Feature: Because She Was Fine

Because She Was Fine

By Karilea Rilling Jungel

Between and betwixt Abilene and Salina, just north of New Cambria, parallel to Interstate 70 and upon a hill, sits Highland Cemetery. It overlooks the valleys of the countryside to the north, south, east and west. Established by the farmers and ranchers of the area back in the 1860’s, it became a prominent highlight in my life in April, 1980.

Highland Cemetery - photo by Karilea Rilling Jungel

That was the year that two people who were planning a second marriage to one another came to Salina. He was returning home, bringing his fiancée to meet his mother, and to gain her approval. Mabel Marie Jorg Jungel, born November 18, 1908, and who had at one time been a one-room schoolhouse educator, a farmer-rancher’s wife, and a mother to an only child at age 35, was to either anoint a yea or nay as to whether or not this transplanted Californian would be granted approval to marry her only boy. It was Easter weekend in April 1980, and although she and I had talked prior to this meeting several times over the phone, I was still nervous about meeting this icon of womanhood.

She was 71 at the time of our meeting, blue of eye and grey of hair, and although she had arthritic hands, she bequeathed wonderful hugs. The first night’s dinner for her boy was his favorite chicken and noodles; you might know the kind – thick Amish-style noodles with huge chunks of chicken and a gravy/sauce not to be replicated. She told me as how she used to make the noodles herself and hang them off the backs of wooden chairs "in my day”;  she was full of aphorisms of what we came to call “Mabel-isms”… little succinct sayings that only she could utter, and she did so with charm and smiles.

By morning she was ready, dressed (and I do mean “dress”) and set to see the countryside by car. We had spent the night before going through boxes of photos so I could meet all of the ancestry that she had to share. Most, of course, were taken in black and white; my imagination had to fill in the color of the people and countryside. So we gathered in her car with her son at the wheel, and off we were. My sense of direction was totally skewed, so I had to be told if we were going N-S-E or W.

 

photo by Karilea Rilling Jungel

However, I felt I had a good eye and a sense for architecture and style. We were hours out on the sand and gravel roads. Passing a house “going north” as I was told, I would eye a structure as if to be invited back…and in case there was a test. I would be given a story of who had lived there and who had died there and tried to follow the conversation between my fiancé and his mother and keeping an eye on the countryside and trust me…neither of them hardly bothered to take a breath, the words were flying between them with no way to get a question in edgewise or any other way.

But…after a while, it would seem like the same road again, the same house or barn again, but from a different direction. There was only one problem. Names appointed to the homes earlier were changing. It took me some while to realize that Mabel, depending on which direction she was traveling, would be talking about another family living there in an entirely different decade! When I realized that her seven decades had seen many changes, only then did I finally settle back, because if there was going to be a test by the end of the day, I would just have to plan to fail, and miserably! I was lost in the history as the stories were so vast and numerous.

However, the highlight of the day came toward late afternoon. I had already mistaken pretty purple flowers for “lovely” before I learned they were the dreaded and illegal musk-thistle. I did, however, identify some birds appropriately, and knew the difference between a horse and a cow, so maybe I would make an “ok” country girl after all. I seemed “trainable.”

Then we found ourselves on top of a high hill, surrounded by tall and ancient cedar trees in a cemetery that still sported fences around plots of graves within a wholly fenced in surrounding. Antique posts and gates had been placed around some family gravesites because of wandering cattle before a newer 1930’s fence enclosed the entire cemetery. But the height of the hill gave me pause. For once upon a time there had been a moment in the past when buffalo, Indians and Settlers had roamed the area in Bleeding Kansas. You could feel the sacredness of the surroundings. You could smell the history by touching the stones as Mabel shared her kith and kin on both sides of the family, the Aunts, Uncles, Grandmas and Grandpas; Cousins, Sisters and Brothers. As she rolled off the names, I recognized many from the stories told just the night before. 

photo by Karilea Rilling Jungel

photo by Karilea Rilling Jungel

 Then we came to her husband Roy’s gravestone. Roy had passed just a couple of years before, just before Christmas 1978. My fiancé told me that the funeral cars reached from the hill south to Old Highway 40 before all had arrived, nearly two point two miles. Mabel explained that she would be buried alongside her husband, and she added in a kind voice, “of course, Carroll will lie there, and you go there, beside him.”

            That was her way of telling me I was going to be one of the family. Oh, I loved her from that day, because she was fine!

Keep up-to-date with everything Abilene with the the ABILENE KANSAS app.