10:10am Writing Practice 60° Boise
I got my good start yesterday, 970 words. I edited it a little this morning based on what I found while revisiting the while box. It took a while to find what I wanted, what I had read before. I found the stories finally but they weren't in the detail that I see in my mind when I think of them. My mind has done a trick and has fleshed out the stories in such a way that I can see people --- it has provided details that were not on those pages when I read them four years ago and they're still not there. The stories are rather flat, in fact. If I can tell them the way I see them in my mind, they will be exciting and touching and if I tell them in that way and make sure the reader knows that the details sprang to life on their own without my even knowing it, maybe that will be OK.
Rachael Riley McDaniel is the intrepid character of this story but cousin Carolyn McDaniel assures me that she was no big deal. I hope my differences with CMcD can be resolved so that I can ask more questions. Rachael's husband, James Harrison McDaniel, "Had" is what he was called, died at age 50 and left the family adrift. Rachael had grown kids that were married but she also had some young ones still at home. They owned a butcher shop in Michigan City, Indiana. Had was the only son of Joseph McDaniel, originally from Virginia. Why they moved to Indiana is anyone's guess. Joseph and his wife are buried there and so is Had.
After Had died, Rachael sold the butcher shop, packed up what she could take, grabbed the kids still at home and hopped a train to Spokane, Washington, about 2000 miles away. Who does that? I'll have to read the account again, it seems that some of her family had moved out there and she was going to be with them. But she left her grown sons and their families in Indiana, along with her home and all her friends. She struck out heading west with a few trunks and a kid on each hand at an age when most women were beginning to settle into to the grandmother years.
Just to put this in context, Rachael would be wearing skirts that covered her legs. Women did not have the vote, they barely had a name of their own which was only used by family or close friends. She would have been called Mrs McDaniel at all times. Also, train travel in those days, while considerably faster than the alternatives --- horse, horse and wagon, foot --- it was by no means fast. The trip from Indiana to Spokane, WA took at least a month, probably closer to six weeks! Six weeks with no bed, no shower, very little food except what could be scrounged along the way. That trip alone strikes me as fantastical and I wish Rachael had kept a journal. I don't have the dates of the trip so I don't know the time of year they traveled. So much has been lost through the years and now a major life journey has been relegated to a sentence in a paragraph that includes no details at all, except the ones provided by my own vivid imagination.
After breakfast, I'm going to scan the pages I found and e-mail them to Carolyn. Maybe that will warm her up, although as far as I know, once she has turned on someone, she never turns back. That also must be a family trait. I'm going to find some answers to my questions and try to formulate a narrative to start this story off. Because as far as I can tell, Rachael Riley McDaniel was the ancestor who provided the genes that kicked off my life as a risk taker and a mover and wanderer, always searching for a home the was out there somewhere, just out of sight, never where I lay my head. To understand my life, I'd really love to have a story for hers.
694 words today.
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