This summer, my fact and fiction shared an afternoon in a tiny little town near the site of the country school where I taught the dear people in the picture above and many more.
The children they once were captured my heart. For decades I have carried the memories of them and Camp Crook, the town where my husband lived and worked, since we moved away. I expected them to fade as time marched forward. Instead they grew more vivid with each trip we made to that wild country to see our friends.
As time went by my memories began to clamor inside me. Insistent. Demanding to be put down in words. To be shaped into a story. I spent years writing and rewriting a factual story based on our life there. Eventually I incorporated the facts into the books in the West River Mystery Series.
This past July my memories came to life again at the Camp Crook All School Reunion. Between 135-150 former students and their families came. Two former students––who used to take a food truck to area rodeos, fairs, and other events––prepared the food. The oldest person in attendance was 102. The oldest former student was 91. The youngest was in her twenties. Seven former teachers, at least one of them a former student as well, attended also.
Everyone talked and ate and looked at tables filled with decades worth of school pictures. Students who attended the school before my time there and those who attended afterwards shared their memories. Amazing memories. This post would never end if I tried to record them all. Even then some would be missed.
In light of that, I will focus on a few memories I hope to carry into the future.
The delight on the faces of school friends reunited.
My former student who asked, “Mrs. Philo, was I in your class the year the lamb ate my homework?” I laughed. “Yes, Micki, you were! You have no idea how many times I’ve told that story.”
Listening to students describe the firm educational foundation they received at Camp Crook’s country school.
Observing groups of classmates who took pictures together and kept talking long after the reunion was supposed to end.
Seeing people pitch in to clean up without being asked.
But what captured my heart once again were my former students. Getting to know them as adults. Hearing about their lives and their kids. Watching their eyes light up while we talked. Seeing the bright, eager children they once were still shining from within them.
Gratitude overwhelmed me. It overwhelms me still. For the privilege of teaching these children. For this rare chance to have seen them again. For the realization that my former students are the reason I love to write school scenes with Jane and her students into my mysteries.
This summer my fact and fiction shared an afternoon in a tiny town near the site of the country school where I once taught. The school building is closed but, but I am happy to say, its spirit is alive. May it ever be so in our hearts.
A year ago we said goodbye to Mom.
I miss her smile, but not the suffering she endured.
I miss her wit, but not her weeping.
I miss her perseverance, but not her pain.
A year ago we said goodbye to Mom.
I miss our games of Uno, but not the “Oh no” sensation upon entering her room.
I miss the twinkle in her eye, but not her distress when she tinkled in her pants.
I miss hearing her say my name, but not her embarrassment when she couldn’t recall someone else’s.
A year ago we said goodbye to Mom.
I wish her last days had been more comfortable.
I wish she’d found more solace in her faith.
I wish she’d still wanted to eat ice cream.
A year ago we said goodbye to Mom.
I’m grateful for all she taught me.
How to escape into a good book.
How to cook and bake.
How to manage money.
How to work hard.
How to exasperate my children.
How to love someone in sickness and in health.
A year ago we said goodbye to Mom.
I miss her every day and always will.
I love her and will never wish her back.
She ran her race.
She finished well.
She is whole once more.
A year ago we said goodbye to Mom.
She is now reunited with those she longed to see in her final weeks on this earth.
Her husband.
Her parents.
Her siblings and their spouses.
Dear friends.
A year ago we said goodbye to Mom.
I am so grateful to have been with her when she went home.
In memory of Dorothea Lorraine Hess Stratton. September 3, 1928-June 23, 2023
Spring blizzards on the South Dakota prairie are uncommon, but they do happen. This week’s weather reports and pictures posted by friends who live west of the Missouri River attest to that fact. Their pictures inspired me to locate snapshots my husband and I took when we lived in Camp Crook. In the top one, a much younger me is holding our son Allen. The one below shows my husband Hiram doing the same.
Now for a few fun facts to accompany the photos:
Our son was born in 1982. Judging from his size, these photos are from 1984 or 1985. My gut says 1985, the last year we lived there.
This snowstorm was in early May. That’s right. May. I believe a week after our school’s spring field trip, which took place on a beautiful day.
Hiram’s mother was visiting at the time. She was tired of arriving or departing during raging snowstorms and expressly chose to come in May to avoid bad weather. Instead, she watched 18 inches of snow, fall, then melt and create 18 inches of mud.
The top photo shows the Methodist Church furthest to the left and the Catholic Church to the right. We lived in the yellow gold house. It is still there, but the building behind us is gone.
Hiram and Allen are standing to the south of our house. The log buildings are a hunting cabin and its outhouse. Hiram made good use of the outhouse when our electricity was out. We had the presence of mind to fill the bathtub with water when the storm began. Hiram’s mom and I used bathtub water to flush the toilet until we had power again.
I am not making any of this up.
The Methodist and Catholic churches in See Jane Run! are similar in appearance to the ones pictured above. Since art imitates life, it is safe to assume that spring blizzards on the South Dakota will appear in future books in the series.
It is not safe to assume the same for the outhouse. Neither Jane nor Jolene consider outhouses artistic. Not at all.
That was my first thought when I cleaned out the dishwasher at our son and daughter-in-law’s house not too long ago. It was the can opener of my childhood and a good one at that. The narrow end made prying the caps off pop bottles on the rare occasions when there was pop in our house. The wide end made short work of opening mason jars filled with the fruits and vegetables Mom canned each summer. That end was put to use almost every night before supper.
But those memories weren’t the second thoughts that sprang to mind as I stared at it.
My second thought was of the jars of jelly and jam mentioned in See Jane Run! Teaching duties and solving mysteries don’t leave much time for Jane to make decent meals. She frequently resorts to peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Her mother insisted on sending plenty of home canned jellies and jams with Jane when she moved. Her mom was quite sure that grocery stores didn’t exist in sparsely populated Tipperary County where Jane had accepted a teaching job. And that home canned fruits and vegetables were nowhere to be found.
Jane’s mom was wrong on both counts.
Tipperary County had three grocery stores, and almost every cook in the county spent August through September canning and freezing garden produce and lugs of fruit purchased from those three grocery stores. In See Jane Run!, she’s busy figuring out 1) how to teach country school, and 2) who the murderer is that she’s unaware of the county canning culture.
Which led to my third thought while staring at the can opener.
See Jane Can! would be an intriguing title for a future book in the West River Mystery Series. Canning could be a launching pad for flashback memories of canning with her mother. A broken canning jar or a purposefully damaged pressure cooker could be a murder weapon. If Jane has a can opener like the one pictured above, it could unfold more of the story of her dad’s illness.
That thought, the fourth if you’re counting, sobered me.
The writing on the can opener says it came from the Glenwood, Iowa Lumber and Coal Company. Glenwood is in Mills County, Iowa. My dad was the county extension director there when he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The story of how the disease impacted Jane’s dad and his family is based on our family’s story.
“Mom,” my son said. “Why are you staring at the can opener?”
“It reminded me of something from when I was a kid.” I laid it on the counter and took a picture with my phone.
“Something good?” he asked.
“Something hard.” I smiled and put the can opener in the utensil drawer. “And very good.”
That was my first thought when I scrolled through Facebook and saw the low temperatures my friends, both near and far, were posting. Curious, I checked the local temperature on my phone.
“It’s -21°,” I told my husband.
He shook his head. “That’s cold.”
“It could be worse. It could be -45°.”
We silly grinned at each other as we remembered the stupidest thing we ever did in the coldest weather of our married lives.
It was a February Sunday in 1982.
We were a young and foolish.
We’d been married for 4 years.
We lived in Camp Crook, South Dakota.
Someone called to say church had been cancelled because it was -45°. I wanted to know what -45° felt like. The inner door worked without a hitch, but the screen door barely moved. It wasn’t frozen shut, but the lubricant in its push/pull mechanism had congealed. It took some muscle to open it. I poked my head out for maybe a second and pulled it right back in. -45° is cold. Really cold.
But not cold enough to say no when our friend Craig called. “Liz and I are going out to eat in Spearfish. Want to come?”
“It’s -45°,” we said.
“We’ll warm up the car,” they said. “We’re not leaving until noon. It’ll be warmer then.”
They was right. It was only -30° when we crawled into Craig and Liz’s car. The sun was shining. The car was toasty. Dinner was tasty, and we all returned home safely. So why do I say the trip was the stupidest thing we’ve ever done? Consider the following details:
Camp Crook is 100 miles from Spearfish.
There are only 2 towns between where we lived and where we were going.
I was 5 months pregnant.
That’s why I know it was 1982.
Now do you see why it was the stupidest thing we ever did?
Then again, it’s a shared memory that makes us grin and say, whenever the temperature dips into the double digits below zero, “It could be worse. It could be -45°”
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The Forest Service Ranger Station in Camp Crook. The brown house in the background is similar to the one where Jane and Pam meet.
Jane threw her Bible away years before she moved to Little Missouri. Her lack of faith is a major player in See Jane Run! Finding a way to show rather than tell readers why Jane threw her Bible away was a real challenge. My daughter, who is doing a final consistency read through before the manuscript goes to the publisher, says a recently added flashback rose to the challenge.
The flashback is based on something that happened during my high school years. I had forgotten about it until about 10 years ago when my uncle–the inspiration behind Uncle Tim in the novel–invited me to look through the journals he’s faithfully kept for decades. I chose the one for 1973-74, which was my senior year in high school. I scanned pages for mentions of our family. One described a phone call to my uncle after I got home from school and found Dad on the bathroom floor. My uncle came over. He cleaned Dad and dressed him in fresh clothes. My uncle’s journal account ended with these words, not written out of pity but with deep compassion: Poor man. Poor wife. Poor family.
To be clear, I didn’t lose my faith after the real event. However, I used it in a fictional flashback to show why Jane threw her Bible away and abandoned her faith. The excerpt you’re about to read is an early scene. It takes place a few days after Jane moves to Little Missouri. On a walk around town she meets Pam, who shows her around the Forest Service campus. Here goes:
After the tour ended, I declined Pam’s offer of more tea.
“Then would you join us at church tomorrow and come to Sunday dinner?”
I wanted to say no. After all, I had wasted years going to church, following every “thou shall” and “thou shall not” in the Bible. Every night at bedtime, I asked God to heal my father. I prayed the same prayer night after night. But Dad didn’t get better. He got worse. Even so, I prayed up a storm. Until the day I walked the bathroom and found him huddled on the floor by the toilet, feces smearing the floor.
He gazed at the wall and spoke in a monotone. “I fell off the toilet.”
“It’s okay, Dad. I’ll call Uncle Tim.”
His jaw clenched. “It’s not okay. A daughter shouldn’t see her father like this.”
Uncle Tim got there as fast as he could and took over. While he gave Dad a bath, I went to my bedroom, found my Bible, and threw it away.
I opened my mouth to say I didn’t go to church, but opted for Iowa nice. “I don’t want to put you out.”
“Put us out? Dan’s grilling hamburgers, and I’m making potato salad.”
My mouth watered.
What do you think of the scene? Does it showing rather than tell why Jane threw her Bible away? You can leave your feedback in the comment box!
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