the afternoon passes slowly as i didn't have to do the driving and won't until tonight. our place is isolated with lots of fresh air and the sun passing into the west, melting lots of the snow and giving everything a nice gentle soak and a good smell.

i have about fifteen projects on the table as usual but am taking a little break from all of them as my son is visiting and working out his future. i try to keep the marketing up but even that is hard. sometimes i just pick up the quilt now and work on that as working with my hands is one of the more relaxing things i can do. the bog is good too; i play with my son and sometimes my brother way over in pittsburgh joins on our team. this and working and walking on the land are my main joys.

the driving is steady and constant as we take kids to school, pick them up, let them hang around town, whatever. they are not completely safe, we're pretty sure. there are seven cases in the village or the area at least, and i'm convinced it's only a matter of time before it hits home. i'm hoping people they know get it before they do, but i'm not sure we'll be so lucky. then on my part i constantly try to minimize risk, making as few trips as possible as a general strategy. it's a general plan to stay alive until i can finish at least a few of the projects on the list.

four of them are family genealogy related though i have to finish the big civil-war era one first. i could move right up past the 1920 pandemic with my dad's side of the family, and do the people in council bluffs to continue my overview right up to my dad and his dad and grandfather. i could do my mom's side; they were the wallaces, and came from scotland to settle in western pennsylvania. i also have one about dedham massachusetts, upstream from boston, and another about patience - daughter of william brewster, separatist leader of the pilgrims, and grandmother great to maybe the thirteenth power. and there are possibly more in there as well; after all, i haven't even begun to look into an entire half of the tree.

one thing about non-fiction is that you have to do considerable research before you write, and you have to hold on to some of the knowledge in hopes that you won't bend it around or misrepresent it when the time comes to put it on paper. i am always questioning the degree that i project things, and put what i want to be true as opposed to what i know to be true.

and finally, got some old postcards from the nineties up. that's because my son helped me with the scanner, and i am now able to scan onto the computer some things that i've always wanted online. these were not so much masterpieces of graphic design - in fact the good scanner i got from my dad makes them show the tape, which irritates me - but they were fun to make and represent a time in my life that i have to gently relive, since it had its ups and downs. but let's get on with the reliving. i'm going through a shed full of scannable items.

and meanwhile, the sun sets gently, the moisture soaking into ground that was so, so dry.

 

spent some time looking into a certain ancestor of mine, william brewster. he was a "first comer," came over on the mayflower, and his daughter's daughter's daughter's son's daughter married my great-great grandfather.

he was a leader of the "separatists," who came to be romanticized as pilgrims seeking the freedom to worship as they pleased. now much has been written about the mayflower and in fact much of it has been romanticized - the mayflower compact, the encampment at plymouth, the leaders, which included brewster, but also myles standish and william bradford. so there is no shortage of information out there.

his sons love and wrestling were also on the mayflower. his daughters fear and patience arrived three years later, and patience married a guy named thomas prence, who went on to be governor of the colony several times. of their four children, one was a daughter who had another daughter etc. that much is clear and well documented, unlike the leveretts, who have all kinds of issues with our just proving we go back that far.

but here's the kicker. a few years back a guy wrote a book about a kid, who was one of four placed on the mayflower as servants in the care of the adults. one of these kids was named richard more, and he lived to become a very colorful character in colonial new england. but what they had found out is this: the four kids' father had placed them on the boat to get rid of them. he had discovered that his wife had had them by another man, as they had grown up to resemble that man more than they resembled him. and he'd placed them on the boat because he didn't want them around.

now william brewster and his wife, and the two sons who were with them, took on two of these kids, richard and his sister mary. mary and the other two died either on the voyage or immediately after, as the mayflower landed in a brutal winter and they were almost totally unprepared. richard not only survived but came to have an interesting book written about him. the author's premise (or one of them perhaps; i haven't read it) is that this richard guy is in some ways more representative of the people who made the colonies than some of the others.

william brewster indeed was the kind of guy for whom separatism had become a central issue. he valued freedom of worship and being away from the king. he was wanted by the king for printing 'treasonous' tracts and had been in hiding in the netherlands for several years.

but he also took on these kids. did he know about their past? did he know about why they were on the mayflower?

the virginia plantations had already had a head start. they were organizing and sending people to the colonies as they needed workers and hands, and kids were good that way. they had an investment. they had the right to trade furs in some cases or the ability to grow food and send it up and down the coast or wherever they could find a market. in terms of business, lots of people on the mayflower were simply in it for the money. the kids, of course, had no choice. their job was to survive and they in some cases just couldn't do it.

i'm curious about the moral culpability of taking on a kid or two, taking them across the ocean into an uncertain fate, knowingly (or perhaps not) separating them from their mother who, angry, was filing suit to prevent their abduction. brewster in other ways was a guy who resonated with me - printing separatist tracts, teaching esl/efl abroad, naming his kids jonathan, love, fear, patience, and wrestling. his wife mary is interesting too in that survival at that time the best i can figure depended on the strength of the women. and though patience died of smallpox after only a few years, her daughter, and that daughter's daughter, seemed to figure out how to get by and prosper, at least to a point in northeast ohio in about 1830.

it appears the mayflower wasn't the first, because jamestown actually had been established already and out here in new mexico, the spanish had been up near albuquerque and santa fe for years. and it's all a sensitive topic these days, when people are changing from columbus day to indigenous people's day, and thanksgiving is going underground, and in short it's an embarrassment to be a white guy trumpeting white colonists' murderous impulses. i'd like to prove that brewster kept his promises, treated the indigenous people with respect, and carried on like we could all live in harmony. but what good does it do for one white guy to keep his promises when those around him are butchering people and stealing land? if that was the case, he was a pawn in a larger colonial game, one that had gone on in other places besides north america. it was a general pattern, not something we white folks should go parading around bragging about.

on the other hand, because these are my ancestors, i have no qualms about at least learning more about who they were, and what they said. the challenge is to not put my own interpretation on it, or read too much into it. they were there, they had children, they survived, and here i am. that's all i know for sure.

a sense of dread has come over me, in part because i believe my niece has the covid. she was very precious to us, but careless, and she went off to college where it was rampant, in leeds, united kingdom. you already know more than you need to. let me just say my heart goes out to her, and i hope she recovers fully. it's a terrible thing to happen.

meanwhile i'll tell you what i see - there is no way to make people more aware of the seriousness of it. we tried to argue and reason. people are kind of fatalistic. i myself am afraid - i'm out here in the mountains, with as much fresh air and breeze and hard new mexico sunshine as i can take, and i'm still afraid. my teens go into town. we're not doing sleepovers; we're not giving rides to kids' friends. we are still surprised that there are only two cases in the zipcode. but we suspect that it's everywhere, all the time.

one son came down to visit from chicago. outside of town his car went over the cliff and he landed in some trees, lost his car. let the warm new mexico october settle the sun on the western horizon, over by the ridge, but i still live in a kind of dread, and stress, and general agitation. it's like i wish there was something i could do about it.

i feel like the country has gone haywire at the top, starting from the top, and results of it are everywhere. the country is feeling ready for its civil war even if he dies suddenly in the night. he was their last hope, and he's gone bonkers, infecting everyone and screaming and making tweetstorms into cyberspace. they will stick to him until the bitter end. the rest of us are just hoping that the whole thing ends, gives up, wears out, lets us have some peace. in my edginess i keep reading the news, as if that will help. or i focus on the hurricanes, the endless series of them pounding louisiana. or i concentrate on the polls - three points in ohio, eleven in michigan, five in georgia, that kind of thing. even though winter approaches at its steady pace, i can hardly wait for at least november.

but the covid approaches too. and it's stealthy, and there's no way of knowing exactly when it will be all over the place. some people will get it. i hope they make it, is all i can say. it's not a good feeling.

i no longer have to tell you all my marketing travails here - this is the last time - because i have another place to put it. but i'll give you a rundown - i have about thirty blogs, in various states of disrepair; i'm going to make a half dozen of them commercial (not this one), and i'm going to upgrade the appearance so that if you happen to land on any of the thirty, you'll have a pleasant experience, and maybe learn something, or if nothing else have good choices of places to go from there.

this is the only one where i feel like i can post any time, and not have any pressure to post a certain uplifting thing, or an educational thing, or an appropriate thing. it's just a ramble about my life, and that's why i put it in all small letters. but it's been around forever. it holds my family. it holds most of my book just passing through: autobiography and true stories from out there...all those true stories? out there? look down in the template and you'll get most of it.

for the most part i keep my family out of it. i have ten children, so that would be worth a book of its own, but i consider their stories to be theirs, and i don't want to mix up their version and mine. better to keep my ideas about bringing them up between me and them, and let them get their own ideas when their time comes to bring up their own. all that is in another realm.

on the other hand, i have a steady machine going for publication, and i operate in several genres. i've given up short stories for the time being; having about eight small volumes, i've run out of "short story" inspiration. i have a choice to make about my family stories, to start on my mom's side while I'm still deep in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, or go charging forward with my dad's side, into the nineteen hundreds and past the pandemic of 1918. I don't really know how my family dealt with that pandemic, or if they lost anyone, or how it affected towns like council bluffs or ames or wherever my grandparents were. anyway with them i'm about at 1918, and could easily keep on going with who i've got, coming into that era, but i'm still finishing the book about the civil war, and i should probably wrap that up before i move on.

i have a couple of side projects. one is to compile esl writing. the big one is to put together just passing through - i've been working on that for a long time, almost done, but life itself is so intense and bizarre that i know i'm not done. one son drove a car over the cliff the other night - and into some trees, so he lived - but that's just an example. can i wrap up a book about my life and call it finished? i'm still bringing up five kids in a pandemic. just because one is 28 and one is turning 19 in a week - technically on their own - doesn't mean i'm in the clear, and can really look back at my life. no i can't. so i'm kind of shelving that one, in favor of compiling esl writing and doing some of the other ones.

one of the things i've found is that in the non-fiction genre - historical writing about real people who were also my ancestores - there is an almost infinite wealth of rich information to dig up and share. i am actually related to a guy who was on the mayflower, and in fact one of the leaders of the pilgrims. and the pilgrims were much more hippie-ish, much more radical, than the puritans. this one guy named his kids patience, love, fear, and jonathan - i'm descended from patience - and i want to do a book about just her, and call it patience. i want to know how people at the time saw the difference - and why for example one would move to plymouth or scituate, or one of those cape towns, up to boston, or the other direction. did they see one as more liberal? or less? or more prosperous?

one of the books which i've actually done research on is powder rock - this is a place just west of boston where a lot of my ancestors ended up in about 1750. they put a powder house up on this rock overlooking dedham and the upper charles river, because they felt they might have to defend the river valley from the occupying brits who came by, soldiers who were rude and took what they wanted. this was a large and beautiful natural promontory up on the edge of the river, near what is today dedham, and the area was quickly developing. the massachusett were rapidly disappearing.

there are a couple more. thirteen altogether. these are things i really want to do, too; they include the big one, vowels in an elevator, which is about language as a self-organizing system.

but back to marketing - the picture is bleak. i don't sell a whole lot. maybe i'm kind of a backwater type writer - since i don't hire anyone to go out and market for me, all the noise i make is just a waterfall in a wide sea. or maybe it's just not good enough for people to invest big money into it. whatever the reason, i sometimes feel like i'm spinning my wheels. but i make pretty books - and i'm continuing to crank them out. whatever else is happening, that's what i have to show.