Susan Raymond was a primary character in my first COVID dream which is a thing some people began having last spring.

Susan is an Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker, along with her husband Alan who were in our area filming a project a few years ago on lead poisoning for the Discovery Channel and that is how I met them. We have stayed in contact, as they continue to seek funding to complete their work on that subject.

In the dream my friend and I went to an impressive art gallery and Susan joined us with her understanding of the passion of the talented artists and their work, when exiting I realized I had not worn a mask. It was a MASK DREAM and the struggles of wearing one!

One of those talented people was Lauren Pelaia, one of the creators of "The Picher Project" which I attended last fall at Feinstein's/54 Below in New York City where I met her mother. I got a post from Lauren I would like to share with you:
"My mom was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's in 2017. The pandemic brought a whole new world of challenges. For the first few months, my brother and I didn't even enter my mom's house; we sat outside her screen door in lawn chairs. Since March, we have not been able to hold her hand, truly hold her hand, without a glove in between. For months now, she has not seen our faces without masks. Stakes are high, to take off a glove, to eat with her, to show her our smiles, could have such a consequence for her or us.

Given these,"uncertain" times, it's shown me the importance of the current moment. Don't wait to start living your life; to take that risk in school or work, to buy that thing you've been wanting, to learn a skill, to call a loved one to tell them you love them. We spend our whole lives saving, but for what? Sometimes, there are bad days, sometimes there is no why. The one thing that gets me through, the one thing that makes me find strength when I didn't think there was any left, is looking at mom, thinking about how brave she is, how strong she is, I'd like to think that, if I have half of her DNA, maybe I'll get the honor of being half the woman she is one day.

I promise you, there is no better time than now to remind people that you love them, to put the little things aside and realize that the only thing we have to get through each day is each other. The pandemic has created and amplified problems for many people and the same goes for individuals and families struggling with Alzheimer's. There will be a survivor one day; I will fight until that day comes.

We are all struggling in so many new ways. I ask that, if possible, you consider donating to my walk team, Team I Love You, for this year's Walk to End Alzheimer's. Please join me in honoring my mom and fighting until we find a cure to Alzheimer's."   Donate to a Walker

I didn't lose my mother to Alzheimer's I lost her just before she turned 92 with her brilliant mind reclaimed after stroke impacts. And physically fit. The morning of the day she left to die she was in bed doing bicycle leg exercises. Later while walking, she fell and her head bounced against the floor. "Fiddlesticks" she said in the hospital as she left for brain surgery. The last word I heard her say before the head trauma's damage took her away from us: fiddlesticks.

She actually could play the fiddle. I had forgotten. I have forgotten more than I can express. I am not going to funerals now. but I can walk for Alzheimer's and will be thinking of head traumas that can happen in a moment. And throw a young friend over the handlebars of the Raleigh Portage Touring bike that quick. A slick sidewalk fall could have been my moment last week, but the overhead work I am doing repairing the ceilings at home must have helped me have neck muscles that kept my head from bouncing off the pavement.

My mother never had a headache. Her mother often had them and would ask her, "What kind of a head do you have anyway?"

These precious brains in our heads are complicated intricate machines, and can be rattled just once too many times before shut downs occur. Sometimes in that blink sometimes it takes years to unravel. And sometimes the cause of what changes our brains stays in the cause unknown column.

Exactly my question. What kind of a head do we have? We know traumas from falls of all sorts can hurt us, but what triggers dementia? and Alzheimer's? Not yet known.

We know lead can have long term effects to our brains even before we are born. Lead is a thing we can remove and EPA will be funding more removal from this county as long as we keep asking for it. We must do what we know can protect these precious brains. Call DEQ and get your yard tested for lead. 800-522-0206.

Respectfully submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

While attending the University of Texas in Austin I came to know Joe Gervers. He had made his own pipe organ from discarded pipes he and three friends had taken from the accumulated pipes they had and created a “Frankenstein” that they thought sounded surprisingly good. I went with him one day to the music building on campus and was amazed at his talent.

I thought about him this evening just at dusk when the frogs began to tune up inside the posts around the swimming pool. The sound amplified and it seemed as if each post was resonating somehow from the frog effort. I looked all around for them and then looked inside the square beams only to be face to face with the tree frog within.

There were multiple frogs along deck and as it seemed, all waiting for me to leave them and their tree friends to the evening’s inevitable performance. That pipe organ memory caused me to reach out to Joe after all these years and he assumes that if we had 12 posts with a frog at each post, that would be 1 frog for each note of a chromatic scale ----and, if each frog sang a different note of the scale, then it would be possible for them to "make music". I am sure it is music to them!

 This experience came to remind me of the marvelous rendition of Maroon 5’s Memory by the multiple voices of children performed on Zoom I had seen recently and now like to begin each day listening to.  

Having frogs near the pool is an annual event. It is theirs first and come mid-July the transition begins reversing the pool from the lake water it had become. We had watched the tadpoles numbering in the hundreds mature. We left items in the water for them to cling to and use for their entry to land and air. The remaining tadpoles were caught and put into the rainwater filled wheelbarrow along with the catch of frog eggs we found deposited on the pool every morning for the last 2 weeks. My garden isn’t the best this year. But the crop of critters coming out of this water homes has been banner.

It doesn’t take a tadpole long to become a frog, but it is magical to watch the metamorphosis of these pollywogs from being water beings to those who as adults breathe air as we do. It is such a responsibility to monitor the water for new eggs, and the reward is the serenade in the evenings from the relatives.

The annual wheelbarrow incubator is getting the best use ever this year. But it is also an awesome year for milkweed. I have seen bumper stickers with the phrase: I brake for garage sales.  Admittedly, I have been known to do that as well, but when on the tractor, I mow around milkweed all season. Here on the prairie, we have always had milkweed, but the rains have come at the right time this year and the varieties here have been productive. Milkweed is a must for monarch butterflies who feed on it as caterpillars and lay their eggs on them as butterflies and has a toxin which makes the caterpillar and the butterflies poisonous to predators!

Climate change puts many species on our planet at risk of extinction. The grassroots movement throughout the monarch’s route is demonstrating single efforts multiplied can help provide the needs of that particular species. We just need the rest of us to do a thing that will help some of these other friendless species so we won’t have only memories of them when they are gone in our lifetimes. And the memories bring back, memories bring back you ...

There's a time that I remember when I did not know no pain
When I believed in forever, and everything would stay the same
Now my heart feel like December when somebody say your name
'Cause I can't reach out to call you, but I know I will one day, yeah

Plant those seeds and grow those flowers, think of those who have no voices and little future without those of us with the power here on this planet. Rescue those tadpoles, help that turtle cross the road. Believe they deserve a future, too.  (photo below by Geoff Gallice)

Respectfully submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Here's to the ones that we got
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
Of everything we've been through
Toast to the ones here today
Toast to the ones that we lost on the way
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
And the memories bring back, memories bring back you

There's a time that I remember, when I did not know no pain
When I believed in forever, and everything would stay the same
Now my heart feel like December when somebody say your name
'Cause I can't reach out to call you, but I know I will one day, yeah
Everybody hurts sometimes
Everybody hurts someday, aye aye
But everything gon' be alright
Go and raise a glass and say, aye
Here's to the ones that we got
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
Of everything we've been through
Toast to the ones here today
Toast to the ones that we lost on the way
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
And the memories bring back, memories bring back you
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo
Memories bring back, memories bring back you
There's a time that I remember when I never felt so lost
When I felt all of the hatred was too powerful to stop (ooh, yeah)
Now my heart feel like an ember and it's lighting up the dark
I'll carry these torches for ya that you know I'll never drop, yeah
Everybody hurts sometimes
Everybody hurts someday, aye aye
But everything gon' be alright
Go and raise a glass and say, aye
Here's to the ones that we got (oh oh)
Cheers to the wish you were here, but you're not
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories
Of everything we've been through (no, no)
Toast to the ones here today (aye)
Toast to the ones that we lost on the way
'Cause the drinks bring back all the memories (aye)
And the memories bring back, memories bring back you
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo
Memories bring back, memories bring back you
Doo doo, doo doo doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo
Doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo (ooh, yeah)
Memories bring back, memories bring back you
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no
Memories bring back, memories bring back you


Lyrics licensed & provided by LyricFind
Lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Written by: Adam Levine, Jacob Kasher Hindlin, Jonathan Bellion, Jordan Johnson, Michael Pollack, Stefan Johnson, Vincent Ford

For my whole career in public education as an Indian Counselor, 25 years at MHS and Will Rogers, the years you were all there becoming the people you would grow to be. Many of you were and remain my "kids." I like to say we grew up together.

When Evans Ray Satepauhoodle, a fellow Oklahoma Indian Counselor, was a bit older than I am now he phoned bemoaning he was in the "4th quarter," (having  turned 75). Evans Ray, a Kiowa, the grandson of Satank, known as Sitting Bear, was a full-grown former football player, determined to find ways to ensure the songs, language and the stories he knew in his language could be remembered into the future.

So at the oddest of times, he would phone and sing, tell the origin story of that song and who was there when he birthed it and why. I didn't know the Kiowa language, but I learned to love the sound of it and the way the words lay together bringing the message, the story forward. I was frantic because I could hear his plea. The guy was full blast and had more to give. Huge Foley at Rogers State University did capture some of his songs and stories which are now on the internet. He was in a race which he completed to some degree.

His story is more relevant now. It is profound. We all must be in the race of our lifetimes. We are still in the early days of a deadly pandemic that is taking the lives of Americans. We flew past the number of dead from WWI too quickly adding 23,000 more. Lives cut short, races lost by people who had hopes and dreams and stories to tell. Stories to help us remember each one of them. The mosaic of faces expands each evening on the news. We must listen to those numbers. Each one has a name, each had more to do and all gone too soon."Oh, the old ones. They had good lives, we can spare them." But we didn't have to.

So I am joining the race. The human race, to finish the thing begun, to bring it closer to the place to hand it off to those who remain. I am not sick. I am broken hearted for those who have been sick and who have died from the virus among us. But I am sharing with you my hope and dream for the future. I long for justice. Not for me. I don't need it. I live on a pristine prairie. The most toxic thing I have on the property is the poison ivy that followed me home from some place long forgotten, or was gifted here by the birds passing through.

I long for justice for the people who might not even know they have been wronged. Justice is big, and yes justice for all. But let's bring it in closer. Honed in tighter, I long for justice for the people and for the environment in Ottawa County.

That is why 22 years ago some folks sat in a circle and read documents in the library. We were looking to learn all we could about why and how we were poisoned and look for every avenue to seek justice to repair  the damaged lands and water. We organized as LEAD Agency, which stood for Local Environmental Action Demanded. This has been my 3rd quarter's work.

Demanded is a loud and pushy word and it has seemed a little out there for me personally, since generally I do not see myself as a demanding sort. But the pushy part does fit. I have been told more than once.

The lights for the most part are off at our office on A. Street, but we are working.

We are asking questions and we are demanding answers. Justice demands them. Why wouldn't LEAD Agency join the Waterkeeper Alliance in a lawsuit against the State of Oklahoma over coal ash rules that won't protect the public? What is the back story about the Inhofe Amendment which could ensure Miami gets much wetter in the future?  Why are we pushing EPA for a better Human Health Risk Assessment for the Tar Creek Superfund Site? We won't get justice for Ottawa County without pushing for more protections now. There is no chance later. This is it and those comments are due August 17. We will share ours with you. Won't we join in the effort to force Oklahoma's Department of Agriculture, Food and Forestry to do their job and protect the public not just poultry industry wishes? You would not expect less from us. EPA removed asbestos from BFG, a slice of justice, but not enough.

Join our efforts and become a member. Make us stronger. How can you help? Debra Warner reads the news and forwards articles on environmental issues. JoAnne Walkup dropped off garden gloves, Debbie East and Georgeann Roye brought tomato plants. Shirley Giles and her daughter Caroline brought BOXES of books for our Little Free Library. Hands-on volunteering has been limited to be protective, but let's get creative. We have work to do, justice to seek, wrongs to be righted.

Races to win. This could be our 4th Quarter.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

A few years before I was born, Woody and Jack Guthrie birthed a song that comes 'round to me while crossing parts of my land in Craig County which lies as a prairie and dips down into a gully and up the other side, as if the land was attempting to become hills.
 
There is a cowboy buried out in the back portion. My dad always pointed where it was, sort of an Indian type of pointing, with a nod of his head in that direction. There was never a headstone and who he was and how he died are no longer known.
 
There is much mention of death and nameless numbers in the news and charts, numbers growing daily even in this state. I regret each loss. Where the dead are laid to rest will be known to only the few who take them since gatherings that bring large groups together have come to be dangerous in these times. Funerals I have attended in the past continued on to the graveyard and when revisiting those grounds, I am also visiting the people from my neighborhood, in their new neighborhood. (Which takes me regrettably to the Sesame Street Song, The People in the Neighborhood.)
 
Just this week, I was unable to attend the funeral of Larry Daylight, one of the world's finest Champion Fancy Dancers, who took great care back in the late 70's to teach my son those fancy moves. Much later, I learned the techniques required to fully bead a dance fan, a skill few can teach since there are so few artists with those skills who are willing to share those secrets.

Larry and his wife Blevins became Lay Health Advisors with LEAD Agency and could teach community and family how to protect children from lead poisoning. He was an important person in my neighborhood. How many others are we losing and failing to see laid to rest? What else is happening?   
 
Last Wednesday I went to sleep in Oklahoma and after waking and coffee when 9:00 came my son read aloud from a Supreme Court ruling I learned I had woken up in Indian Territory, right there in the Indian Nation Woody sang about. I woke up in the Cherokee Nation. I could not contain myself as tears fell.
 
In 1907 our tribal government ceased to be recognized as it was. The State of Oklahoma took our schools and other public buildings as its own. Throughout the Cherokee Nation grief settled in as the powers we had held were all gone, we thought for good. But last week, with the words written by Justice Gorsuch  which read like poetry. Justice. Treaties are law. Congress had failed to disestablish us.
 
Cherokee Nation if it was a single person, she would have been standing taller and proud beyond belief. So after the tears stopped, I stood up proud and tall, as possible.
 
'Way down yonder on the ... in those Oklahoma hills where I belong. I live on the land I belong on. When Cherokees were moved to Indian Territory, we were given a trade, Georgia, and our other lands in the east for the lands here. Equal value. So this is our Georgia and though our origin stories are not here, the rest of our stories are. We can value this place and run ourselves right up to the borders of our very own reservation and delight in knowing we are home.
                                               On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise.
                                          ... their new lands in the West would be secure forever.
 
The action of the State of Oklahoma dishonored each tribal member and made those living then  to feel lessened, perhaps shamed. But read this decision and over and over the State of Oklahoma is given the lecture on wrongs done and in every way the state had tried to prove the reservation of the Creeks was long gone, the court rejected. Wrong, wrong, wrong. The court all but pissed, excuse the language, on Oklahoma's reasoning and all the ways in this last one hundred and 15 years the state had justified taking our land, our resources and our pride.
 
All of that went away with every word of this decision. Rise up, and remember we were Nations, sovereign Nations, enough so the United States made TREATIES with us, like real countries. And those treaties are not over, dead and gone, they are the Supreme Law of the Land. This Decision said they live on and so do we.
 
No more Pinocchio's, we are real people, as our names would call us The People in most of our languages. We are not diminished. We are not disestablished. That would take an Act of Congress and they have not done it. They did not act.
 
This decision in the history of the United States is our Brown v. the Board of Education, this is our Roe v. Wade. In McGirt v. Oklahoma Oklahoma got "a talking to" as the Navajo call a session that is shy of a "go to your room" more like what is done during an intervention in the hope of bringing a loved one to sobriety.
 
What tribal people in Oklahoma got was some respect. Yep, those are our boundaries and we belong here and we got the papers to prove it.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Oklahoma Hills
Words and Music by Woody Guthrie and Jack Guthrie © Copyright 1945 (renewed) by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc., Michael Goldsen Music Inc., & Warner-Chappell Music Inc

Many a month has come and gone
Since I wandered from my home
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.
Many a page of life has turned,
Many a lesson I have learned;
Well, I feel like in those hills I still belong.
'Way down yonder in the Indian Nation
Ridin' my pony on the reservation,
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.
Now, 'way down yonder in the Indian Nation,
A cowboy's life is my occupation,
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.
But as I sit here today,
Many miles I am away
From a place I rode my pony through the draw,
While the oak and blackjack trees
Kiss the playful prairie breeze,
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.
Now as I turn life a page
To the land of the great Osage
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born,
While the black oil it rolls and flows
And the snow-white cotton grows
In those Oklahoma hills where I was born.

Drought can be declared after as little as 15 days without rain. It hasn't rained in weeks. Craig and Ottawa counties  have now officially been included on the 2020 drought map. Thunder brought hope this week, but not a drop came from the low lying clouds. The soybeans in my field were planted today with slim hope the rain will come. Gardens are struggling, yards and fields are stressed. That early rainy season ended abruptly, thankfully without disastrous floods this year, but not before our plant friends were spoiled and failed to put those deep roots they need now to thrive.

We have had too much rain during past summer holidays, Memorial Day and 4th of July bring up those memories. But during these holidays we think of water in that other way, as our relief and lots of people seek access to get into it. Oklahoma's Department of Environmental Quality posted their Tips to Keep You Safe at Lakes, Rivers, and Streams this week. DEQ reminds you to follow some simple tips to help keep you and your family safe while swimming, boating, canoeing, or enjoying other water activities since natural bodies of water, especially warm and stagnant water, can contain organisms that may cause illness. When swimming pay attention to water conditions: if it looks bad, smells, has dead fish stay out. AND don't get water in your nose, mouth or ears! Wash up with soap and water after swimming.

Both DEQ and the CDC state we should all Avoid swimming if you are ill. To stop the spread of COVID-19 if you feel ill limit close contact with people.

https://www.deq.ok.gov/2020-news-releases/deq-offers-tips-to-keep-you-safe-at-lakes-rivers-and-streams-14/

Many of us are not quivering in fear about our next flood, but we want to better understand when and how it may come for us. We know it may because of the number who are now required to buy flood insurance for the first time ever.  There are a number of "flood" maps and the latest one came out recently. We would like you to try it, the makers would like your feedback on how it works and if it is correct. How often do we get to "test drive" a tool like that? Check out https://floodfactor.com/ and type in your address to find out the risk right now you have for flooding with their modeling. (The makers: First Street Foundation notes their flood and climate change risk estimates not intended as precise estimates, or to be a comprehensive analysis of, all possible flood-related and climate change risks.)

https://www.propublica.org/article/millions-of-homeowners-who-need-flood-insurance-dont-know-it-thanks-to-fema

ProPublica discussed this tool stating there are millions of homeowners in the US who need flood insurance and don't know it. Homeowners outside of FEMA’s high-risk zones often believe they’re safe, underestimating their vulnerability. The researchers show how risk changes over time. Explore this interactive flood map and look at historic floods and how flood risk will change in the future. Look at any of the 143 million US properties analyzed.  
LEAD Agency is hoping to understand from this map and the other available maps how quickly flood waters rise and where the escape routes are. Residents who are new to the alert know it because they are now having to pay flood insurance. But what else do they need to know?

Those who have experienced local flooding can help us compile the best list of "to do's" to share with those uninitiated by water who will be new to being flooded.

For a couple of months LEAD Agency was taking the temperature of the folks in and around Miami, not with thermometers like are used now. Hundreds of people simply signed they had flooded and were TIRED of it.  Citizens were committing to do their part in making that different by voting. We dropped the ball. We didn't remind you that if you flood now or are affected by the local flooding it can get worse and the blame in the future floods can be given to a single person. We have never been able to give blame for a flood on a person, we have always blamed the "elements" - "climate change" - "God's plan" and of course GRDA, the gatekeeper at the Pensacola Dam. A single person, if ultimately successful in the near future may be responsible for widening future area flooding.

As individuals we can feel powerless to the natural elements or the forces of evil that swirl around us. But we have powers, almost super powers and can undo and unseat any person who is abusing power, certainly we have the ability to band together and use that power to protect our families, our community and our very own homes.

Ottawa County did not do that this week. The Senator who has put a specific amendment in the powerfully funded National Defense Authorization Act could raise the level of Grand Lake by 2 feet. If you think we have a flooding problem now, think what that would do. 1,236 people in Ottawa County must want you to flood because they voted for the single person who had the personal power to do this to us. Voting is your super power. November can bring us hope we won't have to float our boat on. You vote and I flood,

Respectfully yours,

Rebecca Jim

The fireflies at sunset, a young moon and dust that came from the Sahara brought a sky lit with the colors of the rainbow, brilliantly resting on the horizon, under lit by the on and off lighting from the bugs sailing along the tall grass in the field.

Images like that I have seen with my own eyes, but other pictures that I can call up to memory came because of the travels of a couple who have been seeing the world's sights and posting them for the stay-at-homes to marvel over. Jerry and Laura Edington shared their travels and now are moving on for keeps to Fayetteville, AR. I hope to be learning about their adventures in the new neighborhood and what they will see as they bike the trails there since moving about as world travelers ceases during this pandemic.

Americans may not be welcome for now in ports of entry where the virus is contained and life in those countries is rebounding. I remember a time in Norway the summer after the World Trade Towers were attacked when Americans were loved abroad. Now we are harbingers of the plague with the numbers of deaths climbing each day in our country and we are not weeping for our losses, but clinging to the thought of rebounding our economy and defending our right to freedom no matter what.

I was reflecting on the peace of the sunset and enjoying the heat that is building this summer and waiting my turn in our above ground pool which will begin after the last of the tadpoles gain their legs and walk themselves out of it. The thousands who have met me when I gazed into the water, as they came to the surface to get the air they were finding a need. But then remembering the Edingtons and the impact a single couple can have on a community and how many memories they can conjure up for us after they have long moved on.

That picturesque sundown got me thinking about Sundown towns and about the rally this week in a town once belonging to that category. Black Lives Matter Peaceful Protest. These types of events can gin up fears and real live feelings come to the surface. I remember before heading out to go to Standing Rock after seeing how peaceful protesters standing to protect sacred lands and water were being treated by state and federal troops, how I made sure my will was up-to-date and once there, had the phone number of a civil rights attorney written in permanent marker all down the skin on my left arm. There are times in American history when real people in little towns, and in big can stand together and peacefully ask for the changes that can be made to make this country better in our lifetimes. This rally might bring forward deep feelings of impending doom or a sense of being part of a larger movement while staying in your own neighborhood.

It will be the 144th anniversary of the Battle of Greasy Grass or as history has referred to it as Custer's Last Stand at the Little Big Horn when the speaking begins at the little rally at the Rocket Park.

Our tribal brothers live here in every 4th house and yes, we would like there to be a Indian Lives Matter peaceful protest for us and for the murdered Native women and for the list of wrongs we have endured, but we understand deeply there are great wrongs that need addressing and yet we can be part of helping to stand for others, too. We are generous in our desires and hopes for other dark skinned people, whose ancestors worked for us, and in our place when our ancestors were lost to violence or plagues.

Be there or in spirit join in. Watch the sundown in a different way that evening, let the setting sun of indifference set for the last time.

Care and show that you care for the individuals in your life while you wear a mask to protect yourself and those in our wider world. That wider world the Edingtons traveled to and shared with us on Facebook is out there waiting to be discovered again.

Respectfully Submitted

~  Rebecca Jim

https://www.theadanews.com/news/local_news/dust-and-sand-from-sahara-desert-may-reach-oklahoma/article_ab1f12f2-cd74-58e5-b1c2-dc07b7857b81.html

My life seems to center around a particular season each year. I plan important events either before or after it and events that should come up and interrupt it could be for the best of intentions with the grandest of people but are simply endured with tinges of resentment that I try my best to conceal or to talk myself out of feeling. But it is Blackberry Picking time that toots my horn.

I can hardly wait for it to be light enough to begin. But there must be light and one of the best times ever is just when the sun starts responding with the dew on the ripest of the blackberries in the field. Eye to eye with that glint, the roundness of each of the segments of the berry. After a great morning and evening picking I actually SEE ripe blackberries all evening long when I close my eyes. In those moments, the berries showing up are the ripest, the fullest in what seems like a private slideshow.

Decking out for the picking has become a ritual. Long pants tucked into socks. Tie on boots, laces tucked to keep them tied. Long sleeves, or jean jacket collar up and the hat, of any sort on covering my ears. In other words, I look like it is winter. Then the picking, then when the bending, stretching and isometrics of the exercise picking blackberries has worn me out or the heat of the day gives me the clue to stall out for a bit, the berries are put up, the boots stay on the porch steps and the rest of the clothing goes directly into the washer while the wearer gets straight to the shower. As they say, knock on wood, no chiggers so far this season. It is thought to be fact that for every perfect black segment on a berry, there are several chiggers hanging out looking for a better host with real blood, not that juice they are fooled with time and again.

Black is beautiful is also in season, as we look as a nation at the color of skin for some in an entirely new manner. Our countrymen and women wearing black so deeply want simply to be proud of that color and would like to know simply less hate for being in that skin. Brown can be hated too. I have felt that and understand the bewilderment as a child when stones and names followed me home only to be comforted by my bi-racial parents. When they married, my Cherokee grandmother resented my white mother, while many of my mother's friends wondered why she would marry an Indian. So their children, me and my 2 brothers are mixed blood kids.

My brothers can pass for white and I can't. Another thing happened when I was a kid, it was during the Korean War and there were many Korean orphans who were adopted in the US, and because of the cute haircuts my mom gave me, I could pass for one of the orphans, too, who didn't get a lot of love in the neighborhood either. So I understand deeply the feelings attached to skin, a thing we are all born into. Skin is the largest organ in our body and when you should sunburn and change it briefly it returns to its original color without missing a beat.

This skin we are in causes us to be labeled and labels are another way to call people names and names could be only words, but these kind of words are usually said using a tone that is unforgettable and totally clearly demeaning.

The summer I was 9 going on 10 our family went to live in the Southwest, in Aztec, New Mexico and Kingman, Arizona, where our little rented house had a grocery store around the corner. That summer the store had a special guest: Aunt Jemima. I saw the poster and went on my own to see her. She didn't seem happy, not smiling like the images I had seen. There wasn't a line of people waiting to MEET her or talk with her or hope to get a sample of one of her very own pancakes. Near the tail end of the 1950's the Civil Rights movement was about help her retire, but it has taken this movement 155 years after the Civil War to remove her name and image from the products the Quaker Oats company had been selling since they bought her from another company. That slave image "Mammy" was a real woman, an actual slave who over the century and a half has been on a lot of American breakfast tables.

So how can we change the way we think about color about skin color and the people in skin a color you might not have many friends wearing? Pick a color. I choose black. And by choosing black I will see it as beautiful. And during this season, this season which falls between the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre and Juneteenth, each day's morning and that time before dusk, I will pick the berries and love the color and know that others can and will in the future come to know black as beautiful too.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Now, I understand at some point back the designation of elder became a word that describes me. It is hard to imagine where all the years have gone even though they all were filled to the brim with life and the people in it. Through those years there have been changes, personal decision driven, some accidental and for the most part the years have not caused a great deal of wear on the tread of me. It has not been so easy for some of my friends and family. But for the most part, we muscle on.

Recent events with the pandemic and the extreme emotions felt by masses of people, enough so they have as they say, "Gone to the Streets." This is a thing people in this country have been doing for what? almost since its beginnings. But throughout the years we have been a nation, the changes happen in the streets, then they happen at elections, which we know can have consequences.

This time will not be the first time there are stark divisional choices whether that be local or national. Rhetoric can be harsh, can wear on friends, but can tear families apart. This has happened in mine recently. With the relatively young who have not weathered the yo-yo of elections, feelings are raw right now. Things are not going like they thought they would. There are people in the streets, stopping traffic and it is working. They are changing the culture in this country. There is a right we have to free speech and this is how democracy works, but using that voice, those words to start a movement and make the lives of our citizens better, safer, more prosperous. But change can sound like losing but we can reframe this.

We take turns in this country. No one wins all the time. No party stays in power forever. Voters change their minds or don't and that is the way our country flows for those allotted years.

Several years ago,  an elder woman I so admired, came into my office and gently shut the door. I knew this must be very serious to her, so I stopped everything to be able to give full attention to her and the issue she was bringing with her. She mustered up the courage and only asked one question. "Was our president good for the environment?" I have thought of this throughout his tenure and the answer I gave then would be ever so much more adamant now. The changes to our environmental regulations and the protections that have been put in place by the only federal agency with Environmental as a Middle Name, have been stripped away, one after the other, Clean Air Act, not so Clean, Clean Water Act, getting Dirty, NEPA, oil and gas leases on sacred lands, protecting species or their habitat. Through the years of this administration, our opportunities to comment have been diminished on these actions and our hopes for a cleaner and healthier life for our children are diminished as well.

But we do get chances and you get a chance to learn more about ours next week. The Superfund program breaks up their work into parts, that they call operable units or OUs (not OSUs!) EPA is announcing more information on OU5, the Human Health Risk Assessment and LEAD Agency has worked with EPA to provide a chance, for you to listen to what that looks like and how much risk they think we humans have in the streams, river and lake. Listen and then the next day, these folks will be doing another session to help you and me write up our comments which are due July 17.

This is our only chance. Yours and mine to let these folks know you want it all fixed. Yes, a creek running through Commerce and Miami, about time it gets fixed and the land it floods each and every time it floods ought to get some attention, too. And those fish in the streams, when there are some, they should be fishable and edible, right? RIGHT.
Can we say something? Yes, will it matter? These agencies will never try to read your mind and may not do anything if you should say something. But take a hint. Sometimes people in power listen, they get the hint, the nudge to change or why did NASCAR decide the Confederate flag will be prohibited from all NASCAR events and properties? or why are some TV shows like COPS being taken off the air suddenly? Monuments coming down?

This could be our moment, this could be the WHEN THEY LISTEN TO PEOPLE HERE WHO WANT A CLEAN TAR CREEK AND A LAKE THAT IS GRAND AGAIN. Tune in, take time out of your life and do a WEBINAR, what could be more exciting? I will tell you what could be more exciting, it would be setting your kayak into a clean Tar Creek and not having it stained when you get out. We elders can do it so the little ones and those who follow them can dangle their feet and enjoy having the fish kiss their feet.

People power. You got some, let's put it to use.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Our country, our state has suffered before, and is feeling the pains injustice brings; it visits, perhaps not you or your family, but if you open the windows, look out beyond, you might see it landing on a person you have not known, a person none the less.

Who has feelings and hopes, and dreams for the future like you desire. We want so little actually. Shelter, food and love are staples and simply to find a way to work, to earn a living, to serve, to be of use, at best.

It was through my experiences with Service Learning I was able to meet Cathy Berger Kaye who on more than one occasion read aloud each of the words in a poem by Marge Piercy entitled: To Be of Use, beginning with the words:  "The people I love the best jump into work head first..."
 
It is work that can give satisfaction and when no one is looking absolutely pure joy. The confidence of practice changed directly into faultless skill is longed for by those who wait to be admitted into professional programs by gatekeepers who regulate admission it seems arbitrarily. Our young can wait and do wait until they climb on through those gates or seek another path, to find that other work, a life's calling that will do as well.
 
Some transition and follow paths forged by generations. One of my former Cherokee Volunteers did this. He followed after his father who had followed his father into dentistry. Three generations who practiced those skills "head first" for could it be nearing a century? When I first came to Miami, the elder Dr. Robinson had, as I remember an office upstairs in the Robinson building, able to see the sites of the city and his son, Dr. Tom Robinson's practice allowed him a view of the flow of traffic and now the younger Dr. Chris Robinson looks down from the First National Bank building at that constant flow and is doing "what has to be done, again and again."
 
Serving the public, a person at a time. I remember when he was in high school he worked afternoons on casting molds that might be used as crowns. He learned so easily:
                                                                         "the thing worth doing well done
                                                               has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident."
                       It must have been contagious these generations of Robinsons who longed "for work that is real."
 
The generation becoming our replacements need our support and our trust in them. They have conviction and I hope the expectation we will welcome and believe in them. We must remember we will be replaced, but work can continue and be carried on, better if we do the work of helping to prepare them for it.
 
Our country is hurting, we have to believe in it, too. There are injustices. But they do not have to continue to occur. It can stop with each of us. As is said, this country is built on stolen land. Tribal peoples have faced injustices since as Will Rogers explained, "we met the boat." Had tribes been made to work for nothing, had we not fought injustice, and been able to survive European diseases, there may never have been a need to enslave stolen Africans to do our work for nothing. There are generations of injustices to right. And as they say, the sins of the fathers, sits with even many of the southeastern tribes who in the "race" to assimilate adopted the practice, too of having our own slaves.
 
These legacies of owning and being owned are not that old nor is the status as being an "other" as defined by race, color or religion. But "others" are easily hated and hatred can be hurtful, and can lead to physical hurt. Having power over an "other" feeds on itself.
 
Another former Miami High School graduate, Scott Jones learned much more about how hurtful settings where power becomes unleashed when as a minister in Omaha this weekend he walked with other ministers to do his work to minister to people in a rally, only to be injured by what could have been a rubber bullet as it hit the back of his head. He spoke about that moment, the confusion, the fear, the pain of not ministering to others, but becoming an identified "other" and injured by authorities. It can stop with us as we find ways to widen the opportunities for our basic needs to be met, safe shelter, education and work that will sustain us.
 
To be of use. 
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

In years to come how will we remember our dead? Will we have a day, like Memorial Day to honor those who fell ill? numbering more than all who died in combat since and including Korea? How will we mourn and place the monuments? We will forget how we felt about our "rights to freedom" when being told to wear a mask or stay home. Our future children will know we could not pause to mourn our dead for fear of a disease there may never be a cure.
Perhaps it will be more than a day, maybe it will take a month or even a season, like Christmas extends way before Thanksgiving. A decision of this sort was made 70 years ago to declare May as Mental Health Month, to strive for it and perhaps to honor all who suffer through these otherwise universal invisible diseases and to remember those who served to help us face what impacts our own mental health.

Lots of Mays have gotten by without much notice. This year is way different and how we are dealing with our world is giving us pause to reflect and examine feelings we are experiencing. Perhaps nothing has changed for you. But for many life has gotten complicated, and perhaps lonelier. Some of us are observing for the first time isolation from friends, and family with no end in sight. Others are proceeding undaunted into a world that may expose them to COVID19. What emotions are going unspoken are carried inside, behind doors, and behind masks. These emotions can weigh on individuals and bounce back on others. How we feel toward others who believe like we do, and those who do not can and many times be stuffed and never spoken.

All sorts of organizations like the KRESGE Foundation (Sebastian Kresge, whose goal was to promote human progress) hosted a webinar introducing "Mindfullness." Their trainers demonstrated how to "be present where we are." Lisa Susteren, the author of Emotional Inflammation, an expert on the psychological effects of climate change explained: "how we think drives how we feel" and understanding our emotions is real "pay-dirt!" She suggested we take the energy of our emotions and redirect them into positive actions.

May isn't the month that one of my Mental Health Heroes died, but it is the month I will honor him. My favorite mental health professional friend of all time was born 70 years ago. Dr. Steve Abernathy was a friend and a professional who practiced in Ottawa County for a couple of decades, practiced in Florida and returned to Oklahoma to proudly work with a local tribal health center.

There are countless people, who got a brand new life after working with Steve for as little as one session. He was absolutely the best diagnostician ever. He could figure out how an individual got to where they were, what was wrong, and how to find the path to recovery quickly all while showing empathy with a side of joy.

May as a mental health month is hurting without this man living on this earth. He died 11 weeks ago, at the beginning of the shut down and like many others was not allowed to have the funeral and loving support of friends for his family.

His daughter wrote a tribute to both her parents,

"When I was little, my parents worked Disaster Relief with The Red Cross because my dad is a psychologist and my mom has her Masters in mental health. They worked the OKC bombing, tornadoes, hurricanes.. and now my dad is working with them again, despite how tired and in pain I know he must be. Providing mental health services to those who are scared and losing everything is so so important. Thanks Steve Abernathy and Melissa Ramsey Abernathy for showing me my whole life that helping others is such a valuable thing. Proud of you."

According to Mental Health America: The number of friendships you have early in your adult life and the closeness of those relationships can influence your well being 30 years later. My well being got a great start having a long time friend like Steve Abernathy. We all need those kind of friends who can read your mind and like you anyway.

Steve brought empathy in the door with him and believed in the good in each of us and found it. One child he helped years ago wrote to thank him not long before he passed. What a way to honor him, to have that grown up child remember those kindnesses and make the effort to say it. We must remember how much we can do with so little effort, and just go ahead and do it.

Steve also brought his past with him every day and never allowed it to stop the healing he would provide for others. He like some of us had physical pains, and long carried grief and regrets that surely must have provided the stimuli to help others work through theirs.

Melissa, his wife who survives is another champion mental health provider and my friend, a veteran ROPES Course Instructor who I hope will know we valued this man and what he shared, his ability to love us all.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There is a lot going on in environmental news, but attention is going rightly to that virus that is making so many sick and killing many. As Wendall Berry says in The Peace of Wild Things:

                                                When despair for the world grows in me
                                                and I wake in the night at the least sound
                                                in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
                                                I go and lie down where the wood drake
                                                rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
                                                I come into the peace of wild things
                                                who do not tax their lives with forethought
                                                of grief. I come into the presence of still water.  ...
 
I thought you might want to know what has happened since you were sleeping and hoping to wake up as healthily as you went to bed being.
 
The Supreme Court heard and decided a case Waterkeepers and other environmental groups were afraid wouldn't go well. But Clean Water won in the County of Maui V. Hawaii Wildlife Fund. The new standard may be even better than the original standard.  It was a "Good Win" as described by Daniel Estrin, the General Counsel for the Waterkeeper Alliance, who spoke at LEAD Agency's 2018 National Environmental Conference at Tar Creek, on what else? The History of the Clean Water Act.

I had signed onto an organization's comments but I got busy and totally missed my chance to make a personal comment in an official "Comment Period" that would have allowed me to tell EPA to keep using science when making decisions on how to help communities like us dealing with Tar Creek and BF Goodrich. Comment periods are opportunities to say something, say your piece, tell it like it is, to people in agencies that should have our best interests at heart. I wasn't stellar in the sciences, but I value science and want real facts used when decisions are made on the long term human health issues especially when it hits home. 

Senators got Andrew Wheeler, the head of the EPA to testify and Senator Ed Markey told him, “Your decisions make this pandemic worse,” and get this: demanded Wheeler "apologize to minority communities for “harming the health of the most vulnerable people in our country right now as their lungs are being attacked by coronavirus.” Why did he say that? EPA has rolled back regulations for vehicle fuel efficiency standards and mercury limits from power plants AND implemented a temporary policy so companies can delay complying with air and water quality reporting and monitoring requirements during the health crisis. 

We have a chance right now to read up on EPA's Human Health Risk Assessment for what is called Operable Unit 5, the next phase of cleanup work to be done in the Tar Creek Superfund site.  Read up and on June 18 LEAD Agency will host a virtual session with consultants to go over what they found in the document to better help you focus on the comments you will submit to EPA. You will do that because you are not going to let this opportunity pass by to share your thoughts on the facts EPA will be laying out for the public. A lot of us have time to do this. We are filling up our days, but be honest, we can make time for a thing that matters.

Right here in Oklahoma, our Governor just signed into a law, get this, signed into law making waste water from oil and gas production a THING that is a resource. A resource that Senator Rader, who introduced the bill, feels will "attract entrepreneurs to innovate and invest in technology to process and treat oil and gas produced water and waste, resulting in a beneficial resource and a reduction in wastewater injection." This is how you spin it into gold, a THING that in most places in the world is simply toxic waste. Here in Oklahoma, we want to be able to sell it and hope somebody with land will buy it to spray on their crops.

I am thinking we are not using much science in Oklahoma either and if anyone buys it, better check their high school transcript for what they made in their science classes. House author Rep. Terry O’Donnell, R-Catoosa, said the bill helps clarify an issue that until now was ambiguous in state statute. He wants to use this as a way to diversify our state's economy. Not only will they spin this into gold, he thinks we can put it in the bank, too.

There is a whole long list of supporters, but the saddest one was a man we have met and had hoped would be a champion for the environment when he came to be Oklahoma's Secretary of Energy and the Environment. He proved with this which hat he is wearing.

During this pandemic, we will need to watch closely since the people in power may make changes that can make our world less safe and fail to protect human health for the future. They think we are sleeping.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

“In the old days” or “once upon a time” are phrases we use to alert our listeners we are taking them to a long ago place. Those were places our ancestors lived and figured out for themselves how the world worked and learned to make appropriate accommodations.
 
When myths become known as reality noted Mdewakantonwan historian and philosopher, Dr. Chuck Ross has been known to shout out, “How did those Indians know about that?” Many times important lessons were passed on in tribal origin stories. One example can be found in the Navajo creation myth:
 
As the Navajo entered the world, the Mice brought the seeds to establish the present day ecosystem. For this reason, mice are considered the landlords of the earth. However, mice inhabit the nocturnal and outside world and people the daytime and indoor world: there should be no close contact between people and mice. Such contact will result in sickness and possibly death. Additionally when the landlord mice enter a home and see that it is unkempt and not in harmony it is said that they become angry and may strike down someone in the household, usually a young, healthy member of the family (Simpson, et al).

In the early 1990’s my son based back to his Dad’s culture and attended some summer camps in the southwest US on the Navajo Reservation. So we were much attuned when in 1993 a mysterious disease began to kill young healthy people out there. Patients became ill but death could occur within a matter of hours after the severe respiratory symptom stage developed.
 
The Indian Health Service and the CDC worked together and the cause was identified as a virus that a common Deer mouse carried. Additional cases were discovered throughout the southwest and other states and over 700 people were known to have died of it during that season.
 
As it turned out, the research showed that the traditional Navajo elders and their medicine people Haatalli had predicted that outbreak and others AND the connection with mice as the bearers of that disease. They knew this because their ancestors had known when there would be increased rainfall the pinion trees put on more nuts, and more nuts brought more mice which would bring more disease.
 
When you live in the country, you may not live alone. The little ones can come unannounced, never welcomed. While the repairs on my home continue, my son and I are living in the house my parents lived in, but hadn't lived in since they passed. The house has not been unattended. It had been overrun by the little ones. Since we moved in, each day is a new discovery of their tenacity while they ruled the house. We believe they don't live here anymore, but they did and each drawer we pull out is the opportunity to remove their evidence of residence and give it a new start.
Mice, the little ones are not welcome, ever. But in a home with a Navajo, they are almost taboo. For centuries the Navajo have known that mice waste could be deadly and dwellings must be kept as clean and tidy as possible to deter them.
They can carry a deadly disease; we now know is caused by the Hantavirus. The early symptoms of the shortness of breath or difficulty breathing - acute, sometimes severe, respiratory illness caused by a novel coronavirus which are the same symptoms we know as the new COVID19. And it is surging now  through the Navajo community, with one of the highest infection rates per capita in the country with the peak weeks away.

The past is prolog. And we can pay attention or pay a price. The researchers found out more about the Hantavirus. It is one that can be passed from an animal to humans when it is aerosolized, when we breathe it in, so dust and particles of mouse waste and urine could carry it. The answer was to keep vigilant cleaning your home and keeping what mice want to eat unavailable and when cleaning to protect against inhaling those infected particles.

Now we are all learning about virus and how like the hantavirus, there is no cure, there is treatment, but the best, the very best is to prevent exposure. With the COVID19, we do that by wearing masks, staying home and limiting space between you and the air someone else breathes out. Airborne particles are free to the public and do not discriminate. The very air we need to sustain us can contain what can kill us.

If we could fast forward time, one day there will be myths throughout the cultures of the world about this virus. They will instruct the future generations in how to conduct their lives to stay healthy. For now stay in, stay safe my friends. And maybe do a little more spring cleaning because of the little ones.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim  

When my son was young he figured out sameness, when 2 things were alike, they could be called simply: Same Same.
 
So many years later, I met a remarkable woman who through her life's experiences and observations learned that not only can things be the same, but people, all of us, as we take time to know one another will find we too have sameness. Take time to discover this by looking deeply in any other and then differences disappear, the need for prejudices and discrimination can cease. Our world expands simply into the people who inhabit it with us. Equity begins because we are the same.
 
My knowing this began with Paula Englander-Golden's Say It Straight training and the exercises it requires.
 
Her life experiences could have been a movie. Living through WWII in a Jewish family, hiding in attics, in root cellars, carrying messages for the Resistance as a 7-year old, missing the Nazi roundups of families, being "baptized Catholic" and kept with her sisters in a Catholic convent bombed by the Russians because Nazis used it for wounded soldiers. After the war reunited with her parents, declared stateless, living all over Europe learning languages in each country on their way to find refuge in America. And in America finding  in our Bill of Rights the equity she longed to experience. A degree in Physics led her to meet her husband David Golden and his totally different upbringing helped her understand sameness anyway.
 
Paula obtained an additional degree in Psychology and developed  Say It Straight (SIS)
"a research-based experiential education and training program that results in empowering communication skills and behaviors, increased self-awareness, positive relationships, personal and social responsibility and decreased risky or destructive behaviors."
 
No one else in Miami, OK around anymore got to meet Paula. But for a number of years everyone enrolled in Drivers Education class at Miami High School got trained in Say It Straight.

Drivers Education was a semester elective offered during the school day at no cost to the students. Generally  12 to 15 students enrolled in each class with the first part of the semester for in-classroom instruction and afterwards everyday 3 students would receive their driving experience with the instructor. The year I received my training in Say It Straight, the Oklahoma Transportation Secretary took the training, too, which may have been why permission was given to conduct the trainings in those classes.

One of the first questions we ask in Say It Straight is, "Have you ever been in a situation where you wanted to say, "No" but for whatever reason said, "Yes" instead?"  Did you regret it, blame yourself? blame the other person? Did you come up with rationale, or did you simply change the subject and distract yourself or the other person? Did any of these actions change that answer?  What if we could learn a new way of communicating? That is what we did in Say It Straight. We got to practice saying what we needed to say even to a friend, a parent or other respected person. Everyone got to learn how to actually LEVEL with significant others and practice doing it. They were all practicing driving, so they were also all practicing speaking up for themselves in a way that respected themselves and the other person.

What might be the most memorable for the former students was an exercise I included to help demonstrate the different communication styles we all use as one of the role play "movies" we did together.

Each of us communicate with one another. Sometimes more effectively than at other times. After everyone understood each: placate, aggressive, irrelative and super-reasonable, I engaged everyone in the class in one great big role-play. Everyone brought their chair and they all got in the "car" with a friend who as they found out later had been drinking too much and they all had to try to convince the driver to STOP THE CAR. They tried to placate the driver, and beg and promise to do anything if the car would stop. They tried to bully the driver, they tried to distract and also to bore the driver with facts. As they gave out reasons to stop, I made notes of all they tried. Then they were given the additional tool to LEVEL with the driver, using their learned skills in Say It Straight. It is hard to level with a drunk driver, but if anything worked, it was this.

When that same car load of riders, had a driver who was a parent or respected elder who had been drinking. How could they stop the car? It got quiet, but the class of trained Say It Straight students, always rallied to save their lives with ideas.

I believe this exercise and the many other "movies" the students made helped save lives that  year and for years since. Paula did this through me and through everyone of the students who learned these skills and drove home with them.

Say It Straight has allowed me to speak truth to people even when it would have been easier to say nothing. Leveling with people respectfully, has demonstrated equity and ultimately our same sameness.

It was after my son was grown he and I drove to Austin for a training with both Paula and David at their home. He was able to confirm his theory of Same Same, but also to gain a vastly personal and timely lesson in forgiveness he carries deeply with him yet.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Several years ago I had the chance to help Nick Calcagno do some repairs to the mural that started the mural craze in downtown Miami, the one on the side of Osborn's Rexall Drug Store. Actually I got to take a student from Miami High School to help him, and it was taking longer than the student was able to stay, so Nick allowed me to climb the ladder and dab the appropriate colors as he directed. I felt like and was working with a master, with the paintbrush and got on the top of the ladder to prove it.

It was an exhilarating experience that I got to share with the student whose name I have lost, but who demonstrated the confidence which showed me how to listen and take the directions just so.

After that when talking to Nick I told him how much I really wanted to learn to work with watercolors. While at his house, he simply took a stack of some of the best how to's ever written and gave them to me. And they have sat for all these years at my house. Until Emily Fansler posted a message on Facebook wondering if anyone would like to take a watercolor class on line with her. I jumped at the chance and this afternoon, we began.

This first one ended up looking like a mass of angry alien insects ascending into the sunset, but like Ron Seat told me once: "If you want to learn to paint with watercolors, do one every day for a year, then you will know how." So my year began today.

Much of our world is wrestling with how to manage within the guidelines of the pandemic, what is needed to be safe, and how to protect the economy while doing that and if that is at all possible.

Years ago a friend of mine Truman Geren, an AIDS Educator spoke at a gathering when we knew so little about HIV/AIDS. He told the facts that were currently known, and then added to the large gathering that "within 3 years you will lose someone to AIDS." I repeated his opinion when talking about AIDS to others, but 3 years later at my high school reunion, at that time, the only reunion I had ever attended, I was so very excited to see the fellow who had become my high school dream boyfriend. No, not to rekindle the relationship, but actually to ask for some money I had loaned him to buy his first car! He hadn't shown up and wasn't on the "dead" list. So I asked a former classmate about him. He wasn't coming, he had committed suicide the week before after being diagnosed with AIDS but the program had already been printed.

You will know people who will die from this virus and many people you will never have the opportunity to meet because of our isolation. This is a deadly disease and we all depend on you understanding it is.  Each of us must do our individual efforts to stop the spread.

The LEAD Agency office has been closed for a month of Sundays, (it feels like). But we are still working. This week a woman dropped off some paint chips and I will be able to test them for lead with our XRF. If you are doing home renovations and are wondering if some of that old paint could have lead in it, we would be glad to analyze it for you. Also if you are like me and come across a few antiques that you might want to use for your morning coffee, but wonder if they are safe to use, drop them by and we can test them for you. Just bag them with your contact information and leave them on the back porch. When you get your results, we will include some seeds for your garden since, this year might be a good time for watercolors, but it is definitely the best season for a garden you might ever have had!

We are all going to have a month of Sundays, lets fill each one of them with the good we can offer others and the joy simple pleasures can bring us. Learn something you longed to learn. Mark a thing off your "to do" list, but keep adding to it, we have time.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

I had always heard that phrase, "There goes the neighborhood," on TV comedy shows when I was growing up. But I got to actually say it myself when the houses a block away from the LEAD Agency office went down this week.
The last time this happened out our backdoor was when Colleen's Cottage was bought and taken down by the new owners in order to construct a confined space to place items too large for the nearby lot at East Central Pawn.

I remember it well. I and so many others shopped at Colleen's Cottage through the years. She moved her business to the shops at the Coleman and basically went uptown. But the day the equipment came and set up to take the Cottage down, I went inside with my camera to take a few photos which I then made into a set of greeting cards for the previous owner. We met often at the rose bush in the alley more often than in her shop and had become friends.

Mary Daugherty was working at LEAD Agency at that time through an AARP program and had brought her grandson Hayden with her that day. He was fascinated by big equipment and parked himself on the ramp out our backdoor and watched every piece of that building go down. There was a lot of noise as the glass in the windows shattered and the wood splintered.

And then it was quiet.

It got quiet again out that back door this week when the houses on B Street went down.

There goes the neighborhood. Houses have memories and people who have lived in them will remember the joy and the sadnesses they experienced inside those walls. Those houses were neighbors to each other. Year after year. Season after season, but the last several seasons, no one came to care for them, which reminded me of my 6th grade class in Big Spring, Texas. The teacher Miss Jewel, allowed us to memorize poetry and recite it aloud. She kept track of the number of lines we learned and at the end of the year, I earned a book of poetry I still cherish. 100 favorites, only some of them were ones memorized that year, many others were as they say, "over my head" and some actually still are.

I often thought about the gift she gave me for loving poetry, but also think of all those others who had the chance to be brave and stand in front of the class and speak words we might not have then known all that deeply. Since then and through the years I thought of prisoners of war and how some of what got them through long and lonely days were reciting poetry and lines of the bible that had been memorized as children.

One of my favorites memorized that year came to mind  lately and after these two neighbor homes when down, I flipped to Home by Edgar A. Guest to read those lines and reflect that indeed it takes a "heap of living in a house to make it home."

Abandoned and uncared for houses can become actual homes for ... vermin or pests of a great variety. Where I live in the Craig County, there just aren't any abandoned homes along the highway corridor north of Vinita, because, though vermin might come to be there, they also could serve as hide-aways for runaway prisoners, who do escape from the facility on the other end of Hope Avenue, which could be known as Hopeless (but no one says that outloud around there).  

For a number of reasons the houses that come close to falling down on themselves can eventually get some help from the City of Miami to complete that fall and to actually take away the pile. And that is what just happened to the houses on B Street.

The City of Miami has 13,500 residents but over half of the houses in town are actually rentals. Many of the homeowners become landlords, or as they call themselves property managers for houses they may have once grown up in, or for purchases made as investments. There are many rentals that are well cared for and maintained. But there are some that fall off the maintenance schedule for too long. Roofs go unrepaired long enough, the interior becomes damaged and the home is no longer rentable or habitable. No income, no taxes paid on them. These houses go to sleep.

And the City can follow procedures found in the International Property Maintenance Code which had been adopted by the City, follow procedure and bring those houses down and clear the property. There is a process and those processes may take a year to move through, but the houses on B Street got to the end and "there went the neighborhood." But honestly, the neighbors were already long gone, and for now we have a brand new green space to view and neighbors we hadn't been able to see before.

For more information on the process the City of Miami follows check out the miamiokla.net website for code-compliance.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

"When the Bones are good the rest don't matter" words from Maren Morris' song The Bones. This has become the theme song for what's happening in my world, and ours.

When the carpenters came during this pandemic to do that essential service on the bones of my home, I moved out. When they tore off the flooring, then the floor boards, then looked beneath, the report was the bones are good. Just not enough of them, not enough support for the house that came upon them all those years ago.

The Earth got a good report this week, too. Her bones are good and the skies are clearing and the quest for fossil fuels got a whole lot less profitable, making this a great time for the energy producers to change their ways and provide for our energy needs in the new ways that will give us what we need and in a way that gives companies the chance to be the saviors of the earth while we still pay them for it.

50 years ago the Earth needed help and people 20 million Americans demanded it. We got the Environmental Protection Agency and isn't it ironic that 50 years later its initials could almost be EPA for Environmental Pollution Agency since so many of the rules and regulations to protect human health and our environment are being rolled back by the current administration. A dear woman who worked for us at LEAD Agency came into my office and gently shut the door, sat down and looked at me, then asked, if the president who had been elected was good for the environment. That was early in the term, but that answer certainly and positively stayed NO, not good for the environment. Elections have consequences and voting matters.

And 50 years ago people 20 million people stood up and spoke up for the Earth and as Earl Hatley says, "Look on any April calendar, Earth Day is listed. We made it happen." Regular people made us all recognize the importance of appreciating the only real mother we all have. Martin Lively, LEAD's Americorps/VISTA pointed out through a series of photos that our environmental footprint can have long and lasting impacts but living in different ways and doing the work we do can demonstrate that footprint can be smaller and we are modeling how that can look.

The Rose Foundation's Grassroots Leadership Foundation helped LEAD Agency's bones this week when we received a $5,000 grant to pursue the work we do for our community. We join with other grassroots groups all over the country who like us pull the energy forward to change the places we live and make them safer and healthier. It was a humbling experience to meet their board members in a ZOOM meeting and learn the expertise they each bring. We will be well served through this organization and our relationship with them. They understand deeply about the environmental and personal struggles flooding causes and how leadership, local or global political leaders can influence our futures.

Groups all over the world held virtual Earth Day events, so of course LEAD Agency hung right in there with our own. Music was provided by the Picher Project with a song from their musical and from Moondoggy by Jordan Zable. We had a discussion with reflections and our deep desire as yours would be to find us all physically together with friends and family without the fear of the contagious virus. The Earth was in a terrible mess 50 years ago, some things got better, but she is still our home and we can look deeply into how we extend the years she can give us. We can believe the changes we are making now can be personal changes that can benefit us and make our lives and our own futures better.

Our bones are good. "The house don't fall when the bones are good."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

P.S.
Earth Day -- The Beginning: A Guide for Survival Compiled and edited by the National Staff of Environmental Action is a book on the shelf outside the room I am currently sequestered while my house is getting her new bones. On the dedication page the simple words:
                                                                                                 To the tree
                                                                              from which this book is made

40 years ago I completed building a house I could call my own. From scratch, without a loan from a bank and actually without real plans drawn by an architect. Back in those days if you wanted to learn how to do something, you could study it, where else? The local library. The Vinita Library had 5 books on how to  build your own house, and I checked them all out and pondered over them and compared this how and that why until, finally it was time to begin.

It was a summer vacation I will never forget, or the summer that followed since it took both summers working almost non-stop to be able to walk in and shut the door behind me.

Well, 40 years later, it became impossible to ignore that the 5 books and their best suggestions had left some basics the builder has found she had not quite got right.

My son was 6 when we moved into the house and the very first thing he did was put his marbles at the threshold and let them loose to roll across the kitchen floor. I asked him what he was doing, "Marble races." The marbles rolled without any assistance to the exact middle of the house. That was the moment that has haunted me until this very evening.

This is the eve of the great fix. IT begins in 8 hours. And will basically mean tearing through my floors to fix the floor joists that are failing. Those 5 books had let me down. Or the reader just missed the point they were all trying to get across, the, upon this rock I build my ... that the whole structure depended upon the base.

It was a dream to live in a homemade house, knowing every nail and how many bent nails filled the nail apron, so much the weight of it is a memory. And on the eve of when it gets its fix, I am nervous to see how quickly taking it apart can be.

But in only 3 months, so many things will be different in all of our lives and I am imagining what laying back and reading again in the bed I got 65 years ago will feel like. I remember the day my parents found my bed at a "junk shop" in Lebanon, Missouri. The gentleman was asking $5 for it, and for whatever reason my day said, "FIVE DOLLARS? that's not enough!" So he asked: $25? and the bed has been mine ever since. It is solid walnut with a headboard that is seven feet tall with burl trim and a top knot on both sides that actually can be removed and used as a strange sort of wooden bouquet, or as a weapon  if needed.

 So much of what we are all going through now we hope in 3 months will begin to show we have reasons  to hope. 3 months all those years ago, got the roof on this house and it closed in for the winter while it sat waiting for the next 3 months to complete the finish work.

We can wait it out. We can figure what's next in our lives. We can study up our next projects. large or small. Time is the thing many of us are experiencing in ways we never thought possible. We do these things, while our protectors are doing the essential work that keeps our lives in place. One of those essentials will be at my house at 8 in the morning to make sure it doesn't collapse with me inside. A worry that I had characterized by our insurance company's inspector and his 30-page report on what was happening beneath my floors and what damage it could cause to the whole structure. It took me awhile to get the courage to actually read the report and have been on edge since. It is a process to find carpenters who are not just into building from scratch, but will also find "saving" homes a path to take these days. And his work on this homemade mess could not begin until it got to be MY TURN!
In the last 12 hours, I have lugged out the stuff of 40 years and crammed it into every space available to provide empty, but that old bed will be the last to go!

I will greet the carpenters wearing my handmade facemask, let them in and then walk away.  It took 3 months to get a house built and another 3 months to make it livable. It has been not even 2 months since the first death from COVID-19 in the US. And the first death here in Oklahoma happened only  3 WEEKS ago. We have to starve it and not be where you can become a host for it, that means protecting yourself from everyone, social distance your friends and even family members who are not housebound with you. AND wear the mask of your choice. It hasn't even been 3 months since this virus got here.

Don't let it see your pretty face.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

This is the very first Spring I have experienced without the distraction of working away from home. My home is set on the prairie but at the edge of a gully that falls off to a creek below. Just up the way, it is possible to follow the rock bottomed creek bed currently alive with life all along it. Up the sides huge rocks create foundations for rooms not built beside the dogwood and redbuds bursting in full bloom.

The asparagus peaked up this week and presently became dinner. The winds do their best to dry us out between rains and the grass every day is greener than any green in the Crayola box. There was time one morning to burn some brush, but the breeze changed into wind as the embers were thankfully cooled. Each day time is allotted to removing a bit more of the invasive honeysuckle, saving back the longest runners to use for baskets later in the season. There is a guarantee plenty of product will certainly be available for later use. Clearing it out will let the native buck brush produce the runners I prefer for Cherokee double-weave baskets though both will work beautifully.

I am working remotely on LEAD Agency issues, our latest newsletter will be out this week, planning our virtual 50th Earth Day Anniversary celebration and making sure our Community Garden volunteers get what they need to put in this year’s crops. This is a year fresh foods will be appreciated since they will keep folks out of the grocery stores, saving money while actually keeping our gardeners safely distanced from people, besides who can beat fresh vegetables?

Out back the "bottle bed" got remade this week, reconstructed and filled with our compost and soil ready to seed. There are a variety of raised bed styles in our Community Garden, lots of ideas for folks who wander through it. Right now the carrots are nearly ready to pull, but the onions not quite yet, though the wild onions are certainly in season. Peas are popping up already. There is always more to do in a garden, so if you want to volunteer, call our office and we will direct you to the greatest need and put you right to work. You will have tools to use, or you can bring your own. Our office doors are locked, but the rain barrels will be full to wash your hands before you leave with a bar of soap you get to take home with you.

Plant a garden, plant a few flowers. Spring forward with what you can do with the time you have on your hands if you are sequestered at home. Get a pot for your porch and grow a thing. We are all surrounded by stress and stress can make you sick. Try planting a vegetable that you tend. It will give you hope where there was none and you then of course, the added satisfaction when you get to eat and enjoy what you grew!

Your spring can take you forward in a new way. Use the new lifestyle you have to widen your views, care in new ways for the life-long friends you have ignored. Take a little time to research the new Small Business Loans and write a comment letter before April 10 asking large corporations like poultry producers to quit being able to USE that avenue to avoid their own monetary investments. Keep those funds to ensure really small businesses get the help they need during these uncertain times.

Take yourself and whoever you have found yourself huddled up with outside to see just what Spring looks like where you are. You may find wild plums growing and in full bloom, like I have near my mailbox. They produced the wild plum jelly the mailman will get as a thank you for keeping me connected with the wider world. Our essential workers deserve the appreciation we are more currently aware to give.

This could be a real opportunity to practice kindness. It does take practice, and it is something appreciated long after you may have long forgotten having done it. The who, or whomevers that surprised LEAD Agency with flowers and candy delivered for Valentine’s Day only nudged all of us to pass it on, to others through the work we do.

Stay put, stay tuned, and learn as we all will how we protect ourselves from the unseen virus in our community. But take this moment to enjoy the time with your children, or the ones you get to see out your window. Write children letters and enclose a stamped envelope so they can write you back. Think back to the old days and value Jera Wyrick Rendel for creating a drive down memory lane so many people got to share with their kids.

Spring forward, each of these days, get up with a spring in your step and know our world can be better if we protect it, so write that other letter to the EPA asking for regulations on polluters to be reinstated since the President rescinded these last week. All we need now is to have toxins allowed while we are just trying to live through this pandemic.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim 

To stay certified as a lead based paint risk assessor one is requires by the State of Oklahoma to attend an annual refresher course in order to stay in the "club."

Due to a health issue, the last class was the only one I could attend. The Friday before class Monday morning the  agency hosting the class posted an announcement COVID-19 would necessitate decisions about operations as  President Trump declared a National Emergency that same day.  

Knowing the instructor, the evening before, I texted a question about the site and if it might be closed and if he would let me know. Hearing nothing, I left my house at 4 a.m. to make the 8 a.m. class on March 16. The class was taught as usual by the state sanctioned instructor. The President had announced social distancing saying groups of no more than 50 should gather.

Our group numbered just more than 20. There was some banter in the room before class started about social distancing. I had previously been to the facility and knew we could have been in the larger classroom so as to allow for space between us, but there we sat with almost every seat full. All sitting ducks. And then the accelerated bantering began with the instructor chimed in with the absurd quips of how it isn't as deadly, not as infectious, can't happen here and such. The instructor then explained the site didn't make the decision to go ahead with the class, he had. He was a scientist and he alone had made the decision... And was proud of it and as such, I believed he had put us all at risk.

With more chitchat,  the woman next to me began to ball up and get smaller as her former boisterous, lively spirit seems to deflate. She has lupus and RA. But she was visibly sick. She quietly shared there were new cases in Oklahoma City, having no effect in fact less exchanges. The class review was about to begin when we received word the 2 site inspectors from the Department of Environmental Quality were directed to remain in their office, no outside travel. With that word, the instructor assured us we would be taking our test early and  be home earlier than expected. All good, I am saying as the woman next to me seems weaker each minute.

Then, for some unknown and completely dim-witted reason, the instructor let the class go early for lunch before giving us our test. Everyone emptied out of the classroom, scattered all over Edmond and Oklahoma City for lunch BEFORE coming back together for the test.

The woman next to me asked me to go to lunch with her. I did not go. I went out to the car and read a book until the group gathered back. It was bad enough to have that much contact with the people in the room, but then when they came back, it was as if everyone they encountered at all those varied restaurants and cafes came back with them and brought all or any of their exposures to COVID-19.

I was furious. Wouldn't you be? Thinking of Italy, thinking of China, it was wrong to downplay the possibility of exposure as unlikely. It was happening. Fox News agreed that this “isn’t an overreaction. On the contrary, this is a commonsense, measured response to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus.”

That very Monday the President spoke about the need to Social Distance for no more than 10 persons to gather together and that bars and restaurants should close to stop the spread of the virus. Even NASCAR postponed all races for months.

The day after the class, I contacted the woman who had sat next to me. She knew she was getting sicker and went directly to see a doctor who treated her for flu and gave her some meds. I am not sure they helped. She hasn't contacted me again. That class was  9 days ago. I was already staying in and following the CDC guidelines before having to go to that class.

Years ago, my mother kept a Diary and on each day during the Viet Nam War she made note of how many Americans had been killed that day. I regret we all are watching as the numbers globally grow, and hold our loved ones close as the numbers come closer and closer to our homes. On our own calendars we are marking days when we might have been exposed by our own actions, and when someone enters our isolation bringing all their exposures, only to start our calendar count over, looking always for the lucky 14 for days it may take before symptoms of the virus might appear.

Each one of us has choices. We can be a vector or not. I am doing my best to make it stop with me. And I believe you are doing that very same thing. My calendar numbers will reflect the dead, but they will not deflect my hope for zero new deaths, zero new cases. That was how it ended in my mother’s diary. Finally a day with no deaths to report. Hers and mine:  Zero wins.

Water has been on my mind since LEAD has been focused on local flood issues when suddenly one evening I received a call that water was actually coming into the basement of our office.

Generally speaking a flood damages everything it touches and meanders into the most precious possessions you might have. It can happen as the rains come as they do and flash-flood us, it can slow creep back towards you in the night or it can seep silently into your basement when the stormwater/sewer system fails to do its job and sends brackish waters back at you.

The basement in the LEAD Agency was constructed to deal with water should it come. It is most unusually trenched along the walls so water would flow toward floor drains should water be a thing to enter. Rarely in the years we have been there has this happened. Never in such a way that the trenches failed to be adequate to hold all the water. But sometime over the weekend the water was high enough the empty 5 gallon water jugs stored on the floor became buoyant and floated across the room.

Flood water discovered the containers we held items for our next silent auction and the brand new paper coffee cups we purchased since we do not condone using Styrofoam. The water got into the boxes of Cherokee language books for children we had for children's cultural events we know come around each summer. Water saturated our cardboard boxes, we reuse for projects during the year.

Martin Lively and his brother Alex struggled to make the sump-pump work and it did, but the water kept coming. It kept coming and we knew it was serious. How much and how long would it come? Storm water can rise quickly and drain as quickly. But this time, the system failed and backed water to us. Much like when the river can no longer drain to the lake but turns back on itself to flood our neighbors and our businesses.

The rest of Miami was simply sleeping through our flood. As many times floods are slept through by the general public. This one was ours alone, thank goodness, but no thanks for the experience. Scott Kreeger our landlord called a plumber right away, who assessed the problem quickly and notified the City who sent a team right away to clear out the blockage and stop our singular basement flood caused by the system failure.

Each flood creates stories that need to be told. Each of the stories of how we take on the personal loss of a flood, the way we help a neighbor tear out the sheetrock or offer to store their refrigerator for the duration until it can be plugged back into the house it used to store food.

We would like to record your story. Why? Someone should know how hard and how expensive it is to lose everything you ever had. And how losing your child's favorite stuffed animal to flood water means it can't be made right that time.

How do we learn to love? We learn by the love we feel in those early years of our lives. Those attachments that we feel are real and deep. This teaches us how to love and feel true emotions to the people we know later as adults. Having real lasting attachments even with what may look like toys to a casual observer make us better loving adults in our relationships and with our children.

Who helped you during a flood? What helped?  We need to combine this collective knowledge so we can share it with the people who will be the next wave of flooded friends. If the level at Grand Lake is allowed to be raised 2 more feet, we have a host of people who will flood  who have not experienced this before.

We need your suggestions. What do they take out first? What do they have ready just in case the water comes up in the night like it might have done for your family? Where did you store your car? Where and how do you find people with pickup trucks and how did you ask for help? and did you wait too long? Where do you get boxes? Which ones hold up better?

It is time to prepare for the next flood. Our soil is saturated and the spring rains begin this week since spring is here now. The dehumidifier is running in the basement and the numbers indicate the moisture is being removed and we may have staved off the mold that can so quickly follow the water.

LEAD Agency is closed officially, but we are still working on-line and ready to listen if you should call or email us with environmental concerns. With time you may have due to the changes we all have made to our formerly scheduled lives, do consider calling to talk about your flood experiences, your suggestions for your as yet un-flooded friends. Your story matters and may be a way for us to express to the powers who open those flood gates how important timing can be.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Since learning more about my grandfather who was born one hundred years before me, and actually only 2 months ago reading his notes from medical school, he took a job in Fort Smith, Arkansas as the medical examiner... and was able or had to determine if the sentence of hanging had been successful or not for the officiating judge in the territory. After only a couple of years in this position he was looking for change and got it when he and another doctor accepted the contracts with the Cherokee Nation in the 1870's to vaccinate the members of the Cherokee Nation for Smallpox.

Smallpox had a long and terrifying history in the world and became an epidemic in the world of the Cherokees as well. They had met it for the first time late in the 1600's and a few decades later half of the tribe was decimated. In the 1870's smallpox was a full-blown pandemic in Europe. According to traditional Cherokee beliefs the animals created diseases to protect themselves against humans but believed and had found it to be true, that the plants provided the Cherokees cures for each of the diseases the animals had created. But none of their plants worked to cure smallpox.

But the development of a vaccine by Edward Jenner and later improved by Henry Austin Martin through using  lymph from cattle was more effective at inducing immunity to smallpox. In 1870, the then 46-year-old physician had launched a crusade advocating the benefits of bovine vaccination, or “true animal vaccination,” as he called it. Smallpox did not have to strike the Cherokees this time. My grandfather E.B. Frayser and Dr. Oliver Bagby divided up the Cherokee Nation and begin the process to protect every one of them. It took them two years to complete the effort.

Tribal members knew about smallpox and the serious consequences if they hid from the doctors and failed to receive the lifesaving inoculations.  Word spread a doctor was coming and whole families would be waiting at the next house for the treat of getting protection from the deadly disease.

My grandfather had lost his mother to a deadly disease and I believe he pushed himself during these years to work hard and fast knowing he was trying to outrun the disease before it reached the Cherokees again as it had the century before. They had suffered enough, having only been in Indian Territory a short 40 years since their infamous Trail of Tears brought them to their new home.

The fear of acquiring a deadly disease that spreads silently and quickly may be new to us, as we covey and wonder as the COVID-19 is spreading now even in Oklahoma, but knowing disease is in our DNA. We understand the serious times we face. Our ancestors, not far removed knew to both fear and respond to that fear. Dr. Frayser got his buggy and his supplies and went forth to protect people he had never met and many who spoke no English. He went with the answer, he went with protection. But as yet, we have only our hope to keep healthy and wait for the vaccines and know there will be the health professionals ready to help us, to meet each of us, people they have never met, to help keep us healthy. In the meantime, we must believe these protections will be developed and the disease abated in the future.

Go ahead. Give up your plans. If Cher can, we all can sequester, and learn to be with people in new ways, to continue striving and believing in our futures and encouraging the young to know this too will pass.
There are no more cases of smallpox. It is over. No treatment was ever developed by anyone. Symptoms could be managed. This new pandemic will end. There will be vaccines developed and the disease will be contained and slowly we will come back out and gather again in large places and fill them up with the joy of being together again.
We will long to be back in school, sitting through lectures more alert than before, ready to relish the chance to be together, without fear of each other and what we might be exposed to or what we might be carrying on our person unaware.

Appreciate each of the people who walk out their doors each morning to go out to serve you, to protect you and to treat you should you become ill. Know you are the reason they do this work.
My Cherokee relations, we had help when we needed it and many will find ways to help others this time. We are resilient but we are not stupid, we will heed warnings and follow suggestions. And as Mary Oliver would ask: 

                                                                  Tell me, what is it you plan to do
                                                            with your one wild and precious life?

I know what my grandfather did after that epic journey through the Cherokee Nation. He saw all that tall grass on the prairie, met all those Cherokee women, married one, and that allowed him to pursue a new career raising cattle. Lots of them. I have a better understanding on the importance he must have felt for cattle since using the bovine vaccines.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Emporia State University Geology and Chemistry students signed up for a course with Dr. Marcia  Schulmeister and Dr. Qiyang Zhang for a comprehensive look at sources, transport, reactions, and effects of chemical species in the hydrosphere, the lithosphere, and the atmosphere. And their 2020 field trip to wrap that all up came last weekend.

15 students and their instructors join in a movie and a meal at the end of their first full field day learning just how Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma roll when dealing with the superfund issues that connect us through every possible "sphere" and 8 spent an overnighter with us at the LEAD Agency as their "indoor campground."

It is quite a thing to have wall-to-wallers, but it was not the first time the instructors had brought students to our area and not our first overnight shared experiences. Not a one of these visitors were ever hungry while with us, not possible with the gourmet meals Michael Scruggs prepared. When students invade a space like they do, there is a magic that seems to transform our regular office into a 3-dimensial environmental justice classroom.

The instructors have been coming almost every other year, when that particular class is offered, we have been a selected section for it. The previous group was so moved by their experiences with us, they went back to their university, weighed through the campus rules and regulations and established the first environmental club on their campus. It may be awhile before we know what comes from this go around. But we wait and wonder. But know they went back to their seats in the vans knowing more deeply how science touches the lives of the people exposed to the toxins they simply had known only well enough to identify as specimens in their geology classes.

Out on the Toxic Tour Earl Hatley led they found specimens, but they were amazed when the containers Dale Allen had donated were pulled out and they each one could sort through and take the one that spoke to them. His uncle, George Wayne Morgan Jr. had been a miner for years in the Picher field and he walked each of these out at the end of a hard days work. They are beauties! But nothing is as cool as seeing geology students see the quartz or feel the weight of a real piece of lead!

Service Learning has been part of my life for a quarter of a century, so the what else these students wanted to do for us? Dr. Marcia had asked, "If there are unanswered water and chemistry questions, let us know what they are and we can try to contribute to the solutions."

They intended to collect soil samples for us from our flooded areas and analyze for the possibility of the mining metals they had studied and then now had hard samples to take home. It is hard enough knowing we flood but to know or imagine or FEAR that each time we flood we get another deposit of metals from our Tar Creek or the backwater flooding from the Neosho as it washes back on us what Tar Creek had just shared with her.

We have an XRF set up in our office. What's that? It is our very own x-ray machine, registered with the state, that allows us to analyze items, paint, soil for the elements they are made of, the elements on the periodic table. It is an old instrument almost an antique, but still is functioning as a tool to let us test items for community members, for mothers with lead poisoned children to help determine where the lead might be so it can be removed to protect their child from further exposure. We were able to share how it works and why it is important for our organization to have it and the ability it gives us to help.

It is a funny thing we have been saying a long time around LEAD Agency, we work hard for no money, but it is amazing what we can get done with loyal, dedicated help and programs that allow our help to get paid, whether that is through AmeriCorps/VISTA, AARP or the WIOA. Countless unpaid volunteers, students earning the time through service they need for their scholarships or for those who need to perform some hours engaged in community service, all help us do our work.

I retired early at 53 and that retirement has allowed me to generally work for no pay at a position that gives back more than a paycheck. But every once in awhile there is a knock at the backdoor and a couple walk in bringing a check for $100 dollars, or another couple leaves the brand new vacuum cleaner we need at the office because we used the last one up cleaning a home for a lead poisoned child.

We keep the doors open for serious research at LEAD Agency, we will put the coffee on, and chairs on the front porch. There is a need in this community for an organization like LEAD Agency and we are stronger with your support and sometimes we make room for overnighters.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

As I parked in Tulsa outside the hospital before dawn Monday I was remembering that only a few weeks ago I had read my grandfather's handwritten notes on surgery he had taken during a class in medical school, "You must have courage to use the knife." But as I was discovering with each step, you must also have courage to have the knife slice into you. And that is what I was walking toward to have done.

For over 20 years I have monitored my calcium levels after having had a bone-lead scan done at the Harvard School of Public Health and learned  I had a body burden of lead trapped in my bones. And in order to just keep it sequestered so as not to be released into my bloodstream to continue doing damage to my organs, I have watched my calcium and  had my blood lead levels checked every year since. When my calcium was low and for numerous years it was, I added calcium supplements.

Since the body is tricked by lead and treats it as if it were precious calcium, lead if whirling around in your bloodstream isn't excreted out of your body it is grabbed and stored in your bones in case you might need it later.
Sometime back another switch got flipped and my parathyroid started blasting out calcium to abandon. Understanding that nothing in abundance, could be right and seeking balance, I agreed to submit to the knife to have a surgery to correct the issue.

There is something extreme about having your throat cut open that seems harsh, but when results afterwards determined quickly to be effective and have thus far proved to have been positive, the decision to proceed undaunted, well, I am happy with the choice. And happy when you get old and qualify for Medicare walking in is not as scary financially either. I long for a day each person no matter her age can receive medical treatment as a human right.

In our community at a meeting last weekend I was introduced to a number of people as the "Conscience" of Ottawa County by our state Representative Ben Loring. Now that is a burden to carry, but at least I was not introduced as the Cut Throat Conscience, as might have been stated this week!

There are lots of reasons to speak out in Ottawa County and those who know me understand having a soft voice can be a challenge at first, but speaking out can be contagious and those who Flood are signing our DEMANDS that they are not going to take it anymore! They ARE speaking out, too. There are lots of ways to have your message heard. Everyone who had signed these showed up last weekend to meet with the woman who is challenging Senator Inhofe for his seat in Congress. You were there, your name was. Keep signing, and we will keep sharing your messages to any politician coming to town, or to those who will carry them with them to seats of power. We are on a roll.

You say? Yes, we got 25,120.74 tons of asbestos-containing material removed in 1,675 trucks loads and shipped out of here. AND all 53.82 tons of Carbon Black is GONE all done in 166 days. That is power to the people with EPA finding $4.6 million to serve and protect us.

Remember there is more to be done and when you are the Conscience of the County, you would expect the rally cry to begin, get more done, do more at the old BF Goodrich site, finish the investigation, the state must force the companies to DO RIGHT by the people, or move over and allow the EPA to step in and help us determine how much danger the neighbors are in, how much benzene and other chemicals are we talking about, how far have they spread, what damages do we deserve and who is going to do something about it?

We need to be protected from the next flood and we deserve representatives who will fight for us. We will hold "I Flood I Vote" rally again soon. Need a shirt? We have them.

Sign a Demand.  We are LEAD Agency - Local Environmental Action Demanded.   These are not appeals, or pleas. We demand and deserve to be protected.

The responsibility lies with each resident in Ottawa County to demand of each other to find out if their property is contaminated with lead in the soil and if it is to have it removed, both for free by calling the DEQ Hotline. They are not going to be knocking on your door anytime soon, but you can call and ask them to come and take some soil samples, take some samples from gravel driveways.

You can be a Conscience of Ottawa County. You can ask your neighbors. We can share the title. We can make our community safer for the children who are going to play in that backyard of yours or want to plant their very own garden. What's that number? 1-800-522-0206.

We are not going to take it anymore. We all have a conscience and we can all muster up some courage to use our voices.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Growing up before digital devices, we had to get ready for the future with the toys of the day to keep us busy and engaged for hours in solitary, focused activities. We learned first to draw with a stylus decades before stylus' brief moments of importance on smart-phones. We used the Magic Slate to draw on gray plastic sheets and when we lifted the sheet, our creations went with the lift, and we could start over.

We graduated to Etch a Sketch, engaging both our hands allowing us to manage turning motions into an art form, only to lose that image when the whole device was shook, which began the chance to do it even better.

This is important now? Yes, this interactive map DEQ has developed for Ottawa County lets absolutely anyone play and move around the map to view who's property has tested clean for lead or has had the lead removed from the yard or the driveway as indicated with the little pink dot. It is important to learn how to play because you can find out if your neighbors are playing smart or if it is you who will be the last one in the neighborhood to get a pink dot and make sure children are protected from lead. (We and others have found some anomalies... that caused us questions, but we called DEQ  and Ellen Isbell welcomed the questions, since she wants it to be the best instrument for us to use!)

What if we had a map with layers we could click through to see exactly how each property and those living in that spot might be effected by other aspects of the environment.

Who could develop this map? The layer DEQ has offered showing lead-free pink dots is a good start. What if we could layer the regretfully new flood plain map to see which homes and properties may be most at risk for the next flood, and perhaps by which water so we might then be able to measure amounts of metals deposited from Tar Creek and where they come to reside.

It would be valuable to have a map that also showed where the benzene plume lies beneath the neighborhood near the old BF Goodrich plant, but also showed where the waste drained to the north of the plant into the lagoon and the path the water flowed then to the river, both above ground and the path ground water might have flowed.  I would want the wells on the map that had been drilled both to the Boone and the Roubidoux, all over the county, including of course the BF Goodrich wells on that property.

You need a map to show air deposition, as Bob Dylan would have said: "You don't need a weather man  To know which way the wind blows." But if we had a map to show what went into the air and how it passed over us? What if this map could indicate where smell is detected and what is in that smell and where the 150,000 pounds of styrene emitted just north of Miami might land. We would want to reconstruct where all that asbestos blew in the 5 years it took to be so safely removed and how 80 years of wind deposition from the chat piles might have added to each backyard garden.

It's like we need a three dimensional map, right?

Then we could see who and where and how our environmental justice issues lies upon us and why I stay awake at night wondering how on earth this can be right.

And why one thing at a time, we will be giving you a chance to tell anyone who will listen that YOU ARE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE. For now the pages are out in the community, sign one to say you are tired of being FLOODED.  We intend to collect these white boards and show any politician wanting votes exactly how you feel. So far you can sign them at: Intertribal Council, Papa G's, Post Properties, RIC Insurance, Farm Bureau, Allen Sign Studio, Sooner Printing, NEO Realty and Solid Rock Realty, more will go out. Let us know if you want to be part of this effort.
Any politician in office or running must acknowledge the environmental issues this community, this county faces. We don't need a cheerleader, we need all hands on deck, knowing how science and the environment effect the health of our people and the hope of the future and how to talk to people in power who can and must make decisions to protect us.

And for this task, until we have a layered map of the degradation to our air and water quality, our defenders must study where we are damaged, who may be affected and how on earth the changes can be made to make it right for the public.

Ask any politician seeking office what the legal issues are when dealing with GRDA and FERC and why it is important to listen to hydrologists and the implications new jobs bring if they also bring new hazards to our health. These are serious times and floods are looming. Popularity contests have consequences. 

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Flood Survivors and their friends stood up for themselves
at the "I Flood I Vote Rally" saying this flooding must STOP.
 
Each one had a story, and as a community we need to remember to collect this part of the history of this place. The traumatic times in our lives stay with us, like those snow globes, pick them up, shake them and the snow falls again. That's what its like when a flood survivor begins to speak. It is like they are there again, seeing the slow motion disaster a flood has been described to be. They can name the people who were there, the time it took to load up what could be loaded in the last remaining truck and the barely making it through the water before it was impassible. Or what was left behind as you and your grandchildren leave home for the last time with a few possessions as they load up on the rescue boat. Never to return. Leaving all lost treasures a child can amass as well as the lifelong treasured memories their grandmother can never hold close again.

We can shed a tear. I do, just recalling the latest, freshest stories heard this week. One woman told me "it's like no one cares anymore -- like this is the norm, but this is not normal." I know this not normal, because there are countless towns around that never have a single person flood. Whole towns do not know to worry when the rain begins to fall.

But there are people who are not going to take it anymore. I know that because they signed their name to it this week at the first ever I FLOOD   ~   I VOTE  RALLY, but they left a lot more room so you can add your name too.
A flood is a dirty deal. Dirty water. Catastrophic losses. Personal, private losses.

Stressors to any family and their budget, their plans for a weekend, or the summer, or the birthday they spend in a shelter or sequester in a motel after the Red Cross shelter closes.

Ever so slowly lives finally begin to start over.

When you start over, it means the little things, too. Like paperclips and safety pins, starting a home with nothing, not a thing. No junk drawer in the kitchen as a "go to." When you are eleven and know you are going to start your own business rebuilding bicycles and  have your collection covered with water and mud for weeks, the start is over before it ever begins.

One elderly woman said Catholic Charities just wondered if she and her family still had any unmet needs. Yes, they needed beds, after sleeping on the floor on mats for the last seven months. Unmet needs. She  answered that question and in 2 days, the truck came with beds, mattress and bedsprings AND all the bedding for them, brought them in and SET THEM UP.

Another woman who is just moving back into her home this week, is going to deal with the mess of setting up house again and then she is going to "come up fighting."

Floods can de-neighbor neighborhoods when the Red Tagged homes are torn down, creating green space with useless sidewalks. Floods can ruin the economy of a town for a time and challenge businesses with hard decisions. Not all the decisions are made yet, as we wait to see how high the next flood will be, and when it might come. But it always starts with rain and rain seems to keep coming. Our ground is already saturated before this spring's rains.
You know why LEAD Agency put up that billboard and how we had to pull us together and begin with the first I FLOOD ~ I VOTE RALLY. I can't take it anymore either. It was suggested we should be marching down Main Street to rally, but the retired teacher said no, we should go to the Capitol to rally!

We are open to your ideas and we are open to listen to your stories. What has happened to you, how did flooding affect you, your family, your way of life? Pull up a chair on the front porch at the LEAD Agency, bring your stories and let's organize that next rally.

Our Senator needs to know us, needs to hear your stories, bring your friends, there is always room in the front yard, ours or your own. People came to our rally who had never stood out on a street to let the world know how they felt about anything. It has been such a private thing, so many secret ways we hide our tragedies, so as not to burden others, who may have been suffering themselves, or as we know were mobilized to help a family member or had a coach who called them into service to help someone they had never met before. 

We can get lost and isolated, but we can gather and be stronger together and our voices heard on local TV and our stories out on Oklahoma City's Journal Record or in the town of Shawnee's newspaper. Get that? There is more to say and we are just getting started.

What'd you say? "I can't take it anymore."

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim