The Consolation Prize - Potato Quilt

The Potato Quilt

Just when I think my creative energy is exhausted, out of nowhere comes some silly inspiration.  I had one last Grandchild quilt to make.  The 4 granddaughters and one grandson of Bertie Carter, during her lifetime always spent Christmas Eve at her house and this is their first year that she will have been gone at Christmas.  So, I set about making 5 quilts (one for each) with no plan for which grandchild would get which quilt.  Katy, my daughter came up with a plan:  We'll play board games and the winner will get to choose a quilt, then the second winner, etc.  What is the incentive to go beyond the usual deference to each other, in politeness?  The Potato Quilt!  Who would want the last remaining reference to grandmother to be in the form of a quilt that has potatoes on it?  Maybe someone.... or then again, maybe it will be the last place consolation prize... or the quilt of any child who fails to attend.  Who would say we have not kept our sense of humor?

Water Witching at Tahlequah Junior High

My dad, Gene Carter was the son of a water well driller.  In fact, his uncle Jess Ross drilled wells too.  My grandfather always told him that  if folks wanted their well witched before they dug it, to do that but really, to look for water trees when they picked the well spot.  After his teen years of drilling wells with his father and uncle, my dad became a teacher.  He liked having summer off and it gave him a chance to do other things-- fishing, painting houses, trimming trees for people, and one Summer when I was five, building a new house.  One year when I was in Junior high, he took a job helping the Tahelquah Public Schools to improve Tahlequah Junior High.  With a buddy Jim Bridges, they were tasked with building a retaining wall of railroad ties just uphill  a few yards from the Junior High Gym.  It was hard work.  The ties had been dumped on top of the earthwork, so they had to do a lot of climbing and heavy hauling.  Inside the gymnasium, other workers had poured a new concrete floor and let it set up, but they failed to note the drain and were puzzling over how they'd be able to find it.  The old plumber told Dad and Jim to make dousing rods.  Both men were skeptical but there weren't any other ideas, so they got a coat hanger or something from Willie Wilson's shop and make L-rods.  They found a spot where the rods seemed to cross, and when they hammered into the concrete, they found the drain on the first hammer strike!  "Pure luck," they thought. 

Another task was to find the water lines from Willie Wilson's Wood Shop.  They figured they could start digging anywhere since their chance of finding the water line was going to involve a huge amount of work.  They playfully witched for it.  The grass was about knee-high out there, and they were just joking around by witching it.  Well, the spot those rods crossed over... Jim Bridges reached down and pulled up the first handful of weeds, and what should they find but a faucet above ground! 

Same Summer, the crew was looking for the Public Address System wiring between two buildings and one man had potted the yard with holes from looking here and there.  They witched for the wiring and found it just about 6 or 8 inches below the surface.

I'm not saying that water witching works, works for electrical wiring, works for faucet fixtures or anything else.  I just wanted to share this story because some Tahlequah Junior High alums may not know that water witching took place there on the school grounds.

Its a Good Friday

Easter this year is a bit of an anomaly.  I always like Good Friday because it is an extra day off of work, and a play day.  I often spend it cooking for Easter or dyeing eggs or tee shirts.

This year, Easter will be different without my mother's touch as family matriarch.  She was a gracious hostess and a good cook.  Most of all, she had boundless energy and never was there a holiday where the cake was not themed, or any such thing.  I, on the other hand, somehow inherited the 'guy' genes in my family consisting of two girls, and usually I'm asked to bring the soda pop.  For years there, relatives told ME that the get-together was an hour earlier than 'real time' because I was habitually late... being the type of partygoer who just starts preparing for the party when it is time to be there.

Maybe I exaggerate.  I've been reputed to bring brilliantly delicious dishes from time to time.  And scarcely mediocre ones at other times.

My best Easter was when my sister lived down the street from my parents on Victor Street, and had 3 girls just of the age to wear wonderful Beatrix Potter empire waist chintz floral dresses with fantastic large sashes.  Back then, we had lots of children of the age to race across the yard in competitive Easter Egg Hunting.  Oh the pink velvet and lace tights!  One niece wore a shirt from her grandfather, "Just Say No To Hollow Bunnies."  We were a large extended family of 5 aunts and uncles, their children and grandchildren.  Every person on Earth should have the delight of such a large, fun, funny, handsome, competent, and loving family.

Nieces and nephews now have grown up and there is an equally charming age cluster of Oklahoma University cohorts consisting of not less than five of them this semester.  Now the darling dresses are replaced by crimson and cream jerseys with the number 14 on them.  (For those who may not know, that is Sam Bradford, OU's former great quarterback and Heisman Award winner, who happens to be Cherokee like all of our OU students in the family).

Bootleggers and Quakers, and a Family Quilt

Bigmom's Quilt

My grandmother was Mary Katherine Enlow Kirk Davis.  She grew up around Notchie and Blackgum and Qualls, then lived at Boudinot, Stone Chapel and Tahlequah.  She was a seamstress and tailor, and she owned a dry cleaners.  She had five children and four of them were girls.  So back in the 1940s and 1950s she designed and executed a lot of prom dresses and fancy girls' outfits, not just for her own daughters but also for all of their friends.  She was pretty amazing as a seamstress.  Cherokee County was kinda different when she was a teenager.  Her brother Roy had the first car and was quite the popular guy.  Roy, um, was a bootlegger.  He was older and Mary would get her parents' permission to spend the night at his house in town, along with her girlfriend.  Roy kept a stock of bootleg liquor under the flooring in his house, and the girls would help him lift out the bottles so he could load up his car to make a delivery.  She told me, "Daddy would have been ashamed if he knew we'd been helping with bootlegging.  They didn't know Roy was involved in that.  But he'd give us money to buy a new dress every time we helped him and I'd come home with that new dress, looking proud."  Bigmom also told about life at Qualls when she lived there with her parents.  One time Pretty Boy Floyd came to their house and, as was the custom, anyone who came for a visit was invited to join in for a meal.  He left some money under his plate.

Cherokee County was the home of a few outlaws back in those days and later on.  Perhaps some time this blog will tell the story of Kye Carlile, who was just kinfolks to most folks around what is now the North end of Lake Tenkiller.  Back then, he was a wanted man. 

My grandmother passed away when my daughter Katy was about 4 years old, so it must have been 1989.  She was the most patient and happy, hard-working and skilled woman I have ever met.  She was funny and I always loved to stay with her because we'd make cookies without a recipe or eat big globs of honeycomb, drink Nehi Grape Soda, plant trees, pick strawberries or peaches, play with dogs, gather eggs, shop for Easter dresses-- and once she let me eat Exlax Chocolate because I threw a fit for it.  We had tea parties with the neighbor girls, too.  I don't think she ever said anything harsh to me.  She claimed to be kin to Ulysses Grant, but made me promise not to talk about it because he was bad to drink and had disgraced the family.  She said that one of men in her family in generations past (Abraham Enlow) was the birth father of Abraham Lincoln, and that Abraham Lincoln's mother had worked as a servant to the Enlows.  She was from Quaker ancestors and her parents were fervently religious.  She was a Nazarene for a while there. 

When my grandmother passed, my aunts wanted me to have this quilt by her.  I was the only family member quilting at that time, and this is just a quilt top.  I have been saving it to make up for a wedding gift for my daughter (oops too late) or a niece.  It is sateen blocks set into what you might call a lightning bolt pattern in pastels.  I'm guessing she was making it for Katy and just never finished it.  It looks like bright Mexican giant rickrack.  Sateen is not a sturdy or durable fabric, so I just take it out every few years and admire it and then put it back into a dark closet, waiting for some future time.

What's So Remarkable About This Raggedy Bit?

What's So Remarkable About This Raggedy Bit?

When my cousin had a garage sale, I bought a couple of quilts.  One was a glittery fifties heavy cabin quilt that had been made out of tufted fifties upholstery fabric with the metallic thread loops.  And the other one was a dark, rough hand quilted quilt that had been made from mens twill pants and dark wool pants.  I'm guestimating that it was quite old... maybe from the 1930s or so.  It looked like this:

When I washed it, the heavy old dark thing sort of came apart in a few places, and it became apparent that inside was an even older quilt that had been used as the batting.  Carefully, I removed a few of the shells of quilting that had held the layers together.  This revealed a remarkable mystery--- an even older quilt that was SOOO old that the colors had almost faded away.  Inside, it was all hand quilted still yet, and I could make out a quilted pattern.  Squares were about nine inches, and some squares had charm strip piecing pointed inward, so four squares together looked like arrows pointing in with  > < the tails pointing out.  The fabrics were diverse.  There was a red dotted swiss that looked like it had been flocked.  There were teensy tiny blue gingham wove checks and the same in pink or what may have once been red.  The back of the inner quilt was wholecloth of  the same blue gingham.  I noticed some silk pieces.  And a kind of fabric that is textured in squares with gauze or thin cotton between thicker cotton weave.  One of the solid squares is today yellow, and it may have been either yellow or green originally.

If you are interestedin helping to establish the history of this quilt, please contact me.  I think it is very very old, like more than a hundred years old.  The only provenance is that was a heavy winter quilt in my uncle's cabin back in the 1960sand was later owned by my cousin Cathy Burns Carter, so we don't know if has been in the family for longer than that.

Nancy Newton Carter

Here's a wonderful old picture of my great-grandmother, Nancy Newton Carter.  Her husband, Enoch Carter is in the background.

She was born, if I recall, at Rabbit Trap in Adair County.  A lot of her ancestors are buried at Hope Cemetery North of Westville.

She lived her adult life in Carter community.  In the 1950s when Lake Tenkiller was built, part of that land was changed by the lake.  Today it is called Carter's Landing.  There was, long ago, a Carter Schoolhouse.  There was a post office at Carter community, named after the postmaster Bud Chronister.  The mail came to Chronister, Oklahoma and some of the old birth certificates of babies such as my father show the birthplace as Chronister, Oklahoma.

I published a family history of the Carter women's side of the family in 1995.  Today it is out of print, but I plan to publish it for sale online soon.  Leave a comment with your email address if you wish to be notified about how to purchase this book. 

It contains a story passed down in our family from the Civil War about Nancy's mother, Laura Newton when she was a teen.  She lived back East in the Cherokee homeland of Tennessee.  Raiders came to the home.  They took anything and everything, at gunpoint.  She pleaded with them to let her keep her wedding dress, and they left without taking it.  Another time, she went down the road to a neighbor's homestead to borrow a cup of sugar or flour.  But as she was walking along, she saw a man or men hanged from a tree in their yard.  War must have a terrible toll on the psyches of the people who live thru them.  Laura Newton, all of her life, recounted vivid and chilling stories of these events and she never got over it.

In Memory of Bertie Kirk Carter

I've learned something about cancer this year.  I thought all cancers were kinda alike.  It turns out that some grow slowly, or are more capable of treatment than others.

After Christmas, my mother, Bertie Carter felt tired and listless--- even to the point of not being terribly clear-headed.  When my father and sister finally talked her into going to the ER, they kept her and gave her five pints of blood for anemia.  It turns out that her hospital visit led to tests which led to a visit to the cancer treatment center in Muskogee, where capable Dr. Vasseraddi (sp.) told us, "She has acute, or fast-growing, myopathic leukemia.  Statistically, the 10 to 15% who do live five years out from a diagnosis, are not those who are 72 years of age.  There is treatment-- chemo-- but it would not be successful for you."  The next week, we embarked on Nana's first week of dacogen.  She had four hour-long IV injections of it, but on Friday there came an ice storm and everyone was snowed in.  By Monday's treatment time, she had passed.

So many people have expressed their regards and offered to assist us in this time.  I speak for all of us in saying that we have felt the loving bond with so many friends and family over these few days since Monday, February 1 when she passed.

It has been a journey of less than three weeks, but a very hard one.  Words can't encompass how capable, funny, sweet, beautiful, compassionate, tirelessly energetic, creative, patient and clever my mom was.  She left behind two girls with advanced degrees, 2 at OU, one with an NSU degree and a grandson who loved her very much.

She got to know her first great-grandchild for a bit over one month before passing.  This pic is from November at El Zarape, where she always ordered the chicken lime soup.

The last night, Sunday January 31st was a turning point for her.  I had called her before bedtime and our plan was that I'd drive her to chemo in Muskogee in my truck with four-wheel drive, since snow and ice were still packing some of the streets, highways and bridges.  "OK, Sugar-Babe.  I'll see you at 9:30.  Love you," she said.  We've never been shy about saying we love each other.  My father went to bed early with her.  At 1:30 he noticed she was gone, and found that she had gone to the other bed but was breathing shallow, perspiring and ill.  He stayed awake concerned, but she fought him to keep him from calling an ambulance.  At dawn, he called my sister who came over and called them over Nana's protests.

She was frail but polite going to the stretcher, and thanked the medics.  On the way, her blood pressure bottomed and she was resuscitated-- and again after arriving at the hospital.  She had tubes everywhere when I went in to see her.  The doctor had braced me for it.  Her heart flatlined as my sister and I  sat holding her hand and kissing her forehead.  Now she could be free of the pumps and beeping machines, the painful pricks and the aches and stinging.  She could be beautiful again and free.

When I think of her, my favorite (recurring) image is of a coifed 60s mom, age 30-something in pink lipstick wearing a shorts set and holding a trowel from having just planted roses.  She wrote all over her final instructions "Closed casket, please."    And that was so others could remember her from better times.

In our family, we're not weepy nor regretful nor angry.  My little sister says it like this:  "We just put on our Big Girl Panties and deal with it."  We know Nana is over the pain.  At the memorial, Dennis sang, "Somewhere Over the Rainbow."  I like to think of her as a flitty little sparrow, who has flown away because she has important sparrow business to take care of, and she has done her best to give us the tools in life to carry on with things earthly. She was never just ours anyway--- she belonged to NSU, to the Hospital Board, the town's Planning and Zoning Commission, the sick, the elders, the children, the teens who needed chiffon-dreamy gowns for Prom, the mentees, the exchange students, the pastor's crew, the pitch players and domino players and golfers and History Day students, the intern teachers and the local beauty pageants and fashion shows, the renters and grandchildren.  The pastor remarked that her accomplishments were so great that the Energizer Bunny would be giving up and waving a white flag in concession to her.

Bertie Kirk Carter was b. February 6, 1937 at Braggs Oklahoma. She attended school at Stone Chapel, Boudinot, and Bagley, and perhaps other places.   In 1955 she married Eugene Clinton Carter at the home of Reverend Krouse at or near Welling.  They made their home in Tahlequah, having built a house in Boone Addition.  Then they built a house in Monks Addition at 601 Victor Street.  They had two daughters, Kathy Jean Carter and Karen Jane Carter.  She succumbed to Leukemia on Monday, February 1, 2010 just sixteen days after having been diagnosed.  Donations to NSU foundation will support scholarships in her honor.

Ross & Kin, a Ross Genealogy Reprint by Vera Dean-Ross and Kathy Tibbits

Ross & Kin 

Ross & Kin is a compiled genealogy of the descendants of John Wesley Ross, who shows up in the Ozark Mountains having been born perhaps in the 1820s.  There are mysteries about where he was born, and there are stories about his possible origin.  Even today in Newton and Pope County Arkansas, many of the families are descended from this original settler family.   Granville James (Jim) Ross published this book in about 1982 and it is out of print.  Over the years his wife Vera Dean-Ross kept margin notes in her copy, which refine and enlighten the original... sometimes adding a new generation of information or correcting things or adding clues.  Recently, Kathy Tibbits sponsored the edition's reprint.  It is essentially a photocopy of the original with Vera's margin notes, albeit sometimes faint since these were in pencil.  Now today, it is an essential tool for the next generation of Ross Family genealogists because of Jim & Vera's meticulous work.  Some day it may be revised to add the generations which have been born since about 1980, more photos and the fascinating history of the Old Settler Cherokee ancestors as they came west by wagon to settle there, as well as missionaries to the Cherokees who intermarried.    $28.87  plus shipping, available only at Lulu.com.  

After costs are recovered, half of profits go to a scholarship fund for Ross heirs.  

Surnames:  (among others) Ross, Standridge, Blevins, Meek, Meeks, Martin, Phillips, Goates, Hull, Carter, Jones, and hundreds more.

Geography:  Carroll County, Missouri Territory; Treat; Jasper; Newton County; Pope County; Dover; Russelville; Clarksville; Arkansas Territory; State of Arkansas; Green County Missouri;  Clay County Missouri; Dardanelle; Summers; Box Oklahoma; Vian Oklahoma;  California, and many more places.