Mt. Sherman – 14,036 ft.

I raced him across the campus in my high heels and suit. My teaching colleague was determined to open the door for me. I didn’t need a man’s help. “My mother taught me to open the door for a lady,” he said as my nose met the extra-heavy door.

Some women stop and take notice.

Some women think discussions about chivalry are silly.

Others claim it is an insult to their strength, personhood, and equality.

I’ve softened a bit over the years. I no longer race in high heels (too dangerous.)

I now recognize and appreciate simple and grand gestures of male chivalry, attitudes of respect, and masculine kindness:

Men at the post office and the recreation center who hold open the door – and not because they view me as incapable.

Male classmates from years past who pick up the lunch tab when they’re in town. “I’ve got it,” they say – even when I argue.

The auto service repairmen who do not laugh when I want to show them an issue – but can’t feel where the release lever is beneath the hood. “If you don’t do this every day, it’s easy to forget,” they say matter-of-factly.

The men at the gas station at a crossroad of “Nowhere,” Oklahoma who pulled out a map, assured me I was only slightly off-course, and directed me onward to my destination. “Have a great trip!” They waved.

Men who remove their cap in church – no matter if it’s a casual Friday night, “come as you are” venue.

Men who remove their cap when the National Anthem is sung.

Men who invest time and affection in their grandchildren.

Men who enjoy baking cookies.

Men at the Gun & Ammo store who never laugh when I bring in a shotgun for them to examine, or I ask questions about a handgun with an easier trigger-pull or slide.

The neighbor, who after inviting a group of us to his house for dinner, walked me home – across a small park. I’ve driven cross-country by myself and climbed two mountains over 14,000 feet. I wasn’t helpfulness, but his mother taught him that’s what men are suppose to do.

Men who honor their mothers by practical helps, fix-its, lunch-out, flowers, or a phone call. “I miss you Mom,” touches a mother’s heart.

The neighbor man who tosses my newspaper onto my porch when he walks his dog.

Men who lift my carry-on into the overhead airplane bin. Texas men are particularly good at this.

Men who extend a hand when I’m balancing on rocks to cross a stream on a canyon hike.

My Alaska bush pilot doctor father who saw life as an adventure – and beget my curiosity.

My brother who lets me tag behind him on Alaska mountain hikes, knowing he can reach the summit three times faster without me.

SkyLine Trail, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska

My son who fully engages in parenting his two preschool boys.

Cookie Bakers

I appreciate:

Mothers who taught these values to their sons,

fathers who modeled them,

grandparents who insisted on them,

and other significant people who made an impact.

Thank you….men, fathers, brothers, friends, and neighbors. You’ve put a smile on my face – and I trust you’re doing so for other women in your life or who cross your path.

(First printed in “The Country Register” (Kansas), June 2014)

Saving and re-telling the stories  

           I grew up believing that suppertime and story-time were synonymous. Dad gulped down his food, like most physicians who expect to be called out at any minute, and while we children finished our mashed potatoes and gravy, he told stories. I listened spellbound to his accounts about the patient with a strange rash, the caribou that pranced like Dancer right up to his airplane when he was hunting, and how he fixed the hole in his Piper J-3 float with a kerchief and a stick. Those stories turned into my first book Alaska Bush Pilot Doctor.

           Years later, my husband and his two brothers, along with their parents, laughed heartily at Thanksgiving dinners as they reminisced, and probably embellished, stories about the three boys. Each brother had his version of trying to ride the stray donkey that wandered repeatedly into their Western Kansas barnyard. They howled with laughter and talked at once about trying to stand up in the slimy stock tank and finding cow faces under the water looking down into the water with strands of slobber. The oldest brothers never tired of describing how they taunted their younger brother about the “rollers” coming – the terrifying dust storms that roiled over the plains. The stories continued with rolling Schnitzel, their Dachshund, into a rug and seeing if he’d land on his feet at the bottom of the stairs. After the Thanksgiving pies were eaten, tales continued with Schnitzel dragging home neighbor girls’ dolls, bicycle crashes, and falling off haystacks.

            My daughter and son listened, wide-eyed, and glanced from brother to brother, trying to figure out who was telling the truth.

            My children were 15 and 17 when their father died, followed by his father. The great-grandparents had already died. The family gatherings were smaller. Two brothers told the stories. Everyone chuckled. Everyone was keenly aware of the missing storytellers.

            My parents died, my grandparents died. Within four years, eight family members were gone. Many of my family’s oral traditions were documented in Alaska Bush Pilot Doctor and From Kansas Wheat Fields to Alaska Tundra: a Mennonite Family Finds Home. Now I was concerned that my children would lose their stories.

            On January 23, 1999, the documenting of the three Penner boys took place. This occurred within a traditional event: The Pheasant Festival. For decades, Penner men and boys (now girls and women, too) have flocked to their old home place to hunt pheasants. So it was that while savoring pheasant baked in cream, one brother retold every story he could remember, and I recorded the oral history.

            I transcribed the stories, added photos, included handwritten recipes from my mother-in-law, and printed a booklet for my children, their cousins, and other family members. It wasn’t a birth-till-death memoir, but it captured the supper table stories that were part of the fabric of my children’s lives. It was my gift to them.

            A secondary use of the The Three Boys booklet has been to show other family-savers-of-history a simple, organized, fun way to capture anecdotes that otherwise get lost in the dust storms of life or roll down the stairs and not land on their feet.

            Dads, tell your children stories. Show them where you grew up. Pull out pictures. Go for a ride. Reminisce out loud. Then preserve those stories in written form, digital format, photo books with captions, or in some that way they will remember, chuckle, or blurt out, “Tell us another story,” or sigh longingly, “Remember when Dad…”

            Your story is a gift to your children.

 (This was first printed in “The Country Register” – Kansas, June/July 2013. http://www.countryregister.com/crpublishers/kansas/pdfs/CountryRegJJ-13web.pdf)

Ruby Leppke: Kansas Farm Girl, holding lamb, with Naomi standing behind

My earliest memories are of baby chicks, barn cats under my grandparents’ porch, dogs named “Shep,” sweet-eyed calves, and wooly lambs. Then our family moved to Alaska. Alaska was not like Central Kansas. My new memories were of moose, bears, salmon, and “camp robbers” (Canadian Jays). I missed the farm immensely.

Our first Christmas in Alaska, a large box of gifts arrived. After it had been emptied, I crawled inside, pulled down the top flags, and called out, “Mommy, sent me to Grandma’s house!” She didn’t. Although with the bickering I did with my sister, chances are she would have liked to.

My father transferred with Public Health Services to Browning, MT. That Easter, my mother brought home four pastel-dyed fuzzy chicks. Their box sat on the black-and-white linoleum tiled kitchen floor.  We four children, ages 18-months to nine-years, loved the chicks. They felt so soft against our cheeks.

Then the cute chicks turned into teenagers and developed prickly pin feathers. Their pretty colors faded. We lost our enthusiasm for holding them. One Sunday, Mom gathered up the teenagers, and on the way to Star Baptist Church in the country, we stopped at a Blackfeet Indian home and gifted them the pets, which probably turned into produce —- either egg-layers or supper.

Later, when my parents returned to Alaska and homesteaded, Mom bought chicks for the summer time. They lived in the chicken coop along the driveway – until the weather turned cold. Then she gifted them to Betty, our homestead neighbor from Nebraska, who kept her farm going year-around.

Every Easter, I think of the chicks. Sometimes I stop by a feed store just to look at chicks.  A week or two ago, I drove past the Feed Store in town and the sign read “Order your Chicks Now.” I actually considered it — for a second.

A few days ago, I picked up the local paper and read “Baby Chicks a Popular Easter Gift for Kids.” A reporter, who I email occasionally with article ideas, had followed-up on my suggestion that he write about Parker Feed, one of the remaining landmarks of what this town used to be – a ranching town. I smiled. I emailed him. He thanked me for the idea.

http://www.ourcoloradonews.com/parker/news/baby-chicks-a-popular-easter-gift-for-kids/article_9c9a74aa-956c-11e2-b3f7-0019bb2963f4.html

Some year I’ll have to buy myself some Easter chicks, even if they aren’t dyed anymore. I’ll hold them against my check — and reminisce about the joys of having a farm-girl mama.

Know of anyone who’d like an after-Easter gift?

 The Gaede family in Tanana, Alaska, Christmas 1958

We leaned toward the candle. Our elbows dug into the table top.  I instructed my four-year-old sister, “Ruth, if you do it fast, it won’t hurt.” At age five, I was wise about sticking my finger into the liquid wax puddle around the flaming candle wick.  Tentatively, she reached forward, stuck her pointer finger into the pool and jerked back. We watched it solidify into a thick red cap. “It feels numb, doesn’t it.” She nodded. “Warm, too.”

We didn’t regularly use candles when we lived in Central Kansas, but here in Alaska, the dark winter nights crowded out the daytime, and there was a hunger for light.

Mom (Ruby Leppke Gaede) learned to make candles. She melted the paraffin blocks, added a few drops of color, and poured the mixture into cans with strings pulled tautly through the middle. Once hardened, she slightly warmed the cans, cut off the bottoms, and pushed the candles through. She wasn’t finished. She whipped additional wax and frosted the candles with frothy whiteness. Sequins and glitter completed the light-bearers.

December 21 or 22 is the shortest day in North America; in Anchorage, Alaska, that means 5 hours and 28 minutes of sun peering slightly above the tree tops. In Barrow Alaska, the sun vanishes on November 18, and a slight glow emanates from below the horizon until January 24, when the orb peeks up and slowing climbs out of hibernation.

Mom had come from flat plains where the sun reluctantly slides below distant fields. In Alaska, the sun hurries down, behind mountain ranges and tall spruce forests.  How did she brighten her world, and our lives?

–       Starting in November, she lit candles at the supper table. For variety, and our fascination, she tried tapers that dripped multi-colors which coated a syrup bottle.

–       Inside the house, she outlined our large picture window with Christmas lights. We kids could see these through the trees when we shuffled through the snow from the bus stop in the afternoon darkness. She left them up into January.

What do Alaskans do to battle Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)?

–       Wear bright colors.

–       Paint and decorate the interiors of their houses with warm pastels.

–       Pull back window shades when there is any ray of light.

–       Build a crackling fire in their wood stoves.

–       Spend time with energetic people.

–       Go outside when it is light. Get fresh air. Keep the body moving.

What do I do?

–       Light a candle at my supper table. The friendly flickering seems alive. It keeps me company.

–       Listen to lively and light-hearted music.

–       Buy myself flowers. My favorites are carnations that stay fresh forever.

–       Go outdoors.

–       Get exercise, either indoors or out.

–       Have a winter project to look forward to.

 What do you do to brighten your world in the winter?

 This article first appeared in the Dec. 2012/Jan. 2013 issue of The Country Register – KS

I grew up listening to my father’s supper table stories. He was a doctor; more than that, he was a bush pilot doctor in Alaska.  Never knowing when he’d be called out, these stories were told after he’d gulped down his food. Told after he’d spread yellow mustard on the reheated moose roast, or after he’d swallowed that last bite of cauliflower – fresh from Mom’s garden and smothered in thick Velveeta-cheese sauce.

We heard about the fly-in housecall when a distressed woman tried to crawl out of his Piper PA-14 airplane and go home – when he was 2,000 feet above the Yukon River.  We listened wide-eyed when he described how the low brush on the suitable mountainside strip grew, but he’d committed to land and thrashed down among the eight feet tall saplings. The polar bear hunt on an ice flow along the Arctic coast was supported by his 8 mm movies.

A miscalculation.

All these stories came from a Hillsboro, Kansas farm boy who had grown up shooting jackrabbits, catching catfish with his hands in a muddy creek, jolting on a metal tractor seat across crop fields in the humid-thick Kansas heat, and picking June bugs off the back porch screen door on his way in for supper.

Just a Kansas farm boy.

As a young man he wondered what lay over the horizon. He yearned for adventure.  After trading his suspendered over-alls for a graduation gown from K.U. Medical School, his eyes turned north. He found adventure in Alaska.

I learned from him to reframe amusing, annoying, simple – or terrifying – incidences into stories, rather than leaving them as coincidences, aggravations, or unwanted crisis. They weren’t hard-luck, depressing, self-pity stories, but humorous, “would you believe it?” stories; the kind told around a table-clothed Midwest table that tickled the fancy of listeners while they forked in fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and strawberry shortcake; or on a drizzly Alaska evening with halibut, cranberry nutbread, and rhubarb pie.  These mini-dramas elicited teasing, arguments about real facts, and left the listener in a good mood, or at least challenged to see life in a fresher way.

Dad and I turned his oral stories into written stories. They showed up in Alaska Flying, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Christian Medical Society Journal, and other publications. I thought writing a book wouldn’t be that more difficult. I was naïve. I was uninformed. I was determined. It seemed appropriate to name the book: Prescription for Adventure: Bush Pilot Doctor.  This book is now into its fourth edition as Alaska Bush Pilot Doctor.

*****

Learning doesn’t need formal instruction. It comes from following someone around, listening in the shadows, working side-by-side, and observing interpersonal interactions and personal reactions.

1. What did you learn from your father?
2. How did you learn it?
3. What are people learning when they watch you?

*****

Published in the June/July issue of “The Country Register – Kansas,” a delightful publication for stitchers, crafters, and all people living in, or driving through Kansas.http://www.countryregister.com/kansas/currentissue.html

*****

Naomi Gaede-Penner is the author of the non-fiction Prescription for Adventure series:  Alaska Bush Pilot Doctor, From Kansas Wheat Fields to Alaska Tundra: a Mennonite Family Finds Home, ‘A’ is for Alaska: Teacher to the Territory, ‘A’ is for Anaktuvuk: Teacher to the Nunamiut Eskimos, and The Three Boys. To browse or order her books and to see her own adventures, visit www.prescriptionforadventure.com.  Find her on Facebook: Prescription for Adventure.

Life is full of adventures. Some we choose. Some we are dragged into. Some we find ourselves in the midst of.

My mother, Ruby Leppke, did not seek adventure. She and my dad, Elmer Gaede, were Mennonite farm kids in Central Kansas. Mom drove a tractor, did farm chores, and butchered chickens. It was no surprise that she won first place in a cow milking contest.

When she and Dad married on April 16, 1943, Dad was working on a diary farm. Somewhere on Dad’s way home from some cornfield, he took an unexpected turn. Instead of walking into a barn stacked with musty hay, crowded with the smells of warm milk and the meows of begging barn cats, he found himself at Kansas University Medical School, anticipating a missionary’s life in South America.

Mom had seen the caption below his picture in the college yearbook, “Seeking worlds to conquer,” but it didn’t occur that that might mean something other than dealing with wheat prices and drought, catching catfish with his hands, and shooting jackrabbits. When he mentioned someday he’d like to fly an airplane, she laughed. His twinkly eyes, sense of humor, and restless ambition attracted her.

They didn’t go to South America. In 1955, with my sister, Ruth, and I standing on the broad backseat of the ’47 Fleetline Chevy, they drove north. On the dusty car trunk my father finger-wrote, “Anchorage or Bust.” The blue and gold KU Jayhawk decal faded from view on the chuck-holed Alcan Highway.

Mom didn’t choose adventure, but she had the resiliency to trade the harvest sun of Kansas for the midnight sun of the far North. Sweltering humidity for ice fog. Milk cows for moose cows. Catfish for salmon.

When the content, Mennonite farm girl arrived at her new home in Alaska, she was given a prescription for adventure.

*****

My mother missed acutely the farm-fresh eggs, milk, roasting ears, pork sausage, and tomatoes. Growing up in the Depression, however, she knew how to scrounge around, make something out of nothing – and improvise. In Alaska, she was quickly introduced to rhubarb. That became her Alaska fruit – even though it is factually a vegetable.

Life is full of adventures. Some we choose. Some we are dragged into. Some we find ourselves in the midst of.

My mother, Ruby Leppke, did not seek adventure. She and my dad, Elmer Gaede, were Mennonite farm kids in Central Kansas. Mom drove a tractor, did farm chores, and butchered chickens. It was no surprise that she won first place in a cow milking contest.

When she and Dad married on April 16, 1943, Dad was working on a diary farm. Somewhere on Dad’s way home from some cornfield, he took an unexpected turn. Instead of walking into a barn stacked with musty hay, crowded with the smells of warm milk and the meows of begging barn cats, he found himself at Kansas University Medical School, anticipating a missionary’s life in South America.

Mom had seen the caption below his picture in the college yearbook, “Seeking worlds to conquer,” but it didn’t occur that that might mean something other than dealing with wheat prices and drought, catching catfish with his hands, and shooting jackrabbits. When he mentioned someday he’d like to fly an airplane, she laughed. His twinkly eyes, sense of humor, and restless ambition attracted her.

They didn’t go to South America. In 1955, with my sister, Ruth, and I standing on the broad backseat of the ’47 Fleetline Chevy, they drove north. On the dusty car trunk my father finger-wrote, “Anchorage or Bust.” The blue and gold KU Jayhawk decal faded from view on the chuck-holed Alcan Highway.

Mom didn’t choose adventure, but she had the resiliency to trade the harvest sun of Kansas for the midnight sun of the far North. Sweltering humidity for ice fog. Milk cows for moose cows. Catfish for salmon.

When the content, Mennonite farm girl arrived at her new home in Alaska, she was given a prescription for adventure.

*****

My mother missed acutely the farm-fresh eggs, milk, roasting ears, pork sausage, and tomatoes. Growing up in the Depression, however, she knew how to scrounge around, make something out of nothing – and improvise. In Alaska, she was quickly introduced to rhubarb. That became her Alaska fruit – even though it is factually a vegetable.

Rhubarb Cherry Pie

3 C. rhubarb, chopped

1 can (14.5 oz) pitted, tart, red cherries, undrained

1 ¼ C. granulated sugar

2 T. tapioca

Combine ingredients and let stand 10- 15 minutes

Prepare two-crust pastry. Roll out and line a nine-inch pie plate. Dump in ingredients. Cover with remaining crust. Pinch edges and trim off excess dough. Roll out left-over dough. Cut into 2×2 inch squares. Sprinkle pie and squares lightly with cinnamon and sugar. Bake at 400º: twenty minutes for squares, forty minutes for pie. Nibble on squares while waiting for pie.

(This story is published in April/May issue of The Country Register – Kansas:

http://www.countryregister.com/kansas/kansas.html)