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

 

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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

 

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