Eulogy for Ardes Shea, Who Died on May 24, 2016

My mother wanted to fly. She took all the classes she could in flying, facing down the college dean and a mean, chauvinist flight instructor. When the war  broke out, she wanted to join the Wasps. They said, “How long will it take you to gain ten pounds?” She said, “About a lifetime.” She did other things.

What did she want, when she wanted to fly? I think I know, because of a fine statement from the first person to fly, Wilbur Wright, “More than anything else the sensation is one of perfect peace mingled with an excitement that strains every nerve to the utmost, if you can conceive of such a combination.” She could conceive of that combination: peace and excitement. She wanted both of those, together. She just had to find them some other places than in the air. And she had to constantly fight for her right to be as big and intelligent and active as she was. Being small didn’t help.

There were things in her life she might not have chosen. She always missed the mountain behind the ranch, felt exposed on flat land. She enjoyed working in political organizations, and there wasn’t perhaps enough running room for that. She took every class and workshop she could find, but the range of her options was limited. So she did the best she could, finding ways to work behind the scenes to improve religious education, helping to found new groups and revitalizing existing ones.

She had tremendous energy. We keep finding quilts, large-scale star quilts with radical color schemes. The area of land she cultivated with, essentially, a hoe, was astonishing. Remembering her own favorite childhood memories, she tried to always have something good-smelling ready just when we came home from school. She also made vegetables so interesting that the meat sometimes got lost on the supper table. When she realized that baby trees need shade, she planted four-o-clocks by about 1500 of them, producing one year a farm field of flowers in brilliant colors, opening each afternoon.

She was always fielding surprise jobs. When my dad went off to teach in the fall, she suddenly realized that she was the one to milk the cows. She’d never done that. She had a toddler to watch. The cows outweighed her by a factor 5 or 6. One year, a new pig didn’t thrive, and she had a house-pig for the winter.  It turns out, pigs want as much attention as kids. The year I was away in Germany for Christmas, my sister was pretty sad, so she and Pat embarked on a huge project of making all the ornaments for the tree. There must have been more than a hundred of them. 

In her later years, she kept saying: I don’t get anything done. You had to have seen her in her prime to realize where that lament came from.

My mother left a good record of what she thought and felt. The Litchfield Area Adult Writers Group provided an ongoing, decades-long opportunity for her and Jim to reflect on their lives, monthly, ten months of the year. Her stories, preserved in the Writers Group annual collections and in her own book, It’s Classified, will keep the memory of her life and insights alive for those who are interested, as will her many stories told informally and in college story circles. She didn’t want to be anonymous, and she wasn’t. Bill Peltier takes her story, “Home for Christmas,” around to nursing homes. It will last a while.

In the last months, she barked whenever anyone mentioned her age. She thought, probably rightly, that such mentions were a prelude to statements like, “You’ve had such a nice, long life” or “Maybe it is time for you to go” or (unsaid) “Are you still around?” Her line was: “I have lots of things I want to do.” Of course, there were immediate things, such as anybody with a terminal illness might do: seeing the grandchildren, getting the place in order, publishing her book. But her things to do went  beyond that, beyond any lifespan people have yet achieved. She left some pretty interesting unfinished business. The things she wanted weren’t abstract, like “world peace” or “food enough for all.” They were concrete, doable, and big: she wanted every organization to go in a circle, first thing, so that everybody’s voice was heard. She wanted homework to make sense and to be about home, about practical problems in kids’ lives. She wanted kids to be asked for their opinions and listened to. She wanted home-makers to receive salaries, so that their work would be valued. And she wanted a lot more trees planted, to stop erosion and noise and snow drifting and wind.

She made a good start. The home place is now a garden plot within a nature preserve, with animals and birds I never saw in the 60s, attracted by the cover of her new forest. (Please, people don’t hunt there – except raccoons. She hated raccoons.)  By coming every spring to a residential college philosophy course, she made sure that the stories of her life got heard, and she communicated to the kids that their stories were important. She argued that the Forest City Stockade Festival should be hands-on education, not just entertainment,  and that kids should get in free. (Note to Festival organizers: if you start charging kids, she’ll haunt you.) She spent a lot of time, during her years selling vegetables and also later, just listening to people, and thinking about their stories. (I was always amazed that it took an hour to sell fifty cents worth of beans.)  Also, as perhaps the most visible tribute to her influence: if you drive on Highway 24 toward Litchfield, you will see the only coherent set of shelterbelts – rows of trees to stop wind – that I have seen in Minnesota. Carl Jensen said her trees would never grow, but he helped her plant them anyway. When they grew, he was converted, and lined his fields with rows of trees.

There’s obviously a lot more to do, to make all the eyes and ears and feet and hands in this society know their own strength, to help everybody reach out for both excitement and peace, for dignity and a life that makes sense. What she did was to stay alert, all her life and right up to the end (I was there), and to try as hard as she could to make what she cared about real. I’ll close with the ending of a William Stafford poem she knew:

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

She stayed awake. Her signals were clear. Now it’s our turn.