Well we made it through one of the worst years in most people’s lives. The pandemic took nearly half a million lives. We started wearing masks at the store, at home when someone came to the door. There was political upheaval; we nearly had another government shutdown and we started 2021 with an insurrection, based on the election result in 2020. I think it’s fair to say 2020 was the year that should have never been.
This picture below was Zitkla-Sa.
I had never heard this name before today. She was a Lakota Sioux native from Yankton, South Dakota. She grew up to be a writer, editor, translator, educator, activist and a musician. I think that would be an accomplishment beyond the majority of people in this country. She was born in 1876 on a reservation and schooled in a missionary school. It was a humble beginning but a grand life of achievement. Her name in the Lakota language was Red Bird. I honor her today.
I say that my/our life is good when I relate back to a family of relatives I knew and stayed with in my childhood days. They were a family of 4 living in a 4 family flat with nothing beyond a single cold water tap in the kitchen. They had an outhouse 40 feet from the flat. Come Saturday it was bath time in a wash tub using water heated on a stove. The order of bathing was mother, father, two brothers by age and when I was there, me. It was the same water all the way through until the end. The protein in their meals was fish the father caught from the river, or pigeons he trapped by a local school and on Sunday the father went out into the yard between the flat and the outhouse and chopped the head off one of the chickens that roamed the backyard. So I say yes life is very good today.
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