One Hundredth Part

James Holt b. 1804, married Mary Pain b. 1814

One of my 3rd great grandfathers was James Holt. He married Mary Pain in Tennessee in 1830. She mothered 8 children in her young life, dying at age 30. I married at age 31. Our life paths have been different, but her blood flows in me and on this Memorial Day weekend, I honor her and my pioneer heritage.

I found this paragraph in her husband, James’ autobiography:
We traveled on up the Iowa River and all met five miles above Kitchen’s Settlement, which was the largest settlement at that time on the Iowa River. There my wife died, in October, and was buried. The doctors gave her a dose of lobelia when her stomach was too weak to take it, and it caused her death; and I must say I have ever since been opposed to anyone administering drugs. My wife left a child about two months old, which William Kartchner’s wife took to nurse. She died on the 10th of February 1845. I lost another child at this camp, above Kitchen’s Settlement. It was my oldest [living] son Leander. He died about a month after my wife, in the month of November. I must here state that I cannot give dates and particulars as I would wish, for in my moves I lost my journal and I have to tax my memory to a great extent, to remember even one hundredth part of all which I would like to relate.

I’ve spent a good deal of time this month gathering the descendants of James and Mary Holt. James remarried the next year and had 10 more children. His posterity is numerous. I’ve enjoyed learning more about these relations and the lives they lived.

As I’ve worked on this, that last line in James’s history has haunted me. I wish I could read all the things he would have liked to have told me, especially about his wife, Mary. I wish I knew what she looked like. I wonder what her daily life was like, what chores she had, what pleasures. Did she stitch or quilt? Did she sing to the babes on her knee? Did she garden or bake crusty bread? Where exactly is her unmarked grave?

“I have lost my journal. . . .” Those words cut me to the core. It’s a great loss, but on this Memorial Day weekend, I am grateful to have from his writings, “one hundredth part.”

James Holt b. 10 Feb 1804, d. 25 Jan 1894 Headstone, Enterprise, Utah

Deseret News April 18, 1894 page 3
JAMES HOLT
Teasdale, Wayne County, Utah,
April 9, 1894 – Not having seen a notice of the death of my father in your paper, I take the liberty of sending you a short sketch of his life.

James Holt was born Feb 10, 1804 in North Carolina. He was the son of James and Elizabeth Holt. His parents moved to Tennessee when he was six months old where they made a permanent home. My father received the gospel in the year 1839 and was baptized. In 1840 he emigrated to Nauvoo, where he became intimately acquainted with the Prophet Joseph. He was sent on a mission in the spring of 1844 to Tennessee, and was preaching on the day the Prophet was killed. He was filled with prophecy at the time and said: “Now they have murdered the prophet of God, he has sealed his testimony with his blood and my mission is ended for this time.” He immediately started home and on his way learned it was all too true. He left Nauvoo in the fall and suffered all the hardships of that trip. He stopped in Iowa until 1852, where he came to the valley and settled at North Ogden. He was counselor to Bishop Thomas Dunn for a number of years. He was one of the first to settle Ogden Valley, in 1862 he moved south and settled at Washington, and from there he went to Long Valley, and finely when the settlers were all run by the Indians, he went to the Mountain Meadows, finely settling at the mouth of the Meadow canyon, where he resided until his death. Which occurred on the 27 of January, 1894, he lacked a few days of being 90 years old.

He was honest as the day is long, and a staunch believer in the Gospel, and was always on hand to respond to every call made upon him. He was the father of nineteen children, some having gone before. He leaves a wife, nine children, many grandchildren, and great grandchildren, and a host of friends to mourning his loss. He had a great deal of work done in the St. George Temple for his dead.
W. A. Holt

Blanca’s Quilt

Today I finished a quilt for my dear friend, Blanca. She is battling breast cancer. Blanca comes to my home every couple of weeks to help me do things I don’t like to do. I love her and the kind service she provides.
I picked the log cabin quilt pattern for her because of its symbolism. The red center block represents the heart or hearth of the home (her). It’s paired with an equal sized block–I told her that was her husband. Then those two center blocks are surrounded by the “logs” which, to me, represent the support and love of family. I picked blues because they are the favorite color of Blanca’s son, who died of cancer several years ago. Today would have been his 24th birthday. I told Blanca the tans and blues represent her family on both sides of the veil, surrounding her. I hope she loves this offering and I hope it will bring her comfort, warmth and love.

The World Was Old When We Got Here

we could see that, easy. Paint and birch
bark curling, dried up wells and leaky
faucets, weeping willows and bent windmills
shrieking in the breeze. Driven outside, we swung
our legs from the seats of rusted tractors tangled
in dead branches, crept into abandoned
houses graffitied by trees. We wove sticks
with bale twine to make shelters, fished
the hood of a car from the riverfor a roof, used bricks from the crumbled
cookhouse for a makeshift wall.

Inheriting ruins,
we made ruins.

Blue jeans in the wash still came out dirty. The breath
of grown-ups fermented with things unsaid. Someday
we’d understand “farm crisis,” foreclosure, FDIC. We’d see
people driving Cadillacs, rest our faces on the plush
white carpet of our own remodeled homes, remember
clover by the chicken pen, how each spring we rolled
in it, each spring it was new.
—Kara McKeever
I found this poem on Goodreads and it took me away for awhile. Back to the farm, the tractors, shelters with twine, the chicken pen and the FDIC.

This week I discovered a new secret fort, this one in the far back corner of our playground behind our big fort. There were boards and chains and a padlock and a tipped wagon, the slide and stacked broken bricks and a doll head on a stick. Definitely a boy’s lair. I think I’ll leave a secret note or some wrapped candy hidden there for someone to discover. I wonder who.

Claire’s Feet. The casts come off.

This week the casts came off!

And the stitches came out.

And the boots went on. No walking for a couple of more weeks.
Each day gets a little better. And each day we all get a little stronger lifting her!

State Tennis Championship!

It’s been quite a weekend! Friday and Saturday we cheered on our Mountain View Tennis Team at the State Championship Tournament held in Salt Lake. Aaron and his partner played well Friday, but didn’t get to advance to the final matches on Saturday. But our 3 singles players all made it to the finals. It was crazy fun to cheer them on and watch them win. Especially as they took down the proud and haughty local competition, Orem’s Timpview High School, who have been State Champions 9 of the last 10 years. Tennis tournaments with Timpview are never a pleasure. There’s way too much swagger on that team. It was nice to see them cry yesterday as their dynasty unraveled before their own eyes. They came expecting to win it all, they went home without a trophy and without a single championship match. They were stunned.

Sometimes it just feels good to see the proud fall. It felt even better to see our boys hoisting that championship trophy at the end of the day.

http://www.heraldextra.com/sports/high-school/tennis/mountain-view-relies-on-special-singles-player-group-to-win/article_9e06e2d4-c031-11e2-b6a9-0019bb2963f4.html

Every Day Deeds

Warshing Clothes Recipe — count yore blessings!

“

Years ago, an Alabama grandmother gave the new bride the following recipe exactly as written and found in an old scrapbook with spelling errors and all.

WARSHING CLOTHES
Build fire in backyard to heat kettle of rain water.
Set tubs so smoke wont blow in eyes if wind is pert.
Shave one hole cake of lie soap in boilin water.
Sort things, make 3 piles — 1 pile white, 1 pile colored, 1 pile work britches and rags.
To make starch, stir flour in cool water to smooth, then thin down with boiling water.
Take white things, rub dirty spots on board, scrub hard, and boil, then rub colored don’t boil just wrench [rinse] and starch.
Take things out of kettle with broom stick handle, then wrench, and starch.
Hang old rags on fence.
Spread tea towels on grass.
Pore wrench water in flower bed.
Scrub porch with hot soapy water.
Turn tubs upside down.
Go put on clean dress, smooth hair with hair combs.
Brew cup of tea, sit, rock a spell, and count yore blessings.
————
A Bucket and a Plunger
In 1979 I spent 6 months living on the outskirts Jerusalem with a BYU Study Abroad program. We lived in dorm-like conditions at the Ramat Rachel Kibbutz with communal bathrooms and had no laundry facilities. It was a huge effort to carry bags of our dirty laundry on the local buses into Jerusalem to find laundromats where we paid a lot of money to sit and watch our clothes cycle through washers and dryers.

Not long into our stay, I noticed a cheerful tall blonde named Noralee had packed a toilet plunger and was putting it to good use in the bathroom. But not in the toilets. She found a bucket, bought some laundry soap, and each week she plunged her laundry. I watched, amazed. As we got acquainted, she taught me the tricks of plunging laundry. It changed my life.

After that adventure, I returned to BYU for a few years, then I was a missionary for 18 months in South Africa, then I spent almost 3 years living in a village in the bush of Nigeria, and then I moved into an apartment in Salt Lake City. I did not pay a dime to a laundromat for over 10 YEARS! Everywhere I went and everywhere I lived, I plunged my clothes.

In 1989, the laundromat in my apartment complex lowered the price to 25 cents per load. I decided I could pay that price to watch a machine launder my clothing, after all those years of plunging. In 1990 I married John. He owned a washer and dryer, and so now my plunger rests in a corner of the bathroom, behind the toilet, where it gets little use. But I have never forgotten the glorious feel of hand-washed and hand-rung clothing, slightly stiff from sunshine or from indoor hanging during the winter months.

It makes me want to brew a cup of peppermint tea, sit, rock a spell, and count my blessings.

My Nigerian Bucket & Plunger with collected rain water

Laundry in Eket, Nigeria. Yes, I planted those pineapple!