hi everybody,

5am: prayers 7am: trying to figure out how to join in the conversation here. am feeling tender and understanding about everything. not quite a part of everything that has been going on, but a part of this village enough, to gab a little. out of respect for all who have an established place here, i have been waiting patiently for things to slow down a little.

every list has it's cycles, and we are going through one of them. everything will be okay. everybody is okay.:)

i know?! how about a little more, about me? heheh? no? well, here it is anyway! lol! i am 5'0", weight fluctuates. all i have to say about *that is....i am veddy water rich(like it is said in "Dune"). i am almost 60yrs old, and feel younger by the minute, it seems. well, older sometimes...and sometimes there is a nice polarity that sets in...anybody *stricken with any of that?

am not a newcomer to life, not by a long shot, and full of beans....boston beans, if anyone is asking?:) my grandmother, whom i take after in thought and deed, and all the bad stuff too, mind you....was pequot. i suppose i could talk about all the rotten black hearted deeds her french fur trapping husband, my grandfather did to her and the kids, but nope, too typical, too predictable, etc. am not after a battering story about how gramma got him a good one, back in.......nope! lol! and oh! did it hurt, and was he ever careful, from there on! lol! forward!.......don't mess with gramma for too long, i guess! charge! hehehehe!

grandmother came down out of canada, only after all eleven, (or was it thirteen?--there goes the memory again, martha---) surviving kids had settled here, in the U.S. she was probably the only one out of the family that did not assimilate in any fashion, that was noticeable, anyway. she was not a traditional, or laden with anything secret and out of the way stuff....meaning, she shared what she knew, could be direct with folks, and had a thing about pumpkins! boy, did she ever get down with those pumpkins! lol! when she moved to the U.S....one of the big family discussions was, how to set liz up with the dang pumpkins! gramma needed pumpkins for harvest festival. it was a year long thing for her. the seeds, were very important, and a veddy big part of the deal. pumpkin soup was another. anything to do with pumpkins, squash, yams...oh, the yams! no irish potatoes anywhere, just the yams.

although, she had returned to her ancestral homeland, she also had to make peace with the spirits of the area. she had to get special permission for the planting. the seeds were from canada, after all! lol! they were carried from rhode island generations ago. all in all, she still considered them canadian. gramma liz did not consider herself traditional, remember now.:) she only lived as she had learned to live and was very down to earth, easy to laugh at herself, as well as laugh along with others. she had her limits, knew where to draw the line, and was a good judge of character. she lived as a daughter of her *disappeared* nation, in the true sense of the word.

gramma never defined anyone else's trip in life. she figured she had enough to accomplish with her own. what she *did do on occasion, was to encourage, give a helping hand, and kick butt. she believed herself to be a human being, and most everyone else, for that matter. no more, no less. human being and indian, were intercangeable words in the family. was kept simple that way.

back to the pumpkins...the great family summit over the pumpkins was solved. liz would store the pumpkins in the old shed that was attached to the house. it was no root cellar, but it turned out just fine. she set up in that shed, like nobody's business. she even got a *still(sp?)going!:D heavy into herbs.:D liz did some of her best beadwork out there. worked with the shells, too. piles of shells everywhere, either soaking, drying, being prepared to be ground down, polished.....

one interesting point about gramma, she would never, in a million years, take a sweat. there was the womans' lodge, and the men took sweats. the men needed to purify. the women purified in other ways. heheh.....just a small aside, while i am at it.

gramma liz never told anybody what or how to live life. she did it by example, and very unassumingly, as was done for her. she just plain did it.:)

nuff said about gramma! lol! if you know gramma, then you know me. look like her too. have to admit that the stature part, for this one, is still a work in progress. gramma had the stature, alright! that is how it happened, in this lifetime anyway. heheh! gramma's fav sister raised me part of my life. her name was lala belle. how is *that for a name?! everybody called her lala. what is not to love with all those old timey names?:) i thought lala was my gramma, until somebody told me differently, much later in life, and lala had already passed on! lol! she was a great grandmother, anyway. stood in for liz, right and proper.

i don't have an indian name, that i know of, anyway. it is true, that a lot of things were kept quiet, many secrets, low profiles, etc. don't know anybody in the family who has an indian name, either. i got my name from my dad's fav brother, paul. simple as that. my family is indian, alright, but the human being was stressed, and keeping it real.

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