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Threshold: A Memoir
"A Family Like a Prairie." Our families and communities serve as the threshold we cross into our lives. Whether it’s a metaphorical threshold or the actual physical threshold that marks our front door, the crossing informs who we choose to become. This memoir is a series of eighteen stories, with an introduction and a conclusion, about one family. From five-year-old Joseph Swope, kidnapped and adopted by a war chief, to Cecil Colburn blasting up U.S. Highway 41 with a turtle for a co-pilot trying to save a marriage, this memoir reveals what happens when communities fail and how they thrive. These are the stories of people who worked together and shared resources. There's the smell of wheat dust and sweat and the ozone that precedes a storm; neighbors and family members caring for each other in death and disease. Threshold is full of compelling individual portraits—the midwife Grandma Hendricks, homely George Colburn, and the uncaring doctor who commits an unforgivable atrocity . . . and portraits of individuals seeking to establish the connections that might create the community needed to enhance life beyond the survival mode.
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First published October 30, 2012
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About the author
Faith A. Colburn
11 books24 followersAs the daughter of a big band canary, Faith A. Colburn has unique insights into the backstage lives of the women who sang for their supper during some very hard times. Her other half, a combat veteran and farmer, provided some very different perspectives. With her grandmother, she walked the prairies, getting to know the wildflowers, while she waited for the two halves to finish their struggle to make a whole. She’s the award-winning author of fiction and narrative non-fiction that reveals the character of the prairie and its people, combining careful research with a plainswoman’s passion for her place.
Walking the grasslands, she smelled tiny onion blossoms so sweet they’ll make your ears ring and watched pronuba moths fall like petals from the waxy, white blossoms of yucca. As a public information officer for the state Game and Parks Commission, she canoed the Dismal, rode the Sandhills with dog trainers, cross country skied the Missouri bluffs, seined carp, fixed nets, picked trout eggs, and camped out along Bone Creek. She photographed wildlife, from Sandhill cranes to elk and, as a sixth-generation Nebraskan, knows of the landscape that often appears as a character/catalyst in her work.
The themes she returns to, over and over, are the ways in which families and communities work and how they fail. She's passionate about those families and communities as well as the physical environments that allow them to thrive.
She earned master’s degrees in creative writing and journalism from the University of Nebraska receiving the Outstanding Thesis in the College of Fine Arts and Humanities in 2012 and the Outstanding Work in Fiction Award during its 2009 student conference. Her family memoir FROM PICAS TO BYTES: FOUR GENERATIONS OF SEACREST NEWSPAPER SERVICE TO NEBRASKA received the second place award in adult non-fiction from the Nebraska Federation of Press Women. Her fiction has appeared in Kinesis and Platte Valley Review, and her poetry has been published in The Reynolds Review. While at the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, she wrote numerous articles for NEBRASKAland magazine, including a Centennial history of game and fish management in Nebraska that appeared as a special issue called Sportsman’s Scrapbook.
Walking the grasslands, she smelled tiny onion blossoms so sweet they’ll make your ears ring and watched pronuba moths fall like petals from the waxy, white blossoms of yucca. As a public information officer for the state Game and Parks Commission, she canoed the Dismal, rode the Sandhills with dog trainers, cross country skied the Missouri bluffs, seined carp, fixed nets, picked trout eggs, and camped out along Bone Creek. She photographed wildlife, from Sandhill cranes to elk and, as a sixth-generation Nebraskan, knows of the landscape that often appears as a character/catalyst in her work.
The themes she returns to, over and over, are the ways in which families and communities work and how they fail. She's passionate about those families and communities as well as the physical environments that allow them to thrive.
She earned master’s degrees in creative writing and journalism from the University of Nebraska receiving the Outstanding Thesis in the College of Fine Arts and Humanities in 2012 and the Outstanding Work in Fiction Award during its 2009 student conference. Her family memoir FROM PICAS TO BYTES: FOUR GENERATIONS OF SEACREST NEWSPAPER SERVICE TO NEBRASKA received the second place award in adult non-fiction from the Nebraska Federation of Press Women. Her fiction has appeared in Kinesis and Platte Valley Review, and her poetry has been published in The Reynolds Review. While at the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, she wrote numerous articles for NEBRASKAland magazine, including a Centennial history of game and fish management in Nebraska that appeared as a special issue called Sportsman’s Scrapbook.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 30, 2017
“What we’ve been calling family,” writes Faith Colburn in Threshold, “is a stripped down version of a much richer creation. . . . like calling a field of bluestem a prairie. . . . It’s the rich diversity of grasses and forbs that makes a prairie work, just as it’s the rich diversity of parents and children, grandparents and cousins, aunts and uncles providing nourishment and support that makes a family work.”
Colburn has created something like a prairie in this ambitious book: an interwoven tapestry of eight generation of family, their lives nourished by Nebraska’s farmland. Delving deep beneath the varied plants in her family, she takes us into the skein of roots beneath the soil—and brings us home to a clearer understanding of our own ancestry.
She begins the book with a long list of characters, her family and friends who appear in the book. I once heard Leslie Silko say as she began a reading that the audience shouldn’t try to keep track of all the names immediately. “That’s not good for you,” she said. Just relax, she told us; listen and we would begin to understand the relationships. Do the same as you plunge into this book; all will become clear as Colburn begins weaving her story with the voice of her grandmother. And the real importance of the people in this book may be not that they are members of Colburn’s extended family but that they are recognizable as family belonging to everyone with ties to the prairie.
These twenty stories loop into and out of the history of one ordinary American family’s struggle to survive. Five-year-old Joseph Swope is kidnapped and adopted by a war chief. The author’s father roars up the highway with a turtle as passenger, trying to save his marriage. A singer with big bands who survived an abusive childhood falls for a soldier one enchanted evening and finds herself on a remote Nebraska farm. There are unwed mothers and lonely spinsters who disappear from family records, wild young men who drink too much: all the folks who would appear on the family tree if most of us are honest.
And we all have ties to the prairie, even if we don’t realize them; the prairie nurtured many of our ancestors and feeds many of us still. Still, but for how much longer if we don’t stop paving farmland? Fewer than one percent of Americans now farm the land and fewer still remain on small acreages, Colburn says. That’s too few to lobby successfully for intelligent farm policies that protect and conserve the land for its residents and the Americans it should feed. Agriculture is dominated now by huge corporations who treat the land and its occupiers like machines, not by nurturing communities of families.
Deftly, Colburn juxtaposes some of her own experiences with those of her ancestors to help readers feel the reality of these stories. “The hours of twisting and slicing,” she writes and instantly I, too, could remember what it’s like to mow hay with a scythe, an experience once common to farming folks, though even most modern farmers have never handled the tool. My father used a scythe to mow areas of the yard unhandy to reach with a mechanized mower; I’ve used it just enough to feel the memory in my muscles. Colburn’s ancestors harvested up to seventeen tons of hay by hand as a cash crop. A wagon load of hay might pay for a doctor bill or Christmas presents. On their small Nebraska place, even in the drought year of 1859, the family raised five hundred bushels of corn, two hundred of buckwheat and a hundred bushels of potatoes, sold three hundred pounds of butter and tucked six bushels of beans into the cellar.
Colburn does not lecture her readers but she uses her own experiences to add depth to what the reader may bring to the book, showing us how the prairie is still as abundant as ever, despite the century’s changes. “I ingest the soil, with its millions of microbes, in the form of sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, beans and basil. Every day I leave skin cells and shed hair on the grass.” She is the prairie as the prairie is her so that “when I walk attentively on this earth, I feel welcomed here, a part of the conscious silence of stones and the whirling fury of storms.”
“Once, Grandma mentioned in passing that there was no one left to talk to. I was a little hurt. ‘But,’ she said, ‘no one’s left who knows what I know’” That statement chilled me; even I, at the relatively young age of 69, know a great deal that no one else remembers, both specifically about my own ranch and generally about ranching. I’ve seen how younger ranchers dismiss some of the old wisdom as they find their own way to live with the land. Some change is beneficial, of course, but loss occurs everywhere. Colburn says that sometimes when her grandmother answered a question, she felt as if she was “hesitating, listening to other voices” before she answered. Perhaps she was; I find myself responding to uninformed questions or comments about ranching and the prairie with wisdom I once heard from my father or grandmother.
“In my grandma’s day,” writes Colburn, “a family was rich like a prairie.” Not only did most family members live close together, in the same community, but neighbors were woven into the blanket of helping and being helped. Of course, not all families or communities functioned well, but in recognizing their need for one another, most probably got along better than the average modern subdivision tacked onto the edge of an old ranching community. She speaks of a neighbor who washed his wife’s body, dressed her, built her coffin, and hauled her to the crematorium in the back of his pickup. That’s what she would have wanted, he said. Today, he might be arrested. We may contribute dollars to good causes but many of us have lost the sense of responsibility, the closeness, of helping neighbors face to face.
Faith Colburn is well qualified to tell this personal and universal story. She earned an MA in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Kearney as well as a BA in journalism and political science and an MA in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She received UNK’s Outstanding Work in Fiction Award during its 2009 student conference as well as several awards from the Nebraska Federation of Press Women. In 2012, UNK chose Threshold as the best thesis in the College of Fine Arts and Humanities. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in several publications. While working for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission she wrote numerous articles for NEBRASKAland magazine. Learn more about her at faithanncolburn.com.
You might read this book for a half-dozen reasons: because you need guidance in writing your own family history; because you are interested in Nebraska rural history; because you know the author or her country; or because you want to get some sense of what your own farming ancestors’ lives were like. She recalls “the smell of wheat dust and sweat and the ozone that precedes a storm and there’s the clang of green beans into a metal pot while friends and family sit on chairs dragged out into the yard where it’s hard to discern the border between fireflies and stars.” She remembers how comfortable it was when everyone knew her name. Perhaps, she says, “we can retrieve that feeling in a new century.” Whatever your reason for reading, you will come away enriched and enlightened.
# # #
Colburn has created something like a prairie in this ambitious book: an interwoven tapestry of eight generation of family, their lives nourished by Nebraska’s farmland. Delving deep beneath the varied plants in her family, she takes us into the skein of roots beneath the soil—and brings us home to a clearer understanding of our own ancestry.
She begins the book with a long list of characters, her family and friends who appear in the book. I once heard Leslie Silko say as she began a reading that the audience shouldn’t try to keep track of all the names immediately. “That’s not good for you,” she said. Just relax, she told us; listen and we would begin to understand the relationships. Do the same as you plunge into this book; all will become clear as Colburn begins weaving her story with the voice of her grandmother. And the real importance of the people in this book may be not that they are members of Colburn’s extended family but that they are recognizable as family belonging to everyone with ties to the prairie.
These twenty stories loop into and out of the history of one ordinary American family’s struggle to survive. Five-year-old Joseph Swope is kidnapped and adopted by a war chief. The author’s father roars up the highway with a turtle as passenger, trying to save his marriage. A singer with big bands who survived an abusive childhood falls for a soldier one enchanted evening and finds herself on a remote Nebraska farm. There are unwed mothers and lonely spinsters who disappear from family records, wild young men who drink too much: all the folks who would appear on the family tree if most of us are honest.
And we all have ties to the prairie, even if we don’t realize them; the prairie nurtured many of our ancestors and feeds many of us still. Still, but for how much longer if we don’t stop paving farmland? Fewer than one percent of Americans now farm the land and fewer still remain on small acreages, Colburn says. That’s too few to lobby successfully for intelligent farm policies that protect and conserve the land for its residents and the Americans it should feed. Agriculture is dominated now by huge corporations who treat the land and its occupiers like machines, not by nurturing communities of families.
Deftly, Colburn juxtaposes some of her own experiences with those of her ancestors to help readers feel the reality of these stories. “The hours of twisting and slicing,” she writes and instantly I, too, could remember what it’s like to mow hay with a scythe, an experience once common to farming folks, though even most modern farmers have never handled the tool. My father used a scythe to mow areas of the yard unhandy to reach with a mechanized mower; I’ve used it just enough to feel the memory in my muscles. Colburn’s ancestors harvested up to seventeen tons of hay by hand as a cash crop. A wagon load of hay might pay for a doctor bill or Christmas presents. On their small Nebraska place, even in the drought year of 1859, the family raised five hundred bushels of corn, two hundred of buckwheat and a hundred bushels of potatoes, sold three hundred pounds of butter and tucked six bushels of beans into the cellar.
Colburn does not lecture her readers but she uses her own experiences to add depth to what the reader may bring to the book, showing us how the prairie is still as abundant as ever, despite the century’s changes. “I ingest the soil, with its millions of microbes, in the form of sweet corn, tomatoes, peppers, beans and basil. Every day I leave skin cells and shed hair on the grass.” She is the prairie as the prairie is her so that “when I walk attentively on this earth, I feel welcomed here, a part of the conscious silence of stones and the whirling fury of storms.”
“Once, Grandma mentioned in passing that there was no one left to talk to. I was a little hurt. ‘But,’ she said, ‘no one’s left who knows what I know’” That statement chilled me; even I, at the relatively young age of 69, know a great deal that no one else remembers, both specifically about my own ranch and generally about ranching. I’ve seen how younger ranchers dismiss some of the old wisdom as they find their own way to live with the land. Some change is beneficial, of course, but loss occurs everywhere. Colburn says that sometimes when her grandmother answered a question, she felt as if she was “hesitating, listening to other voices” before she answered. Perhaps she was; I find myself responding to uninformed questions or comments about ranching and the prairie with wisdom I once heard from my father or grandmother.
“In my grandma’s day,” writes Colburn, “a family was rich like a prairie.” Not only did most family members live close together, in the same community, but neighbors were woven into the blanket of helping and being helped. Of course, not all families or communities functioned well, but in recognizing their need for one another, most probably got along better than the average modern subdivision tacked onto the edge of an old ranching community. She speaks of a neighbor who washed his wife’s body, dressed her, built her coffin, and hauled her to the crematorium in the back of his pickup. That’s what she would have wanted, he said. Today, he might be arrested. We may contribute dollars to good causes but many of us have lost the sense of responsibility, the closeness, of helping neighbors face to face.
Faith Colburn is well qualified to tell this personal and universal story. She earned an MA in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Kearney as well as a BA in journalism and political science and an MA in journalism from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She received UNK’s Outstanding Work in Fiction Award during its 2009 student conference as well as several awards from the Nebraska Federation of Press Women. In 2012, UNK chose Threshold as the best thesis in the College of Fine Arts and Humanities. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in several publications. While working for the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission she wrote numerous articles for NEBRASKAland magazine. Learn more about her at faithanncolburn.com.
You might read this book for a half-dozen reasons: because you need guidance in writing your own family history; because you are interested in Nebraska rural history; because you know the author or her country; or because you want to get some sense of what your own farming ancestors’ lives were like. She recalls “the smell of wheat dust and sweat and the ozone that precedes a storm and there’s the clang of green beans into a metal pot while friends and family sit on chairs dragged out into the yard where it’s hard to discern the border between fireflies and stars.” She remembers how comfortable it was when everyone knew her name. Perhaps, she says, “we can retrieve that feeling in a new century.” Whatever your reason for reading, you will come away enriched and enlightened.
# # #
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August 11, 2014Some years ago, when my nephew lost his leg, I found myself focusing on two images. The first of those came out of my grandmother's stories about her great-grandmother, Sicily Hendricks. Grandma Sicily was a midwife and folk healer and I've always envisioned her in a birthing room helping a friend and neighbor with a night delivery by the warm golden glow of candlelight and a fire on the hearth. The second image came out of David's accident, a mishap that resulted in the amputation of his lower leg. I often imagine him an a modern operating theater lit by cold fluorescent bulbs, alone among strangers, having a part of himself removed, labeled hazardous waste and incinerated. Throughout the time I worked on this memoir, I've had those two images in mind, always wondering, thinking about how those two situations are different and how they are the same. How important is it to be treated by strangers? What do we lose when the person who does the surgery need never look us in the eyes, never recognize our humanity?
May 30, 2015
I enjoyed every page of this memoir. Though it’s the story of the author’s ancestors, it felt like the story of mine. If you had a grandparent or great grandparent who struggled to survive in the era when neighbor relied on neighbor, when farmhands moved into the home of their employer, when women had to rely on midwives, this book will be a treat. Threshold, is not just a book about the past, it’s also a book about how we live now because of the past.
January 1, 2020
*This book was won from a First Reads giveaway on goodreads.com*
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews