Gayla Marty

Portal to other worlds

Since the first time I visited the Bardo national museum in Tunis 40 years ago, I've gone back four times, most recently last August. Every time, I've seen new things and learned more—partly because there is so much to see, partly because I change, and partly because the museum changes, too.

This time, the museum was transformed. A huge expansion has made room for so much more to be seen from its amazing collection, from Punic masks to Roman mosaics to dazzling Islamic architecture. A few hours were not enough for my Tunisian friends and me.

I want others to get to know the Bardo, too, so this time I wrote about it and submitted a piece to the travel section of my local paper. Of course there's not enough room for all the photos I would love to share, in print or online, and I am no professional photographer. I'm posting two more photos here to give you a sense of the new expansion that thrilled me so much.

Read the story, "In Tunisia, a showcase of Roman mosaics," in the travel section of the January 19, 2020, edition of the Star Tribune.

 Photos by Gayla Marty, copyright 2020. 

Carrying a torch

My mother grew up with a wood-burning stove in the kitchen of a house without running water or electricity. The stove is now part of a collection at Andersons Rock Creek Relics on old U.S. Highway 61, where she can see and touch it every September during the annual threshing and sawing show founded by her big brother and his wife, Duane and Judy Anderson, and their amazing family.

Uncle Duane knew trees and lumber from all his years in the woods and at the sawmill. He’s the one who visited the 1902 Marty barn with my dad and me to verify its woody origins. Aunt Judy knew the human heart and had an eye for rural beauty.

Duane and Judy both left this world in 2019, but their spirits live on. They understood the love of fine old machines, from my grampa’s sawmill to tractors to threshing machines to kitchen stoves. When my own 1940s kitchen stove bit the dust a few years ago, I thought they might have room for it, but there was already a gas stove something like it in their kitchen collection.

Of course, I loved my old stove so much I had to write about it—I had to understand why. My search took me from the stove to gas, electricity, and wood, and to fire in particular.

“Fire is the ultra-living element,” wrote the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in 1964. Maybe that’s why we say we carry a torch for someone. Love is like fire burning in our hearts.

This fall, I got the news that my essay “Now You’re Cooking With Gas” won a prize from the North American Review, the oldest literary magazine in the nation. It was published in the fall issue and came in the mail the night before Thanksgiving at a moment when I was acutely missing my old friend the stove. I felt I’d finally done right by that stove.

As poetry would have it, the award is called the Torch Prize for Creative Nonfiction. It’s named after a wonderful writer and high school teacher, the late Rafael Torch, and it evokes the stove and the fire in my heart, too.

In a craft reflection for the review’s Open Space online, I dedicated my essay to the memory of Uncle Duane and Aunt Judy, who’ve joined that great cloud of witnesses, lighting our path. We carry a torch for them.

 

Until the fall issue of North American Review is posted online, to order a copy, contact the managing editor at [email protected]. Mention the friends-and-family discount code "contrib3014."

Effie's century

The Hendrickson lawn seemed enclosed by a border of trees and shrubs and bushes, a permeable wall that separated the house from the fields, inhabited by birds and other wildlife. Inside the border were flowerbeds and plantings around the house, a rectangular napping swing suspended between two big hardwoods, and cool shade in the heat of summer. Outside the border was the wide-open sunny world.

An arbor formed a passage between the two. As children we stepped through the arbor into a shady patch of lilacs with a sweeping view of the fields. Three wondrous things appeared: At our feet, a shallow pond with lily pads and darting orange-gold fish in the dappled light. Beyond the shadows, stacks of white boxes buzzing with honeybees. And in between, a little Dutch windmill.

I have a murky memory of crawling inside the windmill, seeing the fields framed by its tiny window. I had to be very small to fit. I also remember rediscovering it sometime later, and turning away confused, unable to enter. We grew so fast that suddenly, Alice-in-Wonderland-like, we had become too large to fit. Instead, to relive the experience, we wanted to give a younger sibling or cousin the magical experience of ducking inside and looking out the tiny windows. It was an early lesson in perspective. My dad, shown in this photograph in 1938 or ’39, must have made sure we experienced the same wonder he had.

On visits to the Hendrickson farm, a couple miles east of the our farm, my great-aunt Effie always welcomed us. She lived on the Hendrickson place with our great-uncles, Harold and Alvin, caring during the 1960s for our petite great-grandmother. Effie, Harold, and Alvin were three younger siblings of my grandmother, Viola. Theirs was a family of 12 children, including a cousin raised as a sister after her own mother died.

Having fun and sharing the joy of creation were clearly priorities to the Hendricksons. We never felt like tag-alongs or after-thoughts. Effie, Harold, and Alvin hosted their nieces and nephews for years, so they had plenty of practice when the next generation came along. They enticed us to visit by discussing in front of us their newest baby animals—a calf or piglets, lambs or kittens, maybe a bird that had built a nest in some convenient spot for viewing. They mentioned when the goldfish had been moved into the pond in the spring and gave notice again before bringing them back in for the winter. They let us know when honey collection or processing was planned.

Years went by and the next generation was welcomed, too. Effie maintained magnificent gardens, adding her own touches. Another kind of windmill joined the scene. In the photo below from 1990, Effie (on the left) is still hosting, now with her widowed sister Ethel (on the right). My son—grandson of the boy in the windmill picture above—is the littlest one sitting up on top of the Hendrickson farm’s century rock.

Effie became the sole survivor among her siblings. She no longer lives at the Hendrickson farm, so there is no windmill to see, no honeybees or goldfish. But last summer, I took my son’s four-year-old daughter to visit Effie and her legendary dollhouse. At home we practice nature vocabulary (birds, trees, flowers) from a ring-binder scrapbook made just for her by Effie. My granddaughter is part of the fourth generation to be touched by one remarkable teacher.

This month Effie turns 100. She still entertains a steady stream of Scrabble-playing guests and beats them. Generations of nieces and nephews from as far away as Seattle are coming to honor her. Once again we learn a lesson in perspective.

N.B. Effie lived on earth almost six more years until her passage in April 2019. Read Effie's obituary.

Photos by Viola Hendrickson Marty (top) and Linnea Wahlstrom (bottom)