EP6 - Milkweed

[00:00:01] Hi, everyone. This is Dawn Clem, and this is my podcast, Milkweed and monarchs. Today, I'm just going to take some time to let you know how I first became introduced to milkweed. [00:00:15] So, to start the story out, I'm going to talk about my mom's family. [00:00:20] My mom, as I said in the introductory episode, was born and raised in northern Ohio. [00:00:29] My grandparents got married right around 1926, and when they got married, my great grandfather gave them this 80 acre soybean farm as part of their dowry. He had four daughters. My grandma was the youngest one. All of them got a property, and the property they got was this soybean farm. She also had a hope chest. That's really when hope chests were invented, right around then or the late 18 hundreds. Women weren't working outside of the home then, and so they had to bring something into the marriage with them to show that they were committed to the marriage. So my grandma also had a hope chest. I still have that hope chest. And in the hope chest would be linens. [00:01:24] My grandma did a lot of sewing, embroidering. I still have pillowcases that she embroidered and little doilies for tables, and there would be sheets in there and blankets, and she always did patchwork quilts. She would sew them together with all different kinds of fabric remnants. [00:01:47] So there were things like that in there also maybe some dishes that were passed down or silverware. So she came with her hope chest, but she also came with this property. So pretty good deal for my grandpa, if you ask me. [00:02:02] So anyway, every year in her small town, my grandma would teach Bible school. And this was an opportunity for my mom to get a reprieve from my brother and myself. [00:02:17] So she would send us down there for two weeks. [00:02:21] My brother and I were 15 months apart in age. [00:02:26] I was the oldest, as I've told you, and he was the youngest, but I don't know if it was we were so close together or what, but we fought all the time, okay? We were always chasing each other around the house, pulling hair, hitting each other, kicking each other. And so my mom was like, I mean, she probably wondered, why am I a stay at home mom? I think my mom was more career oriented. So she really looked forward to those two weeks every summer where we would go down and spend the time with my grandparents. [00:03:02] But let me just say, it wasn't a hardship for my brother or myself either, because we absolutely loved going to that farm. So we would get down there with the understanding that we were not going to hear from my mom for two weeks. My grandparents had a telephone, but at that time, it was a party line. So it was hooked up to. I believe there were five different neighbors, including my grandma, that was on that party line. And there was no way in heck my mom was going to call my grandma and have my grandma tell her how terrible we had been. So she's like, you're getting dropped off, and you're not going to hear from me till the day I come and pick you up. It didn't seem to be so bad, really. I think we were younger when we first started going, probably about four and six. And we went there probably. I mean, I was still going there even as a teenager. So it's kind of funny when I look back, it probably was, like, six years or longer that we would go down every summer, and my grandma, like I said, would teach Bible school. So the first week we're there, we went to Bible school in the morning, and then we had the afternoon to ourselves when we came back to the farm. And the second week, we had all day long just to run around that farm. We absolutely loved it. I mean, it was just so much fun. They had a big barn, and there was usually a litter of kittens, new kittens there. And my grandma would tell us about it. So we would take a pan of milk out to the barn, and we would put it underneath the foundation of the barn. There was a crack there. So we were able to put our arm through the crack and put a pan of milk out for the kittens. Sometimes the kittens would make their way up to the house, too, but it was so much fun to see the little kittens. [00:05:03] They had a chicken coop with a lot of chickens and roosters. And so we looked forward to going into the chicken coop every day. And actually, we would try to go in there multiple times a day, because we just loved looking for eggs. I don't know why. Something that made us happy, they had two dogs when we were going. [00:05:24] They started out with a collie named Benny and then a Weinerheimer named Pluto. So those dogs were part of our exploration of the farm, too. And they went everywhere we went. [00:05:38] After one of them got older, I think it was Benny first, and Benny died. Then one summer when we were down there, we actually got to go with my grandpa and look for another dog. And that was so exciting, to pick out a puppy. We picked out the puppy, and my grandpa named him Gates because he loved the Detroit tigers. And so he wanted to name the dog after Gates Brown. So that was another great memory that we had. It was just so much fun being there. My grandma had a great huge garden with all kinds of vegetables in it, and I would spend hours out there picking the vegetables with her and helping her bring them back in and snapping the peas and cutting off the ends of the green beans. It was just such a simple life. [00:06:32] She actually taught me how to can, and I can to this day, so I'm so grateful for that. Really love it. And actually, I have a lot of her old mason jars, the blue green ones I got from her, and I can with those every year, so it's just a great memory for me. [00:06:54] There were so many things about that time we were there that we just loved. She would sit us down about 04:00 in front of the tv, and we would watch these old, old movies from, like the. My grandma always had dishes of great chocolate hanging around, so we would be sneaking chocolate while we were watching the old movies. And then at 05:00 my grandpa would come home from work. He worked in a granary downtown, and he would come home around five. My grandma would put on this hugest spread of food. You've never seen so much. It would start out like it was just a few simple little dishes, and by the time she was done, there were so many little dishes on that table, and everybody had a taste of everything that they loved. It was just a great time. But the best time that we had, really, was when my grandpa came home. Because as soon as he got done eating, he would haul us out of the house, get the tractor on out, and then we would ride with him on the tractor out to the soybean fields. And our job was to pull the weeds in between the rows of the soybeans. And the weeds that we were pulling were milkweed. So that was my first contact with milkweed. I've known about milkweed since I was six years old. I think the thing is, we'd never really thought anything about butterflies or monarchs at that time. We had no real understanding of it. He just thought that the milkweed was invasive to the crop, so he wanted us to pull the weed. The milkweed was tall, and it's quite a thick stalk, so pulling it out was no easy feat for a six year old. And a lot of times the milkweed would break, and if it broke, this thick, milky like substance comes out of it, thus the name, milkweed. And you're kind of a gooey mess. But we still did the best we could, and we had so much fun. When we went out in the farms, out in the fields, I should say. It was like six or 07:00 at night in northern Ohio and Michigan. It's light out until nine or 10:00 in the summer. So we were out there in daylight pulling milkweed. It started to get twilight while we were out there, but my grandpa had a headlight on the tractor, so that wasn't any real problem at all. But when we were out there, we didn't really see the butterflies. Or if we did, we didn't really pay that much attention to them because they are something that have always been around. So it didn't seem like anything unusual. [00:09:57] So we would get done pulling the weeds, and then my grandpa, he might have tilled like four or five rows. He would come back and he would say, okay, we're going to do something fun now. And he'd lift the tiller up in the back of the tractor, and he'd say, grab a bar, and we'd grab onto it. And then he would drag us around in the freshly tilled dirt. [00:10:25] We looked like giant dirt bombs, as you can imagine. But we absolutely loved it. We loved it so much. It was one of the best times of my life, really. Something so simple. [00:10:38] Then when we were done with that, he'd haul us all up on the tractor, because sometimes my cousins were there. Mostly it was just me and my brother. But if my cousins were there, we would all jump up on the tractor, and then my brother would drive home. He would sit on my grandpa's lap, and then he got to drive us back to the house. [00:10:58] Once we got back to the house, as you can imagine, my grandma would be standing on the porch. My grandma would have her hands on her hips and a stern look on her face. And believe me, she was stern. She was stern. I think about her and I think about my grandpa. And I go, how did they even get together? Because my grandpa was just such a character and always into fun and poking fun at people, and she was much more serious. So anyhow, there she was, standing with her hands on her hips, and she would be like, get into the bathtub right now. And she'd make us all strip down. If it was just me and my brother, we would run into that bathtub. She would come in, she would scrub our hair, scrub us down. We'd get out of the tub, she'd inspect us to make sure there was not one speck of dirt on us. And then we would get our pajamas on. If the other cousins were there, we'd have to go in shifts into the tub, because the tub was not that big. But the same thing happened with them that happened with us. [00:12:05] And then the next thing you know, we'd all get into our pajamas, and then my grandpa would want ice cream. Well, we didn't buy the ice cream from the store back then. We had an actual ice cream maker. So it was with the rock salt and the ice cubes, and you're trying to crank that thing. And all of us were taking turns, and it was so much fun, really. And we'd have vanilla ice cream, my grandpa's favorite. And then all of us would get a mason jar, even when it was just my brother and myself, because this was all just a routine. We'd get the mason jar, and then we'd go out in the yard, and we'd try to catch. We call them lightning bugs, but they're the fireflies. And then we'd have a contest to see who caught the most. We'd poke a hole in the lid in the top of the jar, and then the next day, we would let them all go again, and we'd start all over again. [00:13:08] So that was really my first interaction with milkweed. It was pulling milkweed so it didn't invade the soybean crop, and it really wasn't until years later. Even when I was doing the palliative care study, I really never thought about the milkweed. I was still thinking about the monarch. [00:13:32] So when I was trying to think about a title, I knew I wanted to have something to do with butterflies. And then, of course, why not go with monarch, the king of the butterfly, especially since they have the whole migration history. To me, that is just so fascinating. [00:13:56] So I started to learn more about them, and I learned about their relationship to the milkweed. So we did talk a little bit about how the milkweed provides the housing for where they lay their next eggs to become monarchs. And they also eat the leaves that contain the poison, which acts as a deterrent for any predator to the monarch. But we never talked about what does the monarch give back to the milkweed. [00:14:34] Well, when the monarch is eating the milkweed, pollen comes off the top of the milkweed, and they go to the next milkweed, and the pollen goes there on the next milkweed. So really what happens is the monarchs are the ones that are responsible for pollinating the milkweed, so they need each other for survival. [00:15:03] They are what you call a symbiotic, mutualistic relationship, which means that they need each other, and they both give something to the relationship that keeps both of them going. And that's really incredible. When you think about that, that is so incredible. [00:15:28] So then I started thinking about just that relationship and that relationship that we probably have with people in our lives. [00:15:41] Because there are people in your life that definitely make you who you are, right? Who encourage you or you need them. We all start out needing our parents when we become adults. We need our friends and relatives. We have mentors that we've had in our lives that change our lives. For me, as you know, it was the people in the navy. It can also be an unsung hero, somebody you don't even know, or it could be somebody famous that does something that inspires you to move in a different direction in life. [00:16:22] And really, the key point of all of this is that we really do need each other, just like the milkweed and the monarchs do. We each have a role that makes us who we are as people. [00:16:38] And I don't think we really stop and think about that enough. [00:16:43] When I look back at the story of Karen. [00:16:47] Well, first of all, Karen inspired me to do this podcast. So there's the first thing. Somebody I barely even know, who told me her whole life story, all of a sudden, I'm going to turn this into a podcast now. So that alone is huge. But I would say if I looked at her life, her mom is who inspired her. I can't even imagine being a young mother of six children and your husband gets killed, and then in the meantime, the mother decides to move her family to California, from the midwest to start all over again. Can't even begin to imagine what that must have been like at that time. [00:17:31] So those kind of things, she gave her daughter the courage and the wisdom to continue to move forward in her life. And those are the people that need to be celebrated. I think about that. I mean, my grandpa was a character, but he brought so much joy. And I think my brother and I maybe were kind of mischievous because we spent so much time with him. My brother was a real jokester, and I guarantee you he got a lot of that from my grandpa. So those things that you never take the time to really look back on, like who influenced me. I know when I was first telling the stories about me being in the navy and being at parade rest, or the instructor that helped me to learn how to swim, when I look back at that, I'm like, would I even be the person I am today if I didn't have the influence of those two men in my life? I don't even remember their names, but they definitely made me understand who I was. [00:18:49] So I think my message with this podcast is that there might be something behind the scenes in your life that you don't really pay that much attention to. Like me and the milkweed, right? [00:19:06] But that thing person event is really what pushes you forward, to make you who you are, to make you go from ordinary to extraordinary. And those are the things that we should be celebrating in this life, and we should be honoring each other for the journeys that we've been on. And that's why I created this podcast, because I want to celebrate from ordinary to extraordinary. [00:19:43] So this concludes this episode for today. [00:19:48] And going forward now, I'm going to be doing interviews with people, so I know you're all looking forward to that, and I am, too. I can't wait. [00:19:59] Um, it'll be the same schedule every other week. I'll put two podcasts out. [00:20:05] And please remember, ordinary becomes extraordinary. [00:20:20] Thank you. Bye.