grand prairie and other lands

i'm in billings montana, sitting in a cafe. it's sunny out and cold and that actually feels pretty good (on a short walk, anyway). i went up to north dakota for thanksgiving, to be with my grandparents and to see my parents who were also visiting. i was able to see some old friends, too, which was wonderful.

i took the bus to bismarck and i had hoped to hitchhike back. for a few different reasons i ended up taking the bus again and now i have a 12 hour layover in billings. believe it or not, it's really nice. i am at this cafe, drinking coffee and just thinking. i haven't had a chance to be alone much since i got to north dakota. it's good to have some time to just write and read and think and maybe walk around a bit.

a train just rolled past this cafe; i saw it through the front windows. in another season, under a warmer sun maybe, that would be a new way to travel. new to me, i mean. i would really like to try it. but i think it would be best to wait until a summer or spring to try it for the first time. with the wind and cold steel and all.

my gramma and i looked through so many old photographs and even some scrapbooks from when she was in highschool and college. it was amazing. and so much fun. there were photographs from the nineteen teens, pictures of my gramma's parents and grandparents. and then photographs of her as a child with her family and friends. many photographs of her friends all through school; many of her family as she grew up. and then pictures of her and her own family as it began; her wedding to my grandpa, their first homes, their first child (my mother), their three other children.

the scrapbooks were incredible windows for me into another time and someone else's life. and for my gramma, they were memories in letters and napkins and notes from friends. i learned a lot about my gramma as a person, as an individual growing up and experiencing the world around her. we read letters and cards from old loves and close friends. i was able to recognize the faces of friends through several years, as photographs showed their changing faces.

the scrapbooks especially were also a revealing fragment of a culture at certain times in the past. some of it was really beautiful. a time when my gramma lived with her gramma in the summers and made close friends in her summer town, where everyone walked to each other's houses and sent notes inviting one to little gatherings of close friends. when she moved back to her parents' home after summer, letters were the only way to keep in touch with her friends who lived in her grandmother's town. as she told me, young folks didn't have cars or make phone calls to another town like we do today.

there were also things like a napkin from a restaurant called 'coon chicken' with a black cartoon face with big lips and a hat--typical racist blackface--with the words 'nation wide'. there was a lot of war propaganda....assuring us that we were good and just. a drawing of a male soldier with an image of a woman's face above him and an ode beneath: behind the gun is a man and behind the man is a woman, whether it is a mother, a wife, a sweetheart, or just a girl around the town.....my gramma's father was a really successful basketball coach and, as such, there were numerous newspaper clipping about him. sometimes in these clippings, and in other clippings hightlighting young men she knew that were shipping off for the war, were news articles about the war and little bits of propaganda praising the man with the gun or the man sweating on the assembly line. one article i remember had a photograph of a father and son from north dakota, both of which were joining the military together. this was praised as very noble.

i saw pictures of one of the places she grew up in--an old building next to a cemetary on a church grounds. her family was given the place to live in when her father took up a teaching position at the school. their neighbors would pick my gramma and her brother up in the morning on schools days in a sled pulled by horses. it was a box on runners, she told me. and there were metal boxes full of coals to warm your feet on.

the photographs left one overall impression or feeling in me--relationships. so many photos of family and friends. of parents with children, of siblings together, of several generations all together. it was a really meaningful experience for me. i feel closer to my gramma and even my grandpa (because of the photos i saw of him throughout his life and the associated stories). the photos and scrapbooks are all kept in an old trunk that a relative of mine, depew swartout, built after he came home from the civil war. in the bottom of the trunk were his old tools, really beautiful works of art themselves. the first night we started looking at the contents of the trunk, we stayed up until one or two o'clock in the morning; we stayed up almost as late the next night.

it was so cool to see all that, to think of my gramma as a young women, to see some of the changes in her life, some of the paths she followed, that were recorded in the photographs and scapbooks.

i kinda want to just keep writing but i just overheard someone saying that this cafe closes soon. which stinks--i wanted to hang out here for awhile longer. i guess i'll probably walk around downtown a bit; maybe i'll find another place to sit and read and drink some coffee.