This weekend my great aunt passed away, the youngest of a large
family where only two sisters remain. I will be forever indebted to her
for her memories as I researched a memoir on Oklahoma -- though with
fewer experiences being the youngest, it was in a lot of ways her voice
and thoughts that got me the closest to my grandmother and her early
life. Exploring Oklahoma as an estranged adult -- someone who once hated
the state and whose heart sank crossing the Kansas border --
I
never asked my grandmother the questions I most needed answered (the
questions I only began to come to in her last months through a cache of
photographs).
My journey into Oklahoma and the prairie, Mennonites and
Cheyenne and oil and manifest destiny, is far from over -- yet the
people who can make that journey richer are all but gone. So many little
stories from one moment to the next in our lives, and 99.9% of it is
erased seconds later, the truth hazier and less true with each breath.
The story I will most remember is driving the backroads of red-dirt
wheat fields in the fall of 2009. My great aunt said that, while growing
up, you could know whose farm you were on by the sound of the windmill;
that on still nights she could not fall asleep, only able to drift off
once the breeze picked up and the windmill began turning, creaking.
Moments later she told me the low German Mennonite words for "chicken
shit." Listen to the windmills in your life -- but don't fall asleep,
stay awake, strain to hear the pattern, live harder in a place for every
second you can.
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Marjorie Janzen Heinrichs on the left. |