The View from My Window

Iris I can see from my window

The view from the window above my desk is the same view from which I have observed the world since I was a child.  The row of lilac bushes I loved every spring is now a bed of iris, but the lilac bushes aren't far away, ...only a few steps to the west, where my mother transplanted them to form a patio created with concrete my father had salvaged from the adjacent farm he had bought.  The barn was torn down to raise crops instead of cows.  Over the years that salvaged concrete had served many needs, one of which was being piled into the frame for the front porch when my father replaced the wooden floor with a new concrete floor.  Did that stabilize the new concrete or just reduce the amount of new concrete needed?  We were a thrifty family, and we tried not to let anything go to waste.

Mother's thrift was primarily in the kitchen and at her sewing machine.  There was a canning jar in the refrigerator, and at the end of meals if there were leftover vegetables in the serving bowl, or even just a bit of juice, into that jar it went.  If somehow a piece of meat had been left on the platter, it went into the jar.  By the end of the week Mother would transform the odd collection of leftovers into soup or stew, although she might have needed to add a package of ground beef from the freezer.

She was a master at the sewing machine, and the prettiest prom dress I ever had was created from red taffeta lining from an old coat and curtain fabric for the kitchen windows that she had decided not to use.  I was mortified.  How could I go to a party dressed in curtains and coat lining!  It took old photographs to convince me that it really was the prettiest dress she ever made for me. 

Black swallow tail caterpillars devouring my garden 

But, back to the view from my window...  Today I see the foundation from the old hen house from my window, but once there truly was a hen house, and collecting the eggs and feeding the chickens was my job.  If I forgot to close the doors in the evening to keep varmints out at night, I had to go out after dark to close the doors.  Today it looks like a few steps, but when I was eight, in the darkness it looked like a mile.  The chicken house had been torn down when we came back to the farm, but I didn't want the old foundation removed.  Now that old foundation keeps the Bermuda grass out of the herb garden.  Consistent with my family training, I found a new purpose for something old.

At some time in my teen years, a daybed was put in the alcove of my window.  The wall to the right of the window was just wide enough for a peg board, and I faithfully arranged and rearranged photographs, invitations, cards and other odds and ends--things that had a special (if temporary) meaning to me.  I guess little has changed.  Today that wall holds my FHSU Alumni Achievement Award and the plaque recognizing my Georgia Author of the Year Award presented by the Council of Authors and Journalists.  I believe there is just the perfect place for the Notable Kansas Book Award for 'Prairie Bachelor.'  Old habits are hard to change.  

Christmas Guests



Angels & Ancestors Tree

Every holiday season I invite our relatives for a visit to the Beck family ancestral home that my husband and I have restored.  They all arrived last week, both of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.  Because so many elderly unmarried aunts are forgotten at the holidays, we invite them too, as well as some of our young nieces and nephews.  With all of our pets scattered among them, it is quite a crowd.  I've never actually counted, but there must be fifty or more. 

 

In case you haven't guessed, our holiday guests arrive as photographs, and rather than finding beds for everyone, I find the perfect place on our Christmas tree.  When we restored the Victorian farm house built in 1899 by my great-grandmother Susan and her son Royal, I decided it needed a Victorian Christmas tree.  I was lucky to find some Victorian picture frame ornaments perfect for what I had in mind, and that was the beginning of our "Angels & Ancestors Tree."  The Victorian theme was enhanced by candle lights and cut-glass globes, and I planned a color scheme of crystle, gold and silver.  Then I began collecting beautiful angel ornaments. 

 

Aaron & Susan Beck w/ daughter Anna at upper left



 

The tree goes up as soon after Thanksgiving as I can convince my husband to help me assemble it, and it remains well into the New Year.  Every ancestor from six generations of whom I have a photograph is on the tree, along with other special relatives and all of our past pets.  Our young nieces and nephews are among the relatives on the tree, in hopes that discovering their pictures will encourage them to ask questions about their own ancestors. 

Royal & Lillian Beck w/ Geo. & Theresa Hall upper left

 Although he is not a relative, I wish I had a picture of Isaac to add to the tree.  I would hang his ornament near my Beck and Hall great-grandparents so these old friends would be nearby.  Someplace not too far away I would hang the pictures of my paternal grandparents, both of whom Isaac knew.  In his journal, Isaac wrote about how efficiently young Royal Beck handled a transaction at the post office when his father, the postmaster, was away the afternoon that  Isaac needed to mail important documents.  The only family to whom Isaac mentions having loaned some of his precious books and stereoscope views was the Aaron Beck family.  Isaac was also close friends with the George Hall family.  In his final illness, Isaac stayed with the Halls for a time and would perhaps have been cared for by my 15-year-old paternal grandmother, Lillian Hall.

 

 



Larry & Lyn Fenwick

The farm house is filled with memories--not only my own memories but also the memories shared with me by my parents, my aunts, uncles, and cousins.  My genealogy research sometimes makes it seem as if I knew ancestors who died long before I was born.  Even Isaac added to that store of memories in his journal entries about my ancestors. 

 

I don't really believe in ghosts, but I do like to imagine that the family and friends who shared important events at our farm over the years, both happy and sad, might somehow know that we have rescued the old farm house in which dinners, parties, wakes, holidays, announcements, romances, loud laughter, and shared secrets occurred.  There may not be ghosts in the old farm house, but at Christmas every year, their spirits are remembered.