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Living Madly: Quiet Blessings

Photo by Alison Innes

Living Madly: Quiet Blessings

By Emilie-Noelle Provost

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. There’s always been something special about waking up on Thanksgiving morning: the low-slung angle of the sun as it lights up the bare trees, multicolored leaves scattered along the ground, the quiet street, the delicious smell of sage and onions sautéing on the stove.

I love eating anything I want to without feeling guilty about it, and I look forward to spending time with people I don’t see very often. I can drink wine in the daytime, and catch up with my sisters on the back porch, enjoying the cool air away from the heat of the kitchen.

For years, my mother, sisters, and I took turns hosting Thanksgiving dinner, dividing up the work to make celebrating the holiday with our extended family manageable. But I’ve cooked Thanksgiving dinner and hosted my entire family at my house every year since 2019, when my mother was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

At first, I enjoyed doing it. Hosting Thanksgiving for my family made me feel useful during a difficult time. This was especially true the first couple of years after my mother died, when my stepfather was grieving and alone, the holidays an especially difficult time for him. But as the years passed, Thanksgiving began to feel like a grind. I stopped looking forward to it and instead began to dread it.

Part of the reason for this is because of the large amount of work involved: days of shopping followed by more days of cooking; cleaning my entire house from top to bottom both before and after the event; endless heaps of dirty dishes, and, worst of all, the petty, toxic backbiting among my sisters, nieces, and nephews that began a couple of years ago when my stepfather brought his new girlfriend to Thanksgiving dinner.

Last month, my daughter, Madelaine, who just turned 27, came over to visit. She sat down on the couch, looked at me and said, “I don’t want you to do Thanksgiving this year.”

I began to protest, explaining that I had to do it because one of my sisters does Christmas and the other one now lives two hours away. It wouldn’t be fair to expect someone to host two holidays so close together or to expect people to drive so far.

Madelaine said, “I don’t care. It’s too much for you, and I know you hate it. I don’t want you to do it.”

For a moment, I was speechless. Out of everyone in my extended family, Madelaine is the only person who noticed this, or at least she’s the only one selfless and brave enough to say it out loud.

When I finally agreed, telling Madelaine she was right, I didn’t really want to do it, she smiled and said, “Good.”

She then proceeded to come up with a plan for her, my husband, and myself to celebrate a quiet Thanksgiving together, dividing up the shopping, cooking, and cleaning. There will be no bickering, no drama, just lots of delicious food, love, and each other.

Sometimes, the things we have to be thankful for sneak up behind us on stocking feet.

May you have a happy, safe Thanksgiving full of love, joy, and good things.

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Emilie-Noelle Provost (she/her) – Author of The River Is Everywhere, a National Indie Excellence Award, American Fiction Award, and American Legacy Award finalist, and The Blue Bottle, a middle-grade adventure with sea monsters. Visit her at emilienoelleprovost.com.

BOOK REVIEW: The Hikes into a Higher Consciousness: A Mental Map of Then to Now

Chath pierSath is the author of several books including the poetry collections “Echoes Lost to the Wind,” “On Earth Beneath Sky: Poems & Sketches,” and “This Body Mystery: Paintings and Poems.” His paintings have been exhibited in Europe, Asia, and North America. He holds a graduate degree in community social psychology from UMass Lowell. Chath lives and works on a family farm in the Nashoba Valley of Central Massachusetts. He is a past contributor to this blog.

 BOOK REVIEW: The Hikes into a Higher Consciousness: A Mental Map of Then to Now

By Chath pierSath

Paul Marion’s “City Hikes: Field Notes” is a profound journey into the memory of a place. The book explores a landscape of sweeping changes across American cities—a landscape where the present (“Now”) is inseparable from the past (“Then”). In its pages, one can revisit childhood villages and memories: the taste of an icy lime rickey drink, the excitement of baseball, hot dogs, and riding in a parent’s car, all set against a backdrop of window shopping among fellow pedestrians searching for deals and a good place to eat.

This nostalgia is central to Marion’s work. He guides us through Lowell, his beloved birthplace, which has endured centuries of transformation. Lowell is known for its constant revival, having overcome decades of physical and psychological depression. Its historic rocks, stones, and New England bricks stand as enduring monuments. When the light shines on the cobblestones, it clearly evokes childhood memories for Marion, and perhaps, thoughts of his predecessor author, Jack Kerouac—the constant traveler, philosopher, and dreamer, whose words are inscribed on stones in the downtown park dedicated to Jack.

A Walk Through Memory and Change

“City Hikes” is a form of meditation, almost twenty thoughtful strolls through the city’s industrial past and present. Those who have traversed its grounds will fall in love with its history—both the good and the bad. Like the changing seasons, the city evokes potent recollection. Though the streets and neighborhoods remain, the inhabitants are new, speaking different languages, practicing diverse cultures, and working to be absorbed into this new environment. Over time, these new generations claim their right to shape and reshape Lowell, their acquired memories defining what the city means to them. Shops, cafés, and restaurants now display signs in multiple languages and scripts, welcoming visitors to a flowering city. In this urban garden, more flowers mean greater shine and vibrancy—from the rainbow dust of its canals, dug by the sweat and tears of Irish laborers, to the old pubs serving lagers and ales.

As a Cambodian-born resident who lived in Lowell for seven years, I recall the map, the streets, and some of the neighborhoods Marion mentions during his walk. The book is a document, a poet’s search for purpose and meaning in the ordinary yet extraordinary presence of the Merrimack River, forever flowing and rising against the stone banks of its beautifully architected mills. As Marion points out, some mills are abandoned outside the national jurisdiction, much like the ancient ruins of Cambodia, left for tourists to wander in awe of the great Khmer empire.

I picture Marion walking, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, asking the same questions I’m asking: Why was this then? Why is this now? I walk with him page by page, following a map divided into distinct sections: The scrappy Acre, the better-off Centralville, the French Canadians descended from Little Canada beside the later Greeks, and now, the Cambodians, Africans, Indians, and Vietnamese. The sound is now a plurality of new languages and cultures, replacing the almost too well-known echoes of the past, when the noise of the looms drowned out the simple sound of young girls giggling down the hall about prom dresses and boys.

I mourn with Marion, yet I am more in awe than despair. I welcome the changes from then to now and embrace the seven years of literary memories I acquired learning at UMass Lowell. I remember the bank on Merrimack Street and nearby café where I felt free to love any man—black, white, red, or brown. Everyone there was my friend until 2 a.m., when we’d head to the train car diner for breakfast before the Saturday noon sleep.

“Fait divers”

“Fait divers” – (PIP #87)

By Louise Peloquin

Daily news coverage has always included briefs about accidents, crimes and unexpected events. These human interest stories fed reader curiosity much like social media does today. Here are examples of L’Etoile’s “faits divers.”

L’Etoile – December 24, 1924

TWO LOWELL WOMEN 

ARRESTED YESTERDAY IN LAWRENCE

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     Following a car accident in Lawrence last night, Mrs. Georgiana Grenou, 34, and Mrs. Jennie Sweet, 30, both Lowell residents, were apprehended on charges of theft in the Lawrence store J.F. McGrath.

     Both appeared in Lawrence District Court this morning and both were sentenced to pay a $10 fine.

*****

L’Etoile – December 30, 1924

A WOMAN WHO KILLS FOUR

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Mrs. Emma Hobough, 30, kills her father, her mother, her 22-year-old brother and her own child of 3 with a lead-charged rifle. – Terrible battle in the house. – She alleges mistreatment.

_____

     Logansport, Ind., 30. – Refusing to respond to questions concerning the death of four family members but speaking volubly of alleged ill-treatment received at their hands, Mrs. Emma Hobough, 30, widow, was in county prison last night.

     She was arrested yesterday by Sherif Bowyer at the request of Thomas Sheets about 4 miles from the Bassler residence where, shortly after noon, her father Henry Bassler, 69; her mother Catherine Bassler, 60; her brother John Bassler, 22; and her little girl Viola Hobough, 3, were each found, heads partially smashed by a rifle discharge of lead.

     Mrs. Hobough was going to Lyman Yantis’s residence early yesterday and called Rev. Mullins, pastor of Wesleyan Methodist Church in town. Yantis said that Mrs. Hobough told the reverend that her brother had thrown her to the ground and that if she had a rifle, she would kill him. Yantis said that he had paid no attention to Mrs’ Hobough’s threats because the family was constantly quarrelling.

     Yesterday, when the neighbours noticed that there was no sign of life around the Bassler residence, they inspected and discovered the body of Bassler senior and of his granddaughter Viola in the house. Shortly afterwards, the bodies of Mrs. Bassler and her son John were found close to the barn. It is believed that the four were killed inside the house where traces of a horrific battle were found.

*****

L’Etoile – Front page March 2, 1925 

SHE SHOOTS HER BROTHER WHO  ATTEMPTED SUICIDE YESTERDAY

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An English vicar tries to commit suicide. – His sister, who saw him dying in agony, ends his suffering.

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     Leicester, England, 2. – An extraordinary tragedy, which reopens the question of justifying taking away life in special circumstances, took place in a Hungarton, Leicestershire vicarage. 

     Reverend William Jettison, vicar, returned to the rectory for his breakfast yesterday after having distributed communion. Later, he retired in his study where a pistol shot resounded a few moments later. The vicar’s sister, Miss Jettison, who, with a maid, lives with her brother, went to the study and found him on the floor.

The rectory does not have a telephone so Miss Jettison ran to the post office and called a doctor who lived four miles away. She immediately returned to the rectory and prevented anyone from entering the study.

     A short while later another shot rang out and Miss Jettison came out of the study.

     “I asked him if he would survive and he did not respond” she said. “I saw that he was dying in agony so I shot him to relieve his suffering.”

     Miss Jettison was arrested.

*****

L’Etoile – March 2, 1925

50 PEOPLE LEAVE A HOTEL IN FLAMES

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Guests and employees came very close to being imprisoned in a Salem fire.

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Salem. – Fifty guests and employees at Hotel Essex on Essex Street in Salem came very close to getting caught in the building early this morning when a fire broke out in front of the Daniel A. Donahue clothing store located on the ground floor.

     The guests, dressed only in night gowns, fled into the streets leaving their belongings and suitcases in their rooms while two employees, an elderly man and a woman, were rescued from the third floor corridors by firefighters.

     A great many guests exited the hotel by the fire station ladders but most of them managed to force their way through corridors filled with smoke.

*****

L’Etoile – March 2, 1925

A MYSTERIOUS DEATH

Houlton, 2. – Ralph Burleigh, brother of lieutenant Albert R. Burleigh, U.S.N. who was found in his cabin aboard a naval transport in Wallego, California with a hole caused by a projectile to the head, denied that he had received a letter from the young lieutenant announcing his intended suicide.

     “The last letter I received from my brother was joyous and made no mention of any trouble” said Mr. Burleigh. “I did not know, and I only found out after my brother’s death, that his friend lieutenant Kennedy was in trouble. I heard that my brother wanted to defend lieutenant Kennedy but that is all I know. I still think that my brother’s death was accidental.”

*****

L’Etoile – March 2, 1925

1. POTHIER AND MR. SOUCY GUARDED BY AGENTS

     Woonsocket, R.I., 2. – The news spread that governor Pothier and mayor Soucy of Woonsocket are guarded by detectives and that their residence is “under police surveillance day and night.”

     Chief of police Côté refused to give details on the subject saying that it was police business and of no one’s concern.

     Nevertheless, we know that there are detectives close to both residences and that they politely request lingering passers-by to move along.

     The reason would be, rumour has it, that the two may have offended whiskey salesmen and gambling establishment owners with the cleanup campaign they undertook and that the detectives stand guard to avoid all attempted reprisals.

Neither side has provided details. 

*****

L’Etoile – March 2, 1925

SAD DEATH  OF A RENOWN AVIATOR

——-

     Bayonne, 2. – Roger Rousserail, the aviator known as the Périgord avenger, was killed yesterday close to Mont-de-Marsan during a flight.

     Since the armistice, Rousserail was at the service of a travelling circus for which he performed acrobatic stunts. Despite a violent storm, the aviator wanted to execute his flight as usual. At an altitude of 1500 feet, a wing of his plane was ripped off at the moment that he closed the loop. The plane crashed to the ground and the aviator died instantly.

     In October 1915, Rousserail had downed famous German aviator Adolphe Pégond.

     Rousserail’s wife and two children were present at the moment of the accident. (1) 

****

1) Translations by Louise Peloquin.

A child survives the Holocaust by Marjorie Arons-Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Remembering & forgetting: a memoir and other pieces of my life by Miriam Spiegel Raskin is a short but impactful book by a woman who, in 1939, at the age of eight, fled Germany with her parents, Julius and Fannie Spiegel, in the wake of Kristallnacht. Most of the rest of her family did not survive the war. The trauma of Nazi Germany and brutal persecution of Jews left lasting scars for the rest of her life.

Relocated eventually to St. Louis, Missouri, Miriam, a refugee, always felt an outsider, different, in pain and insecure. She grew into a deep thinker – a published writer, poet and essayist. She wrote beautifully, grappling for most of her life with the question of why she survived when so many millions of others were sent to their deaths in the Holocaust.

Full disclosure: Miriam’s sister Susan, born in this country and 15 years younger than she, is a longtime friend of my husband (who also knew Miriam), which is how I came to this book. It was published in 2008.

Safe in America, Miriam never felt secure as a child, too often left alone to cope with her anxieties because both parents worked long hours. Childhood behind her, she married “the first decent man that was willing to gamble on” her.  They were together until his death in 2019. But contemplating her life as homemaker, she wondered “was it for this that I was saved?”

For decades, Miriam struggled mightily with depression, exacerbated by exhaustion from chronic sleeplessness, unable to take pleasure in ordinary things or block out the dark cloud that kept sunshine from her life. She kept wondering,  is it better to remember or is forgetting the key to survival. For decades, the key to her mother’s adjustment was not dwelling in the remembering, which Miriam saw as denial. Miriam herself could not forget, and so, she wrote, the sadness continued unabated. It would take decades for her to learn to use her memories in ways to heal herself and help educate others.

In 1965, at the age of 35, Miriam returned with her mother to Hamburg, Germany, where she had lived as a child.  Thanks to obsessive record-keeping by the Germans, she was able to reconstruct what had befallen her beloved grandparents, but finally knowing did not bring peace. She struggled with the concept of God and what it means to be Jewish. For a long time, she couldn’t bring herself to attend religious services though she remained engaged in Jewish organizations and spent many years writing about her experiences and contributing to Holocaust memory projects.

Clearly Miriam was a survivor, though she herself reserves the term for those who actually survived the camps. But she bore the guilt of having been saved, and for decades it defined her life. She had three children but wrote that, when she had a granddaughter, she found a new kind of love, one that she could lavish on the baby as  she dearly wished to have been loved as a child.

The poems she includes at the end of the memoir have their own soft rhythms, rich language, and honest sentiments. Several essays are crisply laid out. The book ends with a surprise, which I will not spoil for you readers. It has to do with a letter from a Christian friend from her Hamburg days, bringing even more poignancy to Miriam’s memoir.  Miriam Spiegel Raskin died on October 13^th at the age of 95. In Remembering & Forgetting, she leaves behind a legacy of understanding and empathy for all those who were touched, either directly or indirectly, by the world’s most terrible genocide.