mary power memorial moss garden
...is no more.

I spent some time this summer at M.U.M.PS.* headquarters in Seattle. Coming from Montana - where I get shocked every time I touch anything - the dripping humidity was a pleasant change, except when it came to thinking that my wool socks would dry overnight.

In addition to walking a lot and eating a lot, the president of M.U.M.P.S. took me on a private tour of Bellingham, Washington, final home of Mary (Power) and E.P. Sanford. We visited all the Sanford homesites and the cemetery where they're buried. The Sanford headstones (along with almost every other headstone, mind you) were covered in moss, lovely pincushion tufts of greens and golds.

After Gina and I cleaned the stones with sticks and hands (I had my leather gardening gloves in the car, which helped a lot), I gathered the scrapings and brought them home to plant. Gina kept telling me to do the yogurt/moss thing to get it started. If you grind moss and mix it with buttermilk before "planting", the acid helps it grow.

I wanted the tufts - and Gina assured me there would be another crop at next year's annual cleaning - so I planted the tufts artfully in a shallow clay pot. I named it the Mary Power Memorial Moss Garden. The Garden had to live indoors, as it was already COLD in Montana.

Then came the almost hourly ritual of misting and watering and trying to keep it alive. I even had thoughts of planting some of the moss from Mrs. Power's headstone (Mary's mother, Eliza Donnelly Power, wife of De Smet tailor Thomas P. Power; she's buried there, too) at Mr. Power's gravesite in De Smet this summer...

Cyberbessie has quite the green thumb, but not where moss growing is concerned, she guesses. The moss died. RIP moss garden.

*M.U.M.P.S. = "My (meaning Gina's) Unknown Mary Power Society" --- If you want to know anything and everything about the Power/Sanford families, Gina's the person to talk to. Gina and Ollie at MUMPS headquarters are lovely folk.

P.S. Susie and Jake Hopp (De Smet printer from Little Town on the Prairie: see Chapter 16, "Name Cards") are buried in Bellingham, too. Susie Power was Mary's older sister.

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- posted by pioneergirl at 9:43 PM