Leave ... or stay and fight?

By JoAnne Young

 

I am driving through Florida and Georgia and Tennessee as I write this, rolling back to Nebraska from a two-week stay at the beach house of the Young Youngs (Joseph, Michaela, Ky and Finn). 

 

For 14 days I’ve touched the sand and salt water every day. Watched the sun rise over the waves. Eaten wonderful seafood in restaurants surrounded by lapping water. 

 

Earlier this year, we visited our oldest son in San Diego and our daughter’s family in Denver. All of these are places where the living is pretty easy; all places where we could pull up our Nebraska roots and move, as they did.

 

Many people have vacated this state. Sometimes the state’s politics and policies figure into those moves; frequently it’s for family, lifestyle, economy, taxes. Even former governors and U.S. senators move away from Nebraska. 

 

So I ask myself daily, should we – the last of the Young clan to reside here – leave, too? Or do we stay and fight for a place that has been home for so long, that has established family memories and good friends, but that has distanced itself from me with its stubbornness of conservative politics, its failure to embrace women and people of color in its state leadership, and its refusal to protect the LBGTQ+ community in state law. 

 

I watch as it becomes increasingly difficult for people who ran for office to help their communities and to speak for people who aren’t really able to speak for themselves. 

 

We aren’t confused about the fact that we live in a red state, with Republican rule in the legislative and administrative branches. Money frequently determines policy. That’s due in part to a governor whose net worth is estimated at $60 million to $70 million and whose family’s net worth is in the billions. A governor who uses that money to fund handpicked candidates for the Legislature and other offices and defeat those who don’t walk his line. He uses it to thwart the will of the majority of lawmakers and disrupt the results of petition processes with which he disagrees.

 

I talked today to one of our lawmakers, Sen. Megan Hunt of Omaha, about why she has chosen the fight. I see hers as an uphill battle. Thirty-six years old, a woman, a member of the LGBTQ+ community, a single mom, a progressive.  

 

The question of whether to stay or go is one Nebraskans of all ages ask themselves, she told me. She has pondered it herself. What people don’t talk about is the guilt of leaving, of turning your back on the people who don’t have that option. We all need to live in a place where we have faith that we can reach our dreams. 

 

Politics are getting nastier, she said. Leaders are getting more authoritarian. It’s more difficult to be an elected official. 

 

The fights in state government these days are not substantive, she said. They are “dumb culture wars” that don’t matter deeply to the needs and wants of real people. It’s frustrating, she said, and nothing more than playing at politics and lawmaking.

 

She quoted wisdom from Jewish Talmudic sages: “You are not required to finish your work, yet neither are you permitted to desist from it.”

 

The obligation is in the effort, not the outcome. 

 

A mental health break is good, she said. Hers would take her to the mountains of Norway. When and if she gets there, she will know her contribution has been made, that she did what she could. She’d be more than ready for the freedom leaving could bring. 

 

For me, I will put off the question at least another year, maybe two. I will fight, not out of a sense of obligation, but the result of inspiration. My work with state Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks, who ran valiantly for Congress but was defeated by the candidate handpicked by Ricketts and other conservative Republicans, showed me the beauty is in the journey, not the victory or defeat. 

 

So in January, as a new legislative session begins, I plan to go to the Capitol, to be the watchful citizen, an observer of what the lawmakers and administrators are up to. And I will report back, a battlefield correspondent at least for a while. 

Thank You, Madame Speaker

 By Marilyn Moore

I have been amazed, no, appalled, at the vitriol and hatred flung at Rep. Nancy Pelosi, (D, CA), Speaker of the House.  In the election just concluded, and in the election of 2020, and 2018, and most likely the federal elections before that, she has been the target of outrageous political ads, demeaning her intelligence, her leadership, her courage, her, well, everything about her.  

She is bright. She is strong.  She is courageous.  She knows the rules of the House, and she plays by them, and uses them to get things done.  She has been elected to the Speaker’s position twice.  She is the only woman to have held that position, to have been second in line to the presidency.  

She has been exceptionally effective, leading the large, messy, sometimes unwieldy House to the adoption of laws that, in her words, help the American people.  Laws that increase access to health insurance, laws that cap the cost of insulin for seniors on Medicare, laws that let the federal government negotiate the prices for subscription drugs, likely bringing down the cost for consumers.  Laws that increased the child credit tax during the pandemic, that provided payroll protection for small businesses and their employees.  Laws that build bridges and highways and broadband internet, and that provide increased services for veterans. Laws that protect the marriages of LGBTQ couples and inter-racial couples.  Laws that made real the campaign promises of presidents and legislators.  Laws which are widely popular with American voters.  

And for all that, she has been a prominent target of scorn by the opposing party, and by some within her own party.  And that would be because….well, not because of the positions she has taken.  Those positions have been shared by a majority of the members of the House while she has been Speaker, but theirs are not the faces on the anti ads and political cartoons.  It’s not just because she’s from California; lots of political office holders are from California.  It’s not because of her age, or her clothes, or the fact that she’s a devout Catholic; other officials share those qualities, too.  It’s because she’s smart, and courageous, and strong, and persistent…and because she’s a she.  And especially because she’s very effective.

Nancy Pelosi is, of course, in good company.  Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, Patty Pansing Brooks, the leaders of the suffragist movement, and thousands more over the years….all have been disparaged, not only for their political stances, but for their gender.  And yet….and yet….all persisted, and they have done way more than their part to assure the strength of our democratic institutions.   

Words from an essay written by Clarissa Pinkolo Estes have been shared by Patty Pansing Brooks several times.  “One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul…. To display the lantern of soul in shadowy times like these -- to be fierce and to show mercy toward others; both are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.”  I remember the first time I heard Patty quote these lines….and I think of them every time brave women stand up and step forward, knowing they will be attacked for who they are, but they do it anyway, and they give strength to others in doing so.  

A few days ago, Speaker Pelosi announced she would step down from the leadership position of the Democratic caucus.  She did so with grace and class, noting that the beauty of the U.S. Capitol is because of what it represents…the work of a democracy, the work of the American people.  She named those who had been beside her all the way, including her family.  She celebrated the increase in the number of women in the Democratic caucus from when she was first elected to Congress 35 years ago, from 12 to 90.  A seven-fold increase in a little more than a generation, cause for celebration.  And quoting from the Book of Ecclesiastes, she said that there’s a time for everything…and it’s time for a new generation of leaders to step up.  And so they will.

She has persisted, she has led, she has paved the way for others.  It seems she has, for the most part, been able to ignore the mean girls, and the mean boys.  (Except for the hateful and mean-spirited comments about her husband, who was assaulted in their San Francisco home just before the election.  The pain of those remarks was visible…and those remarks were quite simply inexcusable.) She will continue to serve as a member of the House, and she will be a source of wisdom and strength for others. 

This has been a hard election, and while there are many individual races that did not have the outcome for which I had so hoped, the overall outcome at the federal level was far better than I anticipated.  Still, there are rocky roads ahead, but they are roads that we navigate in a democracy.  Before we enter the next session of Congress, I say with full gratitude, thank you, Madame Speaker.  

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Class of ’72: What would I say to the 18-year-old me?

By Mary Kay Roth

Dark, soulful almost brooding eyes.  That’s what strikes me most when I gaze upon this photograph of the girl I once was.  As a senior in high school, she was a gentle spirit, shy, geeky.

But studying this image, snapped some 50 years ago, there is so much I cannot remember.  What was she feeling, thinking?  What would I tell her today?

The photograph came back into my life, recently, wearing it as a name tag for the Lincoln Southeast High School 50th reunion.

And though I know we approach reunions with some amount of trepidation, strangely, age is a great equalizer. Nobody has acne at the half-century high school milestone, but all of us sport wrinkles. Politics loom, but an unspoken truce seems to provide temporary respite from election debate. We seem less preoccupied with clothes and career paths, more mellow showing off photos of grandchildren and talking hip replacements.  

No, I don’t want to hop “Back to the Future” to revisit the class of ’72, ala Marty McFly.  But even though reunion weekend has now passed, for some reason I have left my high school name tag on the kitchen table and look upon that yearbook photograph daily. 

I remember a young woman who was quiet, pensive, nerdy, bookish.  Editor of the creative writing magazine.  Not popular.  Not  bullied.  

Yet as I look at Mary at 18, I wonder about all the things she didn’t know: What would the 68-year-old Mary tell her now?

     * Perhaps the very most important advice of all:  For gosh sakes, never sell that precious 1969 Mustang. 

     * And ignore the mean girls.

     * I know it sounds crazy, but those new-fangled things called computers – they are worth learning something about.

     * One pimple – even on prom night – is not a true catastrophe.  

     * Be nice to the students everyone teases.  At lunch, try not to worry about sitting with the popular kids – look for the kids who are sitting alone.

     * And being alone is not a bad thing. 

     * You are merely a late bloomer.  You will get boobs.  Eventually.

     * And someday you will no longer iron your hair, nor coil it around enormous orange juice cans overnight, dreaming of tresses as arrow-straight as Peggy Lipton (from the Mod Squad). Someday, believe it or not, you will love your curly, unruly hair.

     * No, “he” is not the love of your life.

     * But your dad is another story.  Remember how he danced the polka with you at the father-daughter high school dance, even though he had no clue how to dance the polka?  Give that sweet man – more hugs. (For that matter, give your mom more hugs, and your grandparents.)

      * Pay more attention in your home economics class.

      * You are smarter than you think.  At the same time, please don’t measure your worth in grade averages and SAT scores.  You are so much more than a number.

      * Yeah, it sucks that you work in high school and others don’t.  But someday you will not only have a deeper understanding of those who wait tables and take fast food orders – you will tell glorious tales of the strange adventures of a long-distance telephone operator (a job you didn’t realize was on the endangered species list).

      * Kids who are often labeled as “losers” – the ones who know welding, mechanics, woodworking – they will be golden someday. 

      * Quiet people are not inferior.

      * Stop apologizing when you spend Friday night with a book.  Reading will be your friend forever.

      * Besides, nothing good happens after midnight when you are a teenager.

      * Listen to your wisest of teachers. Ignore the ones who claim, as a woman, your career choices are limited.

      * Take nothing for granted.  Just a few months after high school graduation, the U.S. Supreme Court will confer your right to have an abortion.  Fifty years later, that same court will take it away.

      * I know you have a soft voice.  Speak up anyway. 

      * Your heart is much more resilient than you think.  

      * You will survive high school.  OK, so you’re not a cheerleader, a student athlete, have the starring role in the high school musical, and you agonize over not fitting in.  Someday you will find your fit. Trust me on that.

***********

On Saturday eve at the close of reunion festivities, my friend Pam and I were packing up remains of the “Memorial Table”– photographs of fellow students who had passed away – when a favorite high school pal wandered up to talk.  Quietly, she contemplated those pictures of students we had lost.  Quietly, she told us she had stage 4 cancer – in her liver, pancreas, lungs.

I’m not sure I want to tell the young Mary about that moment, nor about any of the students we have lost over these past decades.  I’m not sure an 18-year-old can grasp that sort of raw fragility.  I’m not sure this 68-year-old can.

Instead, I think I would tell young Mary that, yes, she will have sorrow in her life.  But she will have glorious moments of joy, magic, adventure.  I would tell her to live with abandon, love well, take risks, embrace the mystery. 

I would tell her that she is enough.  She will be ok.  

Even if she does sell that Mustang.

 

Keeping Her in Circulation

by Mary Reiman

We were never going to be ready. For 99 years she brought joy and goodness to the lives of everyone she met. We can’t imagine our world without her in it. Thanks to her kindness and generous spirit, we learned what is really important in life.

Mom passed away last week. We know she is already in heaven fixing roast beef, scalloped corn, mashed potatoes and gravy, with peach pie for dessert, as she did for the men baling hay and picking corn. If anyone deserved to go to heaven, it’s our mom. She didn’t have a middle name, so we lovingly gave her one: Bug.  She was our Junebug and the nursing home staff affectionately called her Junebug as well.

Her days were spent in the kitchen baking, preparing meals, and taking snacks to the men in the field at 10 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. In-between those hours there was mowing the yard, walking beans, doing the laundry with a ringer washer, taking those heavy loads of laundry up the steps to the clothesline outside and doing everything else asked of her. But when we got home from school every day, she was back in the kitchen waiting for us to tell her about our day…as if she had been there waiting for us all day. 

There are so many stories we could share about her. We could talk about how many games of Yahtzee we played or how many jigsaw puzzles we put together. We could talk about how many pies, cakes, cookies, jello salads and casseroles she made over the years. We could talk about how many letters she wrote and how many cards she sent...and who received the funniest one. No doubt she kept Hallmark in business for many years! 

In 1983, I gave her a blank book and asked her to write some of her life stories. She returned it to me in 1994. I hear her voice in every word I read. It began “All the wonders of nature, change of seasons and new creations of our Lord and Father makes us thankful we have always been plain country folks. There is great joy and satisfaction in preparing the soil, planting, waiting for it to come up, to grow and to mature to the harvest stage.” 

She grew up in the depression, the youngest of five children. “It was a small farmhouse with just 2 bedrooms, but Mom and Dad, one sister, 3 brothers, and a hired man managed to find a place to sleep and eat and we all grew up learning to love the river, hills, trees, cattle and learning what hard work meant!” 

“We had a wood and coal range for cooking and a pot belly wood and coal heater in the living room...We always kept the basement full of split wood and coal. It was my job each night after school to fill the wood boxes which were kept behind each stove. Then I filled the hot water reservoir on the range. The water was carried from an outside pump house and pumped by hand. Always on Sunday night I filled the boiler, which was heated on the range, for Monday’s laundry. The soiled white shirt collars and soiled dish towels were soaked overnight to remove any spots, so they would be sparkly white when hung on the line. The clothes would freeze stiff when hung on the line in winter and later brought inside to finish drying on a wooden clothes rack near the heating stove.”  

“My mom often went with Grandpa to buy cattle in my years from 7-12 grades, so I prepared a lot of suppers. We had a cold back porch where we kept fresh beef and pork in the winter. I would take the meat saw and cut whatever we wanted for supper, usually pork chops or round steak.”  

“My folks first radio was an ‘Atwater Kent’ brand with a big horn type speaker. My dad would have to coax me with a penny or a nickel to go downstairs each morning and write down the cattle and hog receipts at the major markets. They came over the Yankton or Sioux City station.”

“When and where I grew up west of Milford, we had great hills for sliding. We would take an old piece of corrugated tin, turn the end up and put a rope on it and use it for our sled. The winter of 1936 was our heaviest snow ever. We walked out the back door and had to cut steps in the packed snow and walk to the pump house for water, where we made steps again to get down to the pump. We were always afraid of slipping on the packed snow as we had a pail of water in each hand.”

Mom and dad were married in 1947. She wrote: “Our first house was very old, no electricity or inside plumbing, but it had a lot of warmth and character and we both loved it. That is where Cindy was born...We hated to leave our home, but my folks bought the farm and wanted to move there and Barney’s folks had just retired.” 

So they moved to the Reiman homestead where Cindy and I grew up. The stories of our childhood filled many more pages. Our memories fill us with joy and gratitude.

Yes, we miss her greatly. But her spirit lives on in all of us. 

The last sentence in her book says it all: “When I am gone, I want you to grieve but a short time and then talk about the memories.  Keep me in circulation!” 

Oh mom...we will.

Taking a beat from the mayhem ...

By JoAnne Young

 

For more than a year during the hideout heart of the pandemic, our homes became our inner sanctums. Our sweatpants and pjs were the uniforms of wellbeing. And we adopted such cute port-in-a-storm puppies. 

 

Now we’ve remodeled, moved on and rejoined the planet. Now we’re annoying the natural world once again. But we still need our sanctuaries ... those soothing places where our brains can take a beat. Where we have a minute to think rather than do. Where we can be comforted by the contemplation of our inevitable difficult thoughts. 

 

I surveyed my breakfast club this morning to learn about their sanctuaries: 

A predawn bike ride; a walk in nature; early morning at the office before anyone else shows up; a comfortable freewheeling discussion with an intimate gathering of friends; a beach at sunrise. 

 

Mine? My car is an excellent oasis, and I know many of yours are, too. I see you sitting in your Hondas, Toyotas, Chevy Silverados, the engines off, your faces reflecting the glow of your iPhones, your doggo beside you on the passenger seat, your cream cheese and onion sandwich on the dashboard. 

 

Oh sweet closed-in comfort. 

 

For 14 years I had access to one of the grandest sanctuaries in the state. I had an office at the Nebraska State Capitol, my sanctuary especially at night, after I had finished my work and all the others had gone home. I slipped down the 32 steps just outside my third-floor door and walked through a dimly lit hallway to the Rotunda. 

 

I would sit on one of the rockhard benches that seemed to soften in the quiet, and soak in the subdued aura of high ceilings and decades old tile and marble art, looking up to the dome and the seven winged virtues soaring above us, clasping hands and reminding those of us planted on the floor of temperance, courage, justice, wisdom, magnanimity, faith, hope, charity. 

 

Sometimes it left me with an ache that could be at once fill me with hope and with sadness. In December, when an evergreen from a generous Nebraska landscape filled the Rotunda with the scent of holidays and the primary colors of a string of lights reflecting on the polished marble floors, I could barely force myself to get up and go out into the night. 

 

I could have sat there until 4 in the morning writing love letters to Hildreth Meière and Hartley Burr Alexander. 

 

A few weeks ago, I discovered another sanctuary – for those who experienced in May 2020 the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, and the protests and turmoil that followed in that city and around the country. I wanted to see that piece of ground in front of Cup Foods at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue, to stand on the sidewalk and contemplate all that happened on that day and since. 

 

What I found was a two-block square, the George Floyd Free State, that is filled with memorials to him and many others killed by police in our country. It is, as those who tend to it say, a place of peace, justice, mourning and healing. 

 

It feels sacred. I spent time walking and studying, talking to a guardian, and a woman who could easily recite the history of police brutality and injustices visited upon Black people in our country. I met an independent photojournalist who was the first to arrive on the scene and then continued to return and document events, experiences and people there. 

 

Words on the sidewalk (as written): ‘We march, ya’ll mad. We sit down, ya’ll mad. We speak up, ya’ll

mad. We die, ya’ll silent.”

 

From the abandoned Speedway gas station (now dubbed The People’s Way) across the street from the Cup Foods memorial area to the Say Their Names Cemetery art installation, it is a sanctuary for anyone who cares about the injustices that have happened in our country for centuries to our Black Americans.  

 

Paul Eaves, a volunteer caretaker, has said: “There are certain parts of the world that have a certain sacredness because of continued attention human beings give them. And this is one of them.” 

 

Wherever, whenever, you need your own sanctuary, you will find it. In a book, a library or a bookstore. At our favorite table in our beloved coffee shop. Behind a camera. On a deck or a bike trail, an 8-foot fishing boat or one-woman kayak. 

 

I wish you comfort and light or dimly lit joy. 

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Walking for a Cause

 By Marilyn Moore

An outcome of the pandemic has been a renewed commitment to walking…good for the heart, good for the core, good for the soul.  Most days, these trusty Keens have taken me on a variety of neighborhood treks, two to three miles a day.  In the winter, add socks…and change to boots when it’s icy.  

I’ve learned that my neighborhood walks have quite literally grounded me in the neighborhood.  I’ve met my neighbors, I stop to chat, I’ve traded brownies for tomatoes, and I admire the year-round efforts people make to brighten this little corner of the world, from lights in the winter darkness to profusions of blooms in early spring, from Halloween yard art to sidewalk chalk art.  I know the neighborhood in a way I’ve not known it before, despite having lived here for more than forty years.

Sometimes, walking is for another purpose.  Such was true last weekend, when on Saturday I walked to the rally for reproductive rights at the state capitol, and on Sunday when I walked in the Lincoln CROP Hunger Walk.  Both are causes that are important to me; both are causes that drew many other walkers.  Both are issues that will determine candidates I will support in the upcoming elections for local, state, and federal offices.

Reproductive rights is a subset of women’s health rights, and could become a subset of health rights for all people.  The constitutional privacy right that protected abortion, described by the Supreme Court nearly fifty years ago, is the basis for other major life questions.  It’s the same constitutional basis for assuring that a person can marry someone of another race, that a homosexual marriage is no less valid and legal than a heterosexual marriage, and that people have a right to access to contraception.  Marriage and contraception rights are not restricted to women.  

While some Supreme Court jurists tried to soften the anti-abortion judgment with the assurance that the decision would not apply to other such privacy rights, one jurist expressly said that the decision should re-open those questions, too.  And we’ve certainly seen that what has seemed to be “settled law” for decades can be tossed aside…. So yes, there are major ramifications to what some would regard as “just sending the abortion question back to the states,” and it’s an issue that causes me to walk.  

Even if it were “only” about abortion, I would walk, knowing that the people I have known who have made the agonizingly difficult decision to seek an abortion had complications in their lives that could never be anticipated by legislators, most of whom are men, a few of whom are just now realizing the ramifications of bills they so readily, and unthinkingly, passed.  The clamoring eagerness of some legislators to prosecute women for taking care of their health and physicians who are providing treatment informed by training and professional judgement can only result in poorer health for women, in a nation that already has  poorer health outcomes for the general population than is true in most developed countries.  And I speculate….if legislators can decree that women must give birth, could they also decree that some (likely just “some” women) cannot give birth?  There are some horrifying incidences of this in our history…might they be repeated?

The next day, I joined dozens of other walkers in following a route through northeast Lincoln, participating in the Lincoln CROP Hunger Walk. This walk, held annually for many years, is a national event, a fund raiser for programs that provide food for hungry people.  Part of the funds raised are distributed through national and international agencies, and part are distributed to local efforts to end hunger.  

Globally, it is estimated that more than 800 million people, about 10% of the world’s population, go to be hungry every night, a figure that is increasing rapidly.  Three major causes are identified for the increase in the past two years:  Covid, climate change, and conflict.  Covid has impacted supply chains and distribution of food, and it resulted in record unemployment, from which many families have not yet recovered.  Climate change, with resulting fires, floods, and drought, have rendered previously arable land as land that can no longer grow crops.  Conflict, like the invasion of the Ukraine, has disrupted the growth and distribution of food worldwide.  

Locally, the Food Bank supplies an increasing number of meals every year, 13 million in the most recent year.  Even though we are a low unemployment city, the lines at food distributions have not shortened.  Seniors, those with major illnesses or disabilities, children….they’re not able to “just get a job,” and get out of the line.  The number of little free pantries around the city is growing, with neighbors helping neighbors in this most direct and caring way.  Hunger is real, and its effects on learning, growing, health, and well-being are real, too. 

Part of addressing the hunger issue is providing immediate assistance.  Food banks and little free pantries do this.  Part of addressing this issue is examining root causes of why people don’t have consistent access to food.  There are public policy proposals that address systemic roots of hunger, like livable wages, affordable health care, housing and child care, and benefits for veterans and those with disabilities.  

I walk for both of these causes, hoping that my steps might be a part of advocacy that affects public policy on reproductive rights and systemic hunger, that they might be a part of fund-raising that provides immediate assistance to hungry families.  And, I walk to remind myself what I care about, the causes I’m willing to lend my name to, the causes I’ll support financially, the causes that determine my votes.  

And for these reasons, walking for a cause, like walking in the neighborhood, is also good for the heart, good for the core, good for the soul.

A Lifelong Conversation with the Land

 by Penny Costello

In 1972, Nebraska Public Television first aired a conversation between Ron Hull and John G. Neihardt, Nebraska’s poet laureate and author of “Black Elk Speaks.” Neihardt was 92 years old when this interview took place. Hull was 42. As a producer at NET Television (now Nebraska Public Media) in 2015, I had the pleasure of producing a retrospective series of shorts called “Ron Hull Remembers”. One of the gems we pulled out of the archive for that series was the Hull-Neihardt interview.

“Do you feel that there is a special relationship between people that love the land and the land?” Hull asked Neihardt.

“Oh, indeed. Indeed. It’s a mystical relationship. It’s a religious relationship, in the true sense of religion,” Neihardt responded. “There’s something divine about the earth. The earth is our mother, and we depend on the earth for everything. We don’t live with spiritual ideas so much, although the times are changing. There is far more interest now in spiritual matters than there was 50 years ago. It’s the mood of the time that determines what people will think.”

I remember being struck with that response, having had the great fortune to experience that mystical relationship with two South Dakota ranches our family owned and managed, one just eight miles east of the Black Hills on Elk Creek, and the other thirteen miles east of Scenic in the Badlands National Monument. The Elk Creek place had been in my father’s family for four generations. My grandfather acquired the Badlands ranch in the 1940s. When he died in 1965, the two ranches were passed down to my father and his brother and sister. 

My parents, my two older brothers and I lived on the Badlands ranch until I was around five years old. That land was my dad’s soul place, and his dream was for it to be his one day. But that would not come to pass. When Grandad Costello died, the two ranches remained a partnership between his three children. And those three children went on to raise a next generation of seven children.

I remember those early years in the Badlands. Our house was built up on the side of a hill, and had big picture windows in the living room and in the kitchen. The vistas out of those windows were wondrous. There was a remoteness to that land that, for some, may have felt desolate and lonely. But, in my memory, it always felt more like freedom. When my brothers were at school, or out helping my dad, I had the company of our dogs and cats, my imaginary playmates, and my mom. Much of my time was spent outside exploring, connecting with the land and the animals that lived there with us. Cattle, horses, coyotes, deer, antelope, bobcats, prairie dogs, jackrabbits, snakes, snapping turtles, that’s what I remember.

Neighbors helped each other gather cattle for branding, or drove them on horseback to a rail yard a few miles away to be loaded onto rail cars headed for the sale barn. And, while the partnership between my father and his siblings may have had its challenging moments, what I remember about it was having a lot of time with my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and my grandmother. It was a good life.

And those were only my first five years. After that we moved up to the place on Elk Creek. The Elk Creek Valley was beautiful and lush, with the Black Hills and Bear Butte on the horizons to the west and the north. The craggy Badlands buttes were replaced by green rolling hills, cottonwood trees, and alfalfa fields. These were the ancestral lands of the Lakota people that John Neihardt wrote about in his book, “Black Elk Speaks”.

People talk about sense of place. Sense of place includes all of that, the land, the climate, the skies, the people, the animals, the whole spectrum of experience that nurtures and shapes whoever is living in that place. There’s an energy exchange between the people and the land that is palpable. Our sense of place is synonymous, really, with our sense of self. It’s how we know ourselves in that place, and that place in us.

While the Badlands ranch was my dad’s soul place, the Elk Creek place was mine. There I had gained the autonomy, relative maturity and skill to be out on my own, riding horses, hanging with our dogs and cats, playing by the creek, and being on the land. I grew from a small child into an adolescent, and then into a teenager on that place.

I wanted to be out helping my dad make hay, working cattle, being a rancher. But I had two older brothers, and a couple of boy cousins whose fathers felt strongly that it was good for those boys to be out helping on the ranch. At that point in time, during the mid-60s and into the 70s, the only time female children would be tasked with things like driving tractors and doing ranch work would be if they were the oldest child, or the only child, and their dad needed the help. Otherwise, we were ranch wives in training.

Fortunately, my mom saw me for who I was, and after I fulfilled pretty minimal expectations to help with housework and other “womanly duties”, she pretty much left me to my own devices outside with the animals and the land. I am eternally grateful to her for that.

Our family sold the ranches in the mid-1970s. My dad and his siblings had gone through the past decade struggling to make it work with three partners, and they foresaw the difficulties of keeping it sustainable and fair to that next generation of seven heirs. With that sale, we were no longer a ranching family. That sense of place, of identity was gone. Well, not gone. The place was still there, and always would be. It just wasn’t my place anymore.

It has taken me all these years since to come to terms with the grief, the loss that came with the sale of those ranches. If it were up to me, those places would still be in my family.

Along the way, though, some both delightful and troubling synchronicity has occurred. These striking and sometimes bizarre so-called coincidences have caused me to question if anything is truly coincidental, or if perhaps something more mystical, or spiritual is at play. Here are a few examples:

·       In 1978, I was living in Boulder, Colorado. I had an incredibly vivid dream one night of going back to the Elk Creek ranch, and trying to find my brother and the house we lived in. But the whole place where our house used to be had become a cul-de-sac full of condos and townhomes. To this day, that dream is still a vivid memory.

·       In November of 2019, I was back in the Black Hills for a visit. I decided to buy the Rapid City Journal while at a gas station. I don’t regularly buy the newspaper when I go back there, but something compelled me to do that. As I looked through the paper that night in my hotel room, I came across a full-page advertisement for Creekside Estates, offering two to five acre lots right next to beautiful Elk Creek. As I looked closer, I realized that the lots were located in what used to be the pasture just east of the house I grew up in. And the potential development of more lots pretty much encompassed the main body of the Elk Creek ranch.

·       Two days after that, back at my home in Lincoln, I spoke to my father on the phone for the last time. Two days after that, I was on a plane to Phoenix, where he had been living. I got there in time to sit by his bed and hold his hand as he passed. In compliance with his wishes, his ashes were scattered over Lost Dog Canyon, one of his favorite places in the Badlands, adjacent to the ranch.

·       As I reviewed the Hull-Neihardt conversation in preparation to write the intro to this piece I was struck by a couple of things. First, John Neihardt was 92 years old when that interview occurred. Ron Hull is 92 years old today, as I write this. Then, Dr. Neihardt said, “There is far more interest now in spiritual matters than there was 50 years ago.” That piece originally aired in 1972 – 50 years ago. And I think it’s safe to say there is even more interest in spiritual matters today.

 

Over the years, I’ve gone back to the hill that provides a beautiful overlook of the Elk Creek valley, a few times blatantly trespassing on the current owner’s property to get down closer to the creek and reconnect with the places where I played and explored as a child. I have also driven up to the house on the Badlands place, and just sat there for a bit. In one sense, I felt like a trespasser. But in another, that same familiar palpable energy emanating from the land carried with it a sense of belonging, as if the land recognized me and welcomed me back.

I’ve learned that a connection with a place has nothing to do with a deed, title, or ownership. While I cannot live there anymore, that place will always be in me, and I can visit. When I do, if I keep my heart and mind open, and listen with my soul, the land will speak to me. It may be through a dream, or even through a newspaper ad, but if I’m paying attention, that place and my connection to it will endure.

 

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