Gravehopping and Finding My Way Home

My favorite song about home is “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith. The summer of 1989 my life-long group of high school friends and I saw Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young at Alpine Valley. 

We started the aimless trudge through the parking lot on the hunt for Eric’s Ford Escort, when Rolf called “Shotgun!” When we found the car, 45 minutes later, by parking lot etiquette, Rolf sat in the passenger seat and I sat in the back seat of what was really, quite a teeny, tiny little car. 

That Blind Faith song was on a “mix tape” stuck in Eric’s cassette player. I swear to god we heard that song two dozen times. I fell asleep at one point so that may be a low-ball estimate.

We were driving to Madison without a map, just some sketchy directions and a lot of pot. Did I mention we were all totally high the entire night? That probably explains why we shrieked like Howler Monkeys when we finally got to someone’s brother’s cousin’s house we’d been searching for in Madison.

“Home” has had multiple locations and connotations throughout my life. Geographically “home” has included Appleton, Boston, Neenah, Menasha, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Oconomowoc, and Shawano. The consistent location of home has always been Shawano. My maternal grandparents spent their entire lives there, or within the “suburbs” of Wescott and Richmond. My grandma grew up on what was or would become the Menominee Rez. My parents met and married there. I was baptized three weeks after being born there because my father was shipping out to Basic Training before deploying to Vietnam. While he was in country my mother and I lived with her parents, my Grandpa and Grandma Krause. 

We moved to Appleton within weeks of my second birthday, but still, Shawano was Home. When we were leaving after a weekend there, Grandma would kiss us gently on both cheeks and say, “Now you come home again soon.” Her cheeks were soft like powered pillows. I cannot remember a single time when leaving that house without hearing her speak those words.

Sometime in early 2003 my sister and I discovered that on Saturdays of Memorial Day Weekends, our grandparents and our grandma’s two sisters and their husbands, our great-aunts and great-uncles, spent the day driving to the graves of our ancestors. They cleaned off the headstones, pulled out the fake, faded flowers from last Memorial Day Weekend and stuck in a bouquet of new, brighter fake flowers, and shared stories on the drive to the three cemeteries they visited. With their tasks complete, they stopped at a tavern in Red River, another Shawano suburb. In this part of Wisconsin there are no “bars” – far too “big city.” These were taverns. They had supper at one of dozens of supper clubs they could choose from. Places we went to when I was kid and thought eating frog legs made me “exotic” and “sophisticated.” I was eight years old.

Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend 2003 my sister and I tailed along with our grandparents, great-aunt Margaret and great-uncle Dave, great-aunt Shirley and great-Uncle Butch. Butch and Shirley had an enormous Suburban with a back row tiny enough to rival the back seat of my friend Eric’s Ford Escort, which is where my sister and I sat. I swear to god every time we stopped at a cemetery, tavern or the supper club, Margaret would forget my sister and I in that cocoon and shut the door without letting us out of the car. That was the only way we could get out and every stinkin’ time she forgot, we knocked on the window looking forlorn and pissed off at the same time.

Every year at her grandmother’s grave, a woman I never met yet lives inside of me, my grandma said, “There was never a better grandma than her.” Every year I said, “She has a run for her money because you’re the best grandma there ever is.” She held me a little closer and said, “I can only hope so, Dolly.” She called all five of her granddaughters “Dolly”.

It didn’t take long before my maternal aunts and cousins filtered in to Gravehopping with us on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekends. The more we gained, the more we lost. We all lose those we love to the inevitable unknown of Death. It may come fast or slow, tragically or peacefully, but still, it comes. There can be no other way. Margaret was the first of “the Golden Girls”, as we referred to them, to pass in 2010. Then it was Grandma in 2016 and finally Shirley in 2018.

My husband and I moved to Green Bay in August 2019 for my new job. With the help of Siri, Irish accent version, I can now find more places than the casino, the airport and the stadium which was the extent of my geographical knowledge of this town until moving here.

As Memorial Day Weekend closed in around me this spring, plans for Gravehopping were made. As I was writing down ingredients for Cucumber Salad, my signature dish and meal contribution since Grandma died, I stood in my kitchen and suddenly dropped my pencil, my notepad, and I couldn’t shut the cupboard door because I was literally paralyzed. I didn’t blink, I don’t remember breathing although obviously I was, I stood there with one thought banging inside of my skull: From where I stood, I didn’t know how to find my way Home.

Shawano has been my true north since conception. Not knowing exactly how to get there is akin to fate shaking me like a snow globe only when I land, the earth is sand, the air is stiffening fog and I have no voice.

Just like so many decades before when trying to reach Madison without a map made driving monotonous and pointless, I felt that way about driving up to Shawano. For the first time in my life I couldn’t find my way Home. 

Of course, Irish Siri got me to my aunt’s house easily. Gravehopping was accomplished and is in the books for another year. However, if I had to get in my car right now and drive to Shawano, I couldn’t do it...without GPS. In the genuine sense of the lyric, “I can’t find my way home.”

Cucumber Salad

Today was the 143rd Kentucky Derby. We're a Derby family: we've been to the Derby twice as a family, I remember watching the Derby in 1992 from my apartment in Boston because my then-husband was at a Marine Corps Reserve training weekend, and my great-aunt Shirley and my great-uncle Norton always bet on the Derby. They'd usually watch it from my grandparents' living room while all of us kids were running around like crazed banshees. I know the first two versus and the chorus from My Old Kentucky Home, the state song of Kentucky. I don't think I know that much of the Wisconsin state song.
The Derby marks the arrival of May. A complicated month for me. This month has Mother's Day, my birthday, my grandson's birthday which is the same day as my cousin Ann's birthday, my second cousin's birthday which is the same day as mine, my friend Becky's birthday, and Memorial Day weekend. For 20 years we've referred to Memorial Day weekend as "Gravehopping" because it was about 20 years ago that I started going to Shawano to place flowers on our relatives' graves with my grandparents, great-aunt Kootchie, and my great-aunt and uncle Shirley & Butch. Grandpa, Kootchie, and Butch are gone now. Shirley and Grandma are both in nursing homes.
I was the only grandchild who tagged along with them back in 1997. It remained that way for three years until my sister decided to join us, which I was ok with. A few years later when my other female cousins and aunts decided to join in, my initial reaction was jealousy. My first thoughts were, "Fuck no people. This is my thing, not yours." I felt invaded upon. By the time we got to the Red River Tavern & Grocery, my jealousy had withered away and I thought, "The women in my family kick ass! We need to all do this every year." The weekend title "Gravehopping" was born.
Before we left for the cemeteries at 1pm, we had what amounted to a banquet cooked by Grandma, served in her kitchen on South Smalley Street. The menu included a mix-and-match of some of the following: teriyaki chicken wings, ham, pasta salad, a relish tray including radishes cut like roses, cucumber salad, potato salad and at least two desserts such as cherry torte and rhubarb torte. But the absolute BEST part of Gravehopping was the breakfast Grandma cooked on Sunday morning. In her cast iron skillet she fried eggs over hard in the bacon grease from freshly fried bacon. I began looking forward to that breakfast as soon as I was driving home from the weekend. However, here comes the rub.
The week before Gravehopping in 2015 my grandma picked rhubarb from her yard and while walking back to the house twisted her ankle in an uneven spot in the backyard and she fell. She fell hard and fractured her hip. Someone driving by stopped and asked if she was ok. She wasn't and somehow either my aunt Margie and uncle Dan were called or an ambulance came (I'm not sure of the details) but she ended up at Shawano Memorial Hospital and was then transferred to AMC for hip surgery.
She was picking that rhubarb to make a torte for me because she knows I love her rhubarb torte. The guilt and responsibility I continue to feel about how that one event, an event she was engaging in for me, makes me cry to this day, even as I type this on my laptop in my living room two years later.
Gravehopping was different that year because Grandma was at a hospital in Appleton and we were all in Shawano, ready to stick silk flowers into the dirt next to headstones of our ancestors. We followed our basic routine, minus the pre-Gravehopping food feast, and those of us who usually spent the night at Grandpa & Grandma's did even though Grandma wasn't there. I was the last one to leave the house that Sunday.
There were no eggs fried in bacon grease on Sunday morning, and there never would be again.
Although Grandma recovered quickly from hip surgery, when the OT folks did the home safety assessment, they determined that Grandma couldn't return home because the house was so small she couldn't adequately use her walker or other adaptive equipment they recommended for installation. So she's been at Maple Lane since around mid-June of 2015. The house was sold in the fall of 2015. I no longer have a place to come home to in Shawano. It is heart-breaking because pre-hip fracture, whenever we visited, she always told us to "Come home again soon." I don't visit Shawano often any more because I don't feel that I have a place there where I belong. I don't have a home anymore.
Quite some time before the contents of the house were dismantled and the "For Sale" sign went into the corner of the front yard, my sister got a hold of  Grandma's cucumber salad recipe. I've asked Grandma for recipes many times and when relaying them, she always started with, "Well you take some flour and sugar and eggs and beat them together..." It's virtually impossible for me to replicate anything she's ever baked, cooked, or fried based on that information. However, there is one thing I've managed to translate into something edible and that is Grandma's cucumber salad.
The recipe I got from my sister doesn't list the order of ingredients, and there are a few quantities of items missing, but I've managed to cobble it together into something quite spectacular. I first made it for a Salad Bar lunch at work in the summer of 2016. My coworkers raved about it. Honestly, I'm not just making this shit up to help myself feel better. Ask anyone who was there: they loved it.
I brought it to Easter dinner at my parents' house this year and both Rog & Shirl said it tasted exactly like Grandma's.
Exactly like Grandma's. I can't imagine a greater compliment in the world. Maybe one Sunday morning I'll fry eggs in bacon grease in my cast iron skillet.

Thanksgiving Traditions, Fry Bread and All

As usual, this year I cooked the entire Thanksgiving meal my family has annually enjoyed for the past eight years. I generally start cooking items that I can easily reheat the day before the meal, so this year I made the green bean casserole, pumpkin creme brulee for dessert, and pumpkin tomato soup (which is actually much tastier than it sounds) in advance.
By the time the turkey is about 45 minutes from being removed from the oven, I generally look like a wreck. We always eat at 1pm. If someone had taken a photo of me yesterday at 12:15pm, I would have had on no make-up, been wearing an old (likely holey) tee shirt and shorts (I get WAY too warm to wear sweatpants while cooking), had flour in my pulled back hair, a sweaty forehead, and glasses that kept slipping down my nose. It's never my most flattering moment, but within the 45 minutes I have before Tom or Tina Turkey is ready to "rest" before carving, I somehow pull it together: I clean myself up, put in my contacts, put on some make-up, change into decent clothes and manage to look refreshed! Just like Martha Stewart! LOL!
Except for turkey, mashed potatoes and green bean casserole, I generally don't serve any other portion of the meal from one year to the next. That means coming up with a new dessert and several new side dishes every year. This year I decided to make fry bread, as defined by Merriam-Webster's online dictionary as "quick bread cooked (as by American Indians) by deep-frying" and the website goes on to claim the first known use of the term was in 1950. 1950? Seriously? I can trace my Native American heritage WAY back before 1950. Good grief, my parents were born by 1950.  I guarantee you the women in my mother's family had been making fry bread LONG before 1950.
My great-grandma Ziemer, who was Native, and her husband, my great-grandpa was even more so, called fry bread "hounds' ears." When I told my maternal grandma (their daughter) that I was making fry bread this year, she didn't know what I was talking about until I described them and she exclaimed, "Hounds' ears!"
The plain fact of my maternal family's Native American heritage has been a point of contention among some of my family members.  One of my great-aunts (sister to my grandma) hated the fact that she was "Indian." When we would drive past an anonymous house in Shawano (where both of my parents families' are from and where I was born) that had a bunch of stuff on the front porch, or a car parked on the lawn, my great aunt would say, with noticeable disdain in her voice, "I bet Indians live there." As if she wasn't one herself.
When my parents were attending Shawano High School the mascot was an Indian. The school has since had a change of heart about Native American school mascots and are now known as the Shawano Hawks.  When my parents went to high school, there was no high school on the Menominee Reservation so Native American kids were bused into the Shawano school district. According to stories I've heard, it wasn't an easy atmosphere; certainly not as contentious as the integration of white schools in the south, but similar in a lot of ways.
Then there was the Menominee Warrior Society's siege on the Alexian Brotherhood's property outside of Gresham, WI on January 1, 1975, known as the Novitiate. I'm not getting into this portion of Menominee history because it is much better documented in a book titled The Abbey and Me by J. Patrick Rick, a former Catholic resident of the Novitiate. I met with him two years ago in Gresham after I had read his book, but I bought another copy just so I could have him autograph it. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the author's interpretation of the events that occurred that winter, but the fact that Marlon Brando showed up as a sign of support to the Menominees indicates the level of craziness that was going on at that location at that time. Legally, it's trespassing to enter into the Novitiate and its grounds, but I've done it and have taken photos of what I discovered, which was a horribly damaged and beaten skeleton of a once majestic, grand building.
But I digress. What I really want to write about is the feelings I had while making my very first batch of fry bread yesterday. I had the luxury of a marble rolling pin and electric deep frier for my first try at it, but I did knead the dough and beat it down, then knead it some more before finally rolling it out and cutting out 6" circles to place in the hot oil. While my hands were covered in flour and the dough squished between my fingers, I thought about my great-grandmother, Margaret Ziemer, and who had taught her how to make fry bread and what it was like for her to create her first batch. And I kept thinking farther and farther back to the Native women in my family who had likely created hundreds of batches of fry bread, not just as a novelty at Thanksgiving, but as a staple for their families. What were their lives like, especially compared to my 21st century existence? Me, with my graduate degree, when I'm sure I don't have to go back too many generations to find family members who couldn't read English, but sang beautiful Native lullaby's to their children. Me, who uses bottled hair color to keep my grays from showing though my hair, when I know my great grandmother and her sister (my great great aunt Sarah) would take down their hair at night and braid it down each other's backs, speaking a language I didn't understand, but that was lyrical and something special shared between the two sisters.
I see a lot of my great-grandma Ziemer in myself: she had plenty of beaus and absolutely loved big, bold costume jewelry.  She wore rouge the color of bricks and always had lemon drops in one of her many handbags. I can say I had a number of suitors in my youth and that my motto toward jewelry, shoes and purses has always been, "Go big or go home."
These are traits I possess that I attribute to my great-grandma.  I hope I honored her and all the other Native women in my family yesterday, by making my first batch of fry bread.

Photo I took of the Novitiate, October 2012.