Podcasts I've Listened To and Liked Lately: Serial Documentaries

Matt and Will came back from Will's graduation trip to Peru last week, and they brought home with them some artisanal pottery, coca candy, a copy of Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief translated into Spanish, two stuffed llamas, several bars of chocolate, a T-shirt with an unlicensed Game of Thrones reference, a 60-dollar bottle of pisco, and COVID.

The good news is that they took their rapid COVID tests out on the driveway as soon as they pulled in, so they went straight from the car to isolation in a separate part of the house (here's a chance to be grateful for our house's super weird layout!) without exposing me or Syd. And they both feel fine now, although they both definitely felt puny for the first couple of days.

The bad news is that now it's been SOOOOO long since I've gotten to hug half my family! We've been spending a ton of time hanging out in camp chairs in the front yard, gossiping from six feet apart. I dragged over a six-foot picnic table so Will could bring her LEGOs out and I could do fun stuff like edit Syd's final paper for her Intro to Serial Killers class (do YOU think that Gilles de Rais is guilty?). We managed to all eat ice cream together, with the help of bleach wipes and tossing things to each other from a distance. But it's not the family reunion I'd been looking forwards to, so instead of hanging out on the couch with my kids and husband, I've been continuing to entertain myself with all the projects and all the podcasts.

Like seriously, ALL the projects. Will's quilt top and my niece's quilt top and substitute teacher certification and organizing the bathroom closet and Pumpkin+Bear orders and lessons plans for teaching Girl Scouts how to make cold-process soap and poured container candles and then making my own cold-process soap and poured container candle to make sure I didn't miss anything and creating a slide deck for a workshop proposal and mowing the scary steep hill with the riding lawnmower and baking two different kinds of cobbler to decide which is more delicious but actually they're both equally delicious because, you know, it's cobbler.

And podcasts for all of that, interspersed with the entire Arctic Monkeys' discography and the occasional run-through of the Neil Patrick Harris Hedwig and the Angry Inch cast recording. 

I listen to all kinds of podcasts, but I really love serial documentaries when I'm doing these kinds of long projects. A five-hour podcast about the school group that got lost at the top of Mount Hood makes the five hours that I spend basting a dragon quilt top absolutely fly by! Here are some of my favorites of the serial documentaries I've been listening to.

This season of 30 for 30, Heavy Medals, is pretty intense, and all the trigger warnings because it does include the sexual assault scandal in USA gymnastics, but if you are approximately my age and you, too, watched the Olympics during the Bela Karolyi years, then you, too, might be as interested as I was to listen to this in-depth history of the Karolyi duo:

I also recommend Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, which covers the related topic of body image and abuses in the training of child gymnasts and figure skaters:

Caving disasters is one of my Special Interests, and I think I've read and watched just about everything available concerning the soccer team that got trapped in that cave in Thailand a few years ago. If you don't want to read and watch EVERYTHING about it, I thought that this season of Against the Odds, Thai Cave Rescue, is a really good consolidation of several sources. It feels very thorough, while also staying interesting and exciting:

If you want to read more about the cave rescue, I really liked Miracle in the Cave, written by a journalist who was on-site during the rescue:

Reading along in the textbook for Syd's Intro to Serial Killers class has *almost* broke me of my love of true crime... almost... but I actually listened to this season of Cold, about Susan Powell, quite a while ago, and it has really stuck with me:

Like, I bring it up in conversation a LOT. It's not terribly graphic, so it doesn't feel as exploitative as some true crime documentaries can, and the Susan Powell case has the added interest that all of the main characters--Susan Powell, her husband, and her father-in-law--were avid journalers! As in, audio and video journals! So there is SO MUCH evidence that's in their own words and voices, which is by turns sad and terrifying, but absolutely makes the experience of listening to the documentary feel so much more engaging and true.

I also bring up that 911 operator a lot as an example about what the hell is wrong with people. 

I've listened to a few different seasons of Even the Rich. It's really good for getting, say, a medium dive into a celebrity or scandal that you'd be interested to know more about than you've picked up via random news tidbits, but that you're not necessarily interested in knowing every obsessive detail about. This season on Britney Spears really was a revelation to me, and got me firmly on the #FreeBritney bandwagon:

After you listen to that season, I highly recommend listening to the Celebrity Memoir Book Club episode covering Jamie Spears' memoir:

Britney's mother also has a memoir that they also discuss on this podcast, and they're both so interesting because they're literally telling you in their own words how they abused Britney and took advantage of her for their own gain and they 100% do not see anything wrong with it at all. Yikes!

If you love a serial documentary podcast that I don't know about yet, please let me know. I still have Will's quilt to bind and quilt, and my baby niece's quilt to applique and back and bind and quilt, and the rest of that slide deck to create, and I think I need to figure out how to teach seven teenagers how to press flowers in the microwave in the same kitchen in which I'm teaching them how to make cold-process soap...

My Latest over at Pumpkin+Bear: The Cutest Custom-Color Doll Masks

Even after I stopped selling real-person fabric masks in my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop (I switched the kids and I over to these, and Matt prefers this style in whatever brand is cheapest), I keep making and selling doll masks, because:

1. People still want to buy them from me, and I do enjoy exchanging my goods and services for currency.
2. Even though I think a lot of people have also switched to high-quality manufactured masks, if you want a mask for your doll, you're still going to need someone to make it for you by hand. 
3. They're ADORABLE.

Number 3, of course, is the most important reason. 

Here's a cute matching set that I made a few weeks ago:

And here's my latest order of custom-color doll masks! My favorite part of making these masks is seeing what color combinations people choose. This particular customer, for instance, chose these fabrics--

--along with these ties:

And when I sewed them together in the requested combinations, I got these adorable doll masks!

That watermelon mask is the cutest mask that currently exists in the world. 

And here's how I package my masks to go out and about into that world!

If you are a sewer, yourself, I do have the entire doll mask tutorial for free on my blog. It's the responsibility of all of us to keep our dolls healthy!

I've gotten out of the habit of sewing matching items for my own kids' American Girl dolls, since I'm the only one who plays with them these days (ahem), but I'm pretty sure that I DO need to make another couple of watermelon doll masks.

And obviously, if I'm going to make watermelon doll masks, I clearly have to make both dolls entire watermelon outfits to match!

The Fantasy Quilts I'm Working On because Everyone Has Left Me Home Alone

Syd and I have pretty big plans while Matt and Will are taking a graduation trip to Peru. They may be going to Machu Picchu and Lake Titicaca and tasting chocolate and pisco, but Syd and I bought a month of Disney+ and checked Stardew Valley out of the library. So. We're pretty well set.

We've also been keeping the house really, really clean, because we are not the messy ones, and it's really, really quiet, because Syd doesn't get up until noon and sometimes works in the evenings and other times has sleepovers with friends. 

So. I've been pretty much going stir-crazy.

I've gotten way too invested in this history of salt that I'm reading, and I've gotten WAY ahead on my freelance writing schedule (synchronized with getting WAY behind on getting paid, so that's fun), and dang, has it turned out to be a week for quilting!

Above is the quilt that I'm sewing Will for her dorm room bed. She's not going off to college until January, so I've got plenty of time (and it's actually going to be one of her Christmas presents, so don't tell!), but it's also fiddly as hell, involves a couple of new-to-me techniques, Will's not here to get a peek at it and spoil the surprise, and I'm bored.

I started off trying to directly copy this Lily the Dragon quilt, and you can see that I'm using that exact template, too, but then I got way into the weeds and it looks super different entirely because I do not know that ticker tape technique the author references and could not figure it out. 

Fortunately, I think that what I did end up doing, which was just ironing fabric scraps willy-nilly to interfacing, looks fine and probably better suited to my kid's grown-up nerd girl aesthetic than the look in the original blog post. Also, Syd helped me with the color arrangement of the wings, because I never mastered my preschool Montessori sensory work. 

I bought the grey Kona cotton background fabric and the black flannel backing fabric, but the entire dragon is made from scraps and stash. I tried to stick mostly to quilting cottons, but the white spikes (and yes, each spike is a completely novel shape so each one had to be numbered, traced, numbered again, cut out, traced again, numbered again, and cut out again ugh) are some kind of dimensional bottomweight leftover from a pair of pants Syd cut up for some Trashion/Refashion Show garment once upon a time. And hiding there in the blue wings are pieces of a flannel shirt and a skirt that my tiny youngling child once wore. 

I did the same thing for this quilt below:

That black flannel is what I didn't need for Will's quilt backing, that grey flannel was in my stash but uncut so I KNOW I must have bought it for something specific (oops!), but all the rest of the flannel is scraps, including my greatest triumph, that brown that I had exactly enough left of for just those half-square triangles. 

Most of that other flannel is leftover from the Great Jammy Pants Craze of 2014. 

I don't know if you can even tell what this quilt is supposed to be, but basically, it's me deciding that my baby niece might like one of those road play mats for her upcoming birthday. 

And then I got left alone in the house for too long and I went overboard. 

Like, why a felt play mat, when a quilted cotton play mat would be so much more versatile and sturdier? 

And if I'm doing what's essentially a quilt, I might as well make it an actual quilt size so it's even more versatile. 

I love this one, so I'll just buy the pattern and copy it. 

And now I'll spend the entire day going through my flannel scraps and figuring out which ones look vaguely road play mat-themed. 

Syd had to come to my rescue with her design sense superpower again, but I think I got it nailed down. Green is going to be a park, green plaid is going to be neighborhoods, brown is for construction zones (and maybe a dinosaur dig site), black plaid is parking lots, and blue is water. I picked out some interesting scraps that I can use as applique fabrics to add trees and houses and whales and dino bones.

I think I made it WAY too big, though. It's only a throw, but a throw size seems really dramatic for a road play mat. 

Oh, well. You don't want the world's largest play mat, then don't leave me to my own devices for this long! 

We Finally Finished the Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail (and It Only Took 2 Years...)

Indiana murals are always SO weird.

The Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail was one of our first Pandemic Projects, and just might be the last of the original 2020 projects that we were still working on this summer. 

Like, we completely finished our collective obsessions with charcuterie boards, paint-by-numbers--

--and recreating TikTok recipes. I visited every Girl Scout camp in the state, and the kids ate every kind of Little Debbie that there is. Matt made every one of the 100 Famous Cocktails. One of my kids earned a YouTube Silver Play Award. The other kid grew a lot of strawberries.

But in between all of that and afterwards, ice cream remained part of the family dream. 

We're just barely in Southern Indiana, so almost every ice cream place involved quite a long trek. And for most of them, we also found something scenic to do, whether it was visiting a water wheel, a German cemetery, and a locally famous geologic feature, or uncovering the Masonic roots of historic downtown:

In Salem, we also happened upon an interesting piece of local history. This raid is one of the "lands" of Conner Prairie, a local living history park, and the kids and I have visited 1863 Civil War Journey numerous times (including that one time that led to both kids unconscious on the ground and a security escort out of the park), but it had never occurred to me to check out any of the REAL raid sites!

This ice cream trail was a really great way to spend time together during a pandemic. We got to get out of the house and do a little sightseeing, but it was easy to stay in the fresh air and away from strangers. We got to bring Luna along--

--and the long car rides recreated some of the things I best love about travel, that isolated space for conversations and audiobooks and sibling quarrels, as well as siblings having fun and acting adorable:

The only sad thing about the ice cream trail is that way back in 2020, when we first started it, the prize for completing every stop on the trail was a T-shirt. So OMG you would not even have wanted to see Matt's face when we finally made our final stop a few weeks ago (The Happy Hive in Marengo, although alas, we didn't have time to also go to Marengo Cave like I'd planned, because the younger kid had to work that night. I'm hoping to snooker everyone into visiting the cave with me later this summer), and then Matt finished filling in the forms with our address and T-shirt sizes, sent them in, waited by the mailbox for several more weeks, and then got a package with pictures of ice cream cones all over it in the mail, and...

Sometime in the past two years, the prize switched from T-shirts to caps. Matt is SO sad!

If you see Matt doing errands around town wearing his Discover Southern Indiana Ice Cream Trail cap, can you please tell him that it looks really cool and wow, visiting every stop on the ice cream trail must have been a major accomplishment to earn such an awesome cap? Because I have tried telling him that the real treasure was the friendships we made along the way, but he is not buying it and would way rather have had a T-shirt.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Podcasts I've Listened To and Liked Lately: Postmodern Fiction, Plot Summaries, and Serial Documentaries

 

OMG that llama puzzle. I was sooo excited when I found it at the thrift store, because Will is visiting Peru this summer and also loves llamas.

But see how the llamas are assembled, and the edges, and then there's just... empty space? Yeah, those spaces are green. Just green. Green in subtle different shades, sure, but mostly just green. This is the WORST puzzle. We all absolutely loathe it. After this, I am putting a temporary ban on puzzles that are over 300 pieces until I can forget the misery of literally holding every single puzzle piece to every single empty spot because that is the absolute only way to find its match.

BUT sitting together at that table, putting together a puzzle or working crosswords or coloring, is what Will and I do while listening to Welcome to Night Vale, our collective favorite podcast:

I am a HUGE fan of serialized horror podcasts, and I have several favorites that I've listened to the entire run of:

Here are the ones that I've also introduced to the kids, and that we listen to together:

You've got to start each of these from the first episode, and they're very bingeable, because there's always a story arc and an overarching mystery and often details that don't seem relevant but turn out to BE, in fact, relevant! Seriously, I think the kids and I listened to, like, eight Magnus Archives in a row on that long drive home from Michigan last month. My favorite favorites are all postmodern fiction pieces that incorporate elements of pseudo-science/pseudo-history or paranoid fiction that incorporates that same kind of pseudo-knowledge of the world.

So that's what I've been listening to when I really want to LISTEN to something. I also have a whole genre of podcasts that I listen to at times when I want to listen to something, but I don't want to expend absolutely any intellectual labor on the listening. This is usually while I'm gardening or walking, times when I might want to get lost in my thoughts for a few minutes and then zone back in without feeling like I've got to rewind. For those times, I really like a few podcasts in which the hosts talk through the plot of movies or a book series, with commentary OF COURSE. Every now and then I'll try a new one, but these are the ones that I'm devoutly faithful to:

Here are a couple more where I like the hosts a lot, but I pick and choose only the episodes that interest me:

Two recent episodes of Celebrity Memoir Book Club that I really liked are the one on the Jamie Spears memoir and the one on the Naya Rivera memoir. Those are good examples of their podcast, because they HATED the Jamie Spears memoir (for lots of very good reasons!) and loved the Naya River memoir (for lots of very good reasons!). 

This is the only one that the kids like, too, if I pick a good episode:

We listened to the Hereditary episode all together on a road trip one time, and we were basically all freaking out simultaneously. It's so good!

Y'all know how I'm obsessed with people dying or going missing in national parks? I LOVE this podcast:

I love what a deep dive the hosts go into in every episode. Sometimes, information is discovered about a missing person or their remains are found, and the hosts will do an update episode. 

When I'm doing handwork, sewing or crafting orders for my Pumpkin+Bear etsy shop, I like to listen to something a little more engaging. I really like long-form serial documentaries, although I feel like I must be super picky about them, because good ones are so hard to find! Here are my favorites:

I just realized that Stolen has a new season out, which is awesome, because I loved their first season, The Search for Jermaine. Now I've got something to listen to when I sew the car play mat that I've been thinking about making for my niece's upcoming birthday!

See the Light that Shines from a True, True Friend

2017

This is a eulogy for Gracie, my kid's beloved cat. 

Gracie came to us in 2010, as part of a litter of foster kittens that I volunteered us to raise for the local animal shelter until they weighed enough to be adoptable. I volunteered us for that role because the older kid, who had just turned six, had also just broken her leg, of all things, and I figured that a month or so of tiny kittens would be an entertaining and distracting way to spend her time in a cast.

Here's Gracie and her human soulmate on the day that they met:

2010

I don't even have words for the bond between those two, right from the beginning. Gracie chose my kid to be her person, and my kid chose Gracie to be her cat, and from that moment on, they were each the most important thing in each other's lives. 

2011

For years, Gracie was my kid's living stuffed animal, her real-life imaginary friend. She was invited to all her tea parties, carried everywhere in a doll-sized ring sling or in her arms, spoken to like a best friend who carried her own half of the conversation. 

2013

Once, her kid and I took Gracie to the vet for a sick visit, and it was ridiculous because even feeling like crap, Gracie was ALL OVER that office. She was on the vet's shoulders, under the sink, in the trash--he opened a high cabinet at one point and Gracie leapt up INTO the cabinet and started rifling through the stuff, knocking things over, just completely unafraid. The vet said, "I always know when a cat belongs to a little girl, because they're so well socialized."

2014

Gracie was like that because she knew there was never anything to be afraid of. Her kid was always right there to talk to her like a person, and if her kid was anywhere on the property, then Gracie knew where she was and was likely right there with her.

2015

For her entire life, Gracie was her kid's shadow. She walked beside her every day, and slept beside her every night. She vastly preferred being an indoor cat, but when her kid went outdoors, so did Gracie.

2016

 When her kid hiked in our woods, so did Gracie, following right beside her on the path until she decided that she was done walking and asked her kid to carry her. For her entire childhood, from the ages of 4 to 16, most of her kid's memories are wrapped in the presence and unconditional love of Gracie.

2017

As her kid became older and started spending less time playing ponies and more time reading, drawing, and writing, it became a running joke that Gracie never let her get any work done. She was always wanting to be on her lap--and not just over her lap, but draped over her arms, or sprawled across her chest with her face against her kid's face, purring so loudly you could hear her from the next room. 

2018

Her kid tolerated this exactly as indulgently as Gracie had tolerated being a living stuffed animal for years, and they stayed inseparable, a greying grey tabby spending her days and nights lounging on a teenager who carried her everywhere she went and held her on her lap while she did everything from online school to art projects to trying to eat lunch.

2019

Gracie was possibly the gentlest soul I've ever encountered--certainly the gentlest cat I've ever known. Spots leaves dead mice at the back door and must be banished inside when rabbits are foolish enough to nest nearby, and Jones never learned not to bite and scratch when he roughhouses with a human's arm, but I've never known Gracie to choose violence. 

2020

She never put a claw out other than to hang on, I never heard her hiss, I knew better than to rely on her for assistance for any mouse infestation, and her strongest protest at any sort of perceived mistreatment was a meow. 

2021

All Gracie ever wanted in order to be perfectly content was to be with her kid. Her kid wanted the same thing, and so I think Gracie lived the happiest life that a cat could attain.

2022

We thought Gracie had a respiratory infection, this month. Jones had one last summer, and sneezed and looked pitiful for a few days, then we took him to the vet, got him some antibiotics, and he bounced right back. So when Gracie started sneezing and looking pitiful for a few days, we took her to the vet. The local vets aren't super equipped for much more than well checks and dental cleanings and prescribing antibiotics, but they did tell me that there was definitely something much more wrong with Gracie than just a respiratory infection, so I essentially came home from that visit, handed her off to my partner, and he drove her up to a vet hospital in Indianapolis. That's where they diagnosed Gracie's respiratory infection, and also her kidney failure.

Gracie and her kid had another week together, after that. We doted on her and kept her comfortable while we grieved her and watched her fade, and then one morning her kid and I agreed that Gracie no longer looked as comfortable as we wanted her to be, so my partner called every vet in two counties to find her a same-day euthanasia appointment. 

Taking Gracie to be euthanized is one of the worst things that I've ever had to do, but also... I don't know, also healing, maybe? Or, cathartic? Where I come from, my family euthanized every one of my pets in secret. I was literally the child who was told that my elderly dog had gone to live on a farm, and a few years later, that my sick cat had been put to sleep while I was at school that day. And I don't know if it's related or not, but I have a LOT of anxiety about the well-being of the family pets. I can't handle the stress of keeping short-lived pets like fish and hamsters, and I am extremely concerned that our cats, dog, and chickens are safe and happy. Like, half of every vacation is spent internally fretting about their welfare, since they're where I can't see them.

So although having my kid's best friend and childhood companion euthanized was absolutely awful, it honestly did comfort me to hold her head in my hands as she slipped away. I looked into her face and told her that she was okay and reassured myself that she wasn't scared, and she wasn't in pain, and then she was gone. 

And now, we just go on with a Gracie-sized hole in our family. It's weird to look at my kid and not see her draped in grey tabby, and it hurts to see all the places in her day where she grieves the absence of her beloved pet. I swear, every time a cat dies, I wonder to myself why on earth I go to the trouble of loving a pet, when I already know how agonizing it will end up. Why did I subject a child of mine to this much pain? Why did I let her love Gracie so hard? Why did I not warn her to guard her heart even a little?

I think you can only love a pet that way one time. You get one pet, that first pet that makes itself absolutely yours, that you love unabashedly, with a heart that does not know the grief you will inevitably feel. All your pets after that one, you love them just as well, but your heart knows how it will hurt one day with your love of them, and so it's different. 

So, here's to Snowball. Here's to Gracie. Here's to friends who love us with everything they are, and we who love them back just the same.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Smithville News, Just as Riveting Now as it Was 114 Years Ago

 

I went WAAAAY down a rabbit trail last week.

I'm pretty sure this thing I have where I get obsessed with a hobby or a research interest is a positive coping technique for undiagnosed anxiety and/or a negative coping technique for undiagnosed ADD, but regardless, there I was last week, stressed out and anxious, overstimulated and overwhelmed, with the sudden desire to research the history of my property. 

I know the old general store on my land is at least 83 years old, as I have a photo that's dated 1939, showing the general store in business, the owners' bedroom visible through an open door behind the wood-burning stove. It's labeled with the names of the owners, and their surname matches that of the family we bought the house from, so the property was in their family from at least then until they sold it to us.

I'm curious, though, about how old that general store actually is, and how old our house is, and when our land was first cleared for farming, and if it was recorded anywhere who, specifically, the land was originally stolen from, and why it wasn't turned into a quarry like the land just a mile north or the land just a mile east or the land just a few miles south. 

So at some point during a really rough week last week, I was sitting in front of my computer trying to get some work done, and that curiosity all of a sudden became a burning desire. I Googled, and found this website about how to research your historic home, then bypassed all their other useful advice to zone straight in on the "look through historic newspapers" bit. 

So I Googled THAT, and found a run of a very tiny, VERY local newspaper that ran from 1908 to 1914 and served a very small radius of population in this exact area. 

Like, a VERY small radius. We're talking *maybe* five miles in any direction. Little areas that are now just a couple of minutes away by car are referred to in this newspaper as being entirely different towns, and the actual city that I live just south of is referred to as a place you take the train to, and if you want to send your kids to high school they have to board there and only come back on the weekends to visit the "home folks."

It's a miracle that a small newspaper like this even survived to be scanned and preserved, because it's always the unimportant-seeming ephemera like this that's lost. Nobody thinks to preserve it, it's great for starting a fire, it's printed on cheap paper that deteriorates quickly, etc., and most of the time, you'll never know it even existed.

But somebody saved many of these papers--not even close to a complete run, alas, but many of them--and they're scanned into my state's digital archives for me to look at...

...and grow completely obsessed with.

I have never in my life read such a gossipy rag! From what I can tell, the editor just let anyone submit whatever they wanted as news, so along with the occasional murder or theft or buggy accident, every week you get a full accounting of who visited whom and who threw a party and who went shopping in the city and how everyone's crops are doing. And if you thought that today's digital social media inspires FOMO, how would you feel if an acquaintance's recent party was in the newspaper, with a full account of every single person who attended, the entire menu, and who was asked to sing and did so reluctantly and charmed everyone with their beautiful singing voice and organ playing?

And then the next week, you got it all again!

People even subtweeted at each other, right in the pages of the newspaper!

So I started reading this newspaper, and felt like I had fallen into a period novel. Every week all the people were up to something new, and there was gossip and scandal and elopements and fights. And, like, if you lived here in 1908, no part of you was safe. Can you imagine if you went to a party, and at the party you were literally voted "Ugliest Boy?" And then it was IN THE NEWSPAPER that you went to a party and were the ugliest boy there?!?

I horrified Syd by showing her the article at the end of the school year (which was April 16, I'm assuming because after that date everyone needed to go plant corn), which gave the full name of all the eighth-grade graduates of the local schools, as well as EVERY SINGLE KID'S GPA. Including the kid who only earned a 76, poor thing!

Everyone more or less had to get used to me saying, "So, you want to hear the news of 1908?", and then telling them about some local scandal or crime. There were, for instance, a lot of elopements:

There was another one where a 38-year-old guy ran off with a 16-year-old girl. They hired a buggy and fled from the city down to the little town five or so miles south of me, where they'd hoped to catch the train down to Louisville, Kentucky. But the girl's dad had wired every train station around and then gotten on his own horse, and he actually managed to catch them at the Harrodsburg depot. But when the couple saw him, they ran off into the woods and didn't come back out again until the next day. The dad then dragged his daughter back home with him, but she told the reporter that she'd run away again as soon as she could.

They'd also put it into the paper whenever someone left their spouse, including this chance encounter of a spouse who probably thought he'd gotten clean away:

Also in the newspaper was plenty of good advice, stuff like gentleman shouldn't spit on the sidewalks, and ladies should try to dress up a little more and iron their ribbons when going to town, and how to talk on the telephone:

But there were also plenty of actual crimes. Syd and I reckon that there was a serial killer running around 1908-1909 Smithville. Over about 18 months, I saw THREE reports of men found lying on the train tracks, decapitated. One guy wasn't immediately identified, so they took him to the mortuary and invited the public to come look at him to see if anyone could identify him. He was eventually identified as a guy from Alabama, and although he was found on the train tracks, the coroner said that it looked like someone had tried to decapitate him with a pocketknife, but stopped at his spine and left him on the tracks for the train wheels to finish the job. The murder was blamed on "Italians," and left at that.

Two more times, then, in 18 months, there was a report of somebody found decapitated on the train tracks, but each of those times, the report said that they'd probably been walking home at night intoxicated. One guy, it said, looked like he had lain down to go to sleep on the train tracks, which... okay? And the other guy, it said, looked like he'd fallen and hit his head on the tracks. 

You know what I think, though? I think that a serial killer was murdering people and then leaving them on the train tracks to get decapitated by the train. Because how likely is it that THREE people would just happen to land on the train tracks just exactly the right way to get decapitated in this one small area in 18 months?

And then there was the time that people went to the Christian church one morning and found a dead dog on the pulpit, its head on the Bible and a handwritten note next to it that read, "I'm trying to get to dog heaven." A couple of weeks later, the paper said that a guy had accused his son of putting the dead dog in church and his son had shot at him and then ran away.

And THEN there was the time that they were having an ice cream social at the Mt. Ebal Church and some young men rolled up in their buggy. One of them, the Sipes boy (the newspaper then paused for a long reminiscence about the time that the Sipes boy's mother had died in the middle of winter and his father had piggybacked the boy to a neighboring farm in a snowstorm and gotten frostbite on his feet), took out a revolver and started shooting at the sky. This scared the horses, so one guy told the Sipes boy to put his revolver back in his pocket, and the Sipes boy shot him three times point blank.

The newspaper ran regular reports on the guy's eventual full recovery, and the Sipes boy's continued stay in the county jail. 

Okay, and THEN there is the whole saga of the Angora cat. There was an article in the paper about how Harold Allen lost his Angora cat, and was offering the unheard-of sum of $25 as a reward for her recovery. I don't even know how someone would even have gotten an Angora cat into the backwoods of Indiana back then, but I guess the train did run everywhere. So we don't hear anything else for a few months, and then one day there's an article in the newspaper about how Dillon Deckard caught a long-haired white cat the other day, and he thought about skinning it but decided instead that he was going to keep it.

I was all, "HEY! That's Harold Allen's cat!!!!" But, you know, I'm the only one over here binging two years of Smithville News in a weekend. For everyone else, several months have passed. Mary Travers turned down her teaching post so she wouldn't leave her father without a housekeeper. Charlie Delgar grew a pumpkinvine up his apple tree and now it's dangling giant pumpkins down like apples. Judah Harden had to shoot his dog after it savaged the postman. Bloomington took down the hitch rack outside the courthouse and all the farmers are big mad about it and say they'll just mail order from Indianapolis if Bloomington doesn't give them anywhere to tie up their horses. So maybe Harold's cat is just old news, and Dillon Deckard can keep her.

But don't worry--people did remember Harold's cat.

This was basically all I talked about all weekend, so much so that Syd and I now talk about them as if they're real--and on Tiktok:

"She's a 10, but she earned the lowest grade in her class."

"She's a 6."

"He's a 9, but he found Harold's Angora cat and he's keeping it."

"He's a 2."

"She's a 4, but she turned down a teaching job so she could stay home and 'be the housekeeper' for her father."

"I think she's still a 4?"

"He's a 10, but he put a dead dog in the church and then shot at his father."

"He's a -1."

But in all of Smithville, for all of the two years' worth of weekly gossip news that I read, this news was what made me feel the most feels:

To be honest, I was pretty offended on Grandma Woodward's account. Like, the nerve of calling some old woman pathetic when all she's doing is minding her own business sitting on her porch?

A few months later, though, the newspaper reported that she'd died, and then it called her a "good woman who was always doing good deeds for others." Awww! And then the NEXT week's newspaper had about twenty different notices of all the people who'd traveled to her funeral at Mt. Ebal church, including one guy who'd closed down his entire school for the day so he could attend. 

It was Grandma Woodward, then, who inspired me to my next great idea and the next step in my great obsession.

This, Friends, is Mt. Ebal church, about five miles from my house as the crow flies:

It is now an Airbnb, and was the source of its own run of news in the currently gossipy local newspaper of today. I guess it had been unsold for a VERY long time before the current owners bought it, and people were accustomed to parking in its lot when they visited the cemetery across the street, and also for funerals. But the new owners were not allowing this anymore, and people were so mad that they held a bunch of public meetings to try to get the owners to let them keep parking there. The restaurant a block down the street even said that people were welcome to park in their lot and walk over, but nope, people were all, "I can't walk a block! I can only walk across the street!"

We parked at the back of the cemetery, and walked around looking for Susan Woodward and my other newspaper friends. 

I found lots of familiar names:

It was Syd who found my prize for me:

You'll be pleased to know that not only was Grandma Woodward much beloved in life, but in death she had PRIME placement front and center in the cemetery. Check out how close she is to the church!

I haven't quite worked up the nerve to mention to the rest of the family that I also now very much need to visit the Clear Creek Christian Cemetery, Knights of Pythias Cemetery (which is also in the middle of a field now, sooo...), and several now abandoned limestone quarries...