Snow drifted from gray skies, blanketing our beautiful landscape in white, as we drove south to Woodland Christmas Eve for our annual gathering at my sister’s. Snow prevented the Washougal contingent from attending, and my son and his girlfriend were celebrating Christmas in Finland this year.
Life changes and the holiday celebration did too. But the chapters of our lives are filled with change.
I sent photos of our snow to my son over Messenger, and he shot back pictures of the lakeside town of Tampere, a 2½-hour train ride northwest of Helsinki and home to a Natural History Museum with an exhibition about the country’s 1918 civil war that led to independence. How blessed we are today with the ability to stay in touch instantly with one another around the world. We can Skype, telephone, or communicate by Messenger, email, or Snapchat (although I need help from my daughter to save those photos).
I thought about pioneers who settled the Pacific Northwest, people like Matilda Koontz Jackson, who left her mother and siblings in Missouri to follow the Oregon Trail. Her second husband, John Jackson, left England to forge a future in the United States. Eliza Tynan Saunders left Ireland for New York and later traveled around Cape Horn to settle in the Northwest.
Other than letters that took months to cross the country, these people seldom saw or even heard from their relatives again. But they carved new lives in a new land and forged new friendships and families.
I count myself blessed to have family to love and to live in an era when we can stay in touch instantly and hop on a plane to visit, even if it takes 11 hours to travel those 5,000 miles to Finland.
Lessons From Maus
My daughter’s literature class at Centralia College fall quarter read a graphic novel called “Maus.” A graphic novel? No, it’s not what I initially thought, but rather a story in comic book form — and the first graphic novel to ever win a Pulitzer Prize.
“Maus,” originally published as a serial from 1980 to 1991, follows cartoonist Art Spiegelman as he interviews his cantankerous father about his life as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. He drew the Jews as mice, the Germans as cats, and the Poles as pigs. His father tells of losing his son, his sister and her children, his father and his wife’s parents, grandparents, and siblings. As the stories unfold, Spiegelman learns to understand his father better, and his troubled mother, too, who committed suicide when he was 20.
As I read the book, I thought how we can learn so much from our parents and grandparents if we simply sit down and take the time to listen. Today, after the busyness of the holiday ebbs, it’s a good time to pull out the cell phone or a recorder and start asking questions. Lists of oral history interview questions abound on the Internet. I have a list of links to questions on my website at www.chaptersoflife.com under Help for Historians, Hand-picked List of Helpful Links.
Maurins
Investigation Discovery aired a segment Saturday evening called Murder Under the Mistletoe about the 1985 murders of Ed and Minnie Maurin, whose bodies were discovered Christmas Eve in a wooded area outside of Adna. They had been shot in their car after being forced to withdraw money from their savings account. Rick A. Riffe, who fled to Alaska with his brother, John, after the murders, was convicted of their murders in 2013. John died in Alaska in June 2012, just before sheriff’s officers arrived to arrest the brothers.
Save a Deer
By the way, Santa brought each of us a special Christmas gift this year — Save a Deer whistles to mount on our vehicles to prevent collisions with does, bucks and fawns. Boy, Santa sure is smart!
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, may be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
