So, I made a piece of art, a collage that hangs out alongside an essay as a sort of sound and landscape for what I’ve written – at least in my head that’s how I hold these two pieces together. I intend this little bit of an essay to externalize some of that thinking. Together all of this gets me started on pairing essays with collages.

Undercurrents: Land and Sound Scapes

The essay “20 Questions and a World of Stories,” published in the NPEs section of Severance Magazine (with google document version also available) in April this year, revolves around the pair of Tracy houses and gardens that were home to Pops’ maternal family. The larger of the two homes, 131 Morgan Street, was purchased by Hannah Evan Stafford and David Stafford, then passed on to Ellen Svelstad Stafford and Frank Stafford, then to Hannah Stafford Alexander and Claude Alexander, my Gram and Grumpy, who built the 113 Morgan Street home in 1921, where they raised four boys before moving into 131 on Ellen’s death in 1961.

I have memorized the landscape so well that I can travel to them whenever I want or need to rest my brain: multiple flower gardens, row upon row of vegetable to be eaten in season (and canned to last the winter), sticky berry bushes, and plum, apple, maple, and trees shading small patches of lawns landscaped by work benches, water barrels, bird feeding stations, laundry lines, and summer lounging chairs.

Redecorating each of the houses – one with just three rooms (double-sized kitchen, living room, and sleeping loft) and a lean to where stairs led to a cemented cellar with a toilet, shower, and storage; one with an upstairs of four bedrooms, and a downstairs with lean to and cellar, kitchen and pantry, dining room linking to 3-season porch, living room linking to a small bedroom with a toilet-only bathroom wedged between it and the stairway to upstairs landing with one amply stocked bookshelf.

This quarter block of buildings and land in Tracy, Minnesota, was my home from home from my 1957 February birth t0 Gram’s 1990 death just before my February birthday. Thirty-three years, and one week to grow on.

As I write out details of this homescape, a soundtrack vies with the visual memory to garner my attention: the radio always on in the kitchen, the TV featuring music variety programs when it’s on, the portable record player and 45 record case I brought along in junior high school, and the portable tape or CD players packed into my suitcase during high school, college, and graduate school.

Of these, “Windfall,” from Son Volt’s debut album Trace has traveled with me from Mankato to Tracy since the album’s release in 1995, the first year I ventured to 131 Morgan Street after Pops’ eldest brother bullied his way into commandeering the house through a quit claim deed.

With both feet on the floor and two hands on the wheel, the winds of southwestern Minnesota along with AM radio and the in-car tape deck actually did lift if not take my troubles away. Those journeys back to the home from home were physical returns to the safest place I’ve known:

(The Windfall lyrics as alt-text are part of slideset containing images in this post.)

My Windfall Family

The concept of windfall as a positive gain dates to the 11th century when peasants could gather up, for example, parts of trees – branches, fruit, seeds or nuts – that wind gusts caused to fall from plantings on land owners’ properties or royal forests onto the ground of common public spaces, individual land holdings, or the forest floor.

In tarot, four key cards are commonly said to convey unexpected positive change, to signal elements of luck, new possibilities, and abundance as being part of a tarot reading being conducted. Each card has frequently turned up in the tarot layouts and single card pulls while I was writing the Severance-published essay with its focus on the ways stories from both Mom’s and Pops’ families prepared me for new the paternity knowledge that came with recreational DNA spit tests. In this, and other essays, I position myself as someone who asserts that her parents’ had a right to set confidential boundaries about their child’s paternity – just as she had a right to ask questions.  And as someone who knows in her bones that the storytelling traditions her grandparents’ launched shaped a lithesome core identity, one that grows – extends and expands – rather than disappears or falters with the new paternity knowledge.

My Alexanders – all the branches, all the generations – are a windfall in my life. What they and I gathered up in the wind-driven breaking away from other genealogical trees, this is how they and I and we came together to build my heart and soul, nervous system and brain, dreaming and grounding.

Windfall Collage and Soundtrack

Dad’s key to 131 Morgan Street house front door. Mom’s angel pin that reads “Blessed are mothers.” And lines from these songs –

• Bill Withers’ “Grandma’s Hands”
• Rodney Crowell’s “Grandma Loved that Old Man”
• Alanis Moresette’s “You Learn, ” along with
• Son Volt’s “Windfall”

– that all lived in my body as I wrote the “20 Questions and a World of Stories” essay, show up in the collage.

The photos of Gram and her Grandmother Hannah with their pets, of that Grandmother and Pops, her great-grandson, in a swing Grumpy built, of Pops and me – the tree and the acorn according to family stories in the space between gardens and houses, and of Gram and me with our pets as Grumpy takes his customary afternoon spot. This last photo an echo of essay’s backyard photo. And the houses – 131 Morgan Street gains a porch, the back yards of both houses where doors open to gardens and lawns. And that rear view mirror that’s alongside the windshield that moves me forward on each road trip – one eye on the past, one on the future: “A nation, or a person, that keeps one eye on the past is wise. A nation, or a person, that keeps two eyes on the past is blind” (Garrick Pub, Belfast).

The backing? An old AAA Trip-Tik map for the Central Midwest that I found in the Artscraps maps bin – with the green and the darker yellow already imprinted, along with the reminder to Check Weather Every 300 Miles, something I remember as the map reader for our the Trip-Tik maps in our “going East” trip in 1967. The yellow I’ve added to map out Mankato to Tracy via Hwys 68 & 14, the Tracy to Wells and Mankato to Wells routes that bring in I90 and Hwy 22. Moving the collage to get the word Superior into the frame and not cover over Mankato, I discovered that I stop grousing about not being able to find Lemmon, South Dakota, nearest city to the small claim where Gram lived from ages 5-15 – there it was to the left of the collage, and now one of the highlighted bits.

So many stories of where I’ve been
And how I got to where I am
But these stories don’t mean anything
When you’ve got no one to tell them to

– Brandi Carlile