fun fact about me: When I was 6 years old I sent so much hate mail to the president (the second Bush) that the mail carrier had to tell my mom I needed to stop before we got FBI’d
I was COMPLETELY unaware of the US political scene or why the adults in my life hated Bush, but I knew I hated him because he let people shoot wolves from helicopters and that’s mean and shitty
I also had a poor grasp on how stamps worked, so given that I wasn’t allowed to continually throw money away by putting stamps on my presidential hate mail, a lot of the times I just drew squares with little pictures inside on the corner.
Love, love, love reading more proof that everyone should encourage the children in their lives to write to elected officials–it teaches them about citizenship and can also be very funny.
When I taught second grade, one of the options for students who had finished their work was to write a letter to the president. I would send all of the letters in a big envelope at the end of every month.
Watching my students get more and more frustrated with him (and concerned about his wellbeing) was not the result I’d hoped for when I came up with the idea, but it was kind of hilarious.
See, Obama had a standard packet with information and activities about his dog he’d send in response to letters from very young citizens…and of course his office sent one back to our class every single time we sent mail.
So eventually all of the letters looked something like this:
Dear President Obama,
I am writing about the environment. I am sad that the Great Barrier Reef is hurt. Also the Amazon Rainforest. Can you help? PLEASE DON’T WRITE BACK TO TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DOG AGAIN. WE ALREADY KNOW ALL ABOUT BO. WE COMPLETED THE MAZE AND COLORED HIM IN. It is good that you love your pet a lot. But try to remember the environment. It is also important.
Hanging out with me and you keep getting annoyed cause you think I keep sighing loudly but it’s actually wind rushing through my strangely hollow interior and I blow away
It turns out that you can become the person you’ve always envisioned but you’ll still have the person you were before inside of you and you have to treat them with as much forgiveness and love as possible
Seriously though, unmarked/badly marked graves on historical properties are a much bigger problem than you would think. People were just burying people anywhere, especially children who seemed to have home burials more often than adults. Sometimes you know, sometimes you do not. Often there was a wooden cross when the person was buried and it has since decayed. My great great great grandmother is buried alone in the middle of a cow pasture. Her grave is marked by a rock. Just a large weathered chunk of granite, not a headstone. You wouldn’t know she was there if you didn’t have family oral history. She deserves to have a headstone I think but I’m not sure if disturbing her is right. The rock was out there by her husband so it feels wrong to move it.
Great great great grandma Mary has been dead 104 years. She died during the influenza pandemic of 1918 though we can’t find the exact date she died on. She was 35 or 36. She was a fantastic mother to her 5 daughters. My great great grandmother was the oldest and she was only 13 when her mother passed. Mary’s youngest daughter was a toddler. Mary wasn’t buried in the churchyard, maybe because of the pandemic or maybe because her husband didn’t want her to be too far away. It’s unclear. It’s also unclear if she had another headstone or grave marker besides the rock.
What is clear is that before her death, there was a fantastic harvest of persimmons on the property and she canned an abundance of persimmon jam. After her death, my great great great grandfather Robert ate the persimmon jam on toast every morning and cried. I remember this because my great grandmother used to tell my grandmother about being a girl and seeing her father sitting at the kitchen table bawling for his wife. Alone in this world, missing the woman he had been married to for 16 years, thinking of her as he ate the last of the things she had made for the family. Most widowers with young children got remarried quickly in those days. He didn’t. He raised his girls alone and died at 60, never having remarried.
My grandmother is named Mary, after her mother’s mother who lies in a cow pasture with a rock to mark her grave. A woman who died entirely too young, who died wanted and loved and needed.
