What is Community?

Great-Great-Grandfather Gerhart (left) with friends

Webster defines community as society in general. This seems very rather impersonal to me. I like the definitions that defines community as “the condition of living with others, friendly association and fellowship." Most Americans think of community as a place where they feel wanted and safe. Unfortunately with the unrest and turmoil within the world today, some still search for this sense of belonging and safety. 

The idea of a utopian community is not new. There have been more than a few experimental communities in our history. Some have remained such as the Shaker’s community; others are long gone. Communes that had a social purpose such as a “service commune” had great staying power, such as the Koinonia Farm in Georgia. Founded in 1942, Koinonia tried to bring racial integration and farm technology to the rural Southern poor. In 1970, there were 2,000 communes, more than at any other time in history as people strived for a better way of living in society away from the city’s hustle and bustle. They wanted a simpler life, a more natural life than what the bright lights and machinations could give them. The most extreme experiment was the Oneida colony. The Oneida colony was founded by Humphrey Noyes in New York State in…. This group practiced a form of group marriage. It was the most radical and controversial utopian community in United States history. Noyes called his group “Perfectionists.” This group started out as a bible study group in Putney, Vermont. Followers believed that Christ demanded and promised perfection on Earth. At its peak, more than 200 people belonged to the commune. They practiced “complex marriage” or what may be more akin to what the 1970 hippies may have called “free love.” In his pamphlet, “Slavery and Marriage,” Noyes stated that exclusiveness in a love relationship was un-Christian. He also felt that marriage w as demeaning to women because it forced them into unwanted pregnancies and menial work. Children were raised communally in Oneida instead of by their parent. 

After failing at farming, the Oneida commune turned to manufacturing steel traps, travel bags and silverware which also contributed to their income which was also shared communally and business was ran by committee. Eventually due to public condemnation of their sexual eccentricity, they were forced to give up their group marriages, and many entered into traditional marriages. They gave up communal ownership of property and became a joint-stock company in 1881. Founder Noyes, under prosecution for adultery, fled to Canada. Currently they have continued  as one of the world’s largest designers and sellers of stainless steel and silverplated cutlery and tableware, operating in the U.S. Canada, Mexico and Latin America, where they market and distribute tabletop products such as flatware, dinnerware, glassware, kitchen tools and gadgets. 

Now in the digital age of the 2000s, this yearning is again making itself known. People are returning to farming, gardening, recycling, reusing as they learn to take care of the Earth’s resources and build a better community for their children and in doing so, sowing the seeds of regeneration in a world that had seemingly been lost in the technological bubble. People are learning to use technology as a tool but not as a crutch. As people strive to keep their sense of community, which at one time was very narrow and local, we now have to realize that we live in a global community and that, at humans, we all share common goals and needs; among them, adequate healthy food, clean air and clean water, safety from the elements and from oppression. These we need and want to sustain us and give us the ability to choose one’s own actions and fulfill ones’ dreams of a better future for ourselves, our children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren as well. And as we do live in this global community, we should want this for our neighbors as well in the spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. These are the highest ideals of the utopian community. It will remain to be seen if any society can achieve all of those goals on a collective scale but even so, we have to try. We are all one big family on this big, blue marble. Let’s try to be a happy one. This may sound like a Pollyanna way of thinking but not a bad idea if you ask me. For more information about current communal living experiments, “Intentional Living or the “Co-Living” models, visit The Fellowship for Intentional Community. Namaste! - Helen

Grandma Goldie's Aprons

Some people say that something as simple as a fragrance can take them back to childhood memories. For me, it is this apron. And the aprons. If you saw grandma putting on her apron, you knew dinner wouldn't be far away. I had never seen her cook without one. She had a lot of different styles of aprons, usually for bigger meals, she would don a full apron, with the bib going up like a pinafore. An avid seamstress, she made most of them. My mother gifted me with this one last year. To me it represents all the things inherent in my ideas of her; her affection for me, her love of cooking, and her ideals of conventionality that said in those times women wore aprons in the kitchen. Aprons are making a comeback, perhaps for the nostalgia or for purpose, it's to be debated. My grandmother's apron now holds a special place as a piece of family history. This item, in addition to photos and a pineapple doilie that she made, are the only two things of hers that I own. For this reason, they are priceless keepsakes and a link to my childhood. 

So when I got out this apron today to post my blog on this Thanksgiving Day, 2016,  it was a trip back in time to Grandma's kitchen where there was always something cooking and grandma was most likely telling a joke or singing a song while she did it. The holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas at my Grandma Goldie and Earnest at their Muskegon, Michigan home were some of my fondest memories. I spent my first Thanksgiving there when I was five in 1959 after moving here permanently from Texas. Although it wasn’t a large kitchen, it had the usual 1950’s appliances, and she had her electric mixers but still often used the hand mixers.  It was a place that throughout my childhood, her house remained much the same except for the occasional moving of furniture.  Most every memory of Grandma's kitchen is pleasant; the large oak table that the whole family would sit around; uncles, aunts, my cousins, with grandpa sitting in the “captains” chair at the head of the table. This was no ordinary table – nothing like the imitation wooden ones they make today. This was an immense, solid oak table, large enough to accommodate twelve people, with two leaves in the center, which was needed when all the family was gathered. 

Goldie and Ernest Cummins W/Junior

 

Her plates with their golden wheat design decked it out with red and white cloth napkins. Her mixing bowls were the same wheat design. The large, rectangular tablecloth that adorned the table at special dinners, was hand-crocheted by her, in her favorite pineapple pattern. I laugh now when I think of always getting to sit in the high red chair with the steps that, being the littlest, always got to sit in in order to reach the table; and watching the eyes of the black and white kitty-cat clock move from side to side on its smiling face and the tale swish back and forth keeping the time on the dining-room wall.  I can see the spirits of my uncles, now passed on and my aunts, my favorite cousin and sometimes partner in childhood silliness, Mike also gone now; my mother and us four kids sitting around that table, laughing and enjoying food and deciding who was going to get the leg of the turkey (I always wanted it, but of course, could never finish one) and whether anybody was going to have room for pie. What a question! Of course we had room for pie. Ah, the pies! My grandmother was an excellent cook for the staples; but her cakes and pies were truly a joy; pumpkin, mincemeat, lemonmeringue, apple with golden brown cinnamon and sugar crust and my favorite;cherry.  It was heaven.  It was home. It was love.

Any ordinary meal at her house was big doings; the table had to be set and the dishes brought out and placed on it. She would make her homemade soup, stews, dumplings, freshly baked bread, cinnamon rolls, roast beef with potatoes and so much more. Even if it was a "pie" day; dinner was always served with dessert, even if it was just jello or pudding. But often it would also be homemade donuts or sticky buns with crusted brown sugar and pecans at the bottom would make your mouth water, or fresh baked bread (oh, the aroma!), or pancakes on a cold winter morning served with real maple syrup; Goldie made all with quickness, expertise, and of course, love.  The apron reminded me that to her I owe much, and I have never had the chance to tell her, as she passed away in 1965 when I was 15; even though we sometimes had differences. She could be stern, and no nonsense, would tell me I was fidgety when she was trying to watch her shows (I was) or yelling at my cousin Mike and I when we ate the grapes in the backyard before they were ripe; "You'll get a bellyache!" (we did). But all and all, she was kind to me and was especially kind when she let me help her cook. It was a wonderful teaching experience for me, showing me how to crack an egg with one hand, which I still have never mastered; and how to beat the egg whites for angel food cake just so or else the batter won’t mix properly and other kitchen magic she had learned with years of practice.

These are the times that to me feel like home. My memories of Grandma's kitchen are happy ones and remain forever etched on my memory.  While things change over time, families grow up, have families of their own; it is this sense of family that enables me to know that no matter what, whether we eat turkey, chicken, or whatever, its family and the memories of the love shown to us that is important.  It is these memories that fashioned my ideas of how I wanted to incorporate holiday traditions when I had my own family and what traditions I thought were important to pass on. 

I hope that you and your family have the opportunity to make memories and share laughter, stories, memories and love as we begin the holiday season.  hope you enjoyed this post. HAPPY THANKSGIVING! Marie

A Blended Heritage

Christmas, circa 1940s, Cummins household

To get our family history and background, I have had many conversations about it with my mother on my mother’s side. Like me she loves the stories about the family and talking about family history. A few years ago, I copied off all of her old photographs and have uploaded them.

Ernest and Golden Cummins

I was born in Laredo, Texas in 1954, having moved to Michigan as a young child. Muskegon, Michigan is a medium sized urban port city on the Western shore of Lake Michigan. Laredo is a small town that borders the United States and Mexico. It was rural in the early 1950’s but is now a bustling city that has seen much growth. After growing up here, I decided to stay in the Muskegon area to raise my daughters because of family and because the city schools were seen to better than the rural schools in the area in addition to it being closer to working as a medical transcriber at a local hospital for many years. My Great-Grandfather Jose Cisneros, was born in 1918 in Joyce, Texas, a small village that washed away in a flood in the early 1960s, leaving no records. He came to Michigan in the early 1940s to find work in the pickle fields, going to Crystal Valley, where he met my mother,  Alice Cummins, who was born in Crystal Valley in 1922. Crystal Valley is an extremely small rural area in Northern Oceana County, Michigan. The Great Depression was going strong when they lived in Crystal Valley, thus the family made brine pickles and sold them door to door on a wagon.

The house on Albert Avenue, Muskegon, Michigan

The first of the Cummins in America was Isaac Cummins of Ipswich, Massachusetts who is said to have come on either the Gifte or the Talbot George ship in 1639 in the wave of immigrants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, because of exile or escaping religious persecution.  The first Cummins who came to Michigan was Benjamin Cummins born in 1772 and moved to Michgan from New York State when Michigan became a state in order to gain a land grant, settling in Richland, Kalamazoo County. Benjamin was a Ferrier, a person who shoes horses and a soldier in the war of 1812. Family oral history says he was the inventor of the circular saw but did not patent it. The predominate language spoken by grandparents and great-grandparents was English, although their remains a few idiosyncrasies in certain words that have remained such as mother’s use of the word “squeejawed” which is found to be from the Massachusetts area. People in Michigan tend to use the word “kittycorner” to mean the same thing. 

The Family gets a new car (Golden on rt, Alice rt in car)

Many family members came to reside in the Muskegon area to work in the foundries. Like many others, I stayed in the city because family ties, better education for children, and being closer to the availability of work. My father, both grandfathers, and grandmother all, at varies times throughout their lives, worked at the foundries and factories within the city of Muskegon. The pull was better pay than rural manual labor and better living conditions for the families and offered more opportunities for financial security as Muskegon was a growing city due to the automobile industry, and later making turbine engines and components for the war effort.  Grandparents Ernest and Golden Cummins came to Muskegon after their farm in Crystal Valley Oceana County burned and Ernest found work at Continental Motor Company and retired there in the late 1950s. My father most likely chose farm work when coming to Michigan because of his lack of a formal education, thus was not able to find more than menial labor. He did face discrimination in the form of not being served when he went into Muskegon restaurants in the 1940s. But before coming North, he worked at a Smelter in Laredo, and was noted to have helped unionize the workers. This smelter closed down. This may also have prompted his coming North. Some of the challenges and difficulties faced by great-great-grandparents and great-grandparents was the poverty caused by the Great Depression. Grandfather Tomas Cisneros who was originally from Villa Mina, Mexico, was said to have immigrated to America to avoid the political conflicts and to avoid being conscripted into the Mexican army. Benjamin Cummins, great-great-grandfather, left New York with his 22 children, wife with his belongs by wagon to buy land in Michigan.

Alice Grace Cummins Cisneros, age 21

The concept of the “melting pot” is the idea that the diverse groups of people with differing ethnicities, backgrounds, or religious differences should assimilate and meld into the surrounding culture, thereby losing their former identity, language and traditions and forming a new coalesced one. The melting pot was the ideal notion that it was best for everyone within the society to blend these different identities and make them into one distinct identify or people. In this case: American. This is compared to the idea of a “salad bowl” whereby these diverse groups of people retain more of their original identities, language, culture, and traditions and is more pluralistic, with these different groups coexisting in the separate identifies.

Tomas Cisneros (seated) Jose on rt.

I consider our family more in line with the “melting pot” ideal because most of our traditions, celebrations, and this culture does not differ much from the rest of what other Americans. We typically celebrate holidays such as the Fourth of July by shooting off fireworks or having picnics. We celebrate Christmas and Easter very similar to everyone else in our community and involve very few traditions that would have come from the ancestors, except perhaps in some traditional foods that we make on certain occasions. These traditions or celebrations are only spoken of or noted as a matter of passing interest, perhaps reminiscing about what the great-grandparents did in times past but not really incorporating them into our own traditions. Most of our family traditions are relatively new, being handed down from grandparents only, except for particular foods. Thus, culturally our family has only retained our connections to former countries of origin in the form of certain types of food we eat; such as the making of stuffed cabbage from grand-mother Goldie; tamales from grandparents with Mexican roots, or the making of traditional Scottish shortbread from mother, Alice Cummins or chicken and dumplings from Grandmother, Golden Cummins. While they may seem trivial, in some small way it continues to give us a sense of home and heritage in keeping these in the family. It is still a connection to the past. Thus, culturally we have assimilated into what is considered this melting pot of America into a unique identity combining my Polish, Spanish, Mexican, and Scottish heritage.

Clan Cummins Tartan

I am grateful for my family’s diversity with ties in various generations to France,England, Ireland,Germany, Scotlandand Mexico,  America. Like many others, we fit into the same melting pot as other immigrants as well as for similar reasons; economic opportunities. They also immigrated to avoid the hardships of their native countries, or were forced out of their countries due to political strife or warfare: The Scottish exiles and removals, the Polish Diaspora in the 1890s, and the Bracero programs of immigration in Mexico in the 1930s up to the 1950s. This combination gives me a sense of pride to know the hardships my ancestors endured in order to forge a way in this new land, how strong they were to have survived the hardships in order to try and make a better life for them and their children. While this is not a concise genealogy, it does give a general idea since many ancestors have passed and with the generations getting older, it is more difficult to sort out each individual and where they lived at certain times of their lives. It was only through my mother’s memory of them that I was able to get a sense of who they were. 

This is the time of year where favorite family memories are the in the uppermost part of our minds. I sincerely hope that you are able make your own cherished memories this year with friends and family for tomorrow's generation. -Marie Helen

Gram Kendra holds the newest edition-Vera LaBeau

Stormey and Vera LaBeau, Great-Grandchildren

Grandkids Making Christmas cookies, 2014

Christmas, 2014

IT'S HALLOWEEN!

                                                  What to do this Halloween....

Paint a pumpkin!

Paint your face!

Dress like a super hero!

                     But no matter how you celebrate the holiday, spend it with family!

                                                HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

Autumn Gold and harvest home

The greenery of summer is winding down, but don't let it get you down. Now is the time for the richness of golden yellow and orange-red leaves of autumn; with it cozying up with hot cider or hot cocoa after a long day, with the abundance of the harvest of fall produce found at farmers markets or fruit stands. To me autumn is synonymous with family, hearth and home. This is the true gold of autumn.-Helen

Let's celebrate the month of May!

Tiger Lily

The month of May is upon us. Flowers are finally in bloom, people are out and about getting their gardens ready, cleaning their yards for summer parties. Phew it’s a busy month. We have May Day on the first, Cinco De Mayo on the fifth, Teacher’s Day, Mother’s Day, and of course Memorial Day. And if that’s not all, May is National Asparagus month, National Salsa Month, National Barbeque Month, Egg Barbeque Month, National Hamburger Month, and others.

There are also many other Traditional celebrations around the world during the month of May. In Europe, May Day brings girls bedecked with flower garlands dancing around a Maypole. In England, there is a traditional dance called the English Morris Dance. Jews celebrate the giving of the Ten Commandments at Shavuoth. Flowers and plants decorate the synagogues. In Japan, there is a boy’s festival celebrated on May 5^th.  Streamers in the shape of fish are put onto poles. Cinco De Mayo, once a minor Mexican holiday is gaining prominence in the United States and is celebrated with dancing, grito contests, music, and plenty of food.

During the Roman days, there was the festival of Maia where they celebrated the god Mercury on the first day of the Month, possibly the origins of May Day celebrations in Europe as a fertility rite. As an agricultural holiday, it was the time where flocks and herds were sent out to pasture for summer grazing. The ancient Celts called this time Beltane and lit bright fires to celebrate. The dance around the Maypole was traditional from the British Isles to Bavaria. In European celebrations, their traditional May Day celebrations featured a man dressed all in green called Green George.

Since the 20^th century May Day has  turned more political with worker’s parades a common feature as a sort of Labour Day in many countries.

The end of May usually is the official start of the summer season in most parts of the U.S. We also celebrate our brave heroes, who have served bravely for our Country with many parades and ceremonies. We also gather for family barbeques and picnics to start off the summer. What would be more fitting than to gather family together at this time to honor them? Have a Good Day.

There are many sites on the web about holidays, this is just one: Holidays in the United States in 2015.

For some great recipes for the month of May check out The Nibble

I got those holiday blues already.

I used to love the holidays, from Halloween on, it was always fun to