an important date

 by Rain Trueax

Well, it's come around again-- our anniversary. This time it happens on a Saturday, which was the same 56 years ago. I remember a lot of the preparations that day. It was very much a family operation with flowers done by aunts-- except my bouquet, which my grandmother insisted on buying. The groom paid for my wedding gown as well as contact lenses so I could actually see my wedding. I did my own hair (as you can probably tell). Our attendants were two-- my cousin. She and i went shopping for her dress that she'd be able to use for her high school dances. I had no color requirement and she chose a soft green.

My brother was the best man, something that made him never want a wedding with all the trimmings. My mom sang before the service. Afterward, my father-in-law took the photos, except the one he was in. We had the reception back at my parents' small home with again family serving cake, coffee and punch-- no liquor as this was not a drinking family, and I wasn't 21 yet anyway.

 

 

What it makes me think about it today, 56 years after that day, is the importance of family in my life. I come from a long line of people who also valued family. On one side no divorces that I know of until more recent times. 

 

flowers that Paul brought home to celebrate the day and a sculpture I made over 20 years ago where it represents how the couple sustain each other against the wind. Originally I had thought of making it be a rock, which is what it takes to keep a clay sculpture upright, but then I realized, the relationship is the rock-- it has to be her. Years back, I carved from soapstone a woman with one child on her hip and one in her arms. It was me.

The first of my people came over in the early 1600s to what was then New Amsterdam. It was told me that they were running away from the law. After some research, I realized they were probably Walloons and fleeing religious persecution in Europe. When they got to the New World, they changed the spelling of their surname and split up-- or so goes the family mythology. When we did the DNA testing thing, it validated all I'd been told about the family's origins.

Some years back, I spent some time on ancestry research. Given where they lived, census records, and the times, I think my people lived simple lives, worked hard and lived in the North, where I am quite sure none ever owned a slave and doubt they'd have wanted to. they steadily moved west. By the time I got to my great grandfather's life, I learned he was a hard-rock miner. Their twelve children were born in Nebraska and what would become South Dakota. It is said, family mythology, of course, that my grandfather was the first white baby born in the Black Hills. The fact that it was land taken from the Lakota is left out of the mythology but not of history given the dates.

So, I grew up surrounded by regular gatherings of family members who worked for their living with their hands. My dad was in the meatpacking business. My uncles were cannery workers or in one case, a cop. Mom was a stay at home mom until i was in college when she began cleaning houses. I paid for my college tuition with cleaning an office building once a week.

Why say all this right now? It comes from our times and what I am reading about current ideas as to what it means to be an American. It's also as a remembrance of becoming a wife who would raise a family of her own. Family is on my mind. It was important in my life. Still is in terms of who I see myself as being. The daughter, the granddaughter, the niece, the cousin, the sister, the wife, and then the parent and grandparent. We raised our children with the ideas we'd been taught-- conservative values which has nothing to do with politics. That, as well as teaching them what we had been taught-- or so we hoped.

photo taken by Ranch Boss

What I have been reading for months is that the BLM, which is not about black lives mattering but about a political agenda which, among other things, involves dismantling the concept of a nuclear family. When I went looking for what they claim to want, the sites had been taken down. I looked further and found a site that had saved the material, but of course, it was a conservative site; so there are those who won't believe anything from it. I will put a piece of it here anyway.

Visit the Black Lives Matter website, and the first frame you get is a large crowd with fists raised and the slogan “Now We Transform.” Read the list of demands, and you get a sense of how deep a transformation they seek.

One proclaims: “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear-family-structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’ that collectively care for one another."

You could say oh they don't mean it. How do you know? What if they do? I saw the Buffalo school teaching proposals for fourth grade and it was very much trying to turn children against their own parents due to them having white privilege and not supporting the proper ideological positions. Doesn't that sound like how Communism works? The state has the power. The thing is, who will the state be?

My thinking on all of this, including my marriage, which is very much a partnership as he does editing and publishing of my books among other things, has much impacted my novels. The most recent books involve a family where magick is part of what they are born with for abilities. There have been five of these with two more in the works. Family is their strength and where they go to when they hope to fight evil. The concepts are simple. Maybe too simple for today.

The top two books are not in the series but do have the common theme of a world beyond what most of us think we know while what we see seems very much the usual. The next five are of a family. The two planned novellas will continue with some characters from the series.

For now, these books are available in Kindle Unlimited but we are thinking of making them wide in October since they've had few borrows. We shall see. Whatever we do, it'll be a joint choice.