Jaci Dawn

Our trip to see our newest grandchild was also a trip that brought closure to some pain in my life. I wasn’t seeking that closure, wasn’t even looking for it. I had accepted that grief was part of the season of life I am in, and I really was only looking forward to seeing (and holding) Korinne, Micah and Justin.

It was accidental that we had time to drive to Winnemucca to scatter Dad’s ashes. If U-Haul would have rented a trailer to us, we would have spent  the 4th of July sorting through boxes and loading the trailer. But U-Haul will not rent to anyone driving a Ford Explorer, so we were left with extra time on our hands. And extra time meant a private family disbursement of Dad’s ashes into the same winds that blow Mom’s ashes over the Santa Rosas.

As it happened, so much of the drive was on familiar roads, evoking memories of different times and seasons.

In 2009, when I made the drive along I-70 with my brother, I eyeballed the jewelry being sold by Native Americans at the scenic rest stops. I didn’t buy anything, just looked.

This trip, I looked and contemplated.

My mother loved these peddlers. She returned home from an adventure with family friends along I-70 and gushed about the jewelry she’d purchased from “an old Indian on top of the mountain.”

My mother spoke in words that invoked an image of a wrinkled, ancient, white-haired Navajo with arthritis in her knuckles, sitting cross-legged on the rock beside her blankets of silver and turquoise jewelry in the hot sun and blowing wind.

Most of the peddlers were much younger women. They sat in lawn chairs in the sparse shade, drank bottled water and kept coolers in their cars.

We pulled into a rest area on the way west to Nevada and I realized I had not purchased any jewelry in honor of my mom and her legendary old Indian woman. I really wanted to do that.

There was only one peddler at this rest stop, a woman with two black braids that fell down the front of her T-shirt. She looked to be about the same age as myself. She said nothing as I perused the goods. Some of it nice, some of it so-so. That’s how it is at all the rest areas, with all the peddlers: same stuff, but a little different.

There was also some pottery and I recalled seeing one of the other Indians at another rest area packing up the little bits of pottery. I probably wouldn’t have thought much of it, but this woman had something else out beside the pottery: Christmas ornaments in a Southwest Native American theme. Several were marked with a little sign, “horse hair pottery“.

Horses are something I have a hard time passing by.

I purchased a Christmas ornament.

It was a little spendy, but I knew that it was the gift my mother would have wanted me to pick out. I don’t know how I knew that, but I knew it. Jewelry would have been something she would have gone for, but she always urged each of us kids to forge our own way and there it was: a horse on a Christmas ornament decorated with horse hair.

“Do you want it wrapped?” she asked.

I followed her to her car and waited while she wrapped it in bubble wrap and placed it in a paper bag with little business cards.

She talked the entire time, telling me a story about her grandson and how she was worried about him. Her son and some woman had a child together, but they separated before the child was even born. The woman did not care for the child, didn’t hold him, just ignored him. The Tribal Council came to the grandmother and wanted her to step in and take the child.

She considered her life as a peddler and the long hours she spends on the mountain passes. Hot hours, cold hours. She determined it was not a good life for a baby and said no.

The council came back to her after a couple years. Please take the baby. So she did.

He did not know how to sit in the bathtub and play with water. He still drank from a bottle and did not know how to eat. He did not walk.

She put him in day care and had to leave the mountain every day at 4 in order to be back in town to pick him up. She taught him to splash in the bathtub.

Her son works as a well driller and travels to Wyoming. He sends the child’s mother $1,000.00 but the money is always gone by the second day and the child has nothing. Her son wants to raise his son.

She wants to keep the child from his real mother. Teach him to read, talk, laugh.

His name is Junior III, after his grandfather, Junior.

Other people came and wanted to buy from the woman, but she kept talking to me, telling me about this pain in her life, this sorrow that haunted her as she sat on the mountain, alone, peddling her wares.

Finally we were in the car and backing out. Don turned to me and said, “What was that all about? Suddenly you were her best friend.”

I don’t know. Kindred spirit. Maybe she knew I would remember. Maybe she knew I would look her in the eyes and listen without judgment. Maybe I didn’t treat her like a stranger, so she didn’t treat me like one.

I really don’t know.

But I will always think of and pray for Junior and his grandmother when I look at the ornament.

According to her business cards, the thin lines are from a horse’s mane and the thick lines are from the tail hairs. It is fired in a kiln and you can’t predict how the hair will melt onto the pottery. Every piece is unique.

Her name was Lora. She lives in Arizona some times and in Utah some times. Her business card gave me her phone number in both states and a PO Box address in both states.

And somehow, buying that Christmas ornament and listening to Lora’s story, I felt my mother’s spirit pass over and through me.

Just another little bit of closure.