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

Last week as an invited speaker for Emma Colven's Environmental Justice senior capstone class at the University of Oklahoma, the students were discussing the research they had conducted at the Western Heritage Collections. Inspired to do my own research in that facility I found a ledger my grandfather must have carried in his pocket containing notes he had written while studying medicine in 1870.

The volume is bound in red leather emblazoned with a single word on the front. Inside the pages contained his handwritten pen and ink notes. One statement on the page entitled Operations Surgery stood out to me: "You must have the courage to use the knife when necessary..." Isn't that the truth? Courage is necessary to move forward, to take a stand, to speak up, but for our surgeons, surely it does take courage to enter the skin of a patient and take actions to save a life, that moment knowing exactly where  and how to cut and he continued with: "one must not let your feelings have anything to do with the operation." It is hard to be brave, to find courage, I know. Not one of my college classes had a bit of instruction on how to be, find or have any degree of courage, but knowing how could have emboldened me or others and made any number of actions easier to master through the years.
 Like speaking up on climate change.

You might become a believer in climate change if you were outside working in the garden on Monday while both the front and back doors were open to let the breeze flow through, like we did at the LEAD Agency that afternoon.
But 70 degrees one day and two days later schools and businesses closed due to snow is really not climate, it is weather. And weather has been known to change, we grew up knowing that, as they say, "Don't like the weather? It's Oklahoma, just wait a few days and it will change." But having lived in other states, they say the same thing about their weather!

But climate is bigger. Climate is the bigger picture, it is how extremes can affect all of us, not just the pocket of people who get some wind damage or number of times we sit in the "Fraidy Hole" but how many times the county gets washed down the river and how high the river gets each time, and those times are closer together when 100 year floods happen year after year.

The Quapaw Nation hosted a Tribal Resilience Workshop this week and I got to attend one day, and the second day, the snow threatened and made me leery to go to find out even more facts about how this is going and how quickly our future generations will be madder-than-hell at us for allowing it and not doing our level-best to reel it in and save the polar bears and lightning bugs from extinction.

When looking up Resilience you will find it is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. That is what has happened after the floods, after the weather disasters people face. But the ability gets harder when the difficulties keep coming.

That grandfather of mine, didn't have children until he was in his 60's and together his family experienced what they called the Little Ice Age before 1920. My father's clearest memories of that time were  everyone used skates, there was so much ice, it was how you got around, and the fireplace in their home burned wood, single long logs, they walked over as they protruded out of the fireplace into the living room and pushed them forward as they burned.

                What is the difference between weather and climate change? Weather refers to short term    atmospheric conditions while climate is the weather of a specific region averaged over a long period of time. Climate change refers to long-term changes.

We weather the storms, but we hope to endure the effects climate change will have on the earth and her people, as our island people keep coming because the sea is rising and taking their homelands under, there will be more migrations of people walls will not contain, leaving lands where draughts have dried up their soils and water. There will be more flooding for us to come, making simple gardening a challenge and large scale farmers unable to plant or harvest the food a nation requires to feed her people.

Back in the Western History Collection, my grandfather's ledger was in a folder and the folder was in a box and the next folder was Miami, OK's Sam Fullerton. Surely the people who placed those folders in the box, never dreamed the two men were friends, and there they are in the box together for the duration of history! and began their lives just as the world's uses of fossil fuels was beginning.

Courage is what we all will need to go forward into the climate changed world we will live. But also courage to change what is making it worse, we will have to innovate away from fossil fuels in big ways and in simple personal choices.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

The neighborhood edges right up to the fence-line of the old BF Goodrich plant. Eric Rollo and I talked through the fence a few days before the asbestos cleanup had finished, thanking him for the work he and his team has done for us. He looked past me, looking at the home-fronts facing the plant, he could see Will Rogers barely a block away. He simply said how important he saw the abatement, how serious he took the work, "We needed to do this for them."
What we needed to do for the workers was to value their time, their effort, the months away from home and family to work for us, to make our lives safer in the future.

We wanted to give these for the most part, nameless employees one home-cooked meal before they left us to go to their own homes before heading out on another mission to protect yet another damaged town.

On Sunday morning of the EPA Superfund's last week in Miami, I went into the backdoor of the Northwest Baptist Church and asked if LEAD Agency could hold a home cooked meal for the valued visiting workers. The first gentleman turned me over to Jack Trask, who hearing what we hoped to do, took me down the bright white hallway to meet with Pastor Michael Knight. It took only moments before he said yes to our use of their space for the lunch. But he asked a thoughtful question, "How's the water here?" We have nothing without water, we all will agree, so I shared with him my hopes to protect our Roubidoux Aquifer from the legacy mine waste contaminated water in the Boone Aquifer sitting above it. But we were standing only feet from where that nameless swallow perched aquifer with BF Goodrich benzene lies beneath the homes in his neighborhood. These are serious issues in the building serving the Lord to speak about on a Sunday morning.

Mr. Trask walked me out of the building with more serious talk about loss and real possible causes our community musters through each day knowing or sliding aside acknowledgement as we go about our lives.
According to Louis "Red" Mathia, LEAD's board president who had worked at BF Goodrich, then served as Miami's mayor for 12 years, learned the powerhouse was left standing, said even the concrete had asbestos in it and personally wanted every bit of it removed to be the most protective for the community even though EPA said the asbestos had been fully removed from it.

190 tons of debris have been hauled away in trucks. It took 9 months, working for the most part 6 days a week. While if you look on the Toxics Release Inventory website for Ottawa County, over 159 thousand pounds of another carcinogen was released to the air throughout 2018. We got one dangerous pollutant removed at an expense of several million dollars, but we are still being exposed to tons of another.

I divert. We pulled together neighbors, LEAD members, some friends of friends and in walked crockpots with chicken noodle soup, salads, barbeque beans, broasted potatoes, green bean casserole, delightful servings of southwest chicken filets and rolls from the Ottawa Tribe and Hi-Winds Casino, deserts and of course the obligatory 'Thank you CAKE' you would expect to see. But each table had real dinner plates and cloth napkins we had brought from home.

The decorations combined the thanks for work well done, but the hope for the rest of the work left yet unaddressed: what lies beneath that neighborhood, the benzene and other chemicals and what flowed out of the plant and headed to the Neosho River for the life of the plant and since its closure.

In other words, the TOP is done, glad of it, but BENEATH and BEYOND not yet. How do we get that done? We have to care, we have to speak up, we have to MAKE it happen. The investigation, the real investigation must begin and the results must be addressed. This community deserves a CLEANUP and so do our downstream friends.

Lee, Mike McAteer and Lisa McClure arrived right on time, and were able to take note of the comments on white boards the Pam Bevis had posted throughout the room written by Miami Academy students. They didn't just read them, they took pictures of them all. They took photos WITH them. Then the vested workers arrived and we got to enjoy time with them as we shared a meal. Academy students came with their award winning teacher, Marla Stidham. Each table took a turn to speak about our gratitude for their work and time in our community. But when Mike McAteer stood to speak, clearly touched by this simple meal. He said in his 29 years of working in contaminated communities, this was the first one to receive this outpouring of gratitude. We almost made him cry. And that almost got me, too.

How little it takes to show we care. We will all remember that moment and jump into wondering what kindness we can give the next person, group of people who choose to serve us in whatever way they do.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 
https://myrtk.epa.gov/chems?ID=000100425
https://enviro.epa.gov/triexplorer/tri_factsheet.factsheet?pstate=OK&pcounty=Ottawa&pyear=2017&pParent=TRI&pDataSet=TRIQ1

There are mixed messages out there. Some saying Climate Change is a hoax, while seventeen year old Greta Thunberg is saying clearly as possible: Our house is on fire and your inaction fuels the flames, and  you should panic as if you loved your children above all else.

Your house may not be on fire right now like Australia is burning, but your house may have other issues affecting the safety of your children.

We have known for a long time that lead can be harmful to your health and harms children quicker, because their growing bodies absorb more lead than adults do, and their brains and nervous systems are more sensitive to the damaging effects of lead. They are smaller and closer to the source and for our homes that would be the floor.

Starting this week, EPA has changed the amount of dust on floors it takes to be dangerous. The standard  used to be 40 micrograms of lead per square foot (µg/ft2) but it is  now down to 10 µg/ft2 on floors and from 250 µg/ft2 to 100 µg/ft2 on window sills. The concern has been focused on housing built before 1978 and might have lead based paint, but also includes child care facilities and hospitals across the country. But our dust might be from our environment, too.

What does that mean? This information should convince parents to take measures to reduce risks in their homes.
What are we doing? If you currently have a lead poisoned child in your home, LEAD Agency would like to give you a dust mat for the door you go in and out of. What can you do? You could ask EPA why in the latest Press Release on these standards, bare soil in children's play areas should not be higher than 400 parts per million (ppm) of lead, yet the cleanup level for Ottawa County is 500 parts per million (ppm).

You could get your child's blood checked for lead, sign up to get your yard tested by DEQ (for free) and if contaminated with lead, get it removed and replaced (for free).

What can we do? What can one person do? Use door mats, take your shoes off when you come into your house, or even leave them on the front porch. Wet dust and mop. We are encouraging everyone to use door mats to help keep lead out of your house so it will stay out of you and your children. Think your house is clean? watch the sunlight coming in your window or turn on a flashlight at night to see "ten thousand particles, turning softly, twinkling” as Anthony Doerr, described dust.
 
You can learn to speak up, you can be brave, even courageous. That is what Representative Adam Schiff asked US Senators to do, have courage to think for yourself, as it pertained to the trial occurring in the Capitol this week.
You can be brave and ask your landlords if your home or apartment is lead safe, especially now that we know the dust level for lead has been reduced so very low. It changed slowly but the change is official now, as a measure that will be more protective of children. Especially children who are crawling all over their floors.

'It only takes a little lead to contaminate a room.

For example, imagine each granule of sweetener in a sweetener package represents a tiny piece of lead. If only two of these 'lead' granules were placed in a one square-foot area of floor, enough lead would be present to exceed the EPA guidance for lead-contaminated dust.' EPA Lead Sampling Technician Training Course Trainer Manual pp. 3-2
Surely you remember Justin Brown? He sent a couple of journal articles recently showing how of course lead can affect I.Q., we have known that, but also it can make our brains actually smaller and certain areas of lead poisoned children's brains we need for successes in life can be affected, they found, especially for the poor, changing the futures of children and our society.

As poet Gabriel Gadfly has said, “Sometimes I grow so tired of speaking my emotions to you. I open my mouth and dust spills out instead of feelings.”

I guess you can say sometimes I talk dirty. Dust is a dirty deal and a dangerous one for the little ones. We are in a superfund site where the contaminant of concern is lead. Whether you live in a home built before 1978, or have one in your neighborhood, you and your neighbors have yards that may have lead in the soil to be tracked into your home. But Ami Zota's study of air quality found lead in the air throughout our area, perhaps not much on a single day, but it accumulates and it doesn't take much to harm our children.

Your house may not be on fire, but it's a good time to begin doing what you can there and then work outward.

Respectfully submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

There is something special about a hand-me-down cookbook. Being the repository of the most cherished items of my mom, and 2 of her sisters has had me end up with 3 copies of the very same cookbook. My Aunt Sylvia Bradshaw's copy has neatly cut out newspaper and magazine recipes slipped inside. Her sister, Jewel's copy was absolutely spotless, but my mother's copy? the one I grew up using? Stains throughout. My mom and I marked recipes to try again and big X's on ones that just didn't work  and should never be tried again.

The Women's Council First Christian Church's Welch, Oklahoma Cookbook is entitled, "The Way to a Man's Heart" helped me learn to cook, if I wanted to cook a rabbit or make Fried Birds without the birds, or Baby Porcupines without the porcupines. The cookbook is a slice of history, though it does not have the date in it, the recipes are dated with types of ingredients used and the frugality of the times, coming out of the Great Depression and right into the rationing that occurred in WWII. The advertizing included Welch Post Office, Patch Coal Mines: Custom Coal, even "If Nott, Why Nott... try NOTT'S GROCERY 604 South Main, Miami, OK Phone 399" while Chet and Gertrude's Cafe in Welch: A Good Friendly Place to Eat, listed the phone number as simply 3-6.

The other 2 things to mention about this remarkable cookbook: There is a quote on the top of every page. I love quotes and love these because none of them come with the author. But absolutely all of the recipes were submitted by women who listed their name under their recipe. Back in the day, when making something, I would have to call out who's recipe it was and would immediately get grief for using it or acclaim for the reputation of the cook.

If wine was called for in a recipe, like the one for Uncooked Fruit Cake, sweet pickle vinegar or of course peach juice could be substituted. Lard, raisins and brown sugar were necessary for the Black Cake. My Mother's Jam Cake (not my mother's) required "Enough flour for stiff batter" allowing you to  judge  how much that was. A few grains of salt, lots of sorghum and molasses were called for, and one cup of hot mashed potatoes went into the Potato Cake. If the cream was sour, use 1/2 teaspoon soda and on more than one occasion directions called to add butter the size of a walnut.

My older brother is a died-in-the-wool vegetarian, so my mother was always looking for ways to add protein to meals without using meat and she found a recipe to make a meat substitute using peanuts as the base ingredient in this very cookbook. I have modified that recipe to make it my own. In fact, there hasn't been any beef cooked in my home for over thirty years.

But lots of burgers have been cooked and eaten here, and most people who consumed them were shocked after learning the meat was made with PECANS.

Why not give pecans a try, simply takes one cup to make a meal for 4.

While my son was in Law school at OCU, clubs and organizations had fundraisers and he used the recipe and made pecan chili, he said, "Man they loved it! I never forgot them saying, what, NO MEAT? We were Hip with the times, before the times."
 
Pecans can be as expensive as beef, but if you GROW pecans, or know a tree that lays them out on the ground for the picking, you might pick them up for free. You can plant a few pecans and grow your own!

Pecans can decrease total as well as LDL or “bad cholesterol” and increase HDL or “good cholesterol” levels in the blood and are excellent sources of vitamin-E and other important nutrients including protein.

We are on the "cusp of the most consequential disruption of agriculture in history." It is predicted in 10 years the U.S. cattle industry will be effectively bankrupt. Unsustainable livestock production will give way to plant-based agriculture movement as farmers adapt to a changing society and an environment under threat. Farmers are transitioning from animals to more plants according to Civil Eats.

Vegetarian is in. Vegan is coming. Get with the times.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim (recipe follows)

                                                                                BETTER BURGERS
                1 cup chopped or broken pecans                                    1 large egg (2 if small)
                Oats, corn meal, bran meal, or bread crumbs                1/3 cup cheese, grated or cut in small pieces
 
            Combine pecans, egg, and cheese. Add enough dry ingredients to dampened them. Mold into patties and cook on a lightly oiled skillet, brown both sides. These cook quickly and will be enjoyed warm.
For chili use the same ingredients and add chili powder and cumin to flavor, spread the whole mixture on the skillet and scrabble like eggs. Add more chili powder and cumin to pot of beans for a delightful pot of chili.
For Italian meatballs, add Italian seasoning to the mixture, mold into balls and brown on the lightly oiled skillet.
If you are cooking for a vegan, the egg and cheese can be substituted with steamed okra to bind the dry ingredients.   Use usual method for mixing. Cook until done. 

When my son was little, he loved to read, right away, so his favorite book was perfectly: I Want to Read, by Betty Ren Wright, published 1972. Another reason he might have learned to love reading: he grew up with books in every room of our house and his grandparents, and both uncles!

He was devoted to the Lewis Meyer Bookshelf, a Sunday morning show on Channel 6 KOTV, with the host reviewing the latest books in his shop in Tulsa on Peoria. The last thing he said before ending the program was a simple phrase, "The more books you read -- The TALLER you grow."

As the years went by, it was turning out to be literally true. My son, kept reading AND he kept getting taller! Now all these years later, he is bound to be over a foot TALLER than me!

Anyone who ever had a bike of their own remembers how special it was, how it fit, color and usually longs to ride it once more. That was me and my son, Dana Jim. We had those kind of bikes and took them in the back of our pickup when he was in high school to Tulsa to ride the River trails, which on a bike is not far from the Lewis Meyer bookstore, so of course we went there, locked our bikes to a pole outside and went in holding our helmets to enjoy the shop and to shop, knowing no one leaves without buying a book. But as we walked out, both of our bikes were gone. We were helmeted, bike-less people. Mr. Meyer was appropriately shocked at this occurrence. 

Last year, Tony Booth, who had been one of LEAD's board members for years, walked up the ramp to our office 30 years later with one of the bikes, the red Schwinn Mesa Runner with new handlebars. Tony had bought it for $5 at an auction and was donating it to LEAD because we are all about getting people back on bikes. Dana's bike was back like magic you would read at that bookstore. And suddenly we recalled Mr. Meyer saying, "I think people who spend time with their noses in books are the happiest people. "Because books never let you down." And getting your bike back works, too.

Talk about books and someone who loves books that's JoAnn Walkup. She graduated and got the 50 year reunion sweatshirt from Miami High School, and she started a dream career when she worked in that library. Her whole life's work has been in libraries and you have to know books tended to follow her around those 50 years. But this week she decided to lay some on LEAD Agency.

JoAnn recently listed her home, and it sold quickly and reality hit her: she had to empty it right away. She has a giving-heart, so this week she has been "hearting" lots of people and places most of her processions...

And LEAD Agency was on both the "bring a pickup" and the dropping by with a few things lists. Precious children's books, some for our treasured Little Free Library, and some will be kept on our most loved book shelves in the office. Other books she was compelled to gift us were environmental, Indian, birds and garden themed. Think about birds? A stack of books, also binoculars, games, cd's AND actual birdbaths with a heater to keep water from freezing this winter, (if we have a winter) and a Bird Call! It was like that for gardening, too, with plant stand, books, a red azalea and what she called a tulip tree, both in large pots. These required a set of garden chairs and a settee of course to watch birds and rest from the gardening.

Resting from gardening should have been what Jamie Munson and I did today after hours in the beautiful spring like afternoon. Who else to get and proudly wear that blue MHS Wardog sweatshirt, but a "girl" athlete who did all the sports offered to girls back in the day.

JoAnn knows LEAD is always thinking about how to keep the lights on at our office, so among the items she gave might be matched with a good bottle of wine  for a Silent Auction such as the one of a kind book by a MHS alumni,  official Coleman Theater memorabilia and a colorful plate with a motto: until further notice... celebrate everything, which seemed appropriate with the joy she was experiencing while lessening her load with us. 

We are the silent keepers of a set of Pueblo pottery Storytellers her brother Bob Walkup had given her over the years. Keeping until her next home or nest is ready for them. What perfect gifts for his sister, the champion "storyteller" herself. Lots of her stories begin with a book and then take you off to what happened to who read it and what they are doing with the rest of their lives. Books written by then quite classmates she never imagined had a book in them.

And there is balance when the whirlwind of a woman left to find her next gifting, took a moment to sit out by the Little Free Library, made richer with her books.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

A friend of mine, Eric Ferrell, sent an article from the Joplin Globe about lead contamination in Paris after Notre Dame burned last April. Notre Dame is Paris and its beauty is renown.

The roof of that centuries old structure, held up with beams made from 13,000 ancient trees had been coated with between 250  and 440 TONS of lead thought to make it fireproof.  A fire started inside the structure and the beams burned, lead melted and dripped down into the structure and the flames carried the yellow fumes containing lead particles onto the neighborhood.  All these months later Paris is dealing with the massive cleanup that is required to protect human health from lead poisoning. They were finding lead dust levels 500 and 800 times the official safe levels. The levels in Ottawa County is currently 500 ppm of lead in soil would trigger cleanup. Imagine how high they were finding in Paris!
 
Pregnant women and children are being encouraged to have their blood lead checked even as cleanup continues. Some schools were cleaned up quickly but more schools have had to be closed after lead was also discovered there.  Paris is finding out a lot about lead, that it will not dissolve and dissipate, it is poison and it must be removed. We know this and Ottawa County residents are gearing up to make those phone calls to DEQ and get their property tested in 2020, and encouraging their neighbors to get with the program! If we got in gear, we will be cleaned up way before Beautiful Paris gets the lead out.
 
Back in the day, I thought of myself as an artist. My first love, painting took me to Taos, then I turned to beadwork being taught technique and skills on assembly from Betty Pinnecoose who ensured if work was constructed well enough it could be lost in the river and upon being found, it would still hold together. While living in Sapulpa, I took a basketmaking class taught by Hepsey Gilroy and began a lifelong love of making baskets.  My skills in basket making and beadwork allowed me to have the confidence to hang with a fledgling group of Cherokee artists, back in the day. The talent was immediately recognizable with Bill Glass, Jr., Mike Daniels, Anna Bell Mitchell and Knokovtee Scott and they allowed me to join the group in both beading and basket categories.
 
I have become a slacker.  Just today, I sat in my bead-making nook waiting for the beads to yell at me for leaving them to wait so long to become the something else they long to become. And took a walk outside to appraise the buckbrush and honeysuckle vines that claim they long to become baskets.
 And while walking, I thought of two of those original Cherokee artists who have gone on, first Anna Bell Mitchell, who used the clay from our land to create pots, some she actually gave back to us as gifts. The other newly gone. Knokovtee Scott used the purple mussels he found around area lakes to create shell jewelry with Mississippi Mound culture designs that had once been made in the southwestern U.S. a thousand years ago.
 
The latest photos of Knokovtee showed him always wearing a surgical mask around his neck, I thought to help keep the shell dust from entering his lungs when drilling or cutting shells. A comment he made in a 2017 Cherokee Phoenix article became more cryptic since his December death, “I’m in a race against time to make sure this is not lost again.” I have several items he created and I will always wonder if they helped cause his death.
 
But the other thing I never considered to be at issue with local shells is what else they contain. We know there are issues with lead in some of the fish in Grand Lake, Spring River and the Neosho. We have found lead in the teeth of some of our residents. Studies have shown lead in the tissue of mussels. But in the shells? Yes. Mussels filter heavy-metals in contaminated waters and can accumulate toxins in their shells.

Gillian Genser is a sculptor in Canada who learned shells used in her artwork had caused her heavy-metal poisoning only after suffering debilitating symptoms for years. Doctors found high levels of arsenic and lead in her blood. The mussels she had been working with for decades were toxic, likely contaminated from industrial waste. She had sanded, grinded shells for her sculptures but also had eaten the mussels.

Ms Genser hoped her art and suffering might create a sense of connectivity and reverence for the natural world. "I feel grief—both for myself and our planet." But also satisfaction from her art. "That’s how I find my hope. I call [one of her pieces] my beautiful death."

As artists, as natives, as people who want to base back to our culture, or live off the land, we have all expected our environment to be safe but now we know it may not be.

Be cautious but walk in beauty or go create it, "beauty is the promise of the future.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

This Holiday Season started out with a bang for one of LEAD Agency's board members, Grace Goodeagle when she received word that the case she had brought against the United States had been settled and she had won. You and I don't know very many people in our lifetimes who fought the government and ended up winning. She did and several other members of the Quapaw Nation have also won. So when Grace walked into the LEAD Agency office with a gift we opened it right away, and found a sign that summed that up ever so simply with the single word: JOY.
Isaac Watts wrote the words to what we know as the Christmas Carroll: Joy to the World while the tune may have come from several sources, I found myself focused on these words:
        
                                      Repeat the sounding joy,
                                               Repeat the sounding joy,
                                                       Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

It seems like you have all the time in the world, and then suddenly there are only days, perhaps hours to bring people together who may have known each other decades ago. For me, that was how it was one day last week. My friend Diana Duran has lived in Miami for the last few years and worked at the Miami Public Library. She had told me her mother had known Leaford and Barbara Bearskin twenty years ago and had asked if I knew how to find Barbara. Of course, I said yes, but had not brought them together yet and suddenly there were few days left to make that happen before Diana was set to move from Miami for keeps.

We arrived at Quapaw's premier elder estate where Barbara currently lives and marched right in on her, the day after the facility's Christmas party. We found her sitting beautifully covered with the softest red velvet cover with white fleece trim.

I introduced Diana and she began describing her mother and where she lived in Wyandotte and how her antique business might have been the connection between her and the Bearskins. Diana gave clue after clue and then it was the most amazing thing, Barbara remembered Diana's mother's ashes had gone to Scotland and wondered why.
As we visited, Barbara provided more and more remembrances to Diana of her mother while she had been living locally. Bobby had died twenty years ago of breast cancer at age 66, near the age Diana is now, so to hear stories of her mother, things she would have said, details on her "attitude" and how she looked. Well, I have to tell you each remembrance was like a brand new gift. Each comment relished.

There are few things you can give a friend, but these words Barbara Bearskin shared with this daughter,  a woman she had never met, were treasures that could not be bought. The acknowledgment of the love Leaford emitted to people he encountered was voiced only then to become an endearment deepening Diana's connection to her mother. The graciousness Barbara gave, to listen and to remember will long be treasured by that motherless woman, my friend Diana.

Diana's mother had lived in a beautiful home I understood was near the old Seneca Indian Boarding School.  The conversation came to describe the home and the surroundings near the Boarding School, which had been prominently on my mind lately. I had been given the opportunity to review the results of a project Juanita Bigheart  had completed involving the former boarding school. She had learned by listening how those who had attended school there described the site, their days on that hill in Wyandotte and their recollections included the sounds of the bells ringing and the friendships they developed that lasted throughout their lifetimes.

It becomes more important to value not only the stories, but how very important it is to be asked to remember, to then take the time to pull out, perhaps slowly at first the strands and then to accept and take the time to listen to the flood that may follow as these memories begin to flow more easily from that bank account we have stored in our brains.

Big gifts or small, breaking the silence with answers to questions left long unspoken, sharing time with old friends and celebrating lost acquaintances and wrongs made right. All good, all real. These are bringing lasting JOY this year.
 
Find the things that bring you joy and fill your life with them.
And as poet Mary Oliver would say,

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

Surely your answer will include what brings you joy.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

 Last Year I got a word cloud for Christmas. It was a brilliant gift Martin Lively gave me.  You might wonder what a word cloud is. It is a way to view text visually because our brains prefer visual information over any other format.

And how did he make mine? He has secretly been LEAD Agency's webmaster for the last several years and as such, he used a bit of what it held to build the one he presented to me. He clicked on the Tar Creekkeeper drop down page and simply copied all my articles, lots of the ones you have read in the Miami Newsrecord get posted later on my blog there. He then used a "word cloud builder" and ever so quickly these words appeared. Larger words were ones I used more often and tiny ones way less often. He and Lois then chose the heart for the shape to contain the words, I guess they figured it was appropriate since they were written from the heart.

Bold words like WATER, PEOPLE  LEAD TAR CHILDREN GOODRICH CLEAN NOW look like they are being yelled as they appear in various colors, but the YEARS WANT OTTAWA PROTECT LAND are easy to find. I often have felt like when writing my pushy self is out there for the world to see, and there the words pop as proof.  Yes, it was quite a gift to boil all these columns down to the core like this, but It felt like the curtain was lifted or in the old days, my slip was showing.

So who could top this as a gift? You won't believe it, I certainly didn't, it was the Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ for short. Lots of times, year after year, I suggest, wish, nag and repeat how valuable it would be for our community to have an interactive map of all the clean / remediated residences in Ottawa County. Only about 1/4 of all of the properties have had their yard tested or remediated of legacy lead so far and we have been at this since... 1995! Which yards have been tested? which ones still need to be checked?

If you have had your yard cleaned up or want to find out it has already been cleaned before you moved there, you can click on the pink dot by your house and it will confirm it! It is like being famous for doing the right thing! If you zoom in with the interactive map, you may see that you and NONE of your neighbors have any dots.... YET. It is totally free and easy to call DEQ and get on their list so you can be a PLAYER on the map.

Why wouldn't you want to? Your property values? Can only get better if little children can play in your yard without the threat or promise of becoming lead poisoned. That is the whole reason this cleanup business is happening. It is because our kids are only little once, and if they are exposed early in life, it most often happens at home and your home sits in the middle of your yard, right? Little children can not become lead-free after being exposed without possible consequences that will follow them throughout their lives. How children learn can determine how their lives end up and lead can change how children think and process sound.

Prevention is how we protect children and DEQ is giving you a great big gift of a brand new yard or driveway if they are contaminated. Try going out and pricing gravel and how much it costs to haul in clean dirt, that isn't cheap and a little bull dozer to spread it out. Put a pencil to that and think FREE Tell me you can beat that? The other things you can save that you can't purchase are I.Q. points for your kid, or the cost kidney damage will set you back. You also can be sure you will be getting "Peace of Mind" all wrapped up from DEQ with a brand new pink dot on the interactive map for all the world to see.

You end up a hero to your family, to your neighbors, to all the people on the block and the ones on the other street will like you more. All for free.

I guess DEQ didn't just give the interactive map to me for Christmas, they gave it to all of us. Let's open it up and get with covering the board pink. All your country neighbors can get on board, all those rural roads could be lined up with pink, then we would be set and by next Christmas, we will all be sitting around wondering like me, who can beat this as a gift?

Want in? Call DEQ at 800-522-0206. Check out their website click on Tar Creek. go pink.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

My son was just a getting his "sea legs" when the 1973 shows caught his attention in a little apartment where we lived across the street from a steel factory. We could hear the pounding and racket of the work, so he stood at eye level at the little black and white portable TV to watch what came to be his favorite shows: Mr. Rogers and the Senate Watergate Hearings.

It seems improbable that the year the movie, we believe will be an award-winner Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood starring Tom Hanks as America's best friend, Mr. Rogers AND the Impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives would be what we are once again watching together. On a bigger screen of course  at the Center Theater in Vinita and our home TV 8 times bigger than that old black and white portable.

It was not that long ago, but here we are again. That familiar question of Mr. Rogers' "Won't you be my neighbor?" is still remembered by the tune the words conjure.

Always be kind. Those words echo in the Miami community as words and a way of life Angie Douthitt lived each day. People loved her immediately. Angie engaged and shined on you. But one day she asked me a question and I fear the answer. She wondered if her love of running, when running a route by BF Goodrich could have exposed her as she breathed deeply near the plant. I have to say yes. Why wouldn't it? for 5 years piles of the rubble we know were loaded with friable asbestos could have been exposing the public. As soon as EPA discovered this they have been here removing it.

I believe she is a casualty and I fear there will be more. Who caused this? A Rush for Greed and a hasty bankruptcy.
BFG never became a superfund site, but superfund is there now. If the community decided they wanted, no if they demanded real action to occur on the site, and ask for a complete cleanup and a real evaluation of the safety of the neighborhood, while superfund is still here we might get it.

What I know is silent citizens hopes for justice will not get justice. Only more casualties.

I go home everyday to a piece of the prairie, clean air, clean water. No fear for toxins in my garden or the wild plums, the rose hips. I want that for the citizens only 25 miles away. And for the life of me, I can not understand why it is not demanded as a right, a human right at every council meeting, county commissioner meeting, MAEDS meeting, Rotary, Lions and the Masons, much less the women's groups and every teacher in the county. It is not wrong or outrageous to want justice.

We have had role models, and we got them again when Angie became one for us. She and Mr. Rogers right now are reminding us to take the time to listen and be with who you are with. The moments we have on this earth are numbered and each one precious. It is always possible to be kind. It takes more time, but what on earth have we been given but time, and their lessons show us how best to use it.

I apologize to all the marvelous people who got tapped on the shoulder during Miami's Christmas Parade and thank the dozens  who signed postcards along with citizens all over the country who spoke up for us. We had hopes this "be kind stuff" might be contagious. We flooded the mail center at the capitol with cards with hopes for leniency from our senator, to reconsider and pull his amendment. The City of Miami fought hard on this but the wording is much the same as it had been and the lawyers will have to explain it to us, but overall, it doesn't seem like kindness won this one.

My friend Jim Shine, worked with LEAD Agency as a researcher from Harvard a decade ago, occasionally would quote his favorite poet Mary Oliver and was aghast when I had never heard of her, sent 3 volumes to begin catching me up.  The poem that summed me up after our campaign to encourage Senator Inhofe to remove the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act is called,

"I Worried" and begins with:
 
"I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall I correct it?
...
"Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning and sang."
 
I didn't sing today, but went out to our office porch to watch Academy students and Marla Stidham, their Alternative Teacher of the Year, cross the street to help us sort seeds and fill packets for the seed library. The room filled with the delightful aroma of basil as we  processed and sorted our dried collection and ate our version of Butterfinger candy we had made in the kitchen from equal portions of peanut butter and candy corn, heated gently and spread out to cool.
 
Submitted Kindly with Respect  ~ Rebecca Jim