Palenquito

Original Post from October 2018

The Holding Post is our sanctuary. It is where we contemplate and plan and make the future of our family. As the cold breathes it's chill on my home and surrounding trees, transforming their vibrancy into brown leaves.  Their roots finishing off their storage of starches and next years buds with every days sunlight growing shorter and shorter.

I wonder nostalgically for the life that has left and contemplate the future of this plot of ground. We've taken from the ground: toys, many hundred shards of bricks, rotted wood, door handles, drawer pulls, hooks, pulleys, rusted rails that once closed irrigation trenches... All small pieces of the history of our home, the people who lived here. We've found photos of the original inhabitants and seen the glory of the home's history in the garden and leaves climbing up intricate but humble woodwork of the late Victorian Pioneer home.

Now the bricks are falling from the front window sill and the paint still keeps markings from nests of wasps and swallows as a memory of transformative life. We slowly erase the signs of neglect and wildness taking over in the form of unpruned branches still giving apples, though smallish and late. We collect the brick shards and rusted metal machinery. We've tilled the ground where dolls shoes and boys shoes were buried and made tiny holes for beet seeds and onion seeds. Tomatoes have risen up in place of thistles and wild licorice weed.

All the findings are sorted. Doll shoes and boy shoes give us a smile as we toss them in a pile to be lifted by children doing chores into trash bins.  Metal pieces and anything that has withstood the test of many years thrashing rains and wailing winds, go into a pile for me. I make the future of this ground, the face of it. What I want to present it and what I want it to mean and I'll do it in the form of sculpture. Show history in found objects. Everything now takes the form of what will be; the planning, the ideals, the sanctuary...at least in our minds. I consider the future of what was and what we are as a family.

The Holding Post. El Palenquito. A place to tie up your horse and take refuge.

Our family is mixed. We bring to this area of Sanpete county the blue blooded soulfulness my cattle ranching grandfather left me from 20 miles south. We mix it with the warmth of my husband's South American culture, food, language. We teach our children where they came from. Every time we see the old home my great, great  grandparents built, we show them it was built of the same stone cut from the mountain East of town. We teach them in the photo of the couple standing on the porch of our home over 120 years ago, hanging in the entryway. We wonder if they crossed paths with my own great great grandfather. To bring in the culture of Argentina we use the language, though sometimes it might as well be ancient Greek. We name our great adventure Palenquito to bring something my husband and I both love to a place that means forever to us.

This might be our manifesto, but I'm too shy to be so bold. As I unearth yet more toys and machined metal parts, I'm discovering that what I really need in this place, is a place to belong. I'm learning how to let myself belong in each section I till and smooth over. I feel safe. I no longer have nightmares about roads or rivers or wild animals, and I hope that a sense of belonging will come in time because I really, really love the life I'm living in this Palenquito.

Tools of belonging

I am in need of an outlet for words. A way to clarify and find my way. Words do that for me sometimes. Tonight, a few minutes ago, I tried to go to bed. I started thinking about my grandpas tools, because my Dad gave some tools to us the other day and some of them were my grandpa Jack's. I remember asking my grandpa for help once cutting the table legs shorter for a table that Ariel and I had bought. I worried that I would regret cutting the table short, because I really liked the idea of a high table. I never looked back, practically. It was too hard to find comfortable chairs for a high table. My grandpa took Ariel and I out in his garage and I remember my fascination with his tools. he gave Ariel a sander once and some other random tools. I know that I have always been fascinated by things that other people might consider unimportant. But I know my grandpa considered tools important and so do I. So I keep that sander like a priceless relic, even though my Dad later gave me another just like it, which my grandpa had given him, so apparently my grandpa had a ton of them because he collected things which he deemed valuable. Who knows how many more red Craftsman hand sanders he had. One of the most useful tools I've ever owned...

As I lay thinking about sleep, and my grandpas tools, thinking about how some people are willing to impart knowledge and how my grandpa probably had no idea how I regarded his tools and his expert use of them. The memory of being with him as he expertly cut my table legs shorter, explaining why the angle and which side it should be laid on to get the right floor contact and leveling, thinking maybe I should have been inside talking to my grandma Helen, but remembering how I really just wanted see how my grandpa would accomplish the task, I was flooded with the sensation of belonging. Even though my grandparents came from a different generation and women being in love with tools wasn't something they could related to, I felt their home was a place where I belonged. Laying in my bed I felt a sense of belonging and an acute loss of people that in reality, I lost years ago. For Helen it's been 10, for Jack it's been 3; but they are a part of me and I miss them. They appreciated me. And I felt like I belonged. I recognize that it might be helpful for me to write a list of things that make me feel that comfortable, reassuring belonging that I am in need of. And maybe, it just might be time to send my words out into the webwaves.