In winter
          all the singing is in
            the tops of the trees  - Mary Oliver
 
As our cold weather settles in it I am reminded of the sounds of winter.

When I first lived in Spearfish, South Dakota. I rented a room from a widow. After she would leave for work, I would shower and wash my hair, towel dry it and rush off to class at Black Hills State College. It wasn't a long walk.

Fall was quick there and the temperatures dropped and as they dropped way below freezing, I would hear the most peculiar sound. It might have taken me a week or two to finally understand where the sound was coming. It was my hair. It was my long hair hanging down my back. I was leaving with my hair not totally dry.

That cold was really nothing I had ever experienced. And each individual hair was freezing. The sounds were them clinking together as I walked. 

I am like many people finding the cold settling in the thing we have to endure to get us closer to spring and spring gets us all closer to being outside without all these layers of clothes we have pulled out from the closets and bottom drawers to be able to tolerate these few days that may end up being a longer stretch than we thought was coming.

But the cold brings time to think about and ponder and that may be why questions have surfaced ranging from particular health questions to what is really happening with GRDA and are there any next steps to step into with them and where and how do I get my water tested.

Those and a multitude of past questions are why LEAD Agency organized over 24 years ago. We had questions ourselves and believe we will keep generating them. There are a couple of organizations, some colleges and universities who have professors with students who want to help communities like ours that have questions and want real answers, based on facts. So keep asking. Call us, reach out, wonder with us. As they say we are stronger together. AND LOUDER!

Currently we have a couple of scientists helping us create the interactive map that will be of use for those of you who may not know you will be in deep water if and when the lake rises 2 feet. We need it now so you will be able to get your gear to higher ground because you will know you are at risk. We are working with a college on air issues and would like you to contact us if you might want to help them help us all. The Harvard School of Design has a class full of graduate students working on what Tar Creek Remade might look like. We need those designs because that creek will be clean one day and we want to be ready with ways we can enjoy being near her!

Another project we are starting we can't really start without your help. Young women, one from the University of Arizona and another from the University of Oklahoma want to help us collect the inspiring stories some of you may want to share about your work or how water has been part of your life. Water and Work we are calling this. 

Again, health questions got us started all those years ago. And there are still questions on health coming in that are puzzling us since they weren't on our list of what to expect so they weren't on our list to ask about. We didn't know to ask about Aspergillosis or low iron. Before we leap out with the new health survey, please update us on what you are experiencing yourself or in your family so we can include these in that new survey. What we had no idea was coming on us when we formulated our health survey almost 2 decades ago was of course the corona virus COVID-19, which has infected many people and caused too many here and around the country and around the world to die. We will have time to gather and organize the health survey we need, because we will be waiting to conduct it until it is safe to be doing it.

It will be cold, layer up, send us an email at  leadagency@att.net or message us on Facebook, call our office at 918-542-9399. We will pile your questions in on what we have already, we will layer them in, we will seek the answers or look for solutions.

We will keep you posted on the next layers EPA is putting out there about the what's next in their take at the largest superfund site in the nation right here in Ottawa County, OK and how we get to learn what they are looking to do and why.

Stay warm, lay on another blanket, keep your faucets dripping, bring in your dogs. Take some time to ponder and keep your questions coming.

Respectfully yours ~ Rebecca Jim

For over a quarter of a century, I have seen Tar Creek as a wounded, damaged, bleeding water running through a town that built itself between a creek and a river. And once she bled orange, I have been warning people to keep their children away from it lest they become damaged themselves.

None of this is false. Our Tar Creek has a reputation to live up to, worst, most polluted, lost. She is even the namesake of one of the largest superfund sites in the nation. A site that has yet to have a comprehensive plan developed for a real and lasting cleanup.

We have all shown patience. We have waited knowing that the only federal governmental agency with PROTECTION as a middle name would have the best and wisest scientists, geologists, hydrologists who would put their minds together as one and solve the issues, scrape this moonscape back together, healing the land and allowing clean water to flow through it, passing through Commerce and bringing that delightfully refreshing water down through the pecan grove, past my friends' homes along her banks, siding by Torbert Park and nesting through the Frisbee Golf course sliding by what was the Coleman's gazebo before she ducks beneath the Rockdale Bridge, edges through the college campus, lies neatly beneath the bridge at Central before passing in sight of the Rotary Centennial Park where those walking know she passes quietly nearby, while barely noticed she slides under the Highway 10 bridge and gets going wide and deep enough for a fleet of kayaks to join her on her way to the Neosho.

I came to see Tar Creek differently today. I was invited by one of LEAD Agency's board members to come to care for the creek. We have done cleanups along the creek over the years. But this was different. We did pick up a bit of debris, but we took time to watch the water flow, traveling as it did over the rocks, spilling past, shining in the sunlight, rushing past, not noticing many of us watching, pausing to marvel at the roots of the trees washed away by the water, finding the limb broken from a tree, so clearly worked by the resident woodpecker, the hole a work of art no longer his. I always slow when walking along this part of the creek to find a rock that works as a worry stone, and easily bent for this day's, which was later gifted to one of our local medical heroes walking past at the end of his day. We can ease much of his worries if we all wear our masks, social distance and take our vaccines when our turns come around.

Discarded items, some unnamed, debris, bits of broken glass already being weathered by the water were removed. But the Indian patterned blanket we left wrapping the tree as we had found it. As has usually been the case, we did find a tire, this time a very small one, allowing my Texas accent to announce that, "Yes, we had indeed found TIRE CREEK." (An old and sad joke I have pulled on her all these years, because there most always will be a TIRE discarded in her.)

The sun's light, the breeze, the temperature of the afternoon put together gave those of us gathered this pandemic day a chance to see this creek in a new way, brought together friends, and new friends and gave us pause before we left to reflect on the time we had experienced there.

I left the house without bringing Olive Sullivan's poem, Martin Lively read Amanda Gorman's insightful words:  
                For there is always light,
                if only we’re brave enough to see it.
                If only we’re brave enough to be it.
 
Then the words of an old Gaelic Blessing were read by a child:
 
                May you always be blessed with walls for the wind.
                A roof for the rain. A warm cup of tea by the fire.
                Laughter to cheer you. Those you love near you.
                And all that your heart might desire.
 
All these years coming to the creek, this time we came to show we cared while we listened to Jen Myzel, whose music is medicine for these times, sing "Seed Kiva's" words:
 
                "Dream with me. What is the beautiful world beyond war and fear,
                that you know in your heart is not only possible but is what we are here to do?"
 
                "The seeds are dreams of poems yet untold of stillnesses the universe unfolds."
 
That is what we heard and the seed of this day is the dream of what we can find, what we can have if collectively we begin this journey to care, to genuinely care for this water that seeks only to pass through and find her ocean.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

         Throwing shade is a subtle way of disrespecting or ridiculing someone verbally or non-verbally.

 I do know I have been disrespected at times. I can wear it. But the kind of shade I would like to talk about is the real thing, the stuff trees gift us with in the hot summer, the commodity a city needs that must be planned and planted for the generations not yet born.

Where I grew up in west Texas, there were very few trees, but we had one. It shaded our front yard, was climbable and became one of my best friends. It also provided my first experience with serious illness and ultimately death. It was an elm and it got Dutch elm's disease, that slowly starved the tree of nutrients and water, causing the leaves to fall and then the branches died. As a child, I noticed it first, and kept climbing up and trying unconvincingly to have the tree heal itself and get well. I was at school when it was cut down and removed, or I might have displayed my future self by "tree-hugging" it to have it remain forever.

It was no wonder when our 6th grade teacher required us to memorize and recite poems aloud that  I chose Joyce Kilmer's Trees, which ended with the verse:

       Poems are made by fools like me,
       But only God can make a tree.

Yes, but anyone can plant one. Or can plant many.

It is interesting to me that the first tree of interest to me was infected with a fungi spread by elm bark beetles and I learned later those beetles had only arrived in North America in 1928 and by 1989 over 75% of the estimated 77 million elms had been lost. My tree was only one of the casualties.

Now pine trees are dealing with the pine bark beetle. Those beetles have been around for generations, but the difference now is climate change. They are thriving and instead of reproducing every 2 years, they are reproducing 5 times a year and their population is exploding and the trees that made the Black Hills black, are now dead. Same with much of the Rocky Mountain air you used to love to smell. Those trees won't be there for you like they were.

So do we give up? No, we plant more trees. We need the gifts they give. We start again.  And we start this season. We plant trees for the future. For our future, for our children's. And we plant them to remember these friends and relatives who we have lost during our part of this pandemic.

Trees will provide oxygen that we need to breathe. In a community that deals with flooding remember that trees can help reduce the amount of storm water runoff, help reduce erosion and even can play a role in storing or sequestering carbon. Tree roots filter contaminated rainwater and can and trap it before it moved downstream.

Trees provide that SHADE that becomes the canopy that helps reduce the heat we feel on summer days.
But the additional gift trees give may be the fruits or nuts they can provide for the grower.

Which leads me to bring up a particular type of tree and the vision someone had 40 years ago. Our LEAD Agency office is on the corner of A and Steve Owens. And right there in front of it are our Giving Trees. Much like The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein would remind you that the tree gains happiness from the joy we get from the shade that is given and the crop of pecans produced for the taking.

One of my happiest memories is the time the Boys and Girl Clubbers picked up pecans counting each one and then figuring out the total they had all found that day! But the tree must have also loved our Earth Day events, our Community Garden Parties and Greg Fitzgibbon and later Grant Smith playing music in the shade.We know pecan trees are native to America, and thrive locally AND are great in a pie, but pecans are actually really GOOD for YOU.

According to a study in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, pecans contain more antioxidants than any other tree nut. They are loaded with vitamins and minerals such as manganese, potassium, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, and selenium. Pecans contain monounsaturated fats which help reduce the risk of heart disease, and are packed with fiber. Pecans increase metabolism, protect the human body from cancer, are rich in magnesium which is known for its anti-inflammatory benefits, are a rich source of manganese which is a powerful antioxidant, and the list goes on.

And they can be used as a meat substitute to make hamburgers and a great chili (recipes available on request.)
 
Vision with me throwing some shade on the next generation. And let's get some pecan trees planted this spring.

       To exist as a nation, to prosper as a state, and to live as a people, we must have trees. - Theodore Roosevelt

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

Thirty-four years ago I attended a Say It Straight Training taught by Paula Englander-Golden and learned the empowering communication skills and behaviors that have propelled my self-awareness, improved positive relationships and helped reinforce my drive for social responsibility. She defined several communication styles, but the one that works is called: leveling -- when one is able to speak clearly and truthfully about your feelings with respect for yourself and for others. I have waited all these years since for a President to "level" with me. That is what Joe Biden did in his inaugural address. It took him 15 minutes to actually say he was leveling, but he was doing it throughout his speech.

It ends up being pretty simple. His message: Tell the truth, be the good people he says we are. Treat each other with dignity and respect. He believes we can join forces, stop shouting and lower the temperature. He leveled with us all when he said "my whole soul is in this" in bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation and he asked every American to join in the cause.

His whole soul is into uniting our nation. It is like he is asking us to help, to join a cause bigger than our opinions so we can face some of the feelings and the real life issues that we may be experiencing like: anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness and hopelessness. He goes on to imagine that "with unity, we can do great things, important things. We can right wrongs."

It was almost like the "I have a Dream Speech" given by Martin Luther King, Jr., but it was Joe Biden talking straight about how we can finally end up dealing with the 400 year old cry for racial justice that we no longer have to defer. We might even listen to our planet for her own survival.

He sees unity as the path forward to get us through our historic challenges and the crisis of the virus, seeing each other as neighbors not as adversaries. He proposes we begin by listening to one another, seeing each other again and seeing our common hopes for opportunity, security, liberty, honor and yes - truth.

Mr. Biden asks that we all open our souls instead of hardening our hearts, show tolerance and humility and end this uncivil war dividing us. We have lived through one Civil War and other great struggles through the history of this country and as Lincoln reminded us our better angels have always prevailed.

We have a dark winter ahead with the pandemic still raging, we are going to need each other. Biden asks that we face this together as One Nation and make it the American Story that will be told by the generations that follow us, of how we pulled together and answered the call of history, did our duty and healed a broken land.

The platform at the Capitol never became full. The mall in front of the capitol held thousands of flags  waving in the wind instead of the normal supporters, while thousands of members of the military were brought to ensure the peaceful transfer of power would happen without a hitch. We were not there, clapping for the talented performers singing the songs of America, we were not there to stand in amazement for Amanda Gorman's poem, "The Hill We Climb" written for the day by the young poet laureate or to stand for the new president and vice president.

She and the president, the new, but oldest president ever and the youngest poet, these two speakers caught our breath. She hit us aside the head when she said, "Where can we find light in this never-ending shade?" Did she notice how the sun came out when President Biden spoke, just as the sun had broke free when Abraham Lincoln stood in that same space for this 2nd Inaugural speech, after the Civil War was waning. She got us thinking about how quiet isn't always peace and what just is Isn't always justice. She told us "a nation that isn't broken but simply unfinished" - that "we aren't striving to form a union that is perfect, We are striving to forge a union with purpose."

Amanda agreed with the president that we must put our differences aside, laying down our arms "so we can reach out our arms to one another." The efforts must be made and can be.

"If we merge mercy with might and might with right,
Then love becomes our legacy
And change our children's birthright.
So let us leave behind a country better than the one we were left."
 
This old white man and the young black poet made music, gave hope and began the first day of a new American Story.

I think we can try to be brave enough to take his challenge. We can level with each other, show our fellow humans dignity and get to doing our part in what will be the story we want told of how we healed our nation, each one of us, just like Joe Biden thought we would.
 
Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Fever: Although a fever technically is any body temperature above the normal of 98.6 F (37 C), in practice a person is usually not considered to have a significant fever until the temperature is above 100.4 F (38 C).
Fever is part of the body's own disease-fighting arsenal: rising body temperatures apparently are capable of killing off many disease- producing organisms. For that reason, low fevers should normally go untreated, although you may need to see your doctor to be sure if the fever is accompanied by any other troubling symptoms.

Yesterday my eyes were tired, I was sore to move, and I felt totally like AM, the nickname for the fellow in Vinita who moved at a speed that was hard to detect much movement at all. (Vinita's kids were hard on each other and gave nicknames that would follow you throughout your life) AM's nickname was short for "Ambitious" because these boys didn't think he had any. So for the last 2 days I was totally "AM."

But there was a moment when I was thinking about last week's actions at the Capitol and thought about a technique I learned from Paula Englander Golden. She taught us how the take the temperature of a group. Not with a thermometer of course, but by asking and taking time to listen to how people were at a particular moment of time.
What if someone could have stopped the feverish crowd last week and taken time to listen and to be listened to. What if by talking and discussing truths, perhaps real truth could have been honored?

I was able to take the temperature of lots of different groups through the years. Our country had a temperature last week. We were beat into a frenzy. Even though there were thousands of "patriots" activated to invade the capitol, they did so in defense of a lie. Definition of fever pitch : a state of intense excitement and agitation; an example of fever pitch in a sentence: "I worked myself up to a fever pitch of enthusiasm."

A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because its accepted by a majority. Booker T. Washington
 
And that day on the steps of the Capitol and those who broke windows and doors did so in a fever.
 
Yesterday after acknowledging my personal symptoms I hunted down the lone thermometer in my house.  It proved along with the symptoms and no AMBITION that I did have a fever. My Dad always told me if I sucked on a "fever stick" long enough I would get well. That is what I have been doing the last few days, and I think it is finally starting to work.

Rest and clear fluids, and dash of cranberry juice will get me though. 

Passion is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us. William Penn

What will it take for our country?

Calming thoughts can be a cure. There has to be a change in our hearts. But we have to start with what we listen to, and what we see and take in to be true.  But we cannot rule out justice. We have been wronged.

Perhaps by people you care most dearly. There will be consequences, and some of that has begun. Some will be put on the "no fly list" for life. Some will be arrested. Some will try to gain fame from the actions they took at the capitol. They had a fever. And that fever could have been fatal to this country, our democracy just like our bodies are fragile.

The miracle each of us is, the amazing parts and systems we have that crisscross and allow us to get up in the morning and have the ultimate opportunity to make that day the best it can be, for us personally and for the real live chance to do for others just because.

This fever will pass. We can drink those fluids, bundle up in our beds and keep thinking 'well' thoughts but Rudyard Kipling nailed it when he said, "Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.” And perhaps taking time to visit with your neighbors and relatives and talk through the trauma and the feverish feelings they may have been experiencing. We can lower the temperature by using that powerful drug, WORDS.

Be a real man, or gentlewoman and remember to continue wearing masks. Oklahoma was not represented well last week when our own representative failed to accept a mask and remained unmasked in a pandemic and so far 3 others have tested positive for COVID19 who were sequestering with that group in the Nation's capitol.
Take care of yourself, wear a mask and help us save lives.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

We can be stronger once we mend. A bone is after new bone forms around the fracture so as to protect it, a graft onto a fruit tree, even a broken heart can make one stronger.

Cat Stevens' song came to me with the words, "Morning has broken" and so did it seem for awhile that our democracy would be broken.

I could not sit and watch, but I could not stay away. It was as if the country we had grown up with, flawed and historically cruel to non-whites was not on fire, but fracturing with people moved by the righteousness for power denied by the results of our last election denied by the most powerful person in the world.

Results had not been conveyed in believable ways. The concepts I had grown up with have gone away, like: "Don't be a sore loser."  "Winner takes all."  "We take turns." "Win some, loose some."  For the most part we didn't  "burn down the house if we lost."

Elections. Even before I could legally vote, I chose losers and have voted for many losers. But I never had a fit. I didn't even get a Pussy Hat last time around. I have participated in peaceful protests in my life, but never to overthrow an election, but to stop pipelines we knew would leak, because all pipelines leak, or to stop unnecessary wars. I have never participated in a coup, or an insurrection, or a radical takeover of an occupied government building filled with elected officials at work on the people's business.

But I did get to witness such an action. And it was frightening to watch just exactly how fragile democracy might  be. But as the day turned to night, our people went back to work for us. They climbed out of the closets and got off the floors, unlocked doors down long lonely halls and stood back up and came back to finish the task of the day, for us, the American people, to value the votes we had cast, because that is how we determine who our winners and naturally who our losers are.

According to John Haltiwanger Wednesday January 6 was the first time the US Capitol was breached by a large, violent group since the War of 1812 and Senator Cory Booker went on to express his description of both events being inspired by cults of personalities, one a foreign adversary and the other our sitting president. 

This peaceful transfer of power is unique and a thing we have taken for granted. And may not take for granted anymore. We will have to be vigilant and remember how nearly broken we were. We will be stronger, but we have to reach back to another time in our nation's history, and reach deep into how divided we can be as a people. Think back to the Civil War and the deep hatred ginned up in the nation and when Lincoln was re-elected, the words that stood out from his inaugural address:

  With malice toward none; with charity for all; ... to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

As he spoke he wore a jacket and inside the lining these words were embroidered: One Country - One Destiny. 
There is an image from the takeover of our nation's Capitol that connects those times to now. The Confederate flag originated during the Civil War as a battle flag for the pro-slavery Confederacy and throughout the entire Civil War the flag never entered the Capitol, but photographer Saul Loeb captured it being carried through the rotunda in 2021, remarkably shown between the portraits of Charles Sumner, an abolitionist and John C. Calhoun, a defender of slavery.

There were many such flags and many carrying the name of our current president who eventually asked the rioters to go on home, but not before he expressed his love for them.

As we go forward, with a new president who will take his office with malice toward none... he will have to bind up the nation's wounds from the hatred and divisiveness, the divisions we have had even over the deadliest contagious disease our nation has ever faced and find a way to bring us back to the hope we all have of One Country - One Destiny. We have a common destiny.

Morning has broken like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the world
 
I have had many friends contact me and nudge me to get the vaccine to be protected from COVID19, and am glad to report my brother got his first shot today and I will have my first in 2 days. Speaking of praise for the morning!
 
I am believing our common destiny must help our broken feelings heal and attempt to bind up our nation's grief.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

Suggested reading:
Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln,” Edward Achorn

A large avocado colored envelop arrived 10 days ago in my rural mailbox, and looking at the return address I knew it was from our friend Diana Duran at the avocado ranch she had inherited recently. When I opened it of course... it was a book! What else from a woman so attached to our Miami Public Library, than a book. But this one? Embossed with the words of Lucy Larcom: He Who Plants a Tree Plants a Hope. The little volume was filled with a quote on each page not limited to the value of trees in our lives but how to inspire hope.

But she and trees, hope and remembrance have been brought forward in my mind of late. 'There are many reasons to plant trees, the best time? twenty years ago!' That saying goes on with, 'the second best time is now.'

My dad and I planted a cedar tree near my house and I remembered him saying he had been told when planting one he would never live long enough to stand in its shade.  He knew he would never benefit from it, but valued his role in the planting.

Over the holidays I had time, to reflect and go through stuff stashed in a corner and found one of the little booklets Indian Club made for our 'Candle Lighting Ceremony' conducted the day school let out for the Christmas holidays; held there and once at the Miami Mini-Mall, where there I will never forget one of our shyest 9th graders ever, simply opened her mouth and filled that space with the most beautiful song, sung from the heart.

For several years we made luminaries, which are a thing of beauty. Simply made, brown paper sacks half filled with sand and a candle lit inside. We lit them at the Intertribal Council Candle Lighting and on the front steps of Miami High School when held there.

The little booklets were assembled with each page containing 6 to 8 names of the newly lost and those who continued to remembered. Each year someone was moved to write a poem. Each name was read and a simple remembrance given or a story that sometimes made us laugh together through tears. Each was remembered in honor of their lives lived.

There were other times when we planted trees for those we had loved and lost, some we planted for people we never got a chance to know. Like the redbud at MHS we planted for the victims of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Trees were planted for reasons, with purpose. When remembering Jake Whitecrow, we planted a white pine for peace on the east side of ITC. At the Quapaw powwow grounds, we planted a dogwood outside the tribal headquarters after a storm had come through and broken limbs off larger trees. Down by the campsites near Beaver Creek we planted cottonwood trees as hypo-accumulators to take up heavy metals deposited from legacy mining, and to be the shade that campers might enjoy 30 years later.

Many of those trees were later cut down, some did not survive. But we did the act. You plant a tree for the future.

We dug up the ground and placed those trees to remember and long afterwards no matter if the tree survived or not, the act is remembered and in the act, those dear souls are remembered and they are remembered in the shade, with each pecan that is picked up, for the walnuts that crash through the branches and bomb us with memories.

As I look out the window and see the deer eating the acorns under Annabel Mitchell's oak. Around the bend stands the walnut tree John Sixkiller and I planted with a simple walnut. The bench I placed there 20 years ago has long dissolved back to nothing. but the tree provides walnuts and the kindling I need to light the fires that keep me warm each winter.

The loblolly pines here were not planted in rows, they were planted in groups of 7 down the lane to my house for the 7 clans of the Cherokees. When the wind blew through them I was reminded by the sound of my winters and summers spent in the mountains, in New Mexico, in South Dakota's Black Hills and in the Colorado Rockies.

Many of the pines have died here, some each year as the pine bark beetle works their way through one and then has not far to fly to the next. But I don't regret planting them.

There is something about digging the dirt out and planting a tree that symbolizes starting over, while honoring our loved ones and watching for signs of life that comes from those efforts.

Come spring, I will be planting trees, for my friends, and now my cousin who have died of COVID.

I imagine groves of trees. Cities will have shaded streets, perhaps plaques for whom they were planted.

We must remember. We cannot forget they loved shade, the blooms on fruit trees, the fruit so sweet in the summer. The pecans made into pies in the fall.

We will remember. I will remember as I plant these trees that I will never live long enough to stand in their shade.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

When I was growing up my parents would occasionally challenge each other in ways that for the most part paid off for us kids.

For example: They would make hot rolls using their own secret recipes and we got to be the judges. But the time I will never forget was when Nora O'Bannon the little girl who lived across the street came for a sleep-over and it was the fudge-making contest we woke up to that Saturday morning. We could not decide and well... ate way too much fudge during that deliberation.

My son and I re-activated the challenge today with Bread.

Using my mother's recipe, the twist? on top of the stove in a cast-iron Dutch oven. His challenge? Using metrics, measuring grams precisely on digital scales using YouTube instructions and a recipe found on-line from a London chef.

Of course winning is prestigious, but when you lose, you really win because the winner becomes for example, the "Bread maker" for all times. Which meant with tonight's bread decision, I win by loosing since I get to enjoy fresh loaves of bread the rest of my life, that I don't have to cook myself!

Winning is for keeps in our family. My mother never had to make fudge again either.

Traditions can be re-lived and I hope you will find ways to remember your traditions, whatever they have been, jive them back using the twist that fits for you and your loved ones who may be long gone, or recently lost, but the memories are real again as tastes, odors, and the tinge of competitiveness can bring those loved spirits back, their love of the game back with you. Feel the way we are connected in long forgotten experiences.. in new ways...

Nora towered over me. We were in the same grade, but she was older because of the extended time she had to be in an iron-lung as a child. As my dad would describe bigger girls, like Nora, as "horsey" a term he ungraciously used for a girl who could probably beat up any boy she heard calling her that. She only looked bigger because she was actually older and had a year's head start on me.

But Nora was my friend and all these years later keeps crystal clear memories of the times she spent across the street at our house, of a family that could laugh, eat meals together and stay in the same room without all hell breaking out for the most part of course.

It was because of Nora I learned to cook. I wanted to learn because Nora could cook. I still have the little skillet my mother gave me to learn how to fry my very first egg. It is the one with the burnt wooden handle.

Nora had to cook. Her mother made her grow up quick. She prepared meals before her mother got home from work. She had to learn, and I got to. Learning only later that cooking wasn't always the privilege I took it to be since my experience in our kitchen was the joy it could sometimes bring.

Nora grew up in a broken home with a single mom and was a for-real latchkey kid, the only one I knew. But Nora also was the only kid I knew who had had polio. The summer my family moved to Big Spring, Texas kids lined up at Central Ward elementary school to get the polio vaccine and were glad to get it since no one wanted to be stricken by that disease spreading  rampantly just as our COVID19 is now for us.

Polio (short for poliomyelitis) a serious, contagious disease caused by the poliovirus which attacks  nerve cells in the spinal cord, and could leave muscles permanently weak or damaged. About one in every 100 people infected with that virus became paralyzed (unable to move). Nobody wanted the child-crippling disease since most remembered it had even crippled President FDR as an adult.

Doctors and researchers had learned an infected person could spread the poliovirus right before and about one to two weeks after they have symptoms. Ninety percent who got polio didn't have any symptoms but could still pass that virus to infect others. People where dying to get their children in that line to get vaccinated and urgency was the factor just as we have such an urgent need in the US and the world to stop the spread of this generation's virus that will put many in the updated iron-lungs. Our sickest patients will need  ventilators  to be able to breathe like those in my childhood depended on those iron beasts to push weak lungs for them until they were able to breathe on their own.
In the height of the epidemic  that year an outrageous 3145 deaths occurred, and people got in lines and got vaccinated and because we mobilized our country we eliminated polio, but we still vaccinate our children because we know it could come back. As it did for Nora who is suffering with post-polio syndrome as an adult.

AND now we have that many deaths EVERY DAY. Will we stand for this? No. We will stand in lines soon. We will want to live. We will want to know who will win that bread-making contest in our very own kitchens, we will want to know who will be the fudge winner and who gets to enjoy the winnings for keeps.

Respectfully submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

I got invited to go to an empty building my old friend owned, take some boxes and fill them with books and just drive away with them.

Because of COVID, leaving home is rare, but she assured me I would be going to a place where there would be no other persons at all. But as I was heading out, my son decided to come along. It was 4 years ago when he and I had jumped into that jeep and headed up to Standing Rock together, so for old time's sake we were on the road again and he didn't want to miss what might be an adventure of sorts.
 
We turned into her driveway took our boxes, went behind her house and pushed open the yellow door to Carol's private library complete with a loft with a fireplace. Books of all sorts filled the shelves and we were astounded by the variety and quality of what we found. “Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.” – Henry Ward Beecher who also said, "A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life."

And this building was truly well-furnished and certainly full of these necessities! Carol had been widowed by retired anesthesiologist, Malcolm Freeman, who had the books to prove it! along with medical texts and a cadre of calculus volumes, she explained as a subject he longed to master.

Books keep us learning and by stretching our brains, perhaps we will all be ready for what the future will be bringing. We found books for the LEAD Agency library and our popular Little Free Library to be taken home by our public readers. Novels, mysteries, Columbia History of the World, whole sets of the Little  Golden Books, Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, countless other children's books, a single copy of the Joy of Cooking, books on writing, grammar and Birds, Dogs and The Night Sky. There was a beautiful coffee table book with the art of Monet, Going Home, Jesus and Buddha as Brothers by Thieh Nhat Hanh and a signed copy of The Little Giant, the Life and Times of Speaker Carl Albert. The prize of them all was the rare book Griffin & Sabine.

How do you thank someone for gifts like these? You take time out to find the other kind of joy she left behind and fall back into the pile of leaves outside the door and laugh full-heartedly.

Who brought us there and why?

Carol Abernathy, formerly had taught 8th grade Civics, the equivalent of Home Eco, and had worked at Northeast Area Vo-Tech, but thirty years ago Carol Abernathy also wrote columns for the local newspapers entitled: "Table Talk" for the kind of things just regular people might find talked about around the kitchen table, and "Chin-up" after a Ponca City news column she had saved decades earlier. I read those columns and actually my writing style might be mimicking my memory of her writings.

Carol has left Commerce and all of us behind, moving to a brand new community and finding her way around those neighborhoods and will be finding her "what's next" there.

We can find kindness and we can mimic it until doing kind deeds can become what we do, much as Cori Stotts took on finding ways to make this Christmas one that children around here can find a bit more joyous, all made possible by the little acts of kindness given by countless others.

This will be a holiday season unlike any of us has experienced before. Let's remember to be kind, wear our masks and protect the people we love and heck, even people we definitely don't love!

I have been reading one of Chuck Neal's November Book Picks: Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln  and finding the shadows of hatred and racism flowing through it are still here in America. What divided our Nation is still alive. There is a darkness that was frightening then with blood-letting ruthless in the position for "our rights" and though we may not be stepping over the dead in our states as they were doing, we are facing more deaths as people define their "rights" to breath death in this other way upon others, even those closest to them.

We can learn from the past, and learn from those who lived during those times, even from a former slave who instructed us that, “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” – Frederick Douglas.

Let's choose to be free. Let's choose to be kind. We will wait our turn for a vaccine. And we'll meet down at the library, we will meet at Chapters, we will gather round, keep our Chin up and Talk around the Table.  

It doesn't cost anything to be kind and it really doesn't hurt anything either.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

In 40 years the US lost 675,000 to AIDS and 32.7 Million world-wide.
 
In 43 weeks the US has lost 279,865 to COVID19 and 1.49 Million world-wide.
 
What day will we choose to acknowledge these losses?
Will we have a Day of the Dead "Día De Los Muertos" and celebrate these lost ones, decorate their graves and leave their favorite foods? Will we design a flag that will be placed early that morning on their graves and see them waving reminders for us to remember on that one day.

Will we have a day just dedicated to preparing their favorite meals since so many missed having Thanksgiving dinner this year?
 
Will we set off fireworks since they may have missed them last Independence Day?
 
Soon we will be losing as many people who died in 9-11 each day to this preventable virus. And yet we continue with parades? The only parades we can justify are the ones taking our friends to their last resting place, because we do not attend their funerals because we are old and gathering in large numbers can be dangerous.
 
We cannot continue believing there is no danger because we want our lives back. We can live through this, there is an over. There are vaccines coming. We can wait this much longer we can hold out, we can survive home-cooked meals, we can recite our blessings and read the texts scheduled by our houses-of-worship, in our homes. We can call our friends on the phone, write a letter, email, zoom and text those we want to have in our lives later and be protecting of each other. We got this.
 
I was the HIV/AIDS Educator for the Miami Public School District for a great number of years and most every teacher had to spend some time with me as a district requirement. Before those staff-development sessions I did what I am doing tonight: reading the latest statistics, the latest tips for the public on how to best protect themselves and others. As you must know, those sessions touched on the intimate ways that virus was spread or perhaps shared would be a better verb to truly explain transmission. And stopping the transmission was the aim.
 
As adults we could condone and promote the use of condoms, even proper use and how best to discard used ones. Sometimes I had a basket of brand new colored or scented give-a-ways. We talked through the latest myths and spoke the sometimes uncomfortable facts.
 
We didn't have to close schools, fear church services, reschedule ballgames. We had to pay attention to body fluids of all types getting into someone else's body. We lost some really good people to AIDS who had a lot more they could have given the world, their gifts were many and varied.
How big is the COVID Quilt? The AIDS Quilt grew so large finding a venue to display it became difficult. Miami is represented in that Quilt by several of our own who were remembered with each stitch it took to create their piece.  
 
Our new dead: we will memorialize, we will honor, remember and we will miss you.
We will realize how this happened. We simply breathed the same air. The same air that has carried the heavy metals you have been exposed to that may be why our kids are hyperactive, the same air that carries a fungus known as Aspergillus fumigatus, the fungus causing Aspergillosis. The air that carries the styrene that is emitted by the hundred-thousand pounds a year, the same air we worry brought benzene and asbestos into our lungs, the same air that we co-mingle and breathe wondering how we got sick from those exposures we won't name or blame either.
We are what we breathe.

I am known for demanding, wishing, desiring clean water as a right. Clean air is our other human right. But we can be also a source of BAD AIR, this is how we spread COVID19. We are the source, it can't live and produce on its own. It needs a host to carry it and transmit it. We are doing this to each other. And knowing we are the source or could be demands by human decency for us to shut down our emissions. We are the polluter. We are the regulator. We are in control of the air we breathe out to others. Masks  both guard us and protect others from virus we may not know we carry.

I heard a phrase today that may fit and we must fight against it. Empathy Deficit.

Is that what we have developed? Have we lost the ability to have empathy for others? Do we have a deficit? Do we no longer care for our brothers, our neighbors? Have we become selfish?
 
No, we are goodhearted and sensible. We are protective of others. We want to see each other come summer, maybe by the fall out shopping, walking our dogs, attending soccer games, back at church with the kids OUT OF THE HOUSE and back to school. There is an after and we can meet over there.
 
       "Out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing there is a field. I'll meet you there."
                                                                     ~  Rumi, 13th century poet
 
         Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 

Tar Creek got invited, she snuck in at the last minute in the competition as one of the most Endangered Rivers in the country, with a brand new video. True she isn't a river. But she does flow and she is endangered, and that designation might bring to light only too boldly that she needs some help, real help, the big kind, the inclusive and the all purpose fix she deserves.

What else did she get? She got some good attention by a local writer, Linda Sue Warner when she added Tar Creek and her unquestioned ability to share what flows out of her onto property near and new to be flooded with Senator Inhofe's dream coming true to raise Grand Lake's level up 2 more feet especially so when she will be spreading across yet unflooded properties near her. Warner's series of Coyote stories brings him from a visit on Monkey Island to a fishfry and pot luck at the LEAD Agency office where Coyote gets more than fish and fries, he gets the load-down on who gets injured when that creek goes out of bounds.

There is a great deal of talent out there and Tar Creek desires it. She is damaged, yet, she wants to be thought of, considered, themed in literature and rhymed in poetry and put to music in lyrics that will be hummed when you might be doing dishes or walking your dog.

Tar Creek has potential and has dreams of being your friend, your playground, your stomping grounds, your swimming hole. She wants friends to come to her and sit on that log and have feet dangle in the water. She longs to have batches of baby wood ducks learn to swim in her and duck their little bills into the water to find sustaining nourishment.

Cherokee Volunteers can you imagine it was 25 years ago you planned the First Tar Creek Fish Tournament? And still there are no real fish tournaments held there? Your work made history, planning that inventive event, that first virtual fish tournament Tar Creek ever had. I verified you made history when I found it on the Oklahoma Historical Society's TRI-STATE LEAD AND ZINC DISTRICT page for all the world to read.

Millions of dollars has been spent moving, selling and stacking up chat that is not sell-able, while Tar Creek waits her turn. The Superfund site's name sake has patience. It is what she has. She waits for justice. She waits for equity, and waits to be included in the work done at her superfund site.

A creek knows no time, just as the river who accepts that water, they are simply vessels and paths for that water to flow. All moving to the wider rivers and on to the sea. The water cycle is the cycle of life, flowing from and to perpetually moving. But our Tar Creek, she flows as Ryan Lovell said as a sophomore in high school knew when he described what he saw as her "eternal flow of evil."

Our Tar Creek is not evil, but she carries with her the sins of our grandfathers, the ore left behind in the mines bleeds out and into this creek every day for forty-one years this month.  I am keeping time for her. Another set of children will grow up not knowing they lost the use of a treasure. Growing up next to a creek running through your hometown? Doesn't get any better. Ask countless people who knew this one before it was tainted. Ask people who grew up in Tahlequah, and other little and bigger towns all over America. They haven't had their creek taken from them.

It is serious what this creek has seen since mining began and on to our present. This is Tar Creek's second pandemic. Mining was in the heyday in 1918 and the interurban, the network of electric railway lines allowed miners to commute to work.   The first case of the Spanish Flu was reported on March 11, 1918 in Kansas and less than 2 years later over 1,000 people had died of it in Ottawa County. 

To date we have 22 deaths in this county, but at the rate we are going we could certainly match that number. That early flu and COVID19 are both respiratory viruses. Both pandemics have closed schools, but ultimately enough people wore masks and contained it before. Very interesting to many reflecting on the similarities between these time periods when looking at the presidents in power and their slow reaction and that they both contracted the virus of their day.

Tar Creek is still on course for this second round, and would gladly remind you the ones who lived through before outwitted that virus by not breathing it in and did that simply by wearing masks.

I wish you the kindest of weeks, full of fresh air, time with the people you share your home, and loving thoughts for those who from afar wish you the best.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

This week my friend, Elaine Irvin who lives in Miami asked me to please write about COVID19, the virus that is taking over a thousand people's lives PER DAY. Humbly, I wondered what could I say that hasn't been on the news, in social media, the same messages: wear a mask, social distance and stay home if you can to stop the spread.
 
Masks. Maybe people don't have masks. Why don't each of us make sure we have some to share, to pass on, just in case that is why we still see full faced people, because these are our neighbors, our friends, perhaps they have hit on some hard times and can't afford a mask, and don't want to admit it, or don't know where on earth you buy them, or don't have a momma to get her sewing machine out to whip some scraps together to make original creations.
 
This must be why, because these are our people. They do good things, they are friendly. We like their parents, their kids. They would never want to hurt others. One of my neighbors, did a sneaky drop off of the most luscious jars of jam, didn't knock, just left them in a cute little basket and waited for me to discover it. It would have been great to see her and get a chance to thank her in person, but she told me over the phone, she can't wear a mask for a medical reason, and didn't want to get in our space without one. There are tons of acts of kindness going on all around us.  And I bet you are doing some of it yourself.
 
My doorbell rang yesterday. How often does that happen way out here in the country? When I opened the door I didn't know who the masked man was at first. A carpenter had returned to do a project on my house and charged me a much too modest amount, to be kind I think, but when I paid him, I added the value he deserved.
 
He valued me, I valued him. We wore masks.
 
My dad inherited the land I live on, but worked out of state until he retired and moved home. I remember his brothers taking turns calling long distance, remember when that was a thing? They would ask him to hurry up and get moved back to Oklahoma because their friends, people my Dad had grown up with were getting older and  "dying like flies," and his brothers wanted him to get up here to "help bury them."
 
This is literally happening now for real. People here and around the country are literally "dying like flies," They are dying in hospitals alone because they are too infectious for family to be with them.
 
I remember the AIDS Epidemic. At first people didn't know how that virus was spread, and there was alot of fear ginned up against gay people, until children with hemophilia began to get it and more was learned about that virus and how it could be spread and how that spreading could be stopped and the virus contained while medicines and treatments were developed.
 
This virus is worse, you don't have to be intimate with a partner, you don't have to exchange blood, all you have to do is breathe what is exhumed from a person who is carrying the virus. It is an air exchange. Think about that.
 
We all have to breathe to live. But we do not have to exhale virus that can then be breathed in by a person passing by you, someone you might not even know. They could be standing in line near you and there is your virus hanging out in their air. That easy.
 
Back in the AIDS epidemic, to stop the virus from spreading, the mask of that day was a condom. Not all guys wanted to wear one of those either, lots of virus was spread by the macho man of the day, to women and to other men, people who didn't have to die but did.
 
I remember going to visit a former student of MHS who was in hospice in Tulsa, in his last hours, quietly dying without his parents because they shunned him for who he loved. He didn't die alone, he was not going to share bodily fluids with me, I was not in danger.
 
Our people who have been exposed and are quarantining with each moment the real fear must be will I be positive?
 
Back in the AIDS Epidemic being positive was a negative just as it is now with COVID19. People who live through a bout of this virus will be learning for years what lingers and can bite you later as many of us have learned who had Chicken Pox as children, in our later years only to get its mean brother Shingles.
 
Our new virus will have lots to teach us, those who survive it will be the guinea pigs who will bear witness to medical professionals for the decades to come.
 
Together we share responsibility, and care for our community.
 
Thanksgiving's next week, make the choice to only interact with those in your household and not others so you'll all have a next year to share.
 
Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

After having lived in Pueblo, Colorado for only 3 months, I went back one afternoon 2 years later, wearing moccasins and my robe for graduation.

Southern Colorado State is a university now, but when I enrolled there it was a college with a program that changed my life forever. The program, Teacher Corps, was a 2 year commitment of service in a public school, basically in practice teaching, while completing  2 years of college level education courses, while also any "spare" time was spent doing service in the community where you lived and worked.

While living in South Dakota, I learned about the Teacher Corps program in Colorado, grabbed a map and found the campus and the site for my 2 years of service was actually 2 mountain ranges away from the college campus, but with 7,000+ showing on the map, it looked to me like a nice sized town in the mountains. What could be better?

Those 3 months on the campus in Pueblo went quickly, and soon my team drove the 5 hours to my new home on the Southern Ute Reservation in Ignacio. I could hardly contain my anticipation and yes, excitement when I saw the city limits sign. Those same numbers I had seen on the map all those months ago... were the elevation. And the population? 303.

There was suddenly a moment of clarity. And the number that really resonated was the number 2, the commitment of 2 years in a town of 303 people.

As I said earlier, this experience changed my life forever. Most college students enrolled in teacher education have a semester, and sometimes even less time than that to experience life in the classroom and from that make the decision to pursue that career or not, based on that one experience. My team of 5 got to spend 2 whole years in a variety of classrooms, different levels, different subjects with really experience teachers. We all chose to stay in education until retirement. So we must have found education fit for each of us.

My college town of 3 months, if you want to call it that, was in the news this week. Why? Right there in the middle of town, blocks from where my little apartment must have been is their Superfund site. Yep, waste from what else? lead.  There had been a lead smelter and EPA had been in the process of cleaning it up, and the town? getting yards remediated for lead!  Just like us here!

Why was it in the news? Community members are afraid EPA is going to walk away and not finish the work. Yes, that can happen. That is why I hope while you might be home more, it might become more urgent for you to call DEQ at 1-800-522-0206 and ask for your yard to be added to the list to be checked for lead in the soil, and if found to give permission for that contaminated soil to be removed for FREE and replaced with soil you can grow a garden in, or have your children play safely in the dirt. We have been spoiled with that opportunity being out there, year after year. But 1995 was a long time ago, and EPA rarely funds what people WANT, but they are doing this, for as long as people WANT it and are calling in and asking for this service.

One third of my time in Teacher Corps was service in my community. Bnd this sounds like a Commercial, or an Ad for EPA to pay for this Service in our community, and it is. Take advantage of making sure you have a clean yard, and so your neighbors do too.

Years ago I heard the fact that almost a quarter of all the people living the U.S. live within 3 miles of a Superfund site. And yes, I have worked in Ottawa County for over 40 years, and the whole county now counts as one big superfund site because the mine waste was hauled all over it, but I don't live here, I live in Craig County on land untouched by industry or mining. But tonight, I found out the heart of my college town is a Superfund site, early in her OU's.

To check out  that 3 mile theory, stating so many people live within 3 miles of a superfund site , I checked on where I had lived in Big Spring, Texas, and they got it wrong. The nearest superfund site is FOUR MILES AWAY, not three. It is at the Lake we would ride our bikes to.

This is a lot to settle in on.  Those years in Teacher Corps changed my life, and my years here dealing with one of the largest superfund sites in the nation, one that is all around us. That blend of education and service was the training that has kept me focusing on our superfund site, but we are not alone. There are nearly two thousand sites on that list.

Let's keep learning, share what you learn, do what you can to help your neighbors and let's band together in service to make this place get cleaned and off that LIST so EPA can get on with helping our sister sites.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim
 
 
 

The house I grew up in had a mailbox just outside the front door. Lots of houses are that way. It is so very handy to put out a letter to be picked up, and in the morning you don't even really have to get dressed to find out if your bills have already arrived.

Now my mailbox is 3/4 of a mile from my house. It has never been any closer, but for a number of years it was another 3/4 of a mile farther.

For the last half year the mailbox is the way I connect with the wider world. Each day I long to see what kind of "good mail" lies inside. Good mail? Mail from a friend, or actually any real person. A few days ago a nice packet arrived absolutely stuffed with seeds from Virginia from a fellow Woman Accelerator. It will be awhile before any of these get used, but the plan is to kickstart spring by planting some in containers before winter ends.

What came a few days earlier is a book I don't want to finish reading, but can't put it down. June Taylor surprised me with the Louis Erdrich novel The Night Watchman and every page takes me back to the cold winters spent in South Dakota, though the action in the book takes place with the Chippewa.

The story is old, Indians fighting for their rights against the US Government, this time it was to try to stop the Termination of the tribes in 1953, with policies to end the federal government's recognition of sovereignty. The government wanted to end any responsibility they had for tribes and implement relocation as a policy to move Indians into the cities for training and for jobs, so they would become self sufficient.

In other words, the government proved to be the ultimate "Indian Giver" first taking lands, giving land, then taking that, too.

Ottawa County had tribes on that termination list.

What happened here during that era? Who spoke up, how did they fight for their tribes? Were these efforts reported? Where do we look? The Miami NewsRecord, of course: The Moccasin Telegraph, the column written weekly by Velma Niebering about the Indian doings in the area. Collections of her columns were later bound and I am on a quest to find them.

The reinstatement occurred in 1978, the year I began working as the Indian Counselor at Will Rogers Junior High School. The tribal leaders had their hands full, putting their tribal governments back together and making decisions to shape the future for their individual tribal nations. They were diplomats, businessmen, traditionalists and when you were in the room with them, you knew there was great strength and a bravery they must have learned when young that carried them through the changes they had to face and the responsibilities they were shouldering.

Perhaps that emerging pride in tribal heritage is why our Indian Club membership grew every year. Their interests varied, but always included a quest to learn more about their own tribal ways.

June Taylor's son Joby was involved in our Indian Club and became one of our dance team members, along with the new AARP Recognized leader George Briscoe, Aaron Cusher, David Coyne and many others too numerous to list here. Basing back to our culture was sometimes hard because of another US government program: Indian schools.
For our family, it was the Cherokee Female Seminary where my grandmother and her sisters went to school. She learned Latin, chemistry, physics gained a love for opera and became a lady, leaving her native language there like many who later attended the federal Indian schools did.

My friend Jon Sixkiller got to go to Seneca Indian School as a young boy after his father died and left his mother with her hands full with little children. He was really excited to go, so he could learn to be a "Real Indian." though he was already a real Indian who spoke only his native language. Disappointment came when what he came away knowing was how to make his bed so he could bounce a quarter on it.  

I think about him often as I struggle to expand words in my Cherokee vocabulary. But remember how he and his mother kept the language alive by writing letters to each other totally using the Cherokee syllabary. Letters he couldn't wait to find in his mailbox.

... So I have been using the mailbox to stay connected with friends and family.

All summer, I wrote to children, printing or writing in my best cursive, and almost always when they returned their letters to me, they brightened my day because there inside, they always drew a picture. How do kids know to do that? And why don't we link back to our artistic selves and share something we create?

The holidays are coming and with it, the mailbox is going to be our conduit to our loved ones as we postpone Christmas and Thanksgiving gatherings to protect these precious ones from COVID19. I am already planning what goes out and hoping for "good mail." 

Hoping you get some, too!

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Back in the day, when some families took vacations, ours took a weekend drive from Kingman, Arizona where we were living that summer I turned 10 . We drove through Oak Creek Canyon, where we peered out the windows, down both sides of the road looking for crashed automobiles left abandoned in the canyon. We ended up in Jerome, a former mining town, much like Picher, with similar size and heydays, with the same experience expelling people who sought a living wage and joined Unions. But what I remember were the sidewalks. The town must have been undermined like Picher because the sidewalks were tilted so walking was awkward, just as the sidewalks were in part of Picher when I first started working in the county.

Mining was so important to Oklahoma, it is represented on the state flag. Throughout the country there are over 500,000 abandoned hard rock mines. Mining companies historically divide communities with the lure of jobs and the economy over the impacts mining may have on the environment surrounding their very homes. Saying no to progress is shot down pretty quick when the right people benefit with it.

So to speak up again the WORK is speaking up against the WORKERS and by golly, we mustn't talk about Daddy or else. So people in mining towns shut up and endure. They endure and then the mining stops and the towns struggle to endure afterwards.

This is a plot that has been happening in the US since extraction of minerals and later oil began. Pity the people who struggle in these settings. And celebrate the few situations we know where the left-behinds win. Right here we have one of the rare winning situations where what Guy Archibald describes as Power Asymmetry worked. We had a LOUD, VOCAL, and very CREATIVE bunch of citizens who spoke up, yelled, demanded and got a buyout for the people in Picher, Cardin and Hockerville.

What Guy said,when he quoted Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, a great book about risk. was with a small number of intolerant, virtuous people with skin in the game, they can courageously demand change and get it, but only because they asked. We never really celebrated the WIN because it was botched so badly and unfairly carried out by the agencies and those overseeing the effort. But stand back and gloat, those Picher-People made the government pay up to some extent. Where countless other communities never did.

But like that old verse, "Breaking up is hard to do" it is speaking up that is hard to do when speaking out is not part of the culture.

Corporations, or companies, and industries have no skin in the game. They even use borrowed money for these operations and fail to comply with regulations if there are any, and freely walk away and leave their mess. We are familiar with this, first mining and then our beloved BF Goodrich, where so many Daddies worked, never dreamed that it too would turn on our community, take the jobs and the security and leave the mess, knowing benzene lay beneath, and asbestos remained throughout the physical plant.

Mining companies and other industries don't face risk. They have corporate laws to protect them, they even have friends in governmental agencies that soften regulations making it ever more profitable to mine.  
If you don't face risk you take lots of chances.

Think of this, the more you have to lose, like families, the fewer choices you have, along with having less power.

Canadians spoke during the Health Panel for the WMAN/LEAD Virtual Conference. Now I have to admit, the provinces they hale from make more sense if you actually locate them on the map. Ontario and Quebec, but the Yukon that is way up there, and the trivia you might not know, the Royal Mounted Police? Their job in the Yukon was to get the natives out of the way so the gold could be mined!

Whether it is uranium, gold, copper, our lead and zinc, the asbestos we ended up with, which polluted the communities where it was mined in a twice-blessed manner, all the other elements we are pulling out of the ground, none of these mine sites have been properly and safely put to bed. Is the mining industry lazy? stupid?

No. They are following a business model that works for producing ores, but also profits. Why would they stop? They can be stopped. Mining practices that could improve mine closures, how tailings are stacked, how they are dammed in safer manners were also discussed this week during this important conference. The change to that industry begins with meetings like this, we hear the sameness we share, and it does not take our hope, it instills it.

Hope.  We can learn a lot from the Picher-People and the organized way they spoke out for justice. They didn't get all the justice they deserved but they taught us, they taught every other mining town that a few  LOUD, VOCAL, and very CREATIVE people may not move the mountains of chat, but they got themselves moved away from danger.

The lesson is rich and must be remembered and re-mined, and actually honored. It can be replicated by the next batch of loud, intolerant, virtuous people with skin in the game whenever they find that rare thing known as courage.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Haunting Thought. What if the agency in charge of cleanup of this place never really saw it? Or saw how it worked? What they are charged with cleaning up travels and then sometimes doubles back on itself and doses the source site with what got removed. How will we ever be done?

This lifelong learner is at the half-way point on the Indigenous Agriculture & Permaculture class and this week the emphasis has been on energy, so when Brad Mitchell the chimney-sweep known for the care he gives to protecting those of us who heat with wood by making sure our chimneys have been cleaned well enough we won't be having flue fires in the middle of February. But the instructor discussing energy, Kelda Lorax made me remember things we had done in the past, like the winter we all lost electricity during the ice-age that settled in on this territory in those back to back winters...back in oh-seven.

Since the real weather will be heading our way soon, having the chimney clean, the stove set right, then organizing the wood and making sure the kindling gathered is kept dry for easy lighting, let me turn to a few easy tricks. Several years ago I got to go to the old Cherokee homelands and along one of the rivers, if you slowed down, all you would see from bank to bank were stones just right for grinding corn, all sizes of them, some just right for giants, some for the Little People. I stopped and asked the river for permission to bring 3 home with me and they will set near the fire this winter, and they will radiate heat long after the fire burns out.

My mother used to say her mother would put warmed bricks in bed with her and her sisters. Why not try that? I wonder what time during the night that our bodies begin to be what keeps the bricks warm until morning?
Learner, may not be the right descriptor, it could be I was born to questions, I might really be an answer-seeker, but thinking about the issues here at Tar Creek made me think about all the energy being used to fix it. But what if some of that energy goes for naught?

We are midway through LEAD and WMAN's Virtual Conference and this week on Zoom I met 2 more of the technical advisors who have saddled up with us in this quest for answers at the Tar Creek Superfund Site and boy did I get some good ammunition: loads of stuff to add to my questions to EPA and the other federal and state agencies who are managing the reins of what is happening for keeps here. I heard Jim Kuipers explain the term that had only ever been words on a page: Conceptual Site Model. What you get once you figure out the model, you will be able to see the FATE of what you are trying to get rid of at a polluted site. After the work is done and the workers sent home, the fate of that stuff? It should be GONE.

All these years at this Superfund site, that is exactly what has been so disappointing. The darn stuff in the "piles" isn't all gone, the stuff floating down stream hasn't gone away, it is still flowing those same metals. You can watch it. One million gallons a day. And if you stand still you can see the dust whirl by you.

So the term that made the bells ring for me and if put to use after it is designed is:

A conceptual site model is a written and/or illustrative representation of the conditions and the physical, chemical and biological processes that control the transport, migration and potential impacts of contamination (in soil, air, ground water, surface water and/or sediments) to human and/or ecological receptors.

Want to know why after all these years we are not done with the superfund mess?
You can't get done if the model had flaws to begin with.

In part:

 EPA failed to consider groundwater (Boone Aquifer) as a pathway to what they term "the contaminants of concern." What's in that aquifer doesn't always stay in it because of use by rural well-water users, while some flows out at naturally occurring springs that may be used by landowners and those who use the water for traditional practices. Some of it is finding its way down into the aquifer the towns and county water districts are pulling water for our homes. Surface water and groundwater contamination continues unabated.

EPA failed to consider all of the watersheds’ historical floodplains as a waste spreader for residential, recreational, commercial, wetland, and farmland during recurring flooding events by surface water, groundwater, and surface mining waste sources (tailing ponds and chat piles) over decades.

Our waters flow to Grand Lake and chat goes with it so EPA needs to loop the lake into this work if we ever want done to happen, but it's not on the table. SO FAR.

EPA , FERC, GRDA and the Army Corps of Engineers, need to conserve energy, and get started on fixing the conceptual site model that will ultimately ... make flooding in Miami change and settle the FATE of our metals.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

To read more of LEAD's comments to EPA:

I was born to learners. My Dad's mother spoke Cherokee, but refused to allow he or his brothers to learn the language, but he always longed to learn.  When Cherokee language classes were offered in Vinita while he was in his mid 80's he and I would gather together the study materials and head to what was still Eastern State Hospital to attend the classes that were held in one of their classrooms. My Dad was willing and able, except he had lost enough of his hearing he could not hear the distinct sounds many of the letters emote. It was too late.

As a warning to you, they say it is never too late to learn, but sometimes it might be.

"Let us then be up and doing,
with a heart for any fate;
 still achieving, still pursing,
 learn to labor and to wait."
 
These are lines in "A Psalm of Life" written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  Memorizing that entire poem was the challenge my mother took on after her first stroke. She was determined to learn that poem by heart and she did.
 
Since I was born of parents who challenged themselves to continue learning as they grew older what am I learning? I wanted to learn more about permaculture and do something with it, here where I live and with what is learned, figure out how to make a dent in the damaged places that surround a bunch of us in northeast Oklahoma. This past spring Indigenous Agriculture and Permaculture was offered at NSU with the first class Saturday right before Oklahoma shut down for COVID-19. It was a long day with a series of great instructors including our own Kelda Lorax.

As it turned out that was the only in-class meeting we have been able to have together. It took months to reconvene virtually. So almost every morning at 10 a.m. I Zoom to learn the intricacies of permaculture. Homework assignments are delightful. Draw a plant and label its parts and uses for the plant, dig a hole and another hole and find out the types of soil on the site I have chosen.

But listen the next thing is going to keep me busy for awhile. I am building my Base Map.

I have learned how to look at USDA/NRCS to find out the soil types on my property, I have found my site online and measured the size of my home and out building without a tape measure.  I have learned my elevation and the degree of slope occurring here.

When deciding where to build my house all those years ago, I lined it up with the creek that runs below the home at the bottom of a steep gully. And now I can see the place is lined up N-S pretty well.

I am identifying the plants and the trees before the leaves all fall off and naming the microclimates here on the property, the pine forest, the stand of sassafras, the prairie proper and the ferns living and competing with the invasive honeysuckle on the slopes of the hill.

The Base Map is what is here, but listen the fun part is Part 2 of the class. Part 2 is the Project. What do I wish would be different on the property. Will what I want to plant flourish in partial shade? How will I deal with drainage issues?
Right now I am focused on the Permaculture class and picking up and practicing Cherokee.

But it has brought me back to the Base Map. Finding out more about where I am, the layers of information on this space is allowing me to truly know where I am, knowing more about where we are, the slope, the type of soils can help us as a community plan our growth, of housing and industry. How the land lays can determine if the next bill we receive will be for flood insurance.

We need to know our Base Map as a community. And knowing this allows us to determine our risk for flooding. But the unknown is how political power can be used to put many more properties in peril with the floods that will follow the anticipated rise of the lake in the future. The City of Miami fought and I am sure we will never know the amount of money they had to spent to get the professional assessments to fight like hell to protect life and property.

The City may not be able to but I am as a citizen going to say, sometimes elections have consequences and the next big rise in the lake level can be blamed on the way, yes the way some people in Ottawa County have voted. You get another chance November 3 to vote, you might want to consider checking out who is running for Senate and really ask yourself does that person want to serve this community or want to FLOOD US?

I am basing you back to reality. Climate change is said to be bringing ever more intense rain and drought  events, you and I can have little effect on this in our lifetimes. But we do have the power to elect officials who may not want to intentionally want to flood us.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

You might not have noticed but September ended without a word about LEAD Agency's annual Tar Creek Conference. If conferences can become legal, we earned it flat out last year with our 21st! But as many other large event planners around the country, we decided to adhere to the calls for safety and postponed the gathering until next year to do our part to prevent the spread of COVID19. We are hoping, like you that come fall 2021 our lives might be closer to how it "used to be."

People are still gathering in lots of ways and LEAD has chosen to keep you involved by hosting a Virtual Conference the last 2 weeks of October with the Western Mining Action Network entitled: Addressing Mining and Systemic Racism: Staying Connected During a Pandemic.

Numerous guest speakers will be joining us from all over US and Canada by Zoom. You will be able to register on our website www.leadagency.org. On the first day of the conference October 19, just as all other Tar Creek Conferences, we will begin with a Toxic Tour of the site and a discussion of the local environmental impacts and the steps being taken to remedy some of them by the Quapaw Nation, DEQ and the EPA.  

Because we are joining with the WMAN our topics will delve into technical methods of controlling waste from current mining sites and the impacts on the communities where extraction occurs.  Many of WMAN's Indigenous Caucus members were able to attend our Tar Creek Conference last year and knew they wanted the larger organization they are a part of to know more about our site, but they also want all of us to learn and explore more deeply the relationship between the descendants of the colonized and the colonizer. This language and that of understanding more about the doctrine of discovery and its connection with extractive capitalism. Yes, we will be hosting a workshop that will dive right into Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression, Systemic Racism, and Colonization.

In Ottawa County why would these be of interest? We might look at our history, the establishment of the reservations for the 8 tribes who received lands for compensation for traditional homelands they were forced to leave before their for removals, then with government allotment, statehood and the loss of reservation and tribal recognition. The discovery of rich ore on the Miami, Peoria and primarily on the Quapaw lands, extraction and degradation of their lands then run off spilling down the creeks and rivers impacting most of the downstream tribes. Was there any systemic racism conducted in Ottawa County? Let's look closely at our past and the experiences of other tribes who will be sharing at this conference.

Systemic racism is a phrase in the news right now, and you will have a chance to consider the deep consequences as we learn together.

Communities are being overwhelmed by COVID effecting schools and work so organizing for social actions of all types may be taking a back seat, so virtually we will with the topic:  Mining &  Pandemic Recovery Suppression of Resistance during the pandemic caused by COVID19.

19.  So it is only fitting we will begin our virtual conference on October 19!

What would we have celebrated this year? The cleanup of the asbestos at BF Goodrich. It was not a miracle that it was discovered and money was found to remove this deadly material. It was creating a movement inside this community that made that happen. And to get the change we need for the cleanup of the Tar Creek Superfund site, that as we know has impacts to all of our county residents, rising up and demanding it is harder in a pandemic, as demanding equity and protecting democracy may be as well. But we can and you can too. Our health and our homes ride on stopping the floods if the lake level rises as proposed. We would have been shining a great big light on that at our annual conference, wouldn't we? With those next floods, there can be a widening of the spread of our heavy metals if Tar Creek lays across lawns and gardens and deposits them in future flood events. That old slogan, "Don't Spread the Lead" needs to be amplified for our neighbors who may not even be aware this is looming.

As the days pass and yet another friend has been laid to rest, another funeral gathering I have failed to attend, when missing has only adds to the wider grief I feel for those losing their lives to this virus, the loss to families multiplied by the frightening numbers growing daily.

Our annual Tar Creek Conference has been offered to our community as a service, a way we as a community bring regulators, both state and federal to task on the work they are doing "for" us and demand accountability and updates. LEAD Agency is still taking them on and in every way we can devise we will keep you tuned in with these efforts!
Let us continue in all these new ways to put our minds together as one and seek solutions and demand action.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

Recently in one of the assignments for the Women's Earth Alliance Grassroots Accelerator program I was selected to take part this fall, we were introduced to the word Sankofa. Originating in Ghana, symbolized by a bird looking back, as learning from the past, fetching what is at risk of being left behind, to ensure a strong future.

I was asked to identify a person who represents the feminine upon who's shoulders you stand.   I first reached way back to my unnamed grand-ancestors who because they existed and loved and lived, I live now. But after truly considering who has brought me to this actual place in my life at this time, I have to share with you the closer truth is, that woman, the singular woman who has helped allow me to make the decisions that have helped make me be me, was my little mother, who would be 103 if still living.

She was born in 1917 a few hours away from where the 1918 Flu was born only a year later. Bea Bradshaw grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, attended a country school and had to leave home and live with relatives to finish high school, where she impressed her sister's husband enough he paid her way through medical school, graduating  as a doctor in 1939, just in time to take over the small hospital in Welch as the only physician when men were all called to war.

Just as COVID-19 came upon us months ago several items of hers appeared that she had worn to both protect herself but to be most protective of others. I found masks she had worn in surgery, that she would have tied behind her head snugly and the cap that went over and tied in the back of her head. The mask was made out of a multi-layered white cloth and still had her name printed inside. How had those masks survived 75 years and just randomly surface?

How was I to find these items now? in the middle of a pandemic where masks worn at this time is one of the only ways we know individually we can protect ourselves and others from the spread of the same kind of virus that my mother was born to. My mother throughout my life, was always there being that example of what kind of woman I wanted to be. Smart and ethical, delighted in learning and challenging herself to keep asking and finding ever more to learn.

Even just a few years ago I was still meeting people who all those years ago remembered a leg she had set, or that she had delivered them. She married my father and never practiced again. She closed her medical bag AND became the best mom to me and my brothers.

Bringing her forward, realizing the amazing woman she had been in my life, always encouraging, always accepting, knowing now she truly was my Sankofa. The person I never knew to identify as such, as the woman who had the influence that made me who I am. I will persist on this journey because I know she is still with me.

So this evening, I opened her medical bag and reached in to experience the reaching in she must have done under extreme conditions during home visits, as the medical emergency team, herself, a woman never weighing more than 100 pounds, attending to the sick, the injured, those broken and in pain.

She cared for my brothers and me throughout our childhood, as our first defense on all health and of course our broken hearts. And as she aged, I got to be there for her to the end of her life.  She is continuing to be there for me and leaving me just what I need to fetch. Her masks were used as patterns for the multicolored masks of the day. From the pandemic she was born into, to mine.

One of my former students lost his mother this week to our pandemic flu, she was a friend and a great supporter of our Cherokee Volunteer Society and later LEAD Agency efforts and countless other good deeds moms like her in our world do, all ending with her passing.

I asked all those months ago what sort of monument we will be inspired to erect to the dear ones we are losing. Think of the monuments we have constructed through the decades to honor those who have been lost to wars. Is this not a war? against common sense and decency? Let's pull together and do the simple things people around the world did over 100 years ago to protect themselves and put a flu to bed. Let's learn from the past to ensure a strong future.

Respectfully Submitted ~  Rebecca Jim

The four sacred elements of water, air, fire and earth were known by the original peoples of this planet. The power of each experienced vividly by the hurricane only last week and the fires burning throughout the western states turning sky blue to red and air loaded with ash.

Women's Earth Alliance members from all over this continent and the islands from Micronesia, Guam from Alaska to San Salvador participated in an assignment to gather water samples of our water and describe our watershed, her original keepers and what is the work we are doing for it.

I had already walked down below the edge of the prairie where my house sits, lined up all those years ago, not with the sun, but with the creek below to visit, or as I say to "Go to Water." But the next morning had me off to Tar Creek to collect a sample in a mason jar, not unlike the ones John Micka collected over 40 years ago to demonstrate how trapped water can demonstrate how the metals separate out of the water when it is collected and allowed to sit for a period of time. John had taught chemistry at NEO College and with his demonstration project simply used 2 salad dressing bottles filled with Tar Creek water and in one he added simple fireplace ash. He wanted to have an easy way to demonstrate how something as simple as ash could help settle out the heavy metals found in Tar Creek's water. He had them captured together and when you picked them up and shook them water that had looked clear in the jars would cloud with the sediment that had gathered at the bottom.  It was a simple yet now time tested project that keeps allowing the generations of students later to consider some simple questions. Do you know what is in your water? And is there anything you can do about it?

Twenty-six women Zoomed together, those who woke to red skies and ash, pulled together while one appeared though sick, another while on call for her elderly parent, we sat and listened, smiling at the samenesses we shared.
The topic: Water. Water makes up half the weight of every person on earth. Our waters, clean or damaged, abundant or scarce, pulled from the ground, caught water retained, sustaining us and those dwelling within it. We were asked who is doing the water protection for our watersheds and who were the original waterkeepers. WEA had begun each of the last 15 years of  introductory programs by somehow introducing ourselves through our water. I envisioned how they could have while physically together, then been able to pour all of the waters and combine them, symbolically joining the team and the water as one. Traditions of all kinds are changed while we all gather in different ways together, don't they? 

A friend of mine once told me that is how new traditions begin.

We actually took some time to breathe in and consciously breathe out. As they say, Centering, clearing the mind, focusing on the act of breathing, the motion and effort it is to live. “Every breath is a sacrament, an affirmation of our connection with all other living things, a renewal of our link with our ancestors and a contribution to generations yet to come. Our breath is a part of life’s breath, the ocean of air that envelopes the earth.”  … David Suzuki

Air and water. But the thought on air that came was the fact learned that day that was known.

It is in the air, our President said months ago, acknowledging the corona virus is airborne and that is deadly.
It is airborne and deadly.
The facts were acknowledged, understood. We might not have mobilized as a nation then but now we act upon these words, we use protection, we create the barriers, we will live through this because we know it is in the air. Knowing will muster our teams together to combat what is in the air and lives will be saved. There can be on over.  Another president summed it up simply:

For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.   
We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's futures. And we are all mortal. - John F. Kennedy

For fire to burn it must have air. For us to survive water we must have air. For the Corona virus to survive it must have a body of some sort and to get to it, it can travel by air.

Spend some time reflecting on and being with the people we know who with all their efforts are trying to breathe and all those health professionals who are extending every effort possible with every moment attending to those who will not survive without air.

I am proud to be the Tar Creekkeeper, but aren't we all our brother's keeper?

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

When the box labeled BLUE JEAN BOND paper came off the shelf, it was like finding an old friend. I don't think you can find paper made from blue jeans anymore, at least my weak computer search skills didn't find the company still in business or any others, but I am okay. I still have a nearly full box of stationary to use. I will use it, the texture of it feels good and accepts ink well.  When I opened the box, it was easy to brush away the dried spider body and extinguish the lone silverfish, but there were no inserts explaining the value of recycling denim and twice blessing someone's old jean cutoffs. On the front of the box there is a notation of it being 100% rag content from denim cuttings making it a heavyweight bond paper.

Using blue jeans to make paper, made the paper a nice light blue color, but before the big switch to cellulose, paper was most commonly made from cloth rags, and other fibers like rope, recycling done for  centuries, even then at a cost to the environment and the workers.

Connecting that box of found stationary to the fact so many of the environmental issues we face in Ottawa County stem from legacy mining, and it was a tailor in Reno, Nevada who made pants for miners that could stand up to those rough jobs using metal fasteners and riveted them using Levi Strauss' denim fabric.

But making those jeans also links us since manufacturing them creates pollution and water quality issues much as our legacy mining has. According to some references, "It would take 13 years to drink the amount of water it takes to make just one top and pair of jeans.

"While cotton only takes up 2.5% of agricultural land, it accounts for 16% of all the insecticide and 6.8% of all herbicides used worldwide by cotton farmers. Between 1 and 3% of agricultural workers worldwide suffer from acute pesticide poisoning with at least 1 million requiring hospitalizations each year. Furthermore, pesticides can pollute nearby soil and water systems, threatening food supplies and creating health risks!"

Indigo is a native plant that used to be used for the blue dye to make blue jeans BLUE. I have some growing in my pastures, but have never used it that way, tending to use the dyed pods as entertainment as I love the sound of the seeds rattling. Harmful chemicals are used now in the denim dyeing process, some like azo can release carcinogenic amines.

Which is why, though I like BRAND NEW JEANS, they always get washed right away to wash away any chemicals that were used. But washing any jeans that first time and every wash after releases 56,000 microfibers of denim AND microfibers from denim is even being found in the Arctic now! other microfibers are there but scientists looking at them can determine anthropogenically modified dyed blue cellulose and that there is a lot of denim in the environment. 

Knowing this could have added to how I feel. Am I blue?

We are all having so many changes, our lives are so very different. A song by Stevie Appleton, Feeling Blue Without You, might sum it up for all of us. Or some of us. I am missing people, and know we will have time together again, but that would be quicker if in mass we do all we can now to believe in a real future, a healthy one for all.

Collectively our mental health is being impacted, even in June there were estimated to be 82 million people distressed. Since this virus has lingered so long it is a mental stressor, there are economic challenges, schools, closing and re-opening. No football? AND an election and the holidays all coming. Hold on to your hat! This is going to take a while. Accept that. Our rush to the how it used to be "sets us up for failure." But it also is why we are seeing risky behavior, because when people don't feel like they have control, they often throw caution to the wind.

Wind it back in, talk to your friends about these feelings. We might all be feeling blue? Pull on your old blue jeans, reach out, do something that helps someone else, read, express yourself. And listen to great music, maybe even check out the Blues.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim
 

With Louisiana in the news, I remember an adventure my son and I had several years ago when we went to Baton Rouge on what turned out to be a failed mission to pick up air monitors. While we were deep in the discussion on sampling with members of an organization known to loan these canisters,  Lt. General Russel Honoré (U.S. Army, retired) walked in the door and commanded our attention almost at once. I remembered him as a national known military leader who in 2005 "spearheaded the Task Force responsible for the massive search-and-rescue mission and the restoration of order in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina" so we knew we were in the presence of greatness. The evening before Hurricane Laura hit this week, he was the voice I recognized on the news, speaking about the un-survivability of what was coming with Laura if the surge of water from the Gulf came as predicted.

Years before when my dad lived in Houma, Louisiana for a short time while on a work assignment I went to visit him the weekend after Mark Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. He took me to New Orleans, where he and my mother had a Monte Gras honeymoon. So it was a sentimental journey for him and an eye opener for me. We arrived on Palm Sunday and went into heart of old New Orleans and into the empty  St. Louis Cathedral at Jackson Square between services and in each pew were palms laid out for the parishioners who would soon arrive. On the evening news we saw there had been a huge demonstration outside those doors only hours after we had left.

On another trip to Louisiana, I got to visit United Houma Nation members in their homes and it is today I look into the Palmetto basket and find inside the note that it had been made by Rose Pierre, Marie Dean's daughter. The United Houma Nation is a state recognized tribe of around 17,000 tribal members who are spread out across the southeastern coast of Louisiana. They like many other tribal peoples around the country are basing back to our cultural ways, such as bringing back the artistry of basket making, using the available materials native to our homelands.The Houma use palms to create their unique baskets.  I got to visit with tribal basket makers and see the accommodations they have had to make to be able to live on ancestral homelands. They lived in tall houses. The first floor could be used for water to pass through and hopefully beneath the second floor where they lived since they have the unfortunate disadvantage their land is actually disappearing due to coastal erosion.

What General Honore said that evening about the surge of water being 15 to 20 feet and unsurvivable left the Houma on my mind and all of their neighbors for  parishes around.

Water connects us to these people, uncontained unstoppable water. Hurricanes for them which many studies show the worsening of these storms are caused by human-caused global warming and for us, uncontrolled political whims, the power to control water and the water level in Grand Lake for whose advantage? Where is our outrage? And how will we speak of it? Do what about it?

Our floods have been survivable.

We will survive the next flood. But a flood is a dirty deal, a deal I never wish to have happen to another person. How are we speaking of this to powerful people? Do we imagine we will not be heard? We will not be heard if we do not speak out. We will survive, but we could do a whole lot better than just survive. We want to thrive. We want to wake in the night during the rainstorm and just turn and go back to sleep, like lots of real people do all over, but those of us who stay quiet, the polite ones of us inhabit homes that are at risk here and in neighborhoods all over this country. We are the discounted people, people who will lose all we own in the next flood and will start over and over.

Water connects us.  And it also floods us. That is why LEAD Agency has become a member of an organization called Higher Ground, the largest flood survivor network in the country. The network is composed of 51 member-chapters from 20 states plus Puerto Rico, serving a total of 500,000 flood survivors and their neighbors. Our connections are stronger as the water rises and we understand we are no longer alone. It is also the reason LEAD Agency is a member of the Waterkeeper Alliance which works to ensure every community worldwide has drinkable, swimmable, fishable water with our Grand Riverkeeper and Tar Creekkeeper!

There are several interactive maps out there. You might look at floodfactor.com and type in your zip code and observe the predictions, then you may want to join in on a Louisiana rendition of Georgia on My Mind.
 
And keep all our flooded relations in mind as well.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

When pain can no longer be held inside, a dog will cry aloud when alone. Bess got older and so did I. When I am older yet and in pain, I hope there will be someone who will make that pain stop. Love can do that. Hard that it is. Love will not allow pain to continue.

For days after she quietly was able to rest in peace, I heard her cry. It echoed through the house and yard.
Now a week later, I still heard her.

I rarely cry, but my face is wet again. Loss. Whatever loss you have experienced is your own. We feel these personal losses in ways we may never express publicly. Life lost.

One of my former students remarked that she was only now recovering from the deep grief of losing both parents. It seemed to strike a chord with me, I miss my parents but I am over grieving, though I don't remember when grieving stopped and the pure emptiness of proceeding on with my life as a full-fledged orphan was acknowledged. Reflecting now on that and I haven't yet found a word for the dog-less person I have now become.

Monday was the last day to submit commits to EPA on OU5 HHRA, the local tribes and LEAD Agency officially submitted ours and we were so pleased that others submitted theirs as well. Thank you all.

LEAD stands for Local Environmental Action Demanded and since Action is one of our middle names, want some of that action? Like to read? Garden? Dig in the dirt? Take samples? Conduct a survey? Cause some good trouble? Make Action happen to benefit our community?

LEAD Agency will be receiving access to a scientist sometime next month though the Thriving Earth Exchange. We have plans for that person to help us do citizen science.  Fall seems like the right time to launch our signups.  Want to be a citizen scientist? Give us a call at 918-542-9399 or email leadagency@att.net and let's decide on our questions and take them on. The issues we face are real.

We wanted a map that you will be able to easily use that will tell you how high the water will be in your house when the next big flood happens AFTER the lake level rise has been approved. We want to know how the Inhofe Amendment got put into the NDAA. How does power work? Who else benefits?

Let's fight this.

Action. That is what it will take. Action can be as little effort as making a phone call or signing a statement. Many of you have done this. We Won't Take it Anymore.

That is bold and I am proud of everyone of you who signed these. Want a sign for your car window? want a button to wear? A banner for your yard? How about one across the highway? We won't take it anymore.

Starting to sound like action. Boy Howdy, there is no stopping you now. We will be protected by your action. Don't fuss, don't mutter, don't sit silently and wonder what you will save when the water is rising too fast to take it all.
Action. That is what we have to do now.

Action has taken me past the tears on my face, and the lonely sad cries of my dog. This one is for my friends, my former colleagues and all of their families. Action. We have to do something. Bold.

We speak up now. We make the maps. We speak out, we get yard samples now before the contaminated flood water comes across your property for the first time. We will be able to prove how much was deposited every time the water lays down and waits to recede.

We need the BEFORE samples to prove you have been damaged in yet a deeper way, with toxic metals from Tar Creek every time, more is deposited. We will use our Citizen Science hats and prove we have been damaged.

We have smart passionate people in this community and our surroundings who deserve answers and action.
Let's formulate the questions you have and figure out how we collect the data that will lead to the answers and use it to change, fix or otherwise bring solutions.

There could not be a better time to organize, educate and get set to make our lives better.

LEAD needs Lay Health Advisors who have been or will become our community lead poisoning prevention leaders. LEAD needs people who have small water crafts or live on or have easy access to every foot of the water's edge that touch us to survey our waters and be ready and trained to collect soil, water and fish samples.

LEAD has a history of citizen science, having worked on participatory research with universities with researchers who published journal articles for the wider good.

What pushes me forward?

The pain I have seen in the eyes of people who have experienced a flood, the struggle learning can be, the pain of serious health impacts. Kidney damaged lives, lives shortened.  Death and dying push me. Pain and the cry of a lonely sick dog reminded me to widen our team with others who are tired of hearing hurt.

Respectfully Submitted  ~ Rebecca Jim

Sometimes we are asked simple questions like: "How are you?" and we automatically reply "fine." Not truly answering the question with our actual feelings but replying with the standard we are expected to give.

How many times have you gotten away with answering most any question with: "I don't know." When you really did know but didn't want to say, or didn't think it would matter if you did.

There are very few times we are formally given permission to share how we really feel or to voice an opinion. One example is when we are asked by a preacher in a wedding ceremony, "if anyone can show just cause why this couple cannot lawfully be joined together in matrimony, let them speak now or forever hold their peace ..." I haven't ever heard an objection voiced aloud, but looking around at the faces that have been present I must say there have been times, objections seemed imminent.

But generally speaking we rarely get chances to tell officials how we really feel. Which leads me to this important announcement: EPA is asking for comments from the public, that's US! The agency wants our opinions on their Human Health Risk Assessment for the Tar Creek Superfund site. The narrow focus of their work will provide a guide to the cleanup they will perform, perhaps for the next 30 years.

Do you want a real cleanup in Ottawa County? Maybe you think we already have gotten one and what's been done was good enough.

I was listening to a COVID webinar entitled "Returning to K-12 Education - Using Science to Keep Children, Teachers and Staff Safe." A speaker from Denmark explained shutting down their country worked because as a country, they have a history of cooperation and mutual respect. They cooperated in mass and trusted each other to abide by the standards and requirements. when they reopened schools, there were only 300 cases in their whole country.

We don't trust anymore. We do not have a culture of cooperation or a mutual respect for each other or the general public. Think about that. We have lost trust. Trust in each other and certainly we have lost trust in our government. That was easy to do here at the Tar Creek Superfund site, When they were going to get right to it, find money and began doing work, sometimes flawed, always with more, much more to do.

Sometimes we can do it over until we get it right. Overs. You probably never played jacks, but back in the day, it was a game a girl could play by herself or with a friend, using these metal stars and a bouncing ball. One of the options you had allowed you to get "Overs." EPA needs to get right with our county and the downstreamers and do Overs on their OU5 HHRA.

We deserve it. If they are going to commit big bucks to cleaning up this site and protecting the future exposure of children we can wait a while, our kids are worth it. Their grandchildren and theirs are worth getting this right.  EPA will never undo work here, this is our chance to ask them to regroup, reexamine their plan and give it another try. Lead Agency is submitting comments to EPA. A list follows. We believe they can do better.

1.  LEAD Agency believes that the RI does not reflect all the contamination found within OU-5. EPA has largely ignored comments from, and data collected by, tribal stakeholders and LEAD Agency during the Remedial Investigation process.
2.  EPA has failed to consider the contaminated Boone Aquifer as a source of potential human health exposure in the HHRA.
3. EPA has failed to consider the watersheds’ historical floodplains as a source of potential human health exposure.
4. EPA’s decision to ignore numerous contamination sources within OU-5 has led to an HHRA that is un-usable as a tool for protecting human health or developing an effective cleanup plan.
5. EPA’s decision to draw a vast boundary for OU-5 artificially dilutes the nature and extent of contamination currently damaging ecological health, ecological health, and tribal cultures.
6. This HHRA reflects a decades-long pattern by EPA of putting off to some indefinite “later” human health risks that cut across OU boundaries. It is time for EPA to acknowledge and remedy these systemic flaws by reassessing its conceptual site model and creating new site-wide OUs to directly address the most pernicious and persistent risks to human and environmental health.
7. The HHRA should be held in abeyance until the EPA reassesses all Tar Creek OU’s and creates such additional OU’s as are necessary to address sitewide human and environmental health hazards consistently excluded from treatment within individual OU’s. Only after this reassessment should the EPA re-do the RI and HHRA for OU-5.
8. As part of its sitewide review, the EPA should create a new Operable Unit that includes Grand Lake and incorporate Grand Lake contamination in the OU5 RI and HHRA

Groups you belong to like: Rotary, Lions Club, bowling league, softball team moms, could get on the phone, or meet in the backyard and decide to say something. You have until August 17. Check www.leadagency.org for details.

Or forever hold your peace.

Respectfully Submitted  ~  Rebecca Jim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Respectfully submitted ~ Rebecca Jim