MamaStories

I published a review of A Handmade Life, by William Coperthwaite, on Suite101.com.

It took me a long time to write this review, simply because I wanted to do the book justice. And 700 words are not enough to do it justice.

There was, for instance, no space to treat Coperthwaite’s fascinating views on education and childrearing. I will be probably write a separate article on that (UPDATE: did so, you can read it here). Food for thought, definitely, for the home and unschoolers! I did manage to reproduce, at the end of the article, Peter Forbes’ touching photograph on p.109, of Bill carrying a very young child: there is such protection in his stance, and such an outlook for the child…

Neither could I do justice to Coperthwaite’s self-sufficient and sustainable life in nature. I’ll try to devote an article to that too, for the homesteaders!

I still hope you will go and read the review: I did get some things said! There is also some criticism. However unwavering my championship for this book, I couldn’t in all honesty withhold that one reservation…

But most importantly, I hope you will read the book. It was written by a thoughtful and kind man, about lives that are possible for all of us – lives that are for that reason “democratic” in Coperthwaite’s sense. And the photographs by Peter Forbes are simply gorgeous.

It’s time to come clean, lastly, about my “Manifest“:

What do I have to do?

Preserve, not things,

But skills to make things

And skills to make the tools to make things

And the resources to make things

And the skills to preserve these resources

Etc.

Of course Coperthwaite was the one who brought home to me: the need to preserve our skills and tools so we and our children can survive in a difficult future. I am sure I will reflect more and often about A Handmade Life.

Enjoy.

At first I thought it was wounded: it just sat there, next to the thyme, looking at me, letting me make a lot of movement and noise getting the stroller out of our front door, then after I spotted it, letting me run in to get the camera and take three pictures. Then it flew off, to my relief. I was in a hurry to pick up my sick daughter from daycare, and would not have known what to do with a wounded or sick bird.

O but what a beautiful bird! If anyone knows what it is, exactly, please let me know.

Amie is fighting another pneumonia, this while it’s 89 F (31 C) out! A cold immediately turns into something a lot more scary with her. This time we caught it very early, though, so we’re optimistic. Maybe our visitor is a good omen. I wish Amie had been here to see him…

That picture, again…: the tensions.

We are looking at them, intensely, but they have their backs to us, unaware, busy. They are public now, in all their nakedness, but their interaction is most private, hidden from us. The mother is washing the child (a foot), but no one (but the jet of water) is washing her. The water isn’t heated, but there is soap.

And what is most fascinating is the place: a simple platform of rough planks in a margin between an old clapboard house and a forest. It isn’t so much a margin, as an overlap, of wildness and civilization. They overlap, they don’t contradict. The house is made of old wood, and one imagines the waterpipe is slowly rusting away.  The forest is held back from them – though it already encroaches upon our view. The act of washing is animal and human (soap).

Upon this sea of generality (nature, culture), the platform floats like a lifeboat for individuation: those drops of water, that little toe, those breasts. This mother washing this child. Medieval philosophers forged a wonderful word for such intense individualness: haecceitas, literally: this-ness.

This is the best kind of image: it includes everything, and everything in it is alive with tension. But what counts in it, we can only look at it, and never claim as our own.  The only way we could know, or feel, or even imagine the one thing, this thing, that goes on there, would be to do it.

• A photograph 

I was leafing through an old National Geographic compilation book called As We Live and Breathe, The Challenge of Our Environment, when I chanced upon a two-page spread devoted to the Huckleby family and a large photograph that took my breath away. I reproduce it here, not knowing who the photographer or copyright holder is.

This is Ernestine Huckleby.

• Ernestine’s story

In 1969, in Alamogordo, New Mexico, her family sat down to a meal of pork from a hog they had raised themselves. A year earlier, the pig had been fed grains that were not meant for consumption (animal or human), but only for planting more grains. They had been treated with the pesticide Panogen, which contained methyl mercury.

Though all the family members showed high doses of mercury in their bodies, only three of the childen were severely affected. There is conflicting information on the web. The most repeated story is that “one was deafened, another was blinded, a third arrived at the hospital raving mad.” The photographs in the National Geographic book paint a more complex picture: a young woman (Dorothy Jean Huckleby) learning to walk with crutches, and a teenager (Amos Charles), blind but learning to speak again. Of the little girl, whose age I can’t ascertain, the book says “Blinded, mute, her hearing and powers of movement severely impaired, Ernestine Huckleby clings to life”.  There also seems to have been a baby still in utero when her mother ate the pork, and she was born with a severely damaged central nervous system.

• Iconized and forgotten

Back in 1970, when the story made national headlines, it forced the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to ban and recall all mercury-containing pesticides.  Today “the Huckleby Poisoning” still stands as one of the icons for the innocents who are harmed by environmental destruction in the interest of commercial gain and under the “watchful” eye of the government.

But Ernestine, she is forgotten.

When you Google “Ernestine Huckleby”, you get one irrelevant search result. The web, where everyone lives nowadays, does not acknowledge her.

This iconization is a good thing: such images stick in our minds and move our hearts like no theory, accumulation of scientific data or political manifesto can. They make us think, feel, speak out. But does it have to come at such a price?

• Dreaming of Ernestine

The world snapped a picture. The face became an icon. It discarded the little girl behind it, behind those eyes. 

Tonight I will dream of Ernestine, dancing and skipping, singing and laughing. Then I will dream about the world slamming shut on her. Is she still there, in that little girl clutching the stuffed animal with the pink bow? It is terrible to admit it: I hope not. I hope Ernestine too forgot herself. The alternative is simply too horrific.

Update: more of Ernestine’s story here.

This morning, after a rare full night’s sleep (and blissfully no hypnopompic sightings for me!), we cuddled for 15 minutes before getting well and truly up.

Amie was enacting “Baby Amie”: she cuddles and coos and you have to hold and shush her like a baby. Then I asked her: “Do you remember what Baby Amie used to do?” She thought for a couple of seconds and answered:

“Sleeping.”

“Yes, and what else did Baby Amie do?”

…

“Did Baby Amie have lots of gung-gung?”

(“Gung-gung” was her/our word for nursing.)

Amie thought deeply for three seconds or so, then her face and eyes lit up with remembrance and joy:

“Ye-es,” she said, smiling broadly. Then:

“Where is gung-gung?”

“Oh, sorry sweetie,” I said, “there’s no more gung-gung” (she weaned herself about six months ago). She nodded understandingly, and then very seriously stated:

“Amie is all finished with gung-gung.”

I found a photograph that captures motherhood so perfectly – in a setting that completes the picture for me. It’s by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, from his Storybook Life. I can’t reproduce it because of copyright, but click here and you’ll see.

There is something about this photograph… The soft pools of light, the ghost of herself, the movement of her arm. The door standing open, fixed and hard. Her downcast gaze, concentration. Just another split second in our front hallway (/front hallaway/): captured, though not quite…

She was fitting grown-up shoes. Not yet, sweetie, not yet…