Tuesday a.m.

My head's not clear yet, but I think I'll write anyway. Do you designate days? If my life were a grade school classroom and I was asked to help make the bulletin board for today I would cut out white cars and blue highways from construction paper, because today is drive recovery day. I left the snowbound farm yesterday at ten a.m. and arrived home at eight forty five p.m. That's very good time if you consider that we spent an hour and a half at my brother's place in Milwaukee having lunch. I hadn't seen him in a year. I hadn't been home in year. I didn't really know that.

You'll be happy to know that I did stop in Sun Prairie on the way up to buy a power ball ticket. You'll also be happy to know that I didn't win, so there will be no wrangling with camels or needle eyes in my near future. What I did win on my trip was family time and some closure. I hadn't realized that I was avoiding going home.

We moved a great deal when I was a kid, every three or four years. It seems like that rhythm has stayed with me because I seem to reinvent myself on that schedule. I may have lived in Kville for ten years in an attempt to put down some roots, but I still moved houses and identities on that same schedule, from undergraduate, to graduate student, to teacher. Those were all very different lives with different friends and different ways of being in the world. I am changing again now, but into what I have no idea.

Amid all the shifts of my three-year lifecycle there has been one constant: my grandmother's farm in mid state Wisconsin.

Wednesday p.m.

I've decided to push my nostalgia back a little bit, into the history of my family. This is my Grandmother Laura's one room school house in rural Wisconsin. It's still standing and is a short drive from the family farm.



Laura didn't grow up on what is now our family's proverbial home base. While she was working as a domestic in a wealthy Chicago suburb for the Bell family - yes the phone company Bell - her parents began renting the farm for ten dollars a month.

She bought the property in 1954 with money she made working in the Wisconsin Tissue Mills paper plant in Neenah, on the Northern edge of Lake Winnebago and she continued to rent the second floor to her folks. Here's a marriage shot of Freddy and Laura from 1926.



She and Freddy divorced soon after my father was born and he died not too long after from pneumonia and a collapsed lung.

She raised three boys by herself - this is Easter 1940 - the short one is my father



I like to juxtapose photos that show the passage of time - either forward or back ward. In this picture my father is on the far right.




I sat around the kitchen table on Sunday with all three boys (the youngest of whom is 73), my mother & my aunt Shirley while it snowed heavily outside, while the Daytona 500 spun itself out on the kitchen TV. We talked about family history and we looked at some “new” pictures of the farm. My grandmother had been befriended by a women from California named Helen Arnette and Helen in turn had been to visit my parents. She'’s descended from Levi Peter Schumacher, the man who built our farmhouse in 1887.

So we get to do more then and now shots of the farmhouse.

1957:


1887:


1998


1887


1998