t trust the eldest boy to be fair with the rest of his siblings. And the baby brother had some siblings who agreed with him, and the eldest brother had some siblings who agreed with him. My Ma is in the camp with her baby brother; she doesn’t want the property dug up and sold off and doesn’t trust her other brother, also younger than she, to keep his promise to rise up all his siblings out of poverty.

When gramma passed away in 2003, the feud was renewed. It had been many years since I’d been to Kentucky. I went and took my man with me. It was his first time ever seeing Kentucky and the ways of families and people from there. He got to see the feud first hand with me. He immediately took up the side of my Ma and my brother and I, and I was glad of it. He can see the greed emanating from my uncle, too.
Another incident occurred, on the day of gramma’s funeral - the greedy uncle went to the family farm across the holler from where gramma was just buried. We pleaded with him not to go. I cried. He and the siblings that are on his side went with him to the farm while we stayed at the neighbor’s house. Gun waving ensued. Greedy uncle busted his way into the farmhouse and threatened his baby brother, who was now dying of emphasema and on an oxygen tank. He didn’t care if he caused such a stir so as to excite his baby brother and cause his death, no.

That was 2003. My youngest uncle is still dying of emphysema, and you know what? One of the sisters who was on the greedy uncle’s side - she’s now diagnosed with emphysema, too, and her husband lay dying of stomach cancer.

The family is forever torn apart, like the Hatfields & the McCoys. And for what - the false promise of wealth and betterment, when all anyone ever wanted was to live on the family farm in peace - to live out their days in Kentucky on that beautiful property with the memories created of living on the farm, of neighbors and friends.

And yet, I was given pictures and memories and stories - a rich oral tradition handed down from my Ma which was given her by her Ma - the history of our family in Kentucky and Tennessee. Who’s related to who, who lived where. Mythologies, superstitions - passed to me since I was able to remember.

I began writing down our genealogy when I was a kid - perhaps about age 14. I never forgot this history. When I was introduced to computers and the Internet by some friends after I graduated college, I immediately took my history to that level.

I’ve had a love-hate relationship with my Appalachian family, with my roots, with my Self ever since 1989 when I got to see the family I loved so much tear themselves apart so viciously. I wanted no part of that heritage. I hated country music. I joined in with others in making fun of Appalachian people. I still do to this day - I have this love-hate relationship - but at least now I can listen to country music and bluegrass without wanting to slit my throat. Something started to change in me with my gramma’s death. I got to see the locals in Barbourville, KY, and how generious and hospitable they are. Something I so deeply craved to have again in my own family, which is gone forever it seems, but I saw it still alive in that town. At the same time, my grampa’s sister treated me like dirt - she called us yanks and told me I looked like a reporter to come take the family history away. She didn’t trust me. Other family members did but she didn’t. That’s when I started to change. Although angry with my great aunt, I started to grow less hostile towards mountain people, because I’d seen that outside of my own blood ties, there’s still a rich tradition of love and good ol’ Southern Hospitality. I was amazed and grateful. Whenever I have time to work on the very long list of names from my Appalachian side of the family, I always have bluegrass playing to keep me focused on the heritage, the PEOPLE, their stories.

So when my man and I started discussing wedding plans, I decided to incorporate all aspects of my family genealogies into the wedding if I could. After all, my man is only about 1/4 or less Scottish, but he’s going to wear a full kilt to represent his Scottish lineage at the wedding. So why can’t I represent ALL my lineages?

So over a week and a half ago, I did a google search for “appalachian weddings” and found Appalachian Wedding Adventures. I bit my lip, drew a deep breath, and phoned up the lady. I explained to Janice what I was looking for, and gave a very brief history of my family in Kentucky, and said I wanted to incorporate any traditions she might know about. She asked if I’d seen a movie called Songcatcher. I said no. She told me I’d better watch that movie, then. And then she wished me good luck in finding any so-called “Appalachian wedding traditions” and told me to give her a call if I ever find any myself.

Well I just watched the movie today and Janice’s wisdom is abundantly clear. And it stings and makes me think my great aunt Gladys at my gramma’s funeral, calling me a yank and a reporter and being very distrustful. She died five months after my gramma did. And the character Tom Bledsoe in the movie Songcatcher reminds me of great aunt Gladys, too. He’d said that the one thing outlanders never could get through their heads was that mountain people just want to be left alone.

I’m an outlander. A damned yank. Not one of them.

I have no heritage to welcome me - it’s all been forsaken. This is exactly why I have held onto genealogy so much over the years - in an effort to be PART of a heritage again - to be PART of a culture, to be PART of a FAMILY.

But that was all destroyed by the time I was seventeen. It’s time for me to move on. But how? I don’t know how. I’ve wanted for so long to just belong. I didn’t belong in school either - since 5th grade. I was picked on and beat on and mocked and gum spat in my hair and called Carrie by mean kids. I didn’t go to prom because I was convinced that the boy who out of the blue asked me to prom was One Of Them and that they really would pour pig’s blood on me. The boy even had eerily similar curly hair as the boy in the movie who’d asked Carrie to prom. Freaked me the fuck out.

Anyway, touching on my father’s sides of the family for a moment - he never had tradition there, either. His father was 100% Polish but he and his siblings had changed their last name to an Americanised last name because they were tired of being singled out as Polacks and being branded as troublemakers and strikers and commies or worse. And with so many Poles having been executed by Hitler in WWII, American Poles were so afraid that if anyone ever found their identity, or their children’s, or their children’s children’s, that they’d all be sent to concentration camps, too. So my dad grew up being told he was Finnish and German, when he was really half Polish.

His mother was a mix of Scottish and Canadian. Her father was 100% Scottish and her mother was Canadian, but of English heritage about a generation or two removed. When my father’s father hooked up with this English/Canadian woman, his sisters disowned him. My uncle has vivid memories of his aunts telling him and my father that they were bastard children because their parents were never married properly. By that they meant that my grandfather, who grew up staunchly Polish-Catholic, married a woman who grew up Baptist, and they were married in a Baptist church, not a Catholic church. So his sisters, my great aunts, never considered it a valid marriage. “They were like Cruella de Vil“, my uncle told me in 2004.

My paternal grandmother was an only child, while my paternal grandfather was one of nine. But neither carried much of their traditions on to their two boys - my father and my uncle. They grew up knowing of Scottish heritage, and that’s about it. They never had strict religion in the house - it was never pushed on them, which is good of course. They never had culture though. No music and genealogy passed down. Just an old shirtbox with photos of people with first names only written on the back. It was my Ma who pressed my grandma in her later years to please share any history she had, for the sake of her grandchildren.
My Ma, the Appalachian, who only ever knew that you pass on your heritage. Thank her for that.

So I still want to incorporate my heritage into the wedding. I’m Appalachian. I’m Polish. I’m Canadian. I’m Scottish.

I don’t care if people say I’m an outsider. I don’t care what they believe to be true. I know who I am. I know where I came from. You can’t take away my ancestral longings and memories.

I’ll incorporate what I can remember from my own immediate family, and I’ll add what I can here and there from traditions I find in books and online to make it more special for me.

That’s what it’s all about, after all.

It’s MY DAY, right?

Well then. STFU with all your “outlander” bullshit.

This song wasn’t in the movie, but it’s been stuck in my head since towards the end of the movie. It’s called Wayfaring Stranger and is a traditional folk song, sung here by the band Ego Likeness, a band I fell in love with at Convergence XI in San Diego in 2005.
Incidentally, there is a town named Jordan in Kentucky. It’s 373 miles west of our family farm in Barbourville, KY, likely over treacherous mountain passes. Where had this wayfaring stranger gone to? Had this stranger traveled far west, east, north or south in their time away from home? How far did this stranger have to go to get back home?