Quaking Aspen

Aspens
by Edward Thomas

All day and night, save winter, every weather,
Above the inn, the smithy and the shop,
aspens at the cross-roads talk together
Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.


Out of the blacksmith's cavern comes the ringing
Of hammer, shoe and anvil; out of the inn
The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing -
The sounds that for these fifty years have been.


The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,
And over lightless pane and footless road,
Empty as sky, with every other sound
No ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,


A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails
In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,
In the tempest or the night of nightingales,
To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.


And it would be the same were no house near.
Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,
Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear
But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.


Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves
We cannot other than an aspen be
That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,
Or so men think who like a different tree.

Casa de los Meros

It has been so long ago since I stitched this piece. I *think* it is the "House of the Pure." There was just this rather dim snapshot in my box of photographs and it is difficult to read the inscription on the wall. It is a simple piece, but I always thought it held a story.

___________________

Near The Wall of A House
by Yehuda Amichai

Near the wall of a house painted
to look like stone,
I saw visions of God.
A sleepless night that gives others a headache
gave me flowers
opening beautifully inside my brain.

And he who was lost like a dog
will be found like a human being
and brought back home again.

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.

A flower for you

To pick a flower is so much more satisfying than just observing it, or photographing it ... So in later years, I have grown in my garden as many flowers as possible for children to pick.

- Anne Scott-James

Stately: dignified and impressive; majestic, lofty

Why Your Great Grandmother Wasn't An Indian Princess:

http://www.native-languages.org/princess.htm

Excerpted from Vine Deloria. Jr..

"Indians Today, the Real and theUnreal," from Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, New York. Macmillan, no. 1-27. 1969.

"During my three years as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians it was a rare day when some white didn't visit my office and proudly proclaim that he or she was of Indian descent."

"Cherokee was the most popular tribe of their choice and many people placed the Cherokees anywhere from Maine to Washington State. Mohawk, Sioux, and Chippewa were next in popularity. Occasionally, I would be told about some mythical tribe from lower Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Massachusetts which had spawned the white standing before me.

"At times I became quite defensive about being a Sioux when these white people had a pedigree that was so much more respectable than mine. But eventually I came to understand their need to identify as partiallyIndian and did not resent them. I would confirm their wildest stories about their Indian ancestry and would add a few tales of my own hoping that they would be able to accept themselves someday and leave us alone.

"Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians. All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother's side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear.

"It doesn't take much insight into racial attitudes to understand the real meaning of the Indian grandmother complex that plagues certain whites. A male ancestor has too much of the aura of the savage warrior, the unknown primitive, the instinctive animal, to make him a respectable member of the family tree. But a young Indian princess? Ah, there was royalty for the taking. Somehow the white was linked with a noble house of gentility and culture if his grandmother was an Indian princess who ran away with an intrepid pioneer. And royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant."

"The early colonists, accustomed to life under benevolent despots, projected their understanding of the European political structure onto the Indian tribe in trying to explain its political and social structure. European royal houses were closed to ex-convicts and indentured servants, so the colonists made all Indian maidens princesses, then proceeded to climb a social ladder of their own creation. Within the next generation, if the trend continues, a large portion of the American population will eventually be related to Powhattan."

"While a real Indian grandmother is probably the nicest thing that could happen to a child, why is a remote Indian princess grandmother so necessary for many whites? Is it because they are afraid of being classed as foreigners? Do they need some blood tie with the frontier and its dangers in order to experience what it means to be an American? Or is it an attempt to avoid facing the guilt they bear for the treatment of the Indian?

"The phenomenon seems to be universal. Only among the Jewish community, which has a long tribal-religious tradition of its own, does the mysterious Indian grandmother, the primeval princess, fail to dominate the family tree. Otherwise, there's not much to be gained by claiming Indian blood or publicly identifying as an Indian."

Pottery

Missed stitches! Another early piece and I missed a couple of stitches and thus have a lopsided pot!

Interesting Seguin facts: In 1857 John McCamey Wilson, a Presbyterian minister and educator, established the first Wilson pottery. Wilson was not a potter, so the initial pottery operations were probably conducted by his slave potters, Hiram, James, George, and Andrew Wilson.

At various exhibits and talks in Seguin, I've seen some of the pottery (and photos of the pottery and early site).


The following is copied from Magazine Antiques, December 2002 issue

"One of the most important Texas potters was John McKamey Wilson Jr., who, about 1857, established the Guadalupe Pottery in Guadalupe County near Seguin, Texas. Wilson was a clergyman, lawyer, teacher, and planter, but had never been trained in pottery making. Clearly his slaves were adept, for it was they who labored in his pottery works. Pottery in Texas was fired in a groundhog kiln, so named because part of the kiln is buried in the earth. As in Edgefield, potters at Guadalupe initially used alkaline, or ash, glazes. These were common to potteries in the Deep South and are notable for the variety of colors they produced, from yellow and green to reddish and dark brown. Later Guadalupe potters used salt glazes. After emancipation the former salves became employees of the pottery, and, after the Civil War, Wilson took on a partner, Marion J. Durham, to whom he sold the pottery in 1869.

"At this point a group of former slaves, Hyrum, James, Wallace, Andrew, and George, all having taken the surname Wilson, decided to establish their own pottery in a region called Capote. H. Wilson and Company, as the pottery was known, produced only salt-glazed stonewares and, rather unusually, often marked their products. Another distinguishing characteristic of their output is the horseshoe shape of the handles on their jars and jugs in contrast to the crescent-shaped handles used almost everywhere else in the South.

"A booklet with the same title as the exhibition has been published by the museum. It is written by Michael K. Brown, the curator of the Bayou Bend Collection in Houston, and may be obtained by telephoning 713-639-7360."

Ms. Laverne Lewis Britt, the great, great granddaughter of Hiram Wilson is the author of the In Praise of Hiram Wilson The Story of a 19th Century Guadalupe County Potter. Copies can be purchased by writing to the Wilson Pottery Foundation at: P.O. Box 681802, San Antonio, TX 78268. Her book tells the in depth story of a man who owned a pottery business and later became a Reverend among many other accomplishments.

http://www.wilsonpotteryfoundation.org/
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/WW/pkwvk.html
http://seguingazette.com/story.lasso?ewcd=70c8e41847ecf15a

Life is . . .

The Life we have is very great
by Emily Dickinson

The Life we have is very great.
The Life that we shall see
Surpasses it, we know, because
It is Infinity.
But when all
Space has been beheld
And all
Dominion shown
The smallest
Human Heart's extent
Reduces it to none.

Ancestors

At the time I stitched this piece (one of my earliest pieces), I had no idea my father had a Cherokee heritage. It wasn't until the death of my mother when I was sorting through her effects that I found an envelope with a check stub indicating a Cherokee allotment payment to my father. Thus began my search for my Cherokee ancestors. I was lucky. There was a great deal written about my particular ancestors. Richard Foreman was a Scotsman from Pennsylvania who was listed in records as being 'an Indian trader.' One of his daughters married Cherokee Chief Bushyhead (so called because he had a shock of red hair as did his father). There were many records regarding my direct ancestor, Richard Bark Foreman, who was a physician and published The Cherokee Physician or Indian Guide to Health in 1849.

The original title is:

The Cherokee Physician, or Indian Guide to Health, as Given by Richard Foreman, a Cherokee Doctor; Comprising a Brief View of Anatomy, With General Rules for Preserving Health without the Use of Medicines. The Diseases of the U. States, with Their Symptoms, Causes, and Means of Prevention, are Treated on in a Satisfactory Manner. It Also Contains a Description of a Variety of Herbs and Roots, Many of which are not Explained in Any Other Book, and their Medical Virtues have Hitherto been Unknown to the Whites; To which is Added a Short Dispensatory. This book was published by Edney and Dedman, Ashville, North Carolina in 1849 and written by Richard Foreman and James W. Mahoney.

My Foremans were leaders on the very sad Trail of Tears.

Richard Bark's half-brother Stephen Foreman attended Princeton Theological School and was a Presbyterian minister. He also worked with Elias Boudinot on the first Cherokee newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix, first printed in 1828 in New Echota, Georgia.

A nephew, Edward Wilkerson Bushhead partnered with William Jeff Gatewood to establish the first newspaper in San Diego, California: The San Diego Union.

An aside: a relative on my maternal side was the lawyer hired by the Cherokee Nation to bring suit against the State of Georgia for properties lost when the Cherokees were forced from their homes. Another relative on my maternal side was given land in Florida "for driving out the Cherokees" at the time of the Trail of Tears. As William Least Heat Moon wrote in his book Blue Highways, my material and paternal families have been skirmishing ever since!

http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/F/FO021.html

While digging into my Cherokee roots, I learned that the humorist Will Rogers is also related to my Foreman family and lived for a time with a g-g-g (or maybe more greats!) aunt and uncle.

The research is fascinating and I love all of the puzzle-solving.