The sun is shining with all its end-of-February might, making prisms in the snow crust. The Sudbury river sparkles as it flows by, ice-free. Also, I have several windows open a crack. I wish, though, I had with me my mother's copy of Here I Stay by Elizabeth Coatsworth, for reading it again would rebuke any lingering sense of cabin fever.

Here I Stay is a novel about a real event  -- "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death".  In 1816 several climate abnormalities caused the global temperature to drop a little (0.7 - 1.3 F). It truly doesn't take much to cause severe consequences, for 1816 also became known as the Year Without a Summer, or the Poverty Year.

There were major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere. In the Coatsworth novel, the focus is on Maine where European settlers were just getting settled on farms. A series of volcanic eruptions across the globe, notably Mount  Tambora in 1815, veiled the sun's light to a degree that crops just couldn't grow. Settlers left Maine in droves, drawn to Ohio by travelers' tales of deep loam and farming without vicissitudes.

According to Wikipedia, historian John D. Post has called this "the last great subsistence crisis in the Western world".

Coatsworth's young heroine stays on in her deserted Maine farming community to till the land her just-deceased father had labored over and loved. Her lonely year is marked by plenty of vicissitudes faced and overcome. It is also ameliorated by the beauty of natural events and some timely contacts with other humans, such as colorful visits from passing traders and native Americans.

In my family, this book became a major rite of passage into womanhood.  It's not just the happy ending in the prospect of a happy marriage. It's more the heroine's growing strength, her ingenuity, courage, and refinement of character.

Tartan in Ice

Like many Americans, my family tree has almost more roots than branches. That is, my ancestors, coming from several different countries, met and blended here. Together, they created the background for my appearance on earth.

Someone in my Dad's family made a wonderfully calligraphed chart of Bradburys, reaching back, with several sidewise meanderings, through seven ancient kings of (probably) minor French kingdoms. At the beginning of that family tree is He Who Might As Well Not Be Named, for he must be at the root of many a family tree. No, not Adam, but Charlemagne.

We Mitchell children were well entertained to realize that we were credited with Charles the Simple and Louis the Stammerer as progenitors, not to mention an abbot in Normandy who is chiefly remembered for abusing his power over the unfortunate nuns. More to my liking is the Bradbury who ventured out as an early trader to the West Indies, and whose tales of the islands --- so the tradition goes ---  show up in The Tempest. It is said that this talkative Bradbury frequented the same pub as William Shakespeare.

The ancestry that interests me even more, though, is the Scottish. The Martins of Dundee and the Mitchells and Inneses of Huntly and Aberchirder met and married in the persons of Miss Martin and Mister Mitchell who met in Massachusetts and lived their married life in Milton where he was groundskeeper for the grand estate of the "Boston Brahmin" Forbes family. The property eventually became the American Museum of the China Trade, commemorating the clipper ship era.

The Forbses were from an earlier Scots immigrant generation according to Wikipedia. Family wealth was gained through application of Scottish virtues in several different fields, including railroading and the early phases of Bell telephone. I do not know if the Martin-Mitchells had known the Forbses in Scotland, or began their connection here. The Forbes' money-making skills did not however rub off on the Mitchells, who stayed solidly middle class. The Forbses are partially represented today by Senator John Forbes Kerry; the Mitchells, by the likes of me.

When my family visited the museum, the staff were delighted to meet descendants of the servants. Much was known about the Forbses, but they were eager for any information we could give them about the gardener and his family. The museum has since merged with the Peabody Essex Museum.

photo by Bob Ribokas

This rant began with the photo Roy sent me this morning, which he picked off the online Boston Globe, of a local snow sculpture inspired apparently by the fabled Loch Ness monster. The creature in the photo typifies the interwoven threads of engineering skill and folkloric imagination, moderated by humorous self-deprecation,  which define the Scots family tartan I imagine for myself.

More about my Scotland another day.