Gossiping 101

Gossip! We all do it! In one form or another, we all do it! But I'll bet there's something about gossiping that even the most gifted, experienced tongue wagging participants may not be aware of. 

My fictional character, Annie, was taught the art by her grandmother, who fancied herself professor emeritus in the psychology of gossiping. Her duty as the matriarch of the family was the instill into her daughter and granddaughter the art of the gossip, the psychology behind it, and the importance of learning all the latest tidbits without ever opening their mouths.

Interested? Well, let's hope so, because I'm about the share with you Gossiping 101: The Art of the Gossip in Victorian America.

First,  never, ever, ever, coax gossip out of anyone. If gossip begins to flow it is unladylike to ask leading questions and appear to be a gossip yourself. A true gossiper will tell the whole story simply because of the rush it gives them. Secondly, never let body language give the idea that any tale at another person's expense is being relished. Quite the contrary. As much fun as it is to gossip, there is something primal about it, makes us feel better about ourselves. Simply sit, sip your tea, eat your cookies and listen. Always have something in your hands because hands, Annie, are the key to a good tell. Women tend to use their hands when they become enthused or overly interested, encouraging the teller to go on and on. And our goal, the goal of a true lady, is to appear nonchalant and just a tad disinterested. The story will continue, but since you don't speak or give of the feeling of approval, the only thing said about you will be that you're a bore at tea. And that's not so bad. Better than being the focal point of a sermon on the evils of gossip at the next Sunday service. Finally, and most importantly, the eyes have it. Keep a blank look going, not one that says there's nothing behind the eyes, but one says, 'Gossip. I can take it or leave it.' Our eyes, dear one, can give away our every emotion. Especially excitement or sadness. Expressionless gazes can keep the gossiper gossiping, but keep them from asking you to participate.”

And there you have it: Gossiping 101 as told to Annie, by her Grandmother, Prudence Wickham, on the eve of her first formal tea. After all, grandmothers in Victorian America always imparted life's most important lessons to their granddaughters. Appearance was everything second only to not being called out for bad behavior by their parson.

Guess Who's Coming for Dinner?

There weren't three of them, but one seemed more than enough.

After church today, Don and I went to lunch with our good friends, Mike and Sandy Sickefoose. We were enjoying ourselves immensely, but when it came to be about 3:30 we all realized that our housebound pets were probably about ready to euthanize all of us, and, so we scattered, hurrying home to let Rowdy, our Medicare cat out of the house.

When we got home, the first thing I noticed was the hummingbird feeder taken apart and lying on the front porch. That's odd, I thought.  Don opened the front door and said, "Oh, no. No, no, no!"

I looked in to see what was the matter and to my distress, all over the floor was ALL the food from our pantry and refrigerator, a five pound sack of sugar, another five pound pack of Splenda, a sack of flour, a broken antique bowl, two strainers, a jar of peanut butter and a gallon container of raspberry iced tea and lots of cans. Down the hall was oyster crackers, Weight Watchers snacks and a loaf of apple crumb bread.

Following the food trail down the hall, it led to our bedroom. I'm calling for Rowdy, who isn't answering or coming to me. The window was intact, but the screen was torn out and lying on the ground outside the window. In the bathroom, the same thing awaited. A huge paw-shaped rip in the screen gave me the impression that the little bugger (in this case a BIG bugger) had tried to make it through our TINY bathroom window.

We both ran outdoors, called for Rowdy, all the while looking this way and that for the culprit of our break-in. Below the bathroom window was a blown glass bird. Obviously the sun had caused it to shine and our thief liked it very much. The only thing missing from the bathroom was the bird.

Back to the bedroom: whoever it was had to crawl over our ENORMOUS aspen king-sized bed, so I began pulling the bedding off to run through the wash. Next was the cleanup of all the food stuff on the floor. Pine-Sol, bleach and Murphy's soap combined to clean up all the yuck. There were prints all over the outside of the fridge, the stove and the cabinets.

I can't speak for my husband but I WAS TOTALLY GROSSED OUT! Tonight I am looking over my shoulder.

Who was it, you ask?  A BEAR! A bear broke into our home. Thank goodness we scared him off. I hate to think what could have happened if he had still been in the house when we walked in. We think he heard us opening the door and ran out the way he came in...dropping his bread behind him.

You may think living in the country might be boring but it is totally to the contrary. Most of the action around here comes from the four-legged members of our neighborhood. Just last week one of the deer I love so much was killed by a mountain lion just around the corner. The hummingbirds have a war going on outside our front window all day long vying for ownership of the feeder. They're like little stealth bombers. It's hysterical! The crows think they're all that and a bag of bird feed. Every morning about 6 a.m. they plan their strategy. One parks itself in every tree in the front yard and begin to "holler" at Rowdy, who, by the way, has more smarts on one side of his brain than all them put together. They squawk and caw and rattle the limbs of the trees, but Rowdy just ignores them...  The foxes wait just outside the perimeter of the front yard waiting for some morsel from somewhere to land on the ground. Stupid things don't know Rowdy's sitting right on the front porch. They grab anything and run like the wind down the hill. And the raccoons...well, they just climb up in the lawn chairs and peek in the window giving us a "what's up" kind of look.  But, as I've said, before, the deer are my absolute favorites.

The bears can just move along...go somewhere else...they're cute, but I'd rather not get to know them on a personal level. I name the animals I like. The bear doesn't have a name.

Oh...and Rowdy? Hiding under the bed. He may be old...but with age comes wisdom.

Mental Health Issues in the Victorian Era

Mental health is a touchy subject simply because of the stigma attached to it. Fortunately for us today, we live in a time when there are a variety of therapies, treatments, medications and laws to protect to the affected.

In the 1800s, things weren't so good. A wide variety of adjectives and descriptive phrases, some of which unfortunately made their way into the 20th and 21st centuries, were used to describe the mentally ill. Crazy, lunatic, half-wit, nut, lost their marbles, paddling around with one ore, demon possessed, were just a few. Today, there are real medical diagnoses, which, hopefully, we, who calim to be educated, caring people choose to use instead of the hurtful, unkind descriptions of yesteryear.

Most families of the 1800s who had mentally ill relatives, didn't speak of them. Sometimes they were locked in room of the family home with meals brought in, but the person never being received in public venues. Other times they were cast out. And still other choices were to simply ignore the problem as best they could. In the mid-to-late 1800s the asylum was brought into play as a place for the mentally ill.

The treatment of the day was based upon the morals and social norms of the communities in which they asylum was housed. Most people of the time believed that simply loving, caring for and accepting the person would nurse them back to a "normal" reality and more acceptable behavior. In the Victorian age, it was accepted treatment to house a mentally ill patient in a place free of stress. This involved staying in an asylum (which was relabeled "institution" in the 1890s), away from family, friends, job, normal day-to-day responsibilities, and simply resting, eating three square meals a day and wandering the grounds of the institution.  THERE WAS NO MEDICINE! 

On the other side of the coin, right before the "enlightenment" of the Victorian Era, many of the "insane", as they were called, were put in prison with hardened criminals instead of housed in medical facilities. Makes me want to jump in my time machine and go back to ask "and that was supposed to help them how?"

Many of the diagnoses we know today were unknown at that time. Schizophrenia, manic-depressive or bipolar disorder, multiple personality disorder, catatonia, depression....all these were given names in the twentieth century. We learned that depression is a chemical disorder, not simply the "blues". Schizophrenia is now a treatable illness, not just a person who needed shock treatments or worse, to be locked away as an embarrassment of the family.

In my book, I have a character who suffers mental illness. His illness causes him to hear "voices" and takes him on a journey no one in his friendship bank or family unit can deal with or understand. Having a family member whose father suffered from schizophrenia, it has been an interesting study, albeit painful. Hopefully, I can do this justice, and you, the reader will be left feeling sad for him and his family...which is only part of the objective. The other part is to show how far we have come.

It wasn't until the 1900s that more "radical" treatments were begun. It is too bad that medications now used for psychological trauma weren't even in the minds of the providers. Although the physicians and caregivers of the time were doing what they knew to do, it wasn't very much. Like so many things through human existence, psychotic episodes were simply viewed as demonic activity or an embarrassment.

Hopefully my character, his family and friends will tear at your heart and help you reach out to those in your circle who possibly suffer silently from clinical depression, addictions....any disorder. If what happened to my character had been in today's society, his treatment options would be many and varied and less frowned upon.

Where In the World Do All the Stories Come From?

People ask me where I get the ideas for the stories within the story. That's an easy one. The general idea usually comes from some life lesson or experience that I or someone in my family have lived through and survived to tell about. But as the voice on the 1960s Dragnet television series used to say "only the names were changed to protect the innocent".

One such story comes from my father. Legend has it that his dad was quite the ladies' man and I personally, can name three wives. When my father was 16, he, his youngest sister, Alice, and their father, my grandfather, were traveling from Western Oklahoma to Arkansas upon the separation and impending divorce of his last wife. Their plans included driving to Carlisle, Arkansas to pick up daddy's eldest sister and then stay with relatives until Grandpa was back on his feet.

The journey was long and they ended up staying in a travel court in Chickasha, Oklahoma for the night. Sometime during the night, there was an explosion. The hot water heater exploded and Grandpa and Alice were killed instantly. Daddy, on the other hand, was rushed by ambulance to an area hospital, where he was in a coma for several days. He was unable to put his dad and sister to rest and it burdened him his entire life.

The two were laid to rest in a Chickasha cemetery on February 12, 1929.

Daddy and my Aunt Gladys grew up very differently. She was given a proper education and he was used as a family workhorse of shorts, even being taken out of school at times to help with harvesting of crops. While she went to college and became a teacher, he was drafted and went to Japan during WWII.

He was a cook in the Army. When he came home to mother and my two sisters (I was born many years later), he opened a restaurant in Lonoke, Arkansas. A local judge frequently ate lunch there and came in many times asking to set up a meeting with Daddy and then would disappear for weeks on end, as if something kept him from keeping the appointment.

We later learned, through some genealogical searches, that all the records of the fire in Oklahoma as well as the probate records in our county were destroyed from the dates in question. There was talk about the soon-to-be ex-wife's lover hiring someone to cause that explosion. But no one knows for sure.

I only know that my father went to his grave thinking his father and sister might have been brutally murdered, and he, severely injured and left for dead. He suffered from anger issues and could be volatile at times. For all my life, that was the father I knew. He was definitely a product of his upbringing. But I loved him then...and I love him now.

Anyway, there you have it. Just one of a million ideas racing through my head on their way to my computer and your reading pleasure.

The Peterson Petting Zoo

When I was growing up in Arkansas, I used to sit at the community table at the back of my dad's cafe and listen to men who gathered for their daily infusion of caffeine and "manly" gossip talk about deer hunting. I could never wrap my mind around shooting for fun (that was then and this is now...I have evolved, albeit a vegetarian. I just realize not everyone holds to my live and let the animals live values) and really couldn't understand how anybody got close enough to deer to shoot one.

They were an elusive animal in our neck of the woods. It was easier to snag a rattlesnake or gig a frog (a story for another time) than to coax a deer...or even find one. So imagine my bewilderment the first time I encountered the friendly deer of Colorado.

It was late summer 1987. My son had just returned from his summer vacation at his dad's in Texas and we had just moved to Colorado. We drove over to the Royal Gorge with a picnic lunch. When we arrived we were driving through the park looking for that perfect spot to eat and enjoy the beauty of the Gorge. We were parked in the car, just about to get out. My son said something that got my attention. I was holding an enormous package of Cheetos...open bag of Cheetos...my window was rolled down and while my son was talking, all of a sudden his eyes got big and his jaw dropped and I heard this rustling sound next to me. I turned around to find a 12-point buck with his head and neck in my window, his snout in my bag of Cheetos, munching down. When I looked at him he stopped smacking and his eyes locked with mine and he backed out of the car. YIKES! What was wrong with the deer here? That would never happen in Arkansas. I guess when you're hungry and you really like salty treats, etiquette flies right out the window, especially when you are one of the creatures who lives by the survival of the fittest mentality. And he was definitely more fit than I..so eat up, dude!

Once in Ouray, same thing, different food, different vehicle, much larger deer. My husband, Don and I were on our way back to Colorado Springs from Phoenix. It was January 1 and we wanted to see the Climbing Ice Wall in Ouray so we took a detour over the Million Dollar Highway, following a snow plow all the way to Silverton at a fast 15 mph. If you've never traveled this road, you'd not understand how deep the snow is there in the winter. We were in a Tahoe and the snow on the side of the road was taller than our vehicle. And no railings....at an altitude of more than 11,000 feet...and the fall, should it happen, would have been straight down. But I digress.

We pull into Ouray, which is a favorite spot of ours. (That's where we became engaged.) Driving down the main drag, I looked to my right and there they were. A buck and all his lady friends. Someone had put hay out in the yard for them and they were having a feast. We pulled up on the side of the road and here he came. Snorting, strutting, and stupidly, I rolled the window down. He stuck his head in...with all those horns...and enormous nose, big mouth and bad breath. I said, "Don, give me one of the cookies."

A friend of ours had made us some Norwegian Christmas cookies and we had a handful left. I put one in my hand and he took it. He wanted another. I gave it to me. Another. And another. Until they were all gone. And he got huffy. He wasn't quite done yet. "Now what do we do?", I asked.

One thing you have to know about me is this: animals love me. Tame ones, wild ones, it doesn't matter. They love me. I pet his nose and he back out and got rid of the attitude and we drove on. And as we did I watched him in the side mirror strutting back over to his ladies. Stud!

Now...our yard is much like that EVERYDAY. We have yearlings, mamas, fawns, bucks, and they are all my buddies. There's one in the yard right now as I write who just wants to be petted between her ears and she's happy. Another one, just wants to sit next to the house in the shade. The "boys", as I lovingly call them, "are brothers...now yearlings...who we have watched grow since they were about a month old. They run up to meet us when we are outside. It's a hoot.

We have raccoons, foxes, and last night a big old black bear on the front porch. I was on the couch and I started hearing some strange noise that wasn't deer like at all, and I looked out the window, which was open, by the way, and there he was, sitting on the porch, drinking the hummingbird water and licking up what he'd spilled on the concrete floor. I said, "Hey," in my best give-me-back-my-apple tree voice (from Wizard of Oz) and he jumped up and ran hellbent for leather down the side of the mountain where were live, turning and watching until he was out of sight.

I don't pretend to say we should all go outside and pet the bears, but they are funny as long as you're on one side of the wall and they're on the other. By the way, they like the sound of tonal windchimes, in case you're interested.

Yes, we live in a petting zoo and our cat loves it. Especially the deer. One of the mommies cleans his fur. It's weird as all get out, but fun to see. 

My hubby calls me the Wild Animal Whisperer.

Knitting Isn't Just for Old Fuddy Duddies!

When I started writing the Miners' Cut series, I inserted women who loved handcrafts. Needlepoint, crochet, embroidery, tatting, and, my all time favorite, knitting!

I can't speak to the joy of the other fiber arts named, but even though knitting can be relaxing and take your mind off your troubles for a little while, it can also be taxing. Reading patterns can be confusing and not for the faint of heart. I won't mention the website, but, several months ago I found a pattern on it that I thought would be a great sweater for me. I began knitting. Things were moving along quickly and I thought, "this is an easier pattern than I thought". What is that old saying about not counting your chickens before they're hatched?

I got almost the entire front panel completed and things started falling apart. From row to row, the stitches didn't line up and the panel began to look like something a novice would have undertaken. Not to toot my own horn, but I am a professional knitter and can normally look at the stitches and identify the problem. Not so this time. I unraveled a portion of the panel. I gave it another shot thinking I had just misread the pattern. Same problem. I unraveled again. Grrr! This happened four times. I tried altering the pattern. Nope! This was a website all yarn and fiber art people would recognize. I took the entire panel apart and chose another pattern from different site. (By the way...the sweater is an awesome light green, cotton, summer sweater in a lovely lace pattern.)

Not to be unfair to the original website, I tried a simple scarf pattern...same thing! Then a friend of mine called a couple of weeks later and said, "Hey, Hazel, have you ever done a project from ....?" And she named the website. I hesitantly said, "Yes, why?" "Because I have been working on a pattern for three days and it never comes out right." I told her to do herself a favor and move on before she ripped her hair out.

The picture today is of a shawl I just finished for my husband's niece who graduated from high school this year. Virgin wool, bright purple, soft, luscious, beautiful. I hope she likes it as much as I. If she hates, it I will pay to have it sent PRIORITY right back to its maker!

The ladies in my book knit. They are fast and furious. They are determined. And they are competitive. Never to be outdone. You'll love reading about the knitting rivalry betweeen Faerie Wright and Augusta O'Keefe.  Both are strong-willed, bullheaded women who think their designs are the best and will not be outdone by the other. Oh....and they are best friends!  Yeah....right!

Red Mountain Mining...Living and Working Above 10000 Feet

Living in Colorado presents many distinct challenges. On some days, simply going for a walk through my neighborhood is a workout. Choosing to do life in a place with drastic changes in altitude, weather and landscape at every turn is definitely an adventure. When employment is added to the mix, one must be sure they are clear-thinking and used to the thinner air and can handle it.

Surely the prospectors who traveled both near and far to the high country of Colorado in the 1800s, were surprised to see what awaited them. It was a different time, for sure. Most people probably had no idea what lay ahead. Surely once most of the Westward travelers were shocked by the sheer beauty of the mountains from a distance out on the High Plains. Pikes Peak can be seen from a hundred miles away.  The closer they got, the more daunting the sight becomes.

It's like this: you walk along on these flowing plains, the wind always blowing, cool breezes coming from the mountain air. Then BAM! All of a sudden, with no warning, you go from lower elevations to THE MOUNTAINS! Like a brick wall. I used to tell my husband when we still lived in Colorado Springs that it felt like the world just ended right at those mountains.

But those people didn't have the roads we have today. They followed trails made by the Native Americans, deer...like that. And it didn't get easier as they climbed. The altitude only got more intense, the air thinner and the ground....ROCK!

So the mining camps were a primitive way to live in the beginning. Imagine breaking ground for gold or silver in a place that was solid granite. On Red Mountain, I have seen the remains of houses, gantries, warehouses and other buildings that are just built right into the side of  mountains that go straight up. I've tried to imagine how in the world they actually built them...and then how they got to them. No steps, no ladders. Just a building hanging from the side of a huge mountain in the middle of nowhere. Hmm.....

Think for a moment about your life. How comfortable it really is in comparison to what went before us. It's cold up in those mountains; some of the mining camps were above tree line, which is 12000 feet above sea level. It's cold there ALL THE TIME; it snows year round, maybe not everyday, but enough that I'd tire of it quickly.

And let's talk about high-grading. High-grading, for those who aren't familiar with the term, is simply when the workers of the mine filled their pockets, hats, shirts, shoes, socks, any old thing, with ore during their shift and making a profit at the expense of their employers. Call it what it is: STEALING! In the early days there were no laws preventing it. It was a new capitalistic venture and they sort of learned as they went.  Now, it's a big deal.

In Cripple Creek just a few years ago, several men were arrested and brought up on charges of high-grading. I don't know the exact amount of gold they took, but suffice it to say, it was six figures. So, take it back to the 1800s and lots of people made a fair share on top of the salary they drew. I've not found anything that says how it was handled in Colorado, but in California the mine owners decided to start a new rule about reporting in for work and leaving at the end of a shift. It went like this: when arriving, the workers would report to a building that housed showers, lockers...much like the locker rooms of today. They would change their clothes, put them in a locker and don a uniform provided by the mine (hats, shoes, pants, shirt...the whole works). At the end of the shift, with a security guard on site, the men would strip down of those clothes, throw them into a bin for laundry and shower before dressing in their own clothes. High-grading virtually stopped in California.

Many towns sprung up all over the region, many at the lower elevations, to be supply ports for the mine and villages at the highest elevations. Silverton and Ouray both wanted to the be port of entry to the mining fields on Red Mountain, each shouting their accolades. Knowing a road was desperately needed, Ouray built a wagon road on the rough, rocky, dangerous terrain, prompting Red Mountain City, which as initially on the Silverton side of things, to move closer to Ouray.

Later Otto Mears built the now famous Million Dollar Highway through the area. Towns began to appear all over the mountain. As more and more prospectors surfaced in the area, their women and children followed and the area became quite populated. Lawyers, land developers, saloon keepers, and the ever-present prostitutes all made decent money. Before long, thousands of people called the Red Mountain Mining District their home.

And none of those people expected or planned for such extreme conditions. At night, a day that had been shirt sleeve weather could become intolerable with temperatures dropping to twenty below zero. Mining accidents caused death and injury. And the Silver Panic of 1893 brought about a change on Red Mountain. Things would never be the same. Three separate fires, one in 1892, another two years later, then another in 1939 destroyed Red Mountain Town. After the last, it was never rebuilt.

There is still mining in the area but not to the extent of its heyday. What was once a productive, mining area now looks like a series of ghost towns. Rich in history, the Red Mountain Project left the mountains scarred. Driving through the District, you might very well find yourself asking, "I wonder what it was like when...."