Around 30 years ago, I went into training as an Earth-Mother. I began to bake my own bread, make my own granola, my own yogurt. I started an herb garden and made my own teas. I bought vegetarian cookbooks and shopped at health food stores, just then becoming more popular and carrying more items. “Meat” became a dirty word in my house. My husband, whose indulgent mother had let him continue his childish eating preferences way into adulthood, hated vegetables and refused to eat them. He liked hamburger, fried chicken, wienies, jello, and ice cream. He hated my natural food regime and began eating his biggest meal at lunch, where he could go to a restaurant and have as much fat and grease and additives as he liked.

I thought he was ridiculous and was determined to prove to him that he just thought he hated vegetables – it was all in his mind, not in his mouth. One day I found a recipe for spaghetti squash casserole. The recipe said that the squash both looked and tasted like spaghetti, especially if you poured marinara sauce over it and slathered it with cheese. I made this concoction and served it for dinner one night, telling my husband and 6-year old daughter that it was spaghetti. (It was a lie for their own good, you see.)

The recipe didn’t lie in one respect – it did look like spaghetti. My husband suspected nothing and took a big bite. But he didn’t swallow; his cheeks ballooned out, his eyes got huge, and he started making gagging sounds. He leaped from the table, heading for the bathroom, making retching noises all the way. In his haste he upset the table, and tomato sauce flew in all directions – on the walls, the windows, the ceiling, my shirt, our daughter’s hair.

Although she was charmed with the drama, naturally our daughter refused to eat the spaghetti squash casserole too. And I must admit, I didn’t like it either.

Being an Earth Mother is not that easy.

How many of us wish they had an ancestor’s story, told in their own words? Sometimes all we know is a tantalizing tidbit: a tiny piece of an ancestor’s story that raises as many questions as it answers. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, we think, to know the hopes, dreams, wishes and fears of Great-Great-Grandma as she bounced over the plains in a covered wagon? Wouldn’t it be cool to know what Great-Great Uncle Joe was thinking while he robbed that bank? And why did Great-great-great Grandpa leave Scotland in such a hurry? Well, if they didn’t write their thoughts down, you’ll never know now.

I was told that my great-grandmother on my father’s side was Native American, from the Blackfoot tribe (now in Montana) – but then I was also told that she was a “half-breed” (a derogatory term of the time) and the Native American half was Nez Perce from Idaho – but then I was also told she wasn’t Native American at all, and born and raised in a small town in Kansas. The story depended on who you were talking to. It’s hard to know the truth now, since she’s been dead for over fifty years, and so is nearly everyone who really knew her.

Everyone does agree that her name was Isabelle Evelyn McKay and she died at the age of 90-something in 1954. Before that, there seems to be some disagreement. The story I like best is the one told me by her daughter, my great-aunt, now long deceased. It goes like this:

Evelyn McKay was born and raised on a reservation in Idaho (her daughter refused to name the tribe), and lived there until she was sixteen or so, in the mid-1880s. That’s when a circuit preacher rode onto her reservation. A circuit preacher meant that he rode (on horseback or in a buggy) between the little towns in eastern Washington, Idaho, and Montana, and preached his brand of Christianity for a few days, and then rode on. Towns would see him once or twice a year when he would regale them with hair-raising sermons on the hellfire and damnation he saw waiting for them. Those in the family who remember the Preacher agree that he was not a lovable man, being particularly given to frightening small children with vivid descriptions of hell.

But there must have been something about him, for he was able to convince the young Evelyn to marry him. He took her away with him and plunked her down somewhere in Eastern Washington, and left her there to birth and raise their seven children while he rode his rounds, totally uncaring of the vicious racial bias against Indians and “half-breeds” which was normal for the western towns of the time. She must have had a lonely, difficult life.

Or maybe not. Maybe she coped well with a Bible-thumping wanderer, and wasn’t the victim of anti-Indian prejudice. But I wish I knew for sure. I bet she had fascinating stories, at the very least. I wish I’d been around then to ask her questions and write her stories down. But no one did, and now those stories are as dead as she is.