MARCH 29th: A BITTERSWEET DATE

 

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

My mother was born on a March 29th, and ninety-one years later, my father died on a March 29th. My daughter, who is a registered nurse and hospice administrator, and therefore well-versed in the dying patterns of people, predicted my ailing father’s date of death. She was certain he would hold on to life until March 29th of that year. She explained that people nearing the final moment of their life cycle often wait until they reach what to them is a meaningful date to take their last breath. In my father’s case, it was my mother’s birthday, his wife of close to fifty years. She had died twenty-two years before then.

            My parents were country folks, both of them born and raised in the untamed foothills of the Appalachian Mountains of Southern Ohio. Barefoot, innocent, natural, and free, in their early adolescence and a decade before they had me, they courted side by side on the swing located on the cavernous front porch of my grandparent’s farmhouse. The beautiful young girl, her red hair aflame in the sun, and the gorgeous boy, his yellow hair a glowing nimbus enfolding his head, spooned and riding bare-back on Old Smoky, stole into private nooks for kisses in the surrounding thick forests, and then slipped out of their clothes for a dip in the creek, the daredevil boy swinging and howling like Tarzan from a thick grapevine and cannon-balling into the deep water. Refreshed and eager for the hunt, they scavenged for arrowheads that were the plentiful artifacts of the Shawnee who had inhabited the land for thousands of years before white people. Summer evenings brought a gathering on the porch of young boys and girls of the area, guitars ringing and voices singing out in rhapsody of just being alive and in love. Later they scampered like colts in the pitch black night catching lightning bugs in jars, and then passed them on to their younger siblings, offerings the youngsters took to bed and under the covers giggled at the wonder of their blinking insect-nightlights. And then, a hand in hand stroll out to the spacious yard, the girl and the boy watched the stars rise from the gentle Appalachian peaks that on all sides enclosed their distinct world.

Franklin D. Roosevelt took possession of the White House the same year the girl and the boy found each other in the porch swing. All around them the Great Depression raged on, but the distinguished president’s reassuring radio-messages restored confidence in their future, a future that begot marriage, a worldwide war, and my birth while my father was off training to fight in the conflict. In the aftermath of the war, my parents, my little brother, and I beat it to the big city for better employment for my father. Time marched on rapidly, as it is wont to do, and my two kid sisters rounded out our family.

On this bittersweet March 29th, I celebrate the 98^th birthday of my mother while I mourn my father’s passing on the March 29th of seven years ago. Both of them are in heaven, or some other realm of the beyond. Maybe there is a porch swing there, too, and Old Smoky out in the yard, ready and waiting to carry them on his bare back, to follow the Path discovered by the ginger-headed girl and the tow-topped boy so long ago, the Path that leads them forever on and on and on…..©

 

Photo: 4 year-old Linda Lee Greene and her parents

 

***

 

Multi-award-winning author Linda Lee Greene’s GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, is an ambitious and a thorough exploration of two families whose experiences are funneled through the pivotal early to middle decades of the twentieth century. This seamless blend of fiction and nonfiction renders an authentic slice of Americana at its most personal and profound. Based on actual events and oral history of her parents and extended family, and featuring transcriptions of dozens of authentic private letters written by the story’s principle characters, Greene delivers an insider’s view of the hearts and minds and day to day events of a singular group of people counted among history’s greatest generation. Powerful in its sweeping journalistic impact and at the same time tender in its novelistic prose, this extraordinary book contributes greatly to the preservation efforts of the era it interprets.

 

“5 stars…Wonderfully Written! This was a thoroughly enjoyable book. I loved the Americana. It reached out and touched my heart, mind and soul. It provided tremendous insight into what many American families endured during the first half of the 20th century. It captures you and draws you in. This is most certainly a five-star novel.”

 

Purchase Link: http://goo.gl/imUwKO

 

#March29, #Appalachia, #AppalachianMountains, #Ohio, #PorchSwing, #Shawnee, #Americana,  #FranklinDRoosevelt, #GreatDepression, #WorldWarII, #GuardiansandOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR | Owen Clough

 

I am honored to host New Zealand author Owen Clough on my blog today.  Keep reading to learn about him and his wonderful trilogy of books:

Leaving school at the age of fourteen, Owen traveled around New Zealand on a working holiday. At seventeen, he joined the Royal New Zealand Air Force where he spent eleven years on different bases, including a time overseas. At age twenty, he married his wife Kaye and they are still together. Over the years, he's had various jobs from driving the big red buses in Christchurch to selling dairy products. He has owned a coffee bar/tearoom and a limousine. In 1995 he joined the tourist tram operation in Christchurch and spent the next twenty years with the company, including a year in Auckland helping to set up their operation.

Having survived the devastating earthquakes of 2010 in Christchurch, Owen and Kaye sold their home after it was repaired and they hit the road in their 5th wheel motor-home. He is now retired. They have two grown children and one granddaughter.

A keen genealogist, motor caravanner, and rugby fanatic, Owen has put his love of history to good use in his trilogy of books about New Zealand’s turbulent history. A novel of historical fiction, WHISPERS OF THE PAST is the first of the three novels. A reviewer rates it as an “Excellent Blend of Historical Fact and Fiction…Combining historical facts with fiction, Owen has created an excellent plot which will keep you turning the pages. Follow the exploits of Bob, Sam, and Shane as they begin a trek around a New Zealand volcano. Before long, they're no longer in the present, but find themselves embroiled in the Waikato War of 1863.

                                                                         

“The extremely well-developed characters show what they're made of as they deal with what comes their way. Since I don't like to give away too much, you'll need to grab yourself a copy and find out what happens. There's plenty of action and you find it hard to put this one down. I look forward to reading the next one in the series.”

 

The second novel of the series, SHADOWS OF THE MIND is reviewed as “A well written and very different time travel story...Lost in time, transported to 1863, then injured with a head wound. Separated from his mates and not remembering his name or his true past, this is the story of Sam and his friend's search to bring him back to the present. A truly engrossing novel, with great detail and narrative. While I have never traveled to these locations, they certainly are now at the top of my wish list due to the author's marvelous descriptions.”

                                                                         

Published in 2020, CLEARING OF THE MIST rounds out the three-book series. One reviewer finds it “A startling read…I really enjoyed this fantasy. If you're into history you'll love it. An elegant plot with intriguing characters. Well researched, well written and very enjoyable. I would highly recommend you read this.”

                                                                                

This trilogy by Owen Clough was six years in the writing.

Visit Owen Clough at: http://www.owencloughbooks.com

Like each of his books on Facebook:

Book 1: WHISPERS OF THE PAST

Book 2: SHADOWS OF THE MIND

Book 3: CLEARING OF THE MIST

Youtube channel:    https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCusnYcy-_PrG1FJgAIY0t2w   

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B08FTGWYSS?ref_=pe_584750_33951330

 

A Garden: Nature’s Springtime Wardrobe of Many Colors

 

 From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

Surveys reveal consistently that by a wide margin, green and blue are the favorite colors of all of humanity across the globe—green in its call to the spirit of land and all of its contours and accessories, and blue for the sky and water—in essence, those colors most suggestive of our Earthly home. One of the most popular ways we get up close and personal with this magical blue and green orb that anchors us to the cosmos is by way of gardens.

Artists, artisans, and photographers heed in their work this “call of the heart” on the part of human beings, this spiritual yearning for Mother Earth, to run our fingers through Her hair, metaphorically speaking. Claude Monet’s revered paintings of his sumptuous gardens at his estate in Giverny, France are famous examples, canvases revelatory of his singular engagement with his world, underlain principally in effervescent greens and blues. But we don’t have to travel to France to find inspiring gardens. They are everywhere within easy reach of most of us. Two special gardens near me come to mind:

Located on the southern outskirts of my home city in the Midwest region of the USA is a particular garden designed and tended exclusively by an elderly female gardener named Shirley. When I knew her, she was well into her nineties, and although her husband and contemporaries had passed on, this spritely soul sported replaced knees and hips, new body parts she put to good use every day the weather permitted, digging and pruning and dead-heading in her enormous perennial flower garden. It was a garden in which she and statues of Buddha, of Saint Francis, and of Heaven’s Angels greeted their visitors upon their arrivals and departures. While she hedged her bets in the diversity of her garden statuary, sometime during the passage of her era, attending to her garden became Shirley’s reason for living.

The other one is found a distance north of my city on an eastern embankment of the picturesque Scioto River, designed and tended solely by a woman of advanced years by the name of Teresa. At the time I knew her she was mourning the recent death of her husband but also searching bravely for her own footing in the world. Teresa was subdued then within the contours of her tragedy, but this petite bundle of Italian exuberance wouldn’t be down for long. Anyone could see this in the messages throughout her garden, one of layer upon layer of sloped, visual feasts of plants tumbling the hillside to the very rim of the river. At the garden’s summit, the portion of it closest to the house, was a sweet, little fountain-pool hosted in its center by a statue of a tiny angel. It came to my mind intuitively that therein resided Teresa’s memories, dominated by her husband by virtue of their many decades together. Teresa’s garden was a veritable memoir of her marriage, enshrined in the bearing of that teeny concrete garden angel, as well as in the poppies, hollyhocks, black-eyed Susans, and other flowers nestled among a grand selection of trees and bushes.

Gardens inspire some of us to extract their meaning on canvases, in photographs, in crafts; for others, they provide a reason for living. For still others, their gardens hold their memories. If you are like me, this spring provides an opportunity to resurrect a garden that fell to neglect last spring in the pandemic’s lockdown. There are as many reasons to experience gardens as there are plants comprising them, and whatever your motivation, the time is nigh to get back to it with abandon. In the warm days to come, give your spirit wings in a garden, nature’s springtime wardrobe of many colors, a sartorial splendor set against Earth’s fundamental blues and greens.

!!COMING SOON!!

Linda Lee Greene’s next book:

A novella titled

GARDEN OF THE SPIRITS OF THE POTS

A Spiritual Odyssey

#gardening, #gardens, #MidwestGardens, #PerennialGardens, #SciotoRiver, #ClaudeMonet, #GivernyFrance, LindaLeeGreene

♪♪♪ I AM WOMAN, HEAR ME ROAR! ♪♪♪

 

A short story in memory of singer, actress, and activist,

Helen Reddy

1941-2020

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

It was the last day of September, 2020. My cellphone rang at 6:00 AM on the dot. It was my Aunt Carol, my mother’s youngest sibling, and my only remaining relative of my parent’s generation. No one but Aunt Carol would call me at such an hour. We were both early risers, a family trait that harkened back to our farming ancestors. I thanked my lucky stars my coffee pot was already chugging. Her pot would be brewing, too. Aunt Carol had fallen and broken her hip in early March of 2020. Following surgery, she was placed in a rehab facility. The plan was that once she was well enough, she would stay with me for a while before taking up normal life again in her condo in the northern outskirts of Columbus. But then Covid-19 hit and changed everything for everyone. The only choice left to her was to take up residence in an assisted-living facility, and there she has remained. Carol is not her real name. If I divulged her actual, full name, which, to protect her privacy I would never do, you would recognize her. She is a well-known author, active in her work to this day.

Aunt Carol has been my best friend, mentor and trusted ally since the day of my birth. At 77 years old, she is proof that there is no expiration date on cool. Normally, not a week goes by that we don’t see each other, preferably on Sundays. Covid-19 put a stop to that, too. I haven’t laid eyes on my aunt since the day in March of last year that we went into lockdown.

“Good morning, Aunt Carol,” I said into my phone. She didn’t say a word for a few seconds. I did hear sniffles. She was crying. My heart jumped to my throat. ‘Oh God, please no! She’s got the virus!’ my mind screamed in my head. We lived in desperate fear of it every single moment of every single day as her friends at the facility dropped like flies from the illness almost daily.

            “Helen Reddy died sometime yesterday,” Aunt Carol managed to say through her tears, finally. “I heard it on the news just a few minutes ago.”

I drew in a deep breath of relief and then ran the name through the catalog in my mind, a vaguely familiar name, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. “Helen Reddy?”

“You know…the singer…the “‘I am Woman, Hear me Roar!’ singer.”

“Oh! Yeah! God, I love that song. Was it Covid?”

“They didn’t say. I guess she had Addisons for a long time, and dementia.”

“She was Australian, wasn’t she?”

“Australian-American. She had dual citizenship. I think they said she died at her home in L.A., but I’m not sure. She was only two years older than me. Helen Reddy meant a lot to me, you know…an awful lot.”

I knew from her unique storyteller tone of voice that Aunt Carol had a Helen Reddy story she was chomping at the bit to tell me. I love Aunt Carol’s stories, even at the crack of dawn. My cellphone at my ear and a steaming cup of coffee on the table next to my lounge chair, I tucked myself in and listened:        

“Helen Reddy and her ‘I am Woman, Hear me Roar’ was instrumental in my discovery of my special someone,” Aunt Carol began.

“If memory serves, Aunt Carol, you’ve had more than one special someone.”

“I suppose it depends on the definition.” She took a quick sip of her coffee, a characteristically delicate sound in my ear. I pictured her all elegant and pulled together in her chair, all set to charm the attendant who would deliver her breakfast on a tray. No longer were visitors and communal dining permitted. Covid was really cramping the style of my highly social aunt. She took up her story again:

“I was a young wife and mother in 1972 when the song went ‘viral,’ as they say now. I was also one of the millions of women across much of the world who sang those words at the top of our voices as we cooked and cleaned and changed diapers—and washed them. Pampers didn’t existent back then. Because of that song about the empowerment of women, our spirits swelled up and pushed out and cracked the mold of our traditionally narrow and unequal roles, both in and out of marriage. And then we set out to throw off those walls and forge new versions of ourselves we never before thought possible.”

Her reference to diapers set my mind to thinking about her children, Steve and Marci. They were my favorite cousins. I hadn’t seen them since lockdown, either. Aunt Carol’s voice broke in on my musings about my cousins when she said, “I remember like it was yesterday how that song made me feel. It was as if I had undergone a weird kind of surgery on my eyes that gave me new visual powers, like Superman’s. I saw novel dimensions in myself of bravery and optimism, and even of possibilities. I remember an expansive feeling in my chest. I drew in deeper and fresher breaths that cleared my head like happens at the seashore.”    

“That must have had an impact on your marriage.”

“It emboldened me to lobby for some changes that I felt sure would benefit both your Uncle Ted and myself, and by extension, our marriage. Do you remember your Uncle Ted?”

“Only a little bit. I was still a snot-nosed kid when you guys divorced.”

“While I had lived all my life in Ohio and he in New York, at the perfect time, life had placed us on the same road as fellow travelers and best partners on the journey ahead, both as a couple and as individuals. We were very young. As my grandfather used to say, ‘We were still wet behind our ears.’ Ted and I grew up together. We found our footing together. Helen Reddy’s song showed up just in time to arm me against dark forces that lurked in the background of the marriage. They were signals that the road had run out for Ted and me as a couple.”  

“That’s a polite way of describing what he did to you.”

“Oh well, it doesn’t hurt to be kind. I don’t want to prejudice the kids against him. Besides, nothing good comes from holding on to resentment. I forgave Ted a long time ago—as I hope I am forgiven by people whom I’ve wronged.”

“You are too good for your own good, Aunt Carol. But that’s one of the things I love and admire about you.”

“Well, thanks. I love you right back, honey.”

“But do you admire me?”

“Well, of course I admire you. What makes you think otherwise? Do you have something to tell me, Darlin’?”

“No! Nothing! It was a silly, reflexive remark.”

“Are you sure? I don’t need to remind you that you can tell me anything, do I?”

“No, Aunt Carol. I’m good.”

“Don’t you ever forget that I’m here for you. Do you want to hear the rest of my Helen Reddy story?”

“When have you known me to ever resist one of your stories? I’m all ears.”

“All right then. As I was saying, the marriage was the critical, opening lap of my voyage. It was my first grand exploration of new and exciting landscapes and people. It gave me my children. And right or wrong, it was the standard against which I gauged my feelings for subsequent significant others. But absent Helen Reddy’s formidable help, I surely would not have discovered the separate me that lived within that marriage, the one I needed to nurture in order to survive after Ted and I broke up.”

“I know, Aunt Carol. I’ve been along on all of it with you.”

“Yes! But, I’ve been pretty close-mouthed about the difficulties I encountered in the years after Ted. I wasn’t always proud of my responses, and I hid from you and your mother. I look back on it now, though, and understand that all of it was necessary to get to my true life. And thank goodness my Muse was at work beneath all of it, even during long stretches of time I couldn’t or refused to hear her. An example is what occurred during my relationship with that high-powered attorney. He plopped me down in the middle of a bunch of brainy people whose greatest pleasure in life was a kind of verbal volleyball in which they whacked an intellectual ball back and forth to one another across an invisible net, nonstop. I was the sacrificial lamb who got thrown to those lions, time and time again. Chewed-up, but smartened-up as to the sickening extent of my ignorance, I got my butt off to evening- and weekend-college. In no time at all, though, I found out that I liked college a whole lot better than Mr. High-Powered Attorney. My Muse giveth and she taketh away, and away she sent me on a different fork in my road.”

“The experience got you into college. That’s a good thing.”

“Yes. It also gave me greater insight into the possibilities available to women. Some of those lions I encountered with the attorney were women a generation or two younger than me. All of them had gone off to college after high school rather than to marriage. They were attorneys, accountants, and other types of professionals. Traditional marriage remains a good and right option for some women, but not all of them. Helen Reddy and her feminist sisters deserve much of the credit for that progress.”

“It never occurred to me that I wouldn’t go to college after high school. It was the natural transition.”

“The transition never felt natural to me. I found it a constant struggle. A quick scan of my sorry resumé read at that time: ‘lonely, divorced mother of grown children out on their own; lonely, office worker; lonely, adult college student; lonely, social dropout.’ And the emphasis was on ‘lonely’. It’s always such a vulnerable place to be. I was still that little lamb and by then lost in the towering weeds thick in the fringes of my highway. An eagle-eyed, business-guy on the hunt for just someone like me, and at the wheel of his Mercedes Benz, spotted me, scooped me up, and carted me off in his luxury ride to a fancy restaurant. Soon I was the eye-candy on his arm in pricey nightclubs in shining cities populated by glamorous people who indulged in some edgy behaviors, my guy included.”

“You’ve always been a real beauty, Aunt Carol.”

“You too! It’s a lucky attribute of our family. Beauty is one thing and eye-candy another. Eye-candy doesn’t have any substance—it’s intellectually unchallenging. It’s demeaning to someone with a brain.”

“I know you try to avoid speaking his name out loud for fear of summoning his negative energy, but I remember him really well.”

“Making an impression was very important to him, thus his penchant toward eye-candy. And he was the most hyper person I’ve ever known. He turned out to be the crazy-maker who kept me so busy and frazzled that I never read a book or wrote a word during my time with him.”

“Do you remember the time you guys took me to Vegas?”

“It was one of those weekend gambling junkets at Caesars Palace he dragged me to so often.”

“And when I was there with you, he spent the whole time playing poker and you and I eating our way through the place. Do you remember that big, buffet-style restaurant? I thought I had died and gone to food heaven.”

“Take it from me, it was the only heaven I ever experienced with him. I had turned into a person whom the, ‘I am Woman, Hear me Roar,’ version of me no longer recognized. I was buried beneath a heap of faux-glitter in an earthbound hell, and one morning I woke up, packed up, and ran for my life. I drifted for another little while, but then I saw that never was a moment of my time with the business-guy wasted, because the unrelenting noise and chaos of him squared me emphatically toward my north star.    

“Several years later of hard work and lots of self-refection, my old friend Jay turned me on to technology. That was a real liberation. It was no coincidence that soon the words of my first book blared in my mind’s ear like a voice in a bullhorn. So I followed that voice—I knew I had to follow it, and I sat down and pecked out the manuscript on my shiny, new computer, lickity-split.

“I had arrived at the destination my Muse had set for me from the very beginning. She had conjured my experiences, steered me through them, and all the while, made a writer out of me. But I was no spring chicken anymore. I felt pressed for time. I had learned very well that any outside obligation or interruption would break my stride. The struggle for empowerment of women has been an up and down fight, and my personal battle mirrors the collective one. You know as well as anyone that the barriers are massive and stubborn. But if I’m honest about it, I can’t blame those outside forces entirely for my twist and turn ride to owning my personal journey. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve forgotten or dismissed Helen Reddy’s mandate: ‘I am Woman, Hear me Roar,’ and have shriveled up and shut up whenever it was expedient or safer to do so. But I can’t be in that race any longer. I’ve had to slow my pace and work my own agenda. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I read something like what I think you are saying in May Sarton’s ‘Journal of Solitude.’ She wrote, ‘People want to become you and when they find they cannot, they want to kill you.’”

“I would add that the trick is to refrain from killing ourselves when we find we cannot be all we set out to be, or when we haven’t found it in another person. Life has made it crystal clear to me that I am my own right and enduring special someone. I find tangible contentment in my life. And now comes the most astounding part: When I go to sleep at night, I’m carried back in lifelike dreams to a romantic meet-up with an intoxicating man! Apparently the two sectors of my brain have forged a pact in which one of them comes out to play at night and the other goes to work by day. And so, night and day, I have the best of both worlds. What more could an old broad like me ask for? It’s a gift from the gods, and in no way am I complaining about it.”

“You’ve earned it, Aunt Carol. You deserve any happiness you can get. I want you to know that I hear you. You’re turning it over to me—to us younguns!”

Aunt Carol proclaims this to be a Helen Reddy story, but it’s so much more. In her typical fashion, my wise and caring aunt put to use Helen Reddy and herself to tell me some things I needed to hear about the direction I’m traveling on my own road to self-discovery.

Now…six months later, the sun still comes and goes. Tender spring flowers peek through the ground. Worldwide, multiple-millions of people are vaccinated every day. Both Aunt Carol and I have had our two Pfizer shots. Come tomorrow, Daylight Saving Time returns, and I’ll be at Aunt Carol’s door bright and early to bring her home with me, finally. I have a bottle of champagne chilling and clocks we’ll turn forward.© 

Image: Helen Reddy at the microphone

The above is a work of fiction based on true events.

 

                                                                        ***

 

Multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene’s CRADLE OF THE SERPENT, a finalist in the cross-genre category of the 2018 American Fiction Awards, is an in-depth account of the marriage of archaeologists Lily and Jacob Light. One reviewer states: “5 Stars…Gritty, deep, emotionally packed relationship story to sink your teeth into. No fluffy boy meets girl tale, but so much more. Thrilling setting and backstory; suspense galore!”

 

Purchase Link to CRADLE OF THE SERPENT: goo.gl/i3UkAV

 

#ASMSG, #romance, #marriage, #Pampers, #divorce, #MercedesBenz, #thriller, #ebooks, #books, #LindaLeeGreene, #AmericanFictionAwards