You can’t go home again. I grew up in a small town. I remember riding in a car with three of my buddies. We discussed the fact that our lives were like lots in a Roman legionnaire’s helmet. Some would attain enough centrifugal force to cast out of the helmet. Some would not. Of the four of us, only 1 escaped the small town life. Is it a blessing? That remains to be seen.
Made me think of my paternal grandmother who ran away with a wiley man named Wiley when she was 17. She was retrieved by her parents and sent to live with relatives in Boston, where she was arrested one day for not wearing stocking on the beach. She ran off with her Wiley again at 19, had 4 children. Wiley dropped dead the day i was born. Grandmother was then seduced and married to a wiley sailor, who helped her spend all her money from Wiley #1, and left her. She eventually quit her job on a hospital staff, and lived at the masonic home from the age of 65 until she died at the age of 113. The last time i visited her she was 105, and she came flying around a corner and almost ran over me with her wheelchair, and had me follow her out to a veranda. There she fired up a cigarette, and we sat together gazing out on the flowers, and the lovely lawn, bounded by a stand of 50-60 foot Carolina pine trees. She blew out a cloud of smoke, tapped the ash and said, "I remember when they planted those trees."
The early part of her life reminds me a bit of Austen's The Watsons, with Emma rejoining her family after being sent away and being rather shocked at the way the live (later echoed in a more extreme manner in Fanny Price's visit to Portsmouth.) I don't think Austen could overcome Emma's status as a perpetual outsider (or the number of romantic prospects she set up) so she abandoned the novel.
It is weird how normal it was for children to be sent away, or to live apart from their families. My great uncle lived in the basement of his high school earned his keep as a janitor after school because his dad and new stepmother moved away and didn't want him living with them. I wonder if all our current nostalgia for childhood comes from the fact that most people have had fairly happy childhoods.
My mother's family lived on the North Dakota-South Dakota border which I imagine had some similar dynamics to your family in Oklahoma. There's a certain intensity that comes from living in an environment where you've seen neighbors destroyed by failing to manage their farm and finances adequately. (With the further complication that "destruction" generally meant driving a beat-up truck to Fargo or Minneapolis to make decent money with the work ethic and skills required to run a farm.) Deciding whether to allow someone to "come home" was a big drama, which said a lot about who the family was.
My aunt suffered from mental illness from much of her adulthood, but she was actually something of a role model to me, because she was single, and had her own apartment, and worked a job that was just her way of making money, and wasn't grimly driven by her duties to family and work that was a "vocation". She always seemed much lighter than my parents or grandparents, even though now I can see she experience a lot of unhappiness. When she died, there were a bunch of papers in a safe deposit box that I decided I wanted, so I could learn more about her. No major revelations or anything, but it made me aware of some cruelty on the part of my grandparents that was disappointing.
If you do end up researching Josephine, do it with the understanding that everyone involved was under a lot of stress, and undoubtedly said and did some things they were not proud of when they were at the limits of their emotional resources. Figuring out what those stresses actually were is a big part of the research.
"I imagine an uneasy young woman who always had one foot out and one foot in, who insisted on social rules and on dressing well because they were ways she could objectively be doing things “right,” who dragged out an engagement she really didn’t want to ludicrous heights until she decided to blow up her life to see what happened. And what happened was, she landed right where she started. I’d be bitter too."
You can’t go home again. I grew up in a small town. I remember riding in a car with three of my buddies. We discussed the fact that our lives were like lots in a Roman legionnaire’s helmet. Some would attain enough centrifugal force to cast out of the helmet. Some would not. Of the four of us, only 1 escaped the small town life. Is it a blessing? That remains to be seen.
Made me think of my paternal grandmother who ran away with a wiley man named Wiley when she was 17. She was retrieved by her parents and sent to live with relatives in Boston, where she was arrested one day for not wearing stocking on the beach. She ran off with her Wiley again at 19, had 4 children. Wiley dropped dead the day i was born. Grandmother was then seduced and married to a wiley sailor, who helped her spend all her money from Wiley #1, and left her. She eventually quit her job on a hospital staff, and lived at the masonic home from the age of 65 until she died at the age of 113. The last time i visited her she was 105, and she came flying around a corner and almost ran over me with her wheelchair, and had me follow her out to a veranda. There she fired up a cigarette, and we sat together gazing out on the flowers, and the lovely lawn, bounded by a stand of 50-60 foot Carolina pine trees. She blew out a cloud of smoke, tapped the ash and said, "I remember when they planted those trees."
I'd kinda like to know more.
Grandma never told us enough.
The early part of her life reminds me a bit of Austen's The Watsons, with Emma rejoining her family after being sent away and being rather shocked at the way the live (later echoed in a more extreme manner in Fanny Price's visit to Portsmouth.) I don't think Austen could overcome Emma's status as a perpetual outsider (or the number of romantic prospects she set up) so she abandoned the novel.
It is weird how normal it was for children to be sent away, or to live apart from their families. My great uncle lived in the basement of his high school earned his keep as a janitor after school because his dad and new stepmother moved away and didn't want him living with them. I wonder if all our current nostalgia for childhood comes from the fact that most people have had fairly happy childhoods.
My mother's family lived on the North Dakota-South Dakota border which I imagine had some similar dynamics to your family in Oklahoma. There's a certain intensity that comes from living in an environment where you've seen neighbors destroyed by failing to manage their farm and finances adequately. (With the further complication that "destruction" generally meant driving a beat-up truck to Fargo or Minneapolis to make decent money with the work ethic and skills required to run a farm.) Deciding whether to allow someone to "come home" was a big drama, which said a lot about who the family was.
My aunt suffered from mental illness from much of her adulthood, but she was actually something of a role model to me, because she was single, and had her own apartment, and worked a job that was just her way of making money, and wasn't grimly driven by her duties to family and work that was a "vocation". She always seemed much lighter than my parents or grandparents, even though now I can see she experience a lot of unhappiness. When she died, there were a bunch of papers in a safe deposit box that I decided I wanted, so I could learn more about her. No major revelations or anything, but it made me aware of some cruelty on the part of my grandparents that was disappointing.
If you do end up researching Josephine, do it with the understanding that everyone involved was under a lot of stress, and undoubtedly said and did some things they were not proud of when they were at the limits of their emotional resources. Figuring out what those stresses actually were is a big part of the research.
"I imagine an uneasy young woman who always had one foot out and one foot in, who insisted on social rules and on dressing well because they were ways she could objectively be doing things “right,” who dragged out an engagement she really didn’t want to ludicrous heights until she decided to blow up her life to see what happened. And what happened was, she landed right where she started. I’d be bitter too."
...the bolter?