Ginny's Writing

Since I don't feel like writing right now and anything I might write would either piss Someone off or just be a downer I am sharing one of Ginny's writings. The picture is not the one she used because it would not come off from the paper she sent but it is similar. She got an A on her paper. As always I am very proud of her. She writes

I am attaching a writing assignment I did for American Indian Literature. The assignment was: Find a legend, story from your "tribe" ( in my case I used Gordon clan) and rewrite it. Then interview an elder and finally write your connection. It had to be written in the manner of M. Scott Momaday's book The Way to Rainy Mountain. Extra points for illustrations and I did get an A on it. The photo I took somewhere in Carr Woods on a day I literally got lost in the fog and had to aim towards the sound of the trains to get out of the woods. While I found some stories about woods elves/spirits; I made the story up. I didn't interview and elder but I wrote it using what family stories I had heard all my life with embellishments. It was fun to write.

Ginny Jackson Jackson 1
American Indian Literature
Essay Number III.



Long ago in Scotland a lass finished her chores and complained that she didn’t have anything to do. Her mother told her to go outside and play and reminded her to never go into the woods by herself. She was tired of being treated like a child and decided to go into the woods anyway. She thought she heard voices and caught fleeting glimpses of something or someone ahead of her on the path. She walked faster, determined to find out who or what it was. She walked deeper and deeper into the forest and before long she became lost. The voices had faded and the only sound was eerie, like a different language being spoken. It was foggy and she was cold, tired and hungry. She sat down and leaned against a large tree. She tried to remember what her brother had told her about finding her way in the woods. She fell asleep and when she woke up she heard the voices again only this time she understood them. They said, “She wasn’t to be afraid and to go where the trees told her to.” She saw a tree with a branch that looked like an arm pointing to a path she hadn’t noticed before. She soon found herself leaving the woods. Her mother gave her a strange look when she saw her as if she “Knew” where she had been and she was never told to stay out of the woods again.

Jackson 2
Gordon Badge

The roots of the Gordon Cole family run deep in America. The first Cole arrived in Massachusets in 1609 and seven generations ago your ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War. In 1865 your great-grandfather John Cole and his wife Ellen Gordon Cole moved to Ames, Iowa. They raised nine children where 13th Street and Burnett is now. The first thing they were told when they got off the train and were loading their wagon was “not to get sloughed”. They were quite offended because in Ohio where they had come from “sloughed” meant to get drunk; in Ames that meant not to have the wagon get stuck in the mud; Ames being between two rivers. I remember my grandmother acting as if she didn’t like to be around kids, and speaking with a Scottish accent with an occasional Scottish word I didn’t understand. She loved to garden and was happier outside than inside. You get that from her. Think of what it would have been like to have lived in Scotland in the days of the clans. I come from a long line of “tree huggers”.

I remember the house my grandfather Clarence Gordon Cole grew up in. One of the first stories I heard from him was about the maple trees his mother had planted in the front yard. The Ames city planner wanted to extend 13th Street and wanted to cut the trees down. John Cole refused to let them and 13th Street is crooked because of our family. My son, Jonathan Cole Jackson graduated from Iowa State University 100 years after my grandfather. Clarence Gordon Cole. I look at family photos in the books that the Ames Historical Organization has published and my son has the same spark in his eyes as my great-grandfather. He graduated with a double major in Psychology and Environmental Science. I would love him to carry on the “tree hugging” legacy and become and Environmental Psychologist or maybe I will.

Gordon Tartan