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