Marsland

Unless you are in my family circle, I'd bet you a whole quarter that you've never heard of Marsland, much less know where it is. So you might imagine my surprise when during an insomnia induced fit of late night random Googling, I found myself at this page on ghost towns. Even more surprising, I found myself looking at a photo of my own great grandparent's home.

  My great grandparents were James Mundy Tollman and Flora Caroline Maika. They built this home in 1912 of cement blocks made on site. This was their second home in Marsland, the first being on a homestead nearby.  This photo was taken just after its completion and the farm eventually expanded to include a large barn, cattle pets, a smoke house, an ice house, huge garden area, silo, and hog pen.  A family letter written by one of the children, James Perry Tollman, written in his retirement details life in Marsland and on the family farm in vivid memories. One of the amusing comments is that the neighbors were always stopping by to check on the building progress and they were quite perplexed by the modern bathroom that was being installed...apparently one of the first in the county...especially since there was a perfectly good two holer not far from the kitchen door!

Marsland is located in western Nebraska in Dawes County. It's pretty remote. In its heyday, the population was about 800, according the the Nebraska Historical Society virtual Nebraska. The nearest large town is Chadron. Today, Marsland is just a shadow of itself, perhaps deserving of the ghost town designation to the outside world. 

Not for me, a woman who hears the whispers of long gone ancestors. And apparently not for the Nebraska Historical Society; shortly after seeing the house on the ghost town site, I came across it again while doing genealogical research on a Tollman aunt. The Nebraska Historical Society has done an excellent job incorporating the internet with their holdings and I found the house listed in a survey of historic buildings in Nebraska. It was not identified, just shown as an unknown home.  So I contacted them offering details should they be interested. 

A very enthusiastic response followed the next day and I've sent them several photos and other bits of family information to help them document and preserve this part of Nebraska history.  The Tollman family has deep roots in Nebraska and although it is scattered across the USA today, family reunions are still held in western Nebraska and always include a stop at the old house.

 The old house may not last forever, but it sure feels great to have helped it become a part of Nebraska history.

The Cookie Factory

Just some of what's been keeping me busy these days. We have eldery neighbors and single moms I'm going to surprise.

Little Holiday Joys

Winter holidays are about the warmth of memories. These little china musician angels are among the fondest of my childhood. Carefully stored for most of their lives, they'd appear magically to herald the holiday season. I remember them often being arranged on a small gate-leg table with fancy turned legs adding to its charm. The candles were always old fashioned bayberry because according to ancient tradition ~

A bayberry candle burned to the socket, will bring joy to the heart and gold to the pocket.

In retrospect, I think maybe Mom must have been buying imitation bayberry. Eventually a house fire took most of our family mementos. Sad yes, but thanks to eBay, but not tragic. With a little patience and good fortune, I've discovered that joy can indeed be purchased quite reasonably and the sweetness of memories is not diminished if a little gold leaped from my pocket to another.

Thanksgiving Thoughts

Happy Thanksgiving, Family and Friends. We all seem to take stock at Thanksgiving and I've read gratitude lists with everything on them from a warm place to sleep, food to eat, an Xbox and even TiVo. And they're all good. I think its ok to be grateful for the luxury of material things you enjoy.

For me, it's not important what you may be thankful for or about, it is that you actually are in living in the moment long enough to be in a state of thankfulness.

Tonight as I reflect, I am thankful that I live in a country where blithering idiots can speak their mind and I can ignore them.

I am thankful for my bills because they remind me on trying days that I have my dream job that allows me to pay those bills.

I am thankful for the sounds of The Viking's C-Pap and the snoring. One day I may not hear them.

I'm thankful for the challenges life has presented me and that I wasn't behind the barn door when resourcefulness was being handed out.

I'm thankful for the luxury of introspection.

I'm thankful for the amazing strength of friendships discovered in unexpected places.

And, ok... I'm also grateful for TiVo, chocolate, chai latte for my Keurig, men who wink and the Internet. I'm just as shallow as everyone else.

In my email today I got a one liner that says it beautifully:

Thanksgiving is good; Thanks living is better.

Mother Natures Finery

In New England, Mother Nature rails agains the encroaching winter like a fiesty, willful teenager. She dresses in her flamboyant, firey reds and dazzling oranges as though she is defiantly daring winter to rob her of her finery.

Ultimately, she knows she will be donning her gray and white robes but she won't give in silently, she wants you to remember her in brazen splendor.

Fall in New England reminds me of Scarlett O'Hara dressing up in grand style sewn from her mama's green velvet drapes, masquerading as the once elegant lady she was, preparing to ask for help from the Yankees. Tara may be a thousand miles away from New Hampshire, but for me, that's fall in New England.

Here in Texas, Mother Nature shows us a different aspect of her glory. Like a grand old Victorian lady who cherishes her memories of younger, wilder days but knows there is nothing to gain by challenging the inevitable, she presents a maturity earned by experience. No less beautiful, but tempered.



She dresses herself in deep mossy greens, coppery russets and butterscotchy golden hues as she prepares to meet the winter. Grasses turn a soft faded honey as they prepare to rest. Gracefully, she accepts her subtley colored brown cloak. She wears it lightly.




I heard it said recently that no one would ever come to Texas for the beauty of the fall foliage.

Beauty, I believe, is where you find it.

Great Grandma Flora and the Green Monster

This post is a response to the Ancestors Ball Blog Party.

We're approaching the holiday season, beginning now with our modernized holiday of Halloween. It's roots are much different, being the time of rememberence of our ancestors and the loved ones we've lost. In the very olden days, this was a special, spirit filled time when the veil between our world and the spirit grew thin and we could feel each other's presences more clearly.

I've been spending almost all my free time recently working with my sister on our family trees. Ancestry has been important in our families and we're lucky because both sets of grandparents had research that we've been able to work with. Unfortunately, enough of it has been discovered to be inaccurate that now it's left to us, my sister and I, with the advantages the Internet provides researchers, to straighten things out.

No matter many names and dates I find, I still wonder what their daily lives were like. Especially the women. We think women today shoulder most of the burden of homemaking and childrearing. I shudder to imagine my great,great grandmothers' lives. I wonder a lot about the meals they prepared. I have this fantasy that one day a handwritten recipe book belonging to one of my great grandmothers or aunts will appear on Ebay and I'll win it.

This is my great grandmother, Flora. She taught school before she married. She may have been a bit unusual in her day, not because she was a teacher but because she did not marry until she was 28 years old. I met her when I was five. Photos preserved the day, but I wish I could remember it. The black and white photo is her on that day, aged 85.

A few recipes and family traditions have survived through my mother's family. One of them most of us wish would have never begun, yet in reality it is very likely the most important of them all because it ties generations together across time.

Jello has been popular since its introduction in the early 1900's. But it wasn't until 1930 and the introduction of the lime flavor that this ghastly tradition began. Although I don't really know when Flora began making this "treat", our family history, as passed to us by my mother, is that the dreaded green jello salad was made as a special treat for visiting family. What made it special....prepare yourselves.... marachino cherries ...ok, not so bad..... American cheese bits.....getting worse...and OLIVES!

Mom would make this "treat" every Thanksgiving and Christmas, lovingly bringing it to the table each holiday with the story of her grandma making it and loving it as a child. (I think they had not yet discovered real food at that time.) As you can imagine, children in the late 1960's weren't nearly as enamored of lime jello "salad" as a child in the 1940's obviously was!

I grew up thinking this was a distinctly Flora Tollman creation. Recently, I have discovered how completely wrong I was. It seems as though someone in the corporate Jello kitchens decided that through the war years, lime would be the perfect vehicle to enable homemakers to use up bits and pieces of their non-rationed foods to perk up their meals. How ingenious.

Jello concoctions became almost patriotic, in their own way, and certainly allowed Mom to give the family a little treat. I also think they musth have had lower expectations back then about what qualified as a treat.

So that explains the beginning of the very strange combination of ingredients. But it doesn't explain why Jello kept at it through the 50's and 60's!

So now I know truthfully, my great-grandmother wasn't just being frugal, she probably was considered downright fashionable to be serving a weirdly colored jiggling mass of suspended bits of artificially colored food. Cool.

What I also know now is something more profound. My mother, who is in her late 70's, continues to make this, even though she is the only one who eats it. Really, she only has a couple of bites and is done with it. But that's not why she makes it. She makes it and brings it to the table in order to suddenly become transformed into a six year old little girl, thrilled to be having dinner at her elegant grandmother's formal table. When my mother sees the glistening greenness, I believe she sees the shining eyes of her grandmother and for an instant, feels the sense of belonging, security and love that you only get when a heartstring is tied.

And I leave you now, Wendelynn, daughter of Jolene, who is the daughter of Clara, who is the daughter of Flora who is the daughter of Fredericka. In this season of remembering our ancestors, I hope you'll find something that ties your heartstrings too.

Waiting for the Witching Hour