What I know

Like everyone in the universe I know some things and don’t know a lot more.

I’m fair-to-good at being a mom and a writer. I’ve been doing the mom gig for almost 30 years. I have seven children and as I type this they are all employed, three are married, I have one grandson and two are still living at home with one moving out this month. I know a little about being a mom and still answer to the occasional “Mom!” in the grocery store.

I have home schooled my children, or as I like to say, I have practiced the art of home education. Most of us learn things in our home or go different places or to different people to learn things. We get out educational DVDs or attend webinars or watch short youtube clips about how to do a certain thing: bake bread, kill ants, start tomatoes inside, make hummus, find recipes, attract birds to our backyard, build a Works bomb, trim a tree, fix a flat, cast on to start a scarf … All that is home education. Now that I have been educating my children (and myself) at home for many years I also help those that are starting out in the adventure.

I’ve been writing for over 20 years and in most of those years I’ve managed to get something published – magazines, newsletters, Themestream (ever heard of that?), newspapers, books … I’ve conducted workshops and classes just to be with other writers. I’ve written a bunch of books and two have gotten published, not with a big publisher, but published as in people have read them and check them out at the local library and sometimes even buy one. When I get time I write letters, create and send cards, blog, post quirky things on Facebook, pray for people via Internet and send over 500 emails a week.

I’ve been a reporter for over 10 years, three of which I spent as an editor. I have worked with lots of talented writers and worked under five editors with five different views of what a newspaper is all about. I have also worked with a few magazine editors and a few freelance ones. At the time of this writing I am working as a freelancer.

I don’t get to travel. I don’t know Karate. I know just a little yoga and even less pilotes. I can shoot a gun. I can clean a fish. I haven’t gone hunting since that day in the desert where the jack rabbit got away. I can do a little painting and some drawing. I can play a little piano and a few other instruments. I don’t know how to dance much and every partner I’ve ever had has complained about me leading – so I guess that means I don’t know how to travel.

Right now I am studying personality traits – I am an INJF.

I own several cats, to tell you how many I’d have to go out and feed them and count. It varies from day to day. I have to Japanese Fighting Fish, once I bought, the other I adopted when my daughter moved out.

Right now I am feeding the cardinals, blue jays and I think they are called buntings – cute little fuzzy gray birds with white bellies. I love trees and plant new ones on our property whenever I get extra money. We buy a balled Christmas tree each year and plant it the first of the year. I can walk up my driveway and point out the Christmas trees from 1997, 1996, 1998 … all of which are over 15 feet tall. We have an apple orchard that needs a lot of work. It did not produce much this year, but next year should be better.

I garden. I experiment. I take saplings and braid them. I have a dogwood/apple tree that blooms from April until June.

One thing I learned as a writer - at 600 words people stop reading. See you tomorrow.

(By Rachel HT Mendell, 2015)

Back Story

I was born in Waupaca, Wisconsin, to my parents who were living in Chicago at the time. I spent the first two months of my life in Chicago until my mom found a rat in my crib and decided Chicago was no place to raise a baby. So my parents moved to Kimberly, Wisconsin, where my dad worked in a shop that sold and repaired television sets – the black and white kind.

When I was about five or six, I was allowed to go to my dad’s shop one evening to watch “The Wizard of Oz” on the rare and expensive color TV. I still remember my mom exclaiming how beautiful it was when the black and white of Kansas turned into the beautiful rainbow of the Land of Oz.

When I was eight we took a trip Out West. My parents fell in love with Phoenix. We moved the next year. My dad was pretty talented and job openings were plentiful. We were still hanging out at the hotel for the second day when he was hired. We moved around a bit and finally settled a block from the North Phoenix Union High School that I attended when I turned 14. The neighborhood is now historical and the south-of-Virginia-Avenue slums have been converted to $120,000 historic ranch homes. 

Travel an hour or so out of Phoenix in any direction and enjoy the desert.

I attended a small teachers college in Minnesota which allowed me to spend my winters in the frigid north and summers in the arid south. And still, I could not get a tan.

After graduation I taught at a high school in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, then moved to Columbus, Ohio, to teach third and fourth grade in a tiny church school. After two years I married the man I met in LaCrosse (best place to get a husband) and quit to work at Frank’s Nursery and Crafts. I loved that job, but quit when I was seven months pregnant. I wanted to raise my family full time.

We moved every summer from rental to rental and we had a child every two years. Then, after baby number three, we bought a trailer and rented a space in Pataskala. My white trash years were memorable and no one questioned the wisdom of a trailer park mom having six kids.

We found a company that also built on vacant property. We traded in our trailer for a modular that was built on five acres we had purchased in northern Morrow County. Living in the country ignited my dormant urge to write and here we are, plus one more baby to make it an even seven, two published books to my name, three blogs, two Facebook pages and several thousand articles published in five different newspapers.

Thanks, Gramma Paulsen, and Mom, for giving me the bug to write and the encouragement to do what I like. Thanks, Dad, for giving me the balance and determination to want to do what I must.