WHAT A CHARACTER

 

From Linda Lee Greene Author/Artist

Life has hit me with some new low blows lately, and I expect them to continue to menace until I get beyond them—and then on to another round. That’s the way the day to day unfolds here in this particular confluence of protoplasm known as Linda Lee Greene. During times like these, I turn to certain practices that help me through. I meditate; I read inspirational material; I write; I storytell to my immediate loved-ones through a long texting thread; I paw through old photographs and relive the moments they bring to mind, an exercise in which I lose my present self in the past for a while and that rewards me with momentary amnesia of my current stresses.

          I took on the mantle as my birth family’s official photographer at the tender age of six, my mother’s little Brownie camera wound with black and white film incessantly in my grubby hands. I had the natural eye and ear for a good photograph. It was the precursor of my inborn talents as an artist and a writing storyteller that blossomed pretty much concurrently with my penchant for the camera. Such is the story behind my featured photo of my sister Sherri.

You will notice that the date of the photo is Oct. 1956. To be precise, I took the photo on the day of that month and in that year that was the occasion of Sherri’s third birthday. I had turned thirteen two months before. The location was the backyard of our home at 507 W. Second Avenue, Columbus, Ohio, an old multi-storied Victorian that I think of and dream about as home to this day, even though I haven’t lived there for sixty-five years.

That backyard was an ideal setting for great photographs. It was lush with green grass, flowering bushes, and leafy trees—an ancient cherry tree whose many and strong branches provided years of fun summer afternoons of climbing was a favorite of the neighborhood kids. An arbor of sweet green grapes draped the walkway that began at the foot of the back porch and led to the garage and doglegged to a gate that opened onto the alley. Tucked in one side of the arbor was a bench, a two-seater that was both private and romantic among the copious grapevines. I posed Sherri on the bench and snapped a picture. Next I dragged an old chair from the porch to the yard, lifted Sherri up to it, and instructed her to stand straight and smile.

Sherri had her own ideas about how our photoshoot should be conducted. She didn’t like posing upright on the chair and gave me her famous “look of disapproval”, her arms bent and fists coiling in ready to fight. I got the shot just in time and memorialized it in my photo of her on her third birthday. Sherri hasn’t changed one whit since then. She still has her own ideas about things and isn’t shy about having them known. She might be my favorite person in the world while at the same time remaining my competitor. My little secret is that it doesn’t matter to me which of us wins. All that matters to me is that Sherri is my sister, and I count my lucky stars for it every single day.

My wish is that you and yours have a lovely Thanksgiving. I know I will, in large part because my sister Sherri will be with me at our table this year, and God willing, for many years to come.©

#Sisters, #Thanksgiving, #VictorianHouses, #ColumbusOhio, #LindaLeeGreene, #AuthorArtist

“STAND BY YOUR MAN,” SOMETIMES AT YOUR PERIL

It is my great pleasure to feature a new author on my blog today. I hope you enjoy reading about her.    

In her debut novella, author Marla Morris packs in a well-written, powerful, and emotion-charged story of misguided love, of love-gone-wrong, and of fatal love. Set in a time when “Stand by your man,” was still the pervasive ethos no matter the cost or danger to a woman, Morris brings home to the reader a gut-wrenching portrait of the female protagonist of her story whose adherence to the code was her ruination. This is a cathartic read for women who have been caught in similar circumstances, as well as an informative one for women on the outside looking inward, or for women on the inside looking for a way out. I recommend this book as a 5-star read. It is available for purchase at Amazon.com. –Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

 

Mother of two grown children and grandmother of three grandchildren, author Marla Morris is a lifelong Central Ohio resident. She was educated at Columbus’ Capital University School of Law. She enjoys crime and police detective television shows, and her bucket list includes traveling to all fifty states of the United States of America and cruising on the Mediterranean.

   

#DebutNovel, #CentralOhio, #ColumbusOhio, #CapitalUniversitySchoolofLaw, #true-crime, #MarlaMorris, #LindaLeeGreene                                                                                              

THE ZEN OF WASHING DISHES

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author/Artist

 

“If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not ‘washing the dishes to wash the dishes.’ What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future—and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.”

― Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation

***

 

Roma, whom her near and dear called “Ro” was my mother, and in all her 69 years of life, she never owned a dishwasher. Day in and day out, Ro cooked for her family and then washed the dirty dishes by hand as she always had done. The eldest female of her seven siblings, she was born at a time when small family farms were still ubiquitous in America. The responsibilities of an “eldest female” in such farm societies began very young and were numerous. Among the chores she assumed when little more than a toddler was washing the dirty dishes at the completion of every multi-course breakfast, dinner, and supper consumed by her large family, seven days a week, every week of every year and nary a day off in between. After each meal, her mother scooted a chair across the worn linoleum-clad floor of the Southern Ohio farmhouse kitchen and set it before the counter on which the chipped and dented metal dishpan of warm water sat next to the cistern pump, and then she lifted Ro onto the chair. The little girl then got busy washing the dishes and stacking them to air-dry on the counter.

          When Mom and Dad built the house on Alkire Road in Grove City, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, in the late 1950’s, Mom could have made room for a newfangled dishwasher in the kitchen—but she saw no need for it. However, she did opt for a double stainless-steel sink mounted in a countertop of yellow-gold Formica and surrounded by tiles of turquoise plastic on the backsplash. And boy, did that compact workspace see hard duty over the years.

Reva “Re,” one of my mother’s two younger sisters and my favorite aunt, came to visit one September Sunday of 1979, arriving early enough to allow her and my mother ample time to “visit” before getting down to the serious business of preparing the evening meal. Their “visits” were jovial affairs comprised of jawing the latest gossip, hee-hawing, sometimes irreverently, and chewing anything in sight. The photograph of them (Re is on the left; Ro is on the right) illustrates the point better than any words I can bring to mind.

 Among a family of wild cats, Re was the wildest of them all. Stories of her escapades abound in the annals of our family. One of my favorites took place in a ‘beer joint” in Columbus, a rowdy evening that Re, my father, and two of my uncles were hanging out and getting soused together. A fellow drunken patron, slurring epithets and challenges to my father to duke it out then and there didn’t know the peril he was inviting. Re jumped up from her bar stool, thrust her face right up to the big fella’s nose, and hands on hips and blue eyes flashing, she spat, “That’s Lee! He’s my brother-in-law, and anyone who makes trouble for him has to go through me first!” The guy just laughed and turned his back to her. Furious at the affront, Re jumped up on his back and riding him like a cowgirl on a bucking bronco, she pounded him on his skull with her balled fists. It took my father and both my uncles to pull her off the startled man.

With help now and then from their brothers and brothers-in-law, my father and mother built the house on Alkire Road with their own hands, essentially. It was an endeavor rife with successes and challenges, the challenges in large part emanating from my mother’s screwball exploits, all of which were constant bones of contention between my parents. One of them involved her hammering a roofing nail into her bare foot. In all its zany and glorious details, I wrote the story of the construction project in GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, 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 two sisters, my two children, and I also attended that gathering at the Alkire Road house that September Sunday of 1979. It was a giggle a minute, which was always the case when Re was around. The evening meal under our belts and the dining room table cleared, everyone but Ro and Re piled in the living room to watch TV. My mother and her sister wanted to extend their visit while washing the dishes. The yellow-gold Formica countertop heaped with all manner of greasy dinnerware, Ro plunged them one by one in the soapy water of the right-hand stainless-steel sink and scrubbed and scrubbed, and then Re swished and swished them in the clear water of the left-hand stainless-steel rinsing sink. Pretty soon Ro took to braying like a mule and Re to howling like a hyena. The TV show in the living room was no competition for the one underway in the kitchen, and the rest of us raced to investigate. And there, dripping in the dish drainer was a Leaning Tower of Pisa of dishes, topped off with an orange plastic bowl and a metal pan wedged in and teetering upright on its handle. “Get the camera!” my mother yelled.

Thich Nhat Hahn also said that washing dishes was like bathing the baby Buddha. I doubt that my mother and my aunt found that kind of reverence in the act, but they applied their considerable sister wisdom to it and made a delightful game of it to share together. So simple! So real! So full of moments of actual life! I am happy to report that I also love to wash dishes by hand and have no desire to invest in a dishwasher. I have a friend who in all the twenty plus years he has lived in his condo, has never turned on his built-in dishwasher. He stores his deceased mother’s fine china in it instead. To my mind, that is a brilliant use for a dishwasher!©  

             

***

 

Re passed on in 1989 and Ro in 1992. Their lives, from birth to death, are featured prominently in Linda Lee Greene’s, GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, a book of historical fiction based on a true story. To purchase the book, please click the following URL: http://goo.gl/imUwKO.

 

#ThichNhatHahn, #Zen, #Buddha, #Buddhism, #WashingDishes, #Dishwasher, #FarmhouseKitchen, #Formica, #Linoleum, #GroveCityOhio, #ColumbusOhio, #SouthernOhio, #AppalachianLife, #OhioWriters

A SNAPSHOT OF A MARRIAGE

 

From Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

 Back in the days before suburban sprawl and nearby shopping malls, and a year out of high school (I attended college over a decade later), I worked in the business office of the Union Department Store (now defunct), one of downtown Columbus, Ohio’s poshest retail establishments, especially in high-end women and men’s clothing. I grossed $50.00 per week. The best part of it was the generous discount on merchandise its employees enjoyed. After taxes and other obligatory deductions much of which included charges for my newly-acquired clothes, I was lucky to walk away with bus fare in my pay envelope at the end of each week. Fortunately, I still camped out free of charge in my girlhood bedroom in my parent’s home. In addition, I danced away my Tuesday through Saturday nights as an instructor at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio, for which I was paid on commission—very little commission, because I was there for the fun of it rather than the serious business of making money.

The most enjoyable aspect of my Arthur Murray experience occurred after hours, when at 10 PM on the dot, the studio turned off the lights and a gaggle of my fellow dance instructors and I hit the downtown night clubs. And there we dominated the dance floors until closing at 2 AM. Live bands were de rigueur in the clubs back then, and in a band in one of our favorite clubs I met a fascinating musician from New York. And thus, with that captivating young man, began the second main chapter of my life, one comprising a dozen years of marriage—a chapter that carried me well beyond the borders of my Ohio home, blessed me with the birth of my son and daughter, and expanded my world and worldview to a great extent. He married a second time. His has been a long and happy marriage to a lovely woman who has been a caring stepmother to my children. I have remained single, a lifestyle that during the ensuing years has shown itself best for me. Nonetheless, that marriage provided me with the credibility to write about conjugal living in a state of matrimony.   

  

***

 

Among the top winners in the cross-genre fiction category of the 2018 American Fiction Awards, my novel titled CRADLE OF THE SERPENT, is an in-depth treatise on the marriage of archaeologists Lily and Jacob Light—the good and the bad. One of the novel’s reviews 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 

 

Image: THE DANCERS by Linda Lee Greene

 

#ColumbusOhio, #UnionDepartmentStore, #ArthurMurrayDanceStudio, #DanceInstructor, #marriage, #LindaLeeGreene, #CradleoftheSerpent, #AmericanFictionAwards

A CHANCE AT THE MOON - FIRST CHAPTER - LINDA LEE GREENE'S NEW NOVEL

TITLE: A CHANCE AT THE MOON

AUTHOR: LINDA LEE GREENE

GENRE: ROMANTIC THRILLER

PURCHASE LINK: 

https://www.amazon.com/CHANCE-AT-MOON-Betrayal-Murder-ebook/dp/B07Z44YN9X/

One

C

olumbus, Ohio, October 7, 2002—The broad tree-lined avenues leading to the courthouse in the heart of downtown Columbus were crammed bumper-to-bumper with cars of spectators blowing their horns and thrusting middle fingers at one another through open windows. Traffic cops were busy maintaining order. The trial of the person charged the year before with the fatal shooting of one of the city’s most prominent citizens, businesswoman and philanthropist Inez Montoyo, was the enticement for the swarm. Ms. Montoyo’s daughter, acclaimed Broadway and Hollywood actress Olivia Montoyo Simms, was to give her testimony on this the opening day of the proceedings, and was the prime quarry the C’bus citizens had in their sites. It was the job of Nicholas Plato and his twin brother Tobias to shield her from the throng. As the watch on his wrist marked off minutes perilously close to the slated time of the commencement of the trial, Nicholas was growing concerned about whether or not the driver of their limousine would get them to the courthouse on time.

The judge thwacked her gavel on the little pad on her desktop and opened the trial officially. “Crack, crack, crack,” like gunshots the sound brought the room to attention, and Olivia jerked in the chair beside Nicholas. Just like Judge Judy on TV, Nicholas thought to himself, and then he gathered Olivia’s pale cold hands in his large palm and felt her settle into his reassuring touch. He had been worried about the skills of the limousine driver needlessly, as it turned out. The man had pulled some maneuvers that could have won him a spot as a stunt driver with a Hollywood movie studio, and had delivered them to the designated entrance of the building with time to spare. At that point, Nicholas and Tobias had worked for Olivia as her personal bodyguards for more than a year, duties that required their presence 24 hours a day, under her roof, and at her beck and call. The brothers occupied a separate wing of her home in a posh suburb of Las Vegas, a sprawling ranch she had purchased a few weeks after the death of her mother on July 13, 2001. Later that same year, she had sold her flat in Manhattan and her home in Los Angeles. She appeared content to set roots in Las Vegas, leaving behind her acting career, it seemed, as well.

Having to be practically nose-to-nose with the assassin for the first time since the murder, and reliving its retched details in the courtroom testimonies, of course proved worse for Olivia than the awful anticipation of it had been. It was an age-old story of an aggrieved employee taking revenge on his employer. A guilty verdict was brought in late that afternoon. Olivia elected to return to Las Vegas that same evening rather than staying in town and visiting with relatives and friends, some of whom had positioned themselves among the courtroom spectators and had exchanged glances and nods with her throughout the long day. A shaken Olivia and her solicitous bodyguards boarded the private jet one of her wealthy cronies had provided for their roundtrip flight, and departed Columbus as nightfall swallowed the horizon. Upon takeoff, she lowered the shade on the jet’s window that gave view below of the tight cluster of buildings and streets alight with the late hour, and wished never to be called back to her hometown again. She put the thought of Columbus and the trial out of her mind, and wondered if “Nicky” and “Toby,” as she called her bodyguards, would be up for a late-night jaunt to one of the casinos upon their arrival in Las Vegas. She pulled the vial of pain pills from her handbag, shook two of them into her palm, and popped them into her mouth—no chaser required. His tired grunt preceding his movements, Tobias pushed out of the seat next to hers, found a bottle of water in the jet’s galley kitchen, and delivered it to Olivia, its top twisted open. “Thanks,” she said, and then took a delicate sip. Cupping her hands over her aching belly, she laid her head back and closed her eyes.   

All through the following months, the tragedy cloyed with little letup in Olivia’s psyche. As July 13, 2003, the second anniversary of her mother’s death, drew near, Olivia’s body had long been displaying undeniable indicators of her soul’s reckoning with her, most notably in chronic abdominal distress and changes to the left side of her lovely face, in a drawn corner of her mouth, a sleepy eye, a narrowed nostril, features faintly askew as if she had recovered imperfectly from a slight stroke. Oddly, rather than detracting from her beauty, the imbalance in her face rendered her beguiling in a way different than before, fascinating in the way a freeway pile-up transfixes onlookers, both of them having death, or at least, mayhem in common. There was more to it than that, however. Loss was plain to see in her face, as was guilt from time to time—yes, guilt, because a determined vein of speculation threaded through the population as to whether or not she had had a hand in shaping her mother’s death, with or without intention. The investigation of the case had revealed that Olivia and her mother had been estranged from each other for several years, only to have reached a truce in the months prior to the murder. A sidebar to the situation was the fact that the murderer had been Olivia’s lover when she was only sixteen, a relationship to which her mother had put a stop. While Olivia had managed to put it behind her and move on with her life, the boyfriend had not done so, it seemed clear. That he had stayed on as an employee of Madam Montoyo’s after the fact unleashed rampant conjecture regarding the meaning behind it. Subsequent to the murder, the issue pricked Olivia like a thorn in her conscience now and then, but usually languished there, unexamined, and therefore, unresolved, as indeed it remained an unanswered tidbit among followers of the case.

In the face of all that had transpired, the essential life lessons the tragedy had to teach Olivia seemed to have failed to penetrate her conscious mind, at least in the aspect of amending her behavior, apparent in a stubborn ignorance or defiance unmistakable in the backward thrust of her shoulders, the high tilt of her chin, and her nightly pursuit of Las Vegas distractions. There was no hint that her best self would win in the end, due in no small way to her reliable attraction to risk-taking. Her youth and her penchant for recklessness had paid off big time in the past, markedly in her determined, meteoric rise in the film industry while still a teenager, but with the murder and its consequences, life had placed heavy odds against her.

The stakes notwithstanding, it had to be played out. It had already begun—something had been building in the atmosphere, something of moment, some extraordinary event about to be set in motion—some deciding factor. Like air pressure rising, clouds banking, seas roiling in advance of a menacing storm, it churned around Olivia. Nicholas understood that it had long been decided that he and Tobias would play supporting roles to her central one in the coming affair. In wary expectation, Nicholas waited in the wings for the remaining actors to appear.

Lights!      Camera!       Action!

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

©A STEP AT A TIME…THE RIVER OF FREEDOM

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist

Three-quarters of an hour southwest of Peebles, in Adams County, Ohio, which is the place of my birth, the great Ohio River flows briefly northward and narrows to little more than one thousand feet wide. In times of summer drought a nearly dry footpath, and of winter freezes a solid bridge of ice, this taper in the waterway hosted animal and human traffic trekking shore to shore since antiquity, in pre-colonial times including but not limited to the river’s northern-based Miami and Shawnee Indians slinking across it, looting their southern neighbors, and hightailing it home with their angry victims in close pursuit. Once back on the north side of the river, it was easy to take cover in the great and dense “Imperial Forest,” as dubbed by frontiersmen. Caves, hollows, and thickets of bushes and of grapevines that wove impenetrable screens among the giant trees, some of them sycamores so large in circumference that two horsemen riding side by side could pass through their tunneled trunks, provided strategic hideaways. Over time, as the red faces changed to white, the river was a primary transportation route during the westward expansion of the United States of America, and the magnificent trees shading its waters began to be put to man’s ax to build their residential and commercial enterprises.  

            In the spring of 1804, one year almost to the day following Ohio’s designation as the 17^th state of the Union, at the bend of the river where it meets Red Oak Creek on its northern shore, Colonel James Poage, a Virginian, along with his wife and ten children and their possessions, as well as his twenty slaves, disembarked two enormous flatboats on a wild and pristine thousand-acre plot, land granted to him for his twenty years of service to the government as a surveyor. Poage was attracted to the location not only because of its abundant natural resources, which he foresaw lining his pockets with riches, but also because it was a slave-free region. While a member of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War, the practice of enslaving human beings exercised his conscience, and he wanted out of it. Shortly after his arrival at his new home, he freed all of his slaves, dismantled his flatboats, and with the recycled lumber and trees from the forest, built a settlement. Soon a town took root that through a few evolutions finally was named Ripley. The riches never materialized for Poage, but his reputation for his “robust and cheerful piety” and as a welcoming and gracious host to new arrivals and guests in his Ripley, Ohio home grew far and wide.

            Weary black slaves on plantations in America’s Deep South lulled their children to sleep at night with stories of the great river up north with its narrow place that would someday be their pathway to freedom. They called it the “River Jordan” after Jesus’ baptismal waterway in the Bible. “And on the other side of the river, in a place called Ohio, people don’t keep other people as slaves. All people are free, even people with black skins like you and me,” slave mothers told their wide-eyed children. “That river is the line between being a slave and being free.”           

In the years leading to the American Civil War, slaves bolting to freedom on dangerous journeys across the north-south frontier via the Underground Railroad found more escape routes for the largest number of themselves on the Ohio River than anywhere else in the country. According to Ohio State University history professor Wilbur Siebert, Ohio’s Underground Railroad network comprised an estimated 3,000 miles of routes featuring more than twenty points of entry on the Ohio River, and as many as ten exit points by ferry across Lake Erie into Canada. The Ohio River is the generally accepted line to this day in the United States that separates the Midwestern Great Lakes states from the Southern border-states. Remnants of martyrs to the cause of freeing slaves, black and white and all shades in between, pepper the shores of the river. If you silence your mind and put your heart to the task, you might hear their anguished cries above the angry shouts, the snarls of the dogs, the blasts of the guns of their trackers.                                                                                                                                   

Perched atop the high embankment of the narrow bend in the Ohio River, the townspeople of Ripley were major witnesses to and actors in the firestorm of comings and goings of runaway slaves and their pursuers across the river. Among the population at that point were prominent as well as less-known abolitionists drawn to the area by a burning desire to devote themselves to the illegal act of freeing slaves. They set up housekeeping, established secret safe houses, cut backwoods paths, and worked diligently at helping slaves to escape bondage, at risk to their own and their family’s lives. Owing to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that granted slave-owners the right to regain their “property” even within the borders of free-states, slave-hunters, both owners and bounty-hunters, prowled the shores of the river, breached its northern shore, and chased down their human prey in free territory with impunity. It is doubtful that the Underground Railroad would have succeeded as it did absent the presence and support of free people of color fighting against such forces. They were people who had made it to freedom and had deliberately settled along stations of the Underground Railroad in Ohio beginning at the river, and stretching north to Columbus and on to Toledo and Cleveland and other towns around Lake Erie. Their express purpose was aiding runaways seeking safe harbor. During my growing-up years of the 1940s and 1950s in Columbus, I was unaware of the vital role my city, and even my state, played in fighting against one of the most oppressive human rights violations ever to occur. I was proud to learn in my research for this essay that Columbus alone has 22 documented Underground Railroad sites. 

Much is owed in the effort to end slavery in America to the more than 3,200 individuals known to have worked on the Underground Railroad. Many others will remain forever anonymous. But as I submit earlier in my dissertation, listening hearts might hear them.

          

**Author’s Note…I read a fabulous novel on the subject of a fleeing slave recently titled “The Day I Saw the Hummingbird,” by American author Paulette Mahurin. It is available in soft cover and eBook on Amazon.com.

Books by Linda Lee Greene are available on Amazon.com.

Image…Ripley, Ohio from the southern shore of the Ohio River…1847 Woodcut

HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION BLUES by LINDA LEE GREENE©

HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION BLUES by LINDA LEE GREENE©

High school was a hodgepodge of confusion for me. Consequently, I had no clear idea of what to expect in life. For the most part, I took college prep courses because those were the subjects that interested me and in which I made top grades. As a stop gap, I took typing and shorthand classes, and I will wager that I was the worse student in those subjects ever in the history of my school. My low grades in the business courses notwithstanding, I was an honors student, and in the long run was better suited for life as a professional person. But most of the fledgling adults in my socioeconomic circle didn’t have college on their radar screen, and it was an especially long-shot for females. (I attended college as an adult student many years later.) We were expected to marry as soon out of high school as possible, and spend our lives as housewives and mothers. My prospects in that regard were slim, as well, because the boys I had dated had ideas of their own that did not include being saddled with a family so young. And who could blame them?

                When I came across the photograph featured in this piece, taken on May 31, 1961, it reminded me of how purposeless and frightened I felt then. I had designed, and my mother had made my dress, which I loved, but in truth, I was a seventeen-year-old lost soul that evening, posing bravely with my boyfriend Frank Adams before attending my senior class prom. In only a few days my high school diploma from Franklin Heights High School in Columbus, Ohio, USA would be handed to me and the troubled thought that would weigh on my mind would be, “What do I do now?”

Frank and I drifted apart thereafter, our fates sending us to opposite sides of the nation eventually, life journeys neither of us could have anticipated. But isn’t that the way of fate? My guess is that most of us are amazed at the way life turned out for us. What surprises has life sent your way?

http://booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/ 

Multi-award winning author Linda Lee Greene’s books are available worldwide in soft cover and eBook formats on Amazon and other online booksellers.

STRIPPING WOODWORK AND HANGING WALLPAPER by LINDA LEE GREENE©

STRIPPING WOODWORK AND HANGING WALLPAPER by LINDA LEE GREENE©

Columbus, Ohio, USA, March 30, 2019…I was a born-photographer before I knew I was also an artist and a writer. The instrument at the end of my grubby hands was my parent’s kid-friendly Brownie camera. In what was termed “Fly Town” in my family’s blue-collar days and has graduated to the current smart moniker of “Harrison West” in Columbus, Ohio’s near Westside, I gave our Brownie camera a workout, as did kids of most every other nearby household. One of my early endeavors, taken in December, 1953, is the photo featured with this posting.

In terms of composition, the photo leaves much to be desired, but its contents are what are so precious to me. Pictured are my father Lee, my mother Roma, and my brother David, who was eight and none too happy to stand still yet again while his big sister snapped another picture. In my mother’s arms is the newest member of our family, my baby sister Sherri. I was ten at the time, and I remember it like it was yesterday. It was our first weekend outing as a family since Sherri’s birth—our destination was the Christmas gathering at my maternal grandparent’s farm in Peebles, Adams County, Ohio. We would also spend part of the weekend with my dad’s family who lived in Adams County, too.

Almost as dear as the people in the image, is the story its background tells. When my parents bought our house at 507 West Second Avenue, all of that gorgeous woodwork was painted over, and not merely in the area pictured, but throughout its first and second stories. My mother, bless her heart, working alone, stripped every inch of paint off the woodwork in that house, including three gas-burning fireplaces. She stripped it, sanded it, and then stained and varnished it. (There were no water-based paints, stains, or varnishes in those days.) It took her years to accomplish, but she did it. And see that wallpaper on the walls? She hung it, all by herself, while at the same time seeing to every other physical and spiritual need of our family.

The Greatest Generation?! You bet! And I have the photos and stories to prove it.

http://booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/ 

Multi-award winning author Linda Lee Greene’s books are available worldwide in soft cover and eBook formats on Amazon and other online booksellers.

       

THE DAY I SAW MY PARENTS CRY by LINDA LEE GREENE©

I was a teenager then, slugging it out in every waking moment with the emotional turmoil that being a teenager brings, and on top of that, my parents had moved me that year from the inner-city neighborhood, friends, and school that I loved, and had plopped me down in “Hee Haw“

country where I stuck out every bit as prominently as did Elly Mae on the “Beverly Hillbillies,” which crossed our TV screens a few years down the road. The push and pull; the black, white, yellow, and tan faces; the scents of exotic cuisines through open windows; the narrow, brick streets lined with parked cars on both sides for as far as the eye could see, that had been my 507 West Second Avenue in Columbus, Ohio home, and the trade-off in the wide-open spaces of suburbia wasn’t hitting my sweet spot. And then one morning when I walked in the kitchen of the new house my parents and their siblings had built for us with their bare hands, I caught my parents sitting at the table crying.

            There isn’t much of anything more arresting to a child than witnessing the “first” argument between his/her parents. As I was to discover that morning before I boarded the bus that would cart me off to the battlefield of my new school, beholding ones parents wrapped up in each other arms swaying in utter grief is similarly earth-shattering. “What did I do wrong?” was my first thought. “Are we losing our home?” was my second.

            At the time, my dad worked nights as a punch-press operator at the Jeffrey Manufacturing Company in Columbus. Like the inner-city neighborhood from which we had moved, the company had been the staple of our family’s existence since I was a young girl. But that day, and for a few, uncertain others to come, it was our punisher, for dad had lost the end of his middle finger to the punch-press machine that night. The accident was the source of my parent’s tears, not so much because dad was in pain, but because of their fear over what it would mean in terms of his job security. Would he be able to continue with his current job? Would the company place him in another one if need be? Would he be let go?

            Within a day of two, dad did return to work. I do not remember if to his old position or to a new one at the plant. Other than that incident with his losing part of his finger, I do not remember my dad ever missing work due to illness. I am reminded of a statistic I once read. It stated that most of the people of the world go to work every day sick, or wounded, or even dying. That was my dad, and my mother, too. That was the kind of people they were.  

           

That’s three or four-year-old me in the photo, peeking around my mother’s hip. Dad worked at Jeffrey Manufacturing even then.

http://booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/  

Multi-award winning author Linda Lee Greene’s books are available worldwide in soft cover and eBook formats on Amazon and other online booksellers.      

NATURE'S SECRET IS PATIENCE

                                                             By Linda Lee Greene

March 6, 2019, Columbus, Ohio, USA—I sliced an entire bag of soft apples into quarters last week, and tossed them into the ground cover that borders my patio and anticipated the crowd of squirrels and birds they would draw. The squirrels paid no attention to them whatsoever, and neither did the birds at first. Apparently, my apples were no competition with the seeds my neighbor puts out for them in his feeder. But yesterday, two robins took note of them, big fellows sporting rotund, orange breasts, enormous from their winter feeding grounds in some perpetual summerland south of us here in the frozen north.

            One of the robins was slightly larger than the other, and a bully. I watched amused for a good long while as the two of them battled each other for the sweet fare, the smaller and more passive one waiting his chance to dive in and grab a morsel when the tough guy showed any sign of distraction or weakness. I was reminded of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s advice to “Pace yourself as nature; her secret is patience,” a reminder that was particularly meaningful for me, and helped to calm my anxiety over an issue with my health that has caused a delay in publishing my next book.

http://booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/

Columbus, Oho, USA, and multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene has authored and published four books. All of them are available worldwide in eBook and soft cover at online booksellers. Her latest novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV)  was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. In addition, she was the winner of the 2018 Peter Hills Memorial Writing Competition. Scheduled for release in early 2019 is her novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON. It will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com. 

THE LONE SHOVELER©

THE LONE SHOVELER©

By Linda Lee Greene, January 25, 2019

It was one of the big snowstorms of the 1990s in Columbus, Ohio USA. My apartment was on the first floor of the duplex I owned on Mithoff Street. I rented out the apartment above me. It was a day much like the days we have had here in Columbus over the past week: the ground and rooftops and tree limbs blanketed with pristine snow, and the sky a matching white and low-slung, an eerie closeness that seemed almost touchable and gave the impression that there was nothing beyond it, that the whole of the cosmos had been wiped clean of stars and planets and moons. As I usually do, I wakened very early that Saturday morning, and with my 35mm camera in hand, snapped a few photos from my little front porch. The silence was palpable, all but the scraping of a snow shovel up the street from me. And there he was: the lone shoveler, the focus of my shot.

Because I was yet to embrace my calling as a writer (that happened on August 10, 2000), I failed to recognize the possibilities in the incident for a story. Now I see in it the catchy title of a novel: THE LONE SHOVELER©. It might center on a torrid love affair that begins on a snow-covered city street when a woman approaches a man and inquires if he is for hire to shovel her sidewalk.

What storyline comes to your mind in this situation? Do you see in it a love story, or something else?

http://booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/

Columbus, Oho, USA, and multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene has authored and published four books. All of them are available worldwide in eBook and soft cover at online booksellers. Her latest novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV)  was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. In addition, she was the winner of the 2018 Peter Hills Memorial Writing Competition. Scheduled for release in early 2019 is her novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON. It will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com. 

THERE’S MUSIC IN COLUMBUS, OHIO’S SOUTHWEST CITY AIR©

THERE’S MUSIC IN COLUMBUS, OHIO’S SOUTHWEST CITY AIR©

By Linda Lee Greene, January 22, 2019

On a bright Sunday morning a couple of years ago, I walked through the doors of a church located on a busy street in Columbus, Ohio’s southwest quadrant, not far from my former residence. The sign in the yard in front of the church announced itself as a denomination with which I was familiar.

For several decades of my adult life, I have been an on-again-off-again attendee of that particular denomination of churches wherever I have landed in my travels. I like the reliable diversity of people drawn to its philosophy. In my view, spirituality rather than religious dogma is its strongest underpinning and value, and I appreciate its respect and acceptance of other forms of belief, and even of non-belief, and lifestyles. Its doors are open to red-, yellow-, black-, brown-, and white-skinned people across all socioeconomic and cultural sectors. At its core, it is nondiscriminatory, and is the thing I like most about it.

While the church into whose hallowed hall I wandered so enthusiastically two years ago shares the same name, I learned over the course of that morning that it was not an official member of the church of my experience. The first clue of its difference was a broadly-smiling and elegantly-attired pair of black-skinned people who greeted me as I ventured into it. Further evidence presented itself when I saw that beyond them in the sanctuary gathered similarly-plumed, spruced-up, and cheerful African Americans. Considering my church history, these were clues that held little significance to me at first. My major response at the outset was that I felt underdressed, and because of it, woefully out of place.

I hesitated self-consciously and uncertainly, but then tucked my inelegant tail between my legs and entered the sanctuary. Sliding into a discreet corner of one of the back pews, I huddled and waited anxiously for someone who looked like me to enter the room. But no one like me ever did appear. I was destined to be the only white and under-adorned dot in a sea of exquisite black. But funnily, I soon realized that I was the only uncomfortable person there. Minutes ticked by, and finally I straightened my posture and adjusted my attitude correspondingly, and even engaged in eye-contact with the people near me. It wasn’t long before I gave in to the urging of my mouth, when exercising a will of its own, it tugged into smiles of greeting in answer to comparable greetings sent my way.

In my experience, it is customary for church services to open with music, which in its own right is a form of worship. Music is also a preliminary to the sermon, the sermon normally being the principle component of church services. Little did I know that morning that I was in for spiritual instruction of a different sort. The thrum of an electric guitar and a crash of a cymbal pulled all eyes to the front of the room, and a single beat of a drum was the cue that the service was beginning. A hundred or more, perfectly synchronized and harmonious voices accompanied by the guitar and drums rang out suddenly and soared to the cavernous ceiling. The sound shook the floorboards, it rattled the windows, it pulsed the walls, it vibrated the pews: copious, resounding, foot-stomping, arm-swaying, joyous, bewitching, hypnotizing, musical praise to God.

Following a full hour of nonstop gospel music, and among the best I had ever heard, the pastor walked up to the altar to give what I expected would be his sermon. But instead, he read from a sheet of paper a series of announcements of upcoming events and acknowledgements of births and deaths and birthdays and anniversaries. The pastor folded his notes and placed them in the breast pocket of his immaculate suit jacket; the women stood up and shouldered their designer handbags; the men pulled to their feet and adjusted their silk ties, and I realized that the service was over. I understood as well, that after that music, no further God-words had been necessary.

http://booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/

Columbus, Oho, USA, and multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene has authored and published four books. All of them are available worldwide in eBook and soft cover at online booksellers. Her latest novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV)  was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. In addition, she was the winner of the 2018 Peter Hills Memorial Writing Competition. Scheduled for release in early 2019 is her novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON. It will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com. 

    

COLUMBUS, OHIO’S RIVER RATS KIDS©

 

COLUMBUS, OHIO’S RIVER RATS KIDS©

By Linda Lee Greene, January 17, 2019

We were called “River Rats” when I was a kid. That’s because West Second Avenue in our distinctly blue-collar, family-oriented neighborhood in Columbus, Ohio marched right up to the raised east bank of the Scioto River, as it still does, and we spent much of our playtime at the river. We gained access to it most easily on pathways on both sides of the Third Avenue Bridge that spanned it, as it does to this day. In what we called “Fly Town,” and today is officially “Harrison West,” the blue-collar ambiance has transformed to an upwardly-mobile vibe, as most of the remaining houses and apartment buildings of the area have undergone slick renovations. During the last couple of decades, large numbers of them were torn down to make way for stylish row-houses and condos, inhabited primarily by young, childless professionals on view profusely on weekends jogging the blacktop-paved streets. I visited my old stomping grounds not long ago and was heartened to find that the street in front of the house where I lived for the nine years of my childhood beginning at the age of six and ending at the age of fifteen was still comprised of its timeworn original bricks.  

I snapped a few photos while I was there, and then sat in my car as old memories swept over me. I recalled that back before agricultural and urban-generated pollutants and other development threats made the water unsafe for wading and swimming, seining for crawdads in the river at its shallow points under the bridge was a daily task on hot summer days for us kids. Principally, it was a male-oriented activity, but once in a while the boys stooped to allowing us girls a go at it. Females wore skirts and dresses, and rarely shorts then, and I remember well kicking off my shoes and pulling the hem of my full-skirted garment between my legs and tucking it up and into its waistband and wading gratefully into the rapids of the waterway. The goal for us girls was cooling off and impressing the boys with our willingness to participate in their labor, even though once the crustaceans were caught in the seining net, we wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole. Part of the fun for the boys was eliciting squeals of horror from us girls when they scraped the icky, writhing things out of the nets and chased us up the riverbank with them.

Shivers of dismay prick my spine now when I think of the many times a gang of us inched our way into the tunnel beneath the bridge. It seemed then never to end as it bore east under West Third Avenue, but surely it is a judgment influenced by the outsized imagination of an adolescent girl. It was dark and teemed with mold, filth, and acrid leavings of the homeless who made of it their toilet and even their nighttime dwelling. We never saw them, though, as homelessness was uncommon back then—at least it was the case in our corner of the world.    

We lived on the kid-friendly streets then—not that they weren’t frequented by cars, but there was a kind of unspoken contract between us kids and drivers that allowed us full access to the streets as our playgrounds. Hardly ever were any of us kids holed up in our houses, unless we were sick or grounded. After school until dark, and summer vacations from early morning ‘til sundown, we gave those bricks on the streets a workout. Kick the can, hide and seek, Cowboys and Indians, jump rope, marbles, jacks, hopscotch—splashing in rain puddles—riding bikes, climbing trees, picking through trashcans in the alleys—sledding, snowball fighting, building snowmen and igloos, and on and on, the pastimes were endless no matter the season, or the weather conditions. Never was there a boring moment, or a longing for a friend.

http://booksbylindaleegreene.gallery-llgreene.com/

Columbus, Oho, USA, and multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene has authored and published four books. All of them are available worldwide in eBook and soft cover at online booksellers. Her latest novel, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV)  was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. In addition, she was the winner of the 2018 Peter Hills Memorial Writing Competition. Scheduled for release in early 2019 is her novel, A CHANCE AT THE MOON. It will be available in soft cover and eBook at Amazon.com and other online booksellers. An extensive exhibition of Greene’s artwork can be viewed at www.gallery-llgreene.com.