IN DAD’S SHOES

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

Dad was in the garage,

Working on a car.

One of his,

Or one of his brothers’,

Or one of my mother’s brothers’.

It didn’t matter

‘Cause Dad liked working on cars.

Dad removed his greasy shoes and grimy socks before coming in the kitchen,

And as always before and again that time,

I noticed his feet –

So much like mine,

And I took the photo of his shoes to remind me,

And hoped I would be more like him in other ways with time.

©Linda Lee Greene, 2007

 

My father’s given name was Leland Edward Greene, but he preferred the shorter Lee Edward Greene. The briefer version won out and was his name for the entirety of his 89 years of life. I am named for Dad. The distinction is mine among the four offspring of my parents due to the order of my birth: I am the firstborn and because of that accident of chronology, by tradition the name was given to me. As time passed, however, it seemed meant to be, because among my three siblings and me, I resemble my father in appearance most closely. The jury is still out on whether or not I take after him in other, more crucial ways. But I try! I try!

          For the past several years, I have been asked to write the eulogies of members of my family whom have died during that time. The assignments began with the passing of my father on March 29, 2014. In tribute to him on this Father’s Day, I am including the opening paragraph of the eulogy I wrote for him, as well as an excerpt about him in GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS http://goo.gl/imUwKO, my book in which the momentous historical events of the twentieth century, from World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and beyond form the backdrop and my family holds center stage. My father’s grit is the quality that comes across most prominently in these passages, I think.

 

(Excerpt of Eulogy)

 

“Lee Edward Greene, 89, beloved son, brother, husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, and cherished friend was one of the last of the Greatest Generation, a loving and dedicated family man who was a joyful and steadfast breadwinner. He was a man good with his hands whether the task was to fix a leaky faucet, to make a car purr, or to build a house. But essentially he was a simple man – he held no public office, never attained fame nor amassed a fortune, but within the small circle that comprised his life, he was the center that always held, the rock upon whom everyone depended, the flint against which everyone struck on his/her passage to adulthood. We aren’t likely to see his kind again any time soon…”

***

(Revised excerpt of GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS http://goo.gl/imUwKO)

“The one-room, Cedar Fork schoolhouse across the holler from the little log cabin on the near side of Peach Mountain, which nestled among the northern foothills of the Appalachians, was a tolerable two-mile walk in mild weather. It was an enjoyable walk actually, if one had time to swing from a grapevine on top of a high cliff and drop into Cedar Fork Creek for a lazy dip, or to stop by the Workman’s place for a quick smoke of corn-silk tobacco. But in snowdrifts as tall as thirteen-year-old Lee Greene, in threadbare clothes, thin hand-me-down coat, and barely covered feet in holey socks flopping in an old pair of secondhand shoes that were too big for him, the walk that frigid, Great Depression morning was worse than pure misery.

Lee’s chronically aching stomach was hollow and rumbling. His meager breakfast of cornmeal mush and sugar water was quickly wearing thin, but he had more important things than his stomach to worry about that morning. He was stewing about the small amount of milk he had drawn from their cow tethered in the yard just beyond the lean-to kitchen at the back of his family’s tiny log cabin. The two-story structure, built by Lee. his older brother, and their father only five months before, comprised a common, or front room on the main level, a primitive lean-to kitchen at the back, and a bedroom where his parents slept, housing the only closet in the place. A rough-hewn timber ladder gained access to the upper deck, where, in an open-to-the-front loft, all of the many children slept on crude cots, or thin pads on the floor. A large ceiling-to-floor fireplace of indigenous stones in the common room on the first floor was the only source of heat in the place. Felled tree trunks supporting its roof, a porch spanned the width of the front of the log cabin.  

The soil where they lived on Cedar Fork—thin, hard, and dry, a crusty layer of sediment topping a bedrock of limestone, dolomite and shale—made for poor farming and gardening, posing a formidable challenge for growing adequate food. Squirrels, rabbits, opossums and birds, hunted and brought in by Lee, the insufficient supply of milk from the cow, and scant eggs supplied by their paltry flock of scrawny chickens in the yard, were the only sources of protein for the family. In season, a large vegetable garden and a stand of corn were coddled into fruition in the poor soil, but only if they were favored with enough rain.    

His nose and eyes crusty from yet another head cold, gloveless hands thrust into the pockets of his thin coat, and his feet turning to blocks of ice, Lee trudged on to school, his white-blond head under his hat hunkered into his shoulders. Despite the fact that he might not make it through the perpetual hardships of his life, much less that cold, windy, and snowbound morning, his soul was full of dreams, his mind of intention, his body of vigor and endurance, and on the strength of pure power of will alone, and maybe some help from the man upstairs, Lee was determined that if he ever got out of his childhood alive, nothing would ever encumber him again.

The one-room schoolhouse was dark and frigid, and Lee, by design, was the first to arrive. The door was unlocked, as always, and Lee, halting for a few minutes to give his blood a chance to circulate again in his frozen limbs and digits, sat down on one of the benches. He would have wept if he had allowed himself to seriously consider his unfortunate circumstances—but not Lee! No, not Lee! Not the boy/man who would one day be my father. He had a chance to earn fifty cents that week and every week for weeks to come, fifty cents for building a fire in the “Warm Morning” wood-burning, heating-stove each morning before school. And By Gum!!! That was exactly what he was going to do…”©

 

#Father’sDay, #CedarForkCreek, #AppalachianLife, #AppalachianMountains, #Southern Ohio, #PeachMountain, #WarmMorningStove, #GuardiansandOtherAngels, #LindaLeeGreene

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

 

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