Today’s my 5-hour alone time while my daughter was out to summer school went by so quickly. I am still reading the book; Tall woman: the life story of Rose Mitchell, a Navajo woman written by Rose Mitchell.
This book contains lots of interesting memories of the author. I have been really enjoying reading this book,
The author had 12 children. It was common for women to give a big number of children birth those days. She mentioned some of her children including herself didn’t go to school because their parents needed the child’s help to take care of sheep, goats, and other cattle. She named her first daughter as Mary and the second daughter too as Mary, so they had 2 Marys. I thought it interesting that she named one of the daughters Chubby Woman and named the daughter born after Chubby Woman as Beautiful Woman. The two girls grew up close to each other.
The author kept on having a baby for many years. It is interesting that the author and her oldest daughter had their baby around the same time, like a couple of months apart, so the babies grew up like twins even though they were in an uncle/aunt and nephew/niece relationship. And it happened twice. One time when the author got infected from a rattlesnake’s bite and needed to stay in a hospital for a month, the author asked her daughter to nurse her baby together with her baby. When the author came back from the hospital, she was happy to see the two babies were nice and fat in a healthy state. It was a cute story.
I like the part where the author mentioned about one of the old traditional ways. It was to break a pot over the child’s head to fix a child’s stuttering. One of the author’s children stuttered when he was about to be sent to school. The boy got scared and refused to use the traditional way, but the author’s mother did it anyway. When she held a pottery over the boy’s head and broke it by hitting the pottery with a wooden stick, the boy was surprised and scared. But amazingly this method worked. The boy’s stuttering was fixed right away and he never stuttered.
three wisdom 