GREAT-GRANDPARENTS, GRANDPARENTS, MOTHERS AND FATHERS

INSIDE THE TICKING MOMENTS OF A PANDEMIC – III – EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 12, 2020, COLUMBUS, OHIO, USA, LINDA LEE GREENE, AUTHOR & ARTIST

GREAT-GRANDPARENTS, GRANDPARENTS, MOTHERS AND FATHERS

Of my early childhood, I recall quite a lot, both great and small—little things such as the floral pattern of my grandmother’s apron; the chewing-tobacco aroma of my grandfather’s breath; the giggle of my Uncle “Neenie.” I remember big things, as well, such as the gnarled old man, his cavernous eyes shadowed beneath a snow-white pair of shaggy, brush-like eyebrows, whom from time to time nodded off on the davenport in the front room of my grandparent’s farmhouse. Landon Howard Caplinger was his name, and he was the father of my grandmother, a worn-out farmer and grieving widower. Great-grandmother, Sally, his wife of over fifty years, had died when my mother was in the early days of her pregnancy with me, and by all evidence, he mourned her passing until his own death nine years later at the age of eighty-nine. It was also one day before my ninth birthday.  

My great-grandfather, Landon, was the first old person I ever knew, and I recollect that I was always on guard around him while he was alive—on guard so as not to disturb his sleep, but also because I think I somehow feared I would catch what he had—that I would also grow suddenly old if I failed to keep a very long and very safe distance between him and me. Shielded behind the frame of the doorway between the kitchen and front room, at every chance, I peeked around the edge of it and studied the strange old man, scanning him from head to toe, rooting out his secrets—secrets, I suppose, of what it was like to be such an ancient being.

Religion weaves through the history of my family, but by the time of my childhood, church attendance was a luxury they could no longer afford. Sundays on the farm were like all other days. The cows still needed morning milking, the pigs slopped, the chickens fed, and meals prepared for the many of us. Animals didn’t take out time to worship God, nor did the members of my family whom were their busy caretakers. Even so, there was a kind of reverence in the air of those Sundays, a softly-spoken devotion among my grandparents, my parents, and my aunts and uncles. I hail from a family of talkers, chatterboxes whose verbal excesses required of me to take cover beneath tables and behind chairs and to listen, to observe, and to examine their words for myself. No doubt my soul was rehearsing me even then for my role as the chronicler of their story.  

It was there in those times of overhearing that I learned about another sad man, a man by the name of Jesus. While all around my great-grandfather the house bustled with that activity and chatter, out of the corner of my eye, I watched him half-prone on the davenport, silent and sad. That old man added a kind of curious weight to my childhood. I seemed to understand that he was the linchpin of my family, indeed of my very existence, while at the same time he seemed to me to be of another world. I think that deep down I had a feeling that Landon and Jesus were one and the same.©

Image: Landon on the davenport between my grandfather and grandmother, Adams County, Ohio, circa early-1950s.     

Multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene’s books are available for purchase at Amazon.com.

A TALE OF TWO LIVES

INSIDE THE TICKING MOMENTS OF A PANDEMIC– II –Linda Lee Greene, April 1, 2020, Columbus, Ohio, USA

A TALE OF TWO LIVES

Fifteen months ago, I was with my kid sister, Suzee, as she succumbed to a long illness. She was a radiant creature of 63 years of age. In her final weeks, family and friends gathered at her side and stayed with her, myself included. I came away from the experience saddened and distraught, but also enlightened in an utterly unexpected way.

                I was an adolescent when Suzee was born. The first time I held her in my arms, she was three days old. I was privy to the opening three decades of her life from an intimate standpoint that can only be provided in the fold of a birth-family. My concept of her was pretty much set in stone. I would describe Suzee as quiet; shy; private. She was a loner. She stood apart. The spotlight held little interest for her. She would prefer to steal away in a book. She loved animals more than people.

Thirty years before her death, Suzee relocated from Ohio to the Gulf Coast of Florida, and there she forged a new life for herself. Our sister, Sherri, and I had remained in Ohio. While visits, letters, and telephone calls were consistently passed among us, there is just so much people can know about the nitty gritty of one another’s life under such circumstances. The bottom line was that Suzee got away from us, to a large degree. Separated from the support of her early foundation, as well as out from under its scrutiny and stresses, she remade herself. While I was with her in her final three weeks, I was stunned to see that the Suzee I knew was only one, narrow dimension of her, and I saw it through the dynamic at work between her and the people she had attracted to herself in Florida.

The shy, quiet, private Suzee had grown into a deeply loved, very popular, and sought-after person. She had evolved into a witty chatterbox and a raconteur. She had become a talented artist. She was a property and a business owner. She was an advocate for animals and a minister of their care. She didn’t have children of her own, but in her role as a business person, she sheltered, guided, and mentored many young people. One after another, people told me that Suzee was the greatest woman they had ever known. What a revelation all this was to me!

Had I not been with her during her final weeks, I would have missed knowing the complete Suzee. And more importantly, Suzee would not have had the chance to reveal herself to me. She yearned to see the amazement in my eyes. She longed for my validation. She needed me to endorse her achievements. She wanted so much for me to open my mind about her. Otherwise, the whole of Suzee’s story would have gone undiscovered. She was desperate that I get her story right because she knew I would write it.  

My experience with Suzee circles back to our current situation with Coronavirus. I find myself lamenting the missed opportunities for people everywhere to examine and likely to edit the final chapter of the life of their dying loved-ones. Souls are passing away all alone. Confessions, apologies, secrets, successes, failures, ideas, histories, heroics, revelations, statements of love, and more, are going unsaid. So many vital stories are vanishing, are getting lost, are adrift in the ethers.

I hope that after Coronavirus, some sort of archive of the stories will emerge. Lacking that, I yearn for something akin to the Viet Nam wall scribed with the names of our precious brothers and sisters across the world who lost their lives to the virus.© #STAYHOME #SAVELIVES #INTHISTOGETHER

      

**A personal note to my readers: Muse kicked me out of my cave and told me to get back to my keyboard. It is a struggle, but I will take a stab at following her lead whenever she deigns to whisper in my mind’s ear.      

AN OHIO STATE BUCKEYES FOOTBALL FAN WRITES A LETTER TO HIS SOLDIER SON

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist.





Pvt. Joseph S. Williams

68^th C. A. (A A) Reg. Hq. Btry.

ASN 35405121 APO, C/O Postmaster, NY, NY 



                                                                                                                            November 14, 1943



Dear Son:

We received your last and very welcome letter about two weeks after the date on the heading. The Army’s V-mail service is certainly an improvement over the former snail’s pace. Of course, we are always so grateful to learn that you are doing well. Your mother asks me to remind you to keep your feet dry and warm, and to eat your vegetables. She worries so much about your being exposed to the cold.

Your mother, sister, and I are just fine. Our only bad news is that Grandpa Williams is suffering from gout. The big toe on his right foot is swollen to twice its size. He growls like a testy old bear from the pain. I took a carving knife to his shoe and house-slipper, cutting away the portion that would touch his toe. Grandma is her usual patient and accommodating self. Grandpa doesn’t deserve such an angel for a wife. Nor do I deserve to have her as my sainted mother. She still goes to Mass every morning and lights a candle of protection for you.

The newspaper and radio keep us abreast of the status of the Allied Forces both in the Pacific and European Theaters of the war, although we are in the dark as to your exact position, and whether or not you are in transit. Your mother thinks you are still in Italy, but I think you might be on your way to England, if not already there somewhere. There is a lot of talk at church and at the country club about a big buildup of troops and material in England that will go against Germany in their own territory sometime soon. Of course, we have heard that speculation since World War II began. We understand that you are not permitted to divulge such information in your letters. Our prayers are always with you and all the troops.

I’m sure you have yet to receive the letter I sent you in which I reported the good news of Ohio State’s 46-6 win over Pittsburgh last week. It was an away game, so we weren’t able to attend it. But we were right there in our usual seats at Ohio Stadium yesterday when OSU hosted Illinois. The framed photograph of you that normally sits on the mantle here at home was perched on your reserved seat beside me at the stadium. It was pointed toward the field. And of course, your mother and sister occupied the two seats to your left. Our fondest wish is for the day you will occupy your seat at the stadium again. 

Frost has set in here in Central Ohio, and to ward off the cold at the game, we donned our trusty old beaver coats and hats, and wrapped our throats in woolen scarves. Thermoses of hot chocolate warmed our insides. It was a grueling contest on the field. The Buckeyes and the Illini were tied 26 to 26, and the Buckeye’s pass on the last play fell incomplete. The game was over. The players left the field and we, as well as most of the other 36,328 spectators, filed out of the stands. We didn’t find out until I read the story in the newspaper this morning that twelve minutes after the apparent end of the game, the players were sent back onto the field. Nobody realized it, including the coaches, players, and fans that an official had called an off-sides penalty against the Illini, and two seconds were then put back on the clock. In a spectacular second-chance effort, the Buckeyes kicked a field goal straight into the scoring lane. It was Ohio over Illinois 29-26. Hooray! But we didn’t get to see it happen!

Next week we will meet Michigan at Ann Arbor for the final game on our schedule this season. You will recall that this is the third year for Paul Brown as our head coach. I wonder if his contract will be renewed owing to our less than stellar Big Ten record this year of three wins and five losses so far. Let’s stop Michigan from ending our record with six losses!

By the by, my dear son, I will send you the results of that game next week, along with our news, and our love and prayers for your safety. GO BUCKS!

                                                                                               

All my love,

                                                                                                Dad©

Note: the above is a work of historical fiction based on actual events.



Source: Andrew Buchanan, 100 Things Buckeyes Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die, (Triumph Books, 2014) pp. 246–247.

 

Books by multi-award-winning author, Linda Lee Greene are available for purchase in eBook and paperback on Amazon.

A STEP AT A TIME…BIRTH AND DEATH IN WAR

By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist



At precisely 6:30 PM on Friday the thirteenth, August, 1943, the cry of a newborn child shattered the hot and sluggish summer air of tiny Peebles, Ohio, USA, located just thirty miles north of the Ohio River. It was a girl-child, born in a farmhouse bedroom of her maternal grandparents, a place that sat atop a wooded knoll in the center of town. The firstborn child of her parents, she was delivered by “Old Doc Ellison,” the bent-shouldered and white-haired physician whom for many years had seen the family through much illness and strife. Wrapped in a new quilt that her grandmother had made for her, Doc Ellison placed the rosy-faced baby in her exhausted mother’s arms. “Have you decided on a name for this pretty little girl, Roma?”

                “Her name is Linda, because I read in a book that it means ‘beautiful.’ And her middle name is ‘Lee’ after her Daddy.”

                “How’s Lee doing? Is he still at the Great Lakes Navy Boot Camp?”

                “He’s having an awful time with his stomach, Doc. The food there keeps him sick most of the time.”

“That belly of his has given him fits since he was a little kid. I feel for him, Roma.”

Like every town in the USA, as was the case across nearly all of the civilized nations in those World War II days, Peebles was a place of women and children and their elders, the able-bodied men of fighting age having been drafted into the military, some of them serving actively, some of them home or in hospital seriously maimed, or already dead and buried in family cemeteries or lost on foreign soils, their remains never to be recovered. As it turned out, because of his problem with his stomach, my eighteen-year-old father was given an honorable medical discharge before completing boot camp training. It was a physical condition that plagued him all the 89 years of his life. However, if he had gone on to serve, there is every reason to assume he would have been a “swabby” on a ship or submarine reported to the Pacific Fleet, there to fight in hotspots of the pitiless water- and air-war against the Japanese.

I was nearing seven weeks of age by the time my dad first laid eyes on me. He had missed my birth, but was home in time to celebrate with my mother the joyful event of their first wedding anniversary. Other than concerns about my parent’s brothers, cousins, and friends on active duty, our little family led a peaceful existence through the balance of World War II, dad contributing to the war effort in various factories in Dayton, and Cincinnati, as well as in Columbus, Ohio, where we finally settled permanently, and is my home to this day.

However, my family’s elation over my birth surely would have been tempered had news come via the radio or newspaper of the sinking of the “USS Cisco,” a submarine on which my dad might very well have been a crewman, if not for his bad stomach. Having sailed on August 7, 1943 from Panama for Brisbane, Australia and arriving on September 1^st to assume local patrol duties, she docked at Darwin on September 18^th for two days. While at Darwin, Chief Radioman Howell B. Rice (USN ret.) was taken ill and sent ashore to the Navy hospital. “Cisco” then put out to sea on her first war patrol on September 20^th, the only submarine on duty in her field of operation. She was never seen again. Japanese records relate a grisly tale, one of an oil-leaking US submarine sighted and then sunk by bombs and depth charges by Imperial Japanese Navy carrier-based torpedo bombers and the Japanese riverboat “Karatsu.” The brutal irony is that the riverboat was originally the U.S. Navy gunboat “USS Luzon,” captured from the US by Japanese forces earlier in the war and put to work against its former owners. “Cisco” is thus presumed to have been lost in action on September 28, 1943, which was also the date of my parent’s wedding anniversary. The only survivor among the 77-member crew was Chief Radioman Howell B. Rice, left behind in a hospital bed in Darwin more than a week before that fateful day.

If you would like to donate to Linda's Birthday Fundraiser for Wounded Warrior Project, please click onto this link. Thank you so much.

Fundraiser for Wounded Warrior Project by Linda Lee Greene

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

©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

WE CALL HER, “SH-BOOM” by LINDA LEE GREENE©

WE CALL HER, “SH-BOOM” by LINDA LEE GREENE©

The 1954, doo-wop song “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, as well as the Crew-Cuts, is the source of the nickname of my sister Sherri Beth Greene. That the letters of the song’s title correspond to her name is one factor in its link to her, but there are others. It burst on the music scene only months after her birth, and as it rang through the multiple levels of our house at 507 West Second Avenue in Columbus, Ohio, USA, she learned to talk and walk to it. Along with “No” and “Zorro,” and a series of others, “Sh-Boom” was among the earliest words she voiced, and was the first to which she sang and danced. It was a sight to see that tiny ball of dynamite boogying up and down the sidewalks of our Fly-town neighborhood, her pudgy arms and legs pumping as she sang at the top of her lungs, “Sh-Boom, sh-Boom, ya da ya, ya da ya, ya da ya, sh-boom, sh-boom….” When as a baby she gazed upon us with her sparkling blue eyes and gifted us with her rosy-gummed smile, we had an inkling that a pixie had shown up among us. And when as a toddler she began to sing and dance to that song, and along with it work her magic on us, we were convinced of it.

            Our parents had celebrated their eleventh wedding anniversary 22 days before Sherri was born. Our brother David and I were eight and ten, respectively. Mom and Dad had come upon a rough spot that was endangering the bonds of our family unit, and threatening to split it apart. And then our redheaded pixie plopped herself at the forefront of our lives, and she was having none of it! She had things to do and places to go, and no monkey business on the part of anyone was going to keep her from it. “Snap to it!” her attitude signaled, and as if she had sprinkled it with magical pixie dust, the problem went away, and our family was safe and sound again.

             

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.

UNPACKING

UNPACKING©

By Linda Lee Greene, December 31, 2018

It is one of those days when a pale light in the distance informs that dawn has arrived, but the light doesn’t quite break through the cloud cover and icy rain well enough to properly proclaim itself as “dawn.”  I refuse to switch on lamps just yet because I want to experience the quality of this dark light—to feel its gauzy softness. I go so far as to turn the thermostat of my furnace to the OFF position and to open the sliding glass door to my patio to the sound of the rain dancing on its roof. A train clacks by on frigid tracks; an airplane soars in the frozen Ohio sky, and my defrosting heart rises to these spilling words that I hold in my mind until I am released from this nature’s magic to reach for my laptop. I tilt back in my recliner, wrap my legs and fuzzy-slippered feet in a warm afghan, and know that I am a woman content.

In a half-hour or so, I will gather in the palm of my left hand a collection of pills that I will gulp down with my second cup of coffee, medications to aid and/or protect and/or replace my bodily functions. This is the morning routine of my 75 years old self, a woman enthralled with where I have been and where I am going despite the fact that I have begun to solicit recommendations from my girlfriends of my same age as to the best brand of hearing aids. 

All that aside, tugging at my consciousness is the fact that it is taking me days to unpack from my trip to Florida whereby key members of my family and I sat round-the-clock vigils for more than two weeks at the bedside of my dying youngest sibling. The unpacking is taking me so long to accomplish not because there is so much to put away, but because my rooms have been a milky haze that have sheltered but failed to console me since my return. One cannot go through such a thing and not emerge stunned, shocked, ones essence for a time blank with trauma as stark as erased pages in a book. The contours are reappearing now, though, even in this morning’s reluctant light, and their shapes are welcoming me and showing me how to continue to drop back into my everyday life.

Once my enchantment with this murky morning is satisfied, my morning maintenance completed, and my lamps finally ignited, I will finish my unpacking. This is a good day for me to begin to unpack 2018, as well, to go into those dark and musty drawers and closets, and into my heart and mind, and to clear them of outworn and unnecessary, and especially of harmful, things. I have learned well in my many years of life that the Universe adores empty spaces because they are canvasses on which It brings forth new life, new resources, new ideas, new events. I am hungry for such things.

My hope is that by way of this miraculous forum of social media, you, my cyber friends, and I will go on helping one another to grow and prosper and learn and feel through all the days of 2019. Your friendship helps me so much to get through some lonely days and nights, and contributes greatly to my contentment—and I thank you.

Happy New Year to you, one and all!

***

To date, Linda Lee Greene has authored five novels: “Jesus Gandhi Oma Mae Adams” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG); “Guardians and Other Angels” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO); “Rooster Tale” (http://goo.gl/vNq32g); and “Cradle of the Serpent” (http://amzn.to/VazHFG), which was designated as a finalist in the 2018 American Fiction Awards Competition. It was also awarded a 5 Star Review by Readers’ Favorites. Scheduled for release in early 2019, her latest novel titled “A Chance at the Moon” 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. 

This Reader Recommends a 5 Star Book

Legacy of Hunger: Druid’s Brooch by Christy Nicholas

Ireland is no promised land in 1846. It is wracked by a crippling potato blight, and people are dying. But Valentia McDowell doesn’t know that.

From her father’s prosperous farm in Ohio, young Valentia is haunted by tales of an abandoned family and a lost heirloom. She travels to her grandmother’s homeland with her brother, Conor, and two servants, to find both. Her delight in the exciting journey on one of the first steam ships to cross the Atlantic is shattered by a horrible tragedy.

What she encounters upon her arrival in Ireland is both more and less than she had hoped. Valentia finds both enemies and allies, amid horrors and delights, and a small bit of magic. She finds a richer heritage than she had ever imagined, but it comes with a price.

When she finally reaches her goal, a terrible price is demanded. She must pay or forfeit, and both decisions have strong consequences for her and her friends.

Award-winning artist and author, blogger, editor, and interior designer Linda Lee Greene is on social media at the following:

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene

Email: lindaleegreene.author.artist@gmail.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/LLGreeneAuthor

Blog: http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com

Also look for her on LinkedIn and Google+

ROOSTER TALE By Linda Lee Greene

“ROOSTER TALE is a fun and easy book to read. It’s humorous and has great illustrations. The lovable animals and children in the story work together to solve a problem on the farm where they live. It ‘s a heartwarming and inspiring story that shows children how important it is to cool down after they get mad because otherwise they might do something they will be sorry for later. Best-selling author Linda Lee Greene has delivered again with a book that I think deserves a five star rating. I recommend it highly.” A Reader …the book is available on Amazon.com and at http://goo.gl/vNq32g.

My Talking Heart - Chapter Eight: A Past Life Experience at Chicago's O'Hare Airport

O'Hare International Airport

One sultry August afternoon in 2002, my travel companion and I were annoyed passengers stuck at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. We were awaiting our delayed connecting flight back home from a vacation in New Orleans. While there were no pyrotechnics, gunshots, microphones or cameras associated with it, nor a naked man streaking up and down the aisles as I had witnessed at New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International Airport years before, this layover was different than any in my experience. In fact, then as now, it is a completely unique event in any setting in my life, and is one of my most indelible memories.

Among the sizeable group of my fellow irritated passengers, I sat with book in hand and tried to pass the time by losing myself in the story, normally a reliable escape for me under almost any circumstance. But there was something strange in the air that distracted me, a weird feeling, a sort of prickly awareness not unlike the sense that sweeps across my consciousness and skin when someone is staring at me. I looked up through my eyelashes and in the section across the aisle from ours, one for a different flight, a man and an adolescent girl sat, and indeed, both of them were looking at me intently. I recognized them instantly. I couldn’t have stated how, or why, or under what circumstances I knew them, nor did I know their names, but know them, I certainly did so. I noticed that not only were those two individuals staring at me, but all of the many people milling around or sitting near them also gazed at me relentlessly, with total recognition of me in their eyes. And as with the man and girl, I knew all of them in return—they were as familiar to me as members of my own family.

If I were Oprah Winfrey or Angelina Jolie, my outsized fame would account for the O’Hare crowd’s recognition of me, but I am “private citizen Linda Lee Greene,” even less known then than I am now, for I was yet to join the throng of Internet users. It was a decade down the road before I began to develop a serious social media presence, on the occasion of publishing my second book. However, even if I had been a celebrity, what is the explanation of my recognition of them?

Perplexed by then, I revisited every possible setting in my mind in which I might have met the O’Hare crowd before then. I thought perhaps they were a delegation of some sort, and since there were a few other children among them, maybe they were a church or sports group I had encountered somewhere in New Orleans, or in my home city of Columbus, Ohio. But their incoming flight was not New Orleans or Columbus, and the outgoing flight was to a city to which I had never visited. To this day, I have been unable to identify any prior situation in which I came in contact with those people.  

One of the other strange things about the incident is that there were no discernible responses on the faces or in the bodies of any of them once eye contact was accomplished among us. Not one of them smiled or nodded or made any physical gesture whatsoever in acknowledgement of me, not even a twitch of an eyelid, or a tiny flick of a finger. They merely held my eyes steadily, and I swear to goodness that I began to think they were communicating a message to me, telepathically, but not of a soothsaying nature. There seemed to be no warning of impending misfortune or fortune. It didn’t cause me to feel uncomfortable or creepy—it simply felt like a gentle affirmation of kinship with me. As a matter of fact, the exchange settled me somehow—my spirit relaxed, my irritation over the delay lost its edge, and I felt friendlier toward my companion, a royal pain in the rump during our trip together.

 Back in my college days, I wrote a paper about reincarnation, and I recall that one of its tenets is that we travel through time with a pack of spiritual soulmates appearing in dissimilar guises at different times. For instance, my mother in my current life might have been my brother or sister or husband in lives past. Both major and minor characters appear in the sequential acts of our spiritual journeys, like the headliners and bit players of a Broadway show. Both types are essential to the full performance and disclosure of the story, a conjoined cast of pliable energy stores materializing when needed and providing continuity through which to work out ones spiritual lessons over time.

In literature as well as in the historical, scientific, and religious records, accounts of past-life experiences abound. Across the board, or nearly so, researchers discount them as so much smoke and mirrors, labeling them as fantasies, delusions, playacting, or a type of confabulation, a fancy word for lying without knowing one is lying. Within their quiver of rationales, even alcoholism can trigger false past-life memories.

Whether or not reincarnation will ever be observational, and as a result accepted as chapters in the script of life, isn’t about to be settled any time soon, if ever, as far as I can see. But there was something about the chemistry of my O’Hare Airport encounter that has kept it vibrant in my memory. It has remained a curiosity to me. It seems to refuse to allow me any sense of closure pertaining to it. I admit that I can’t help but wonder if those people are members of my spiritual family. And when I do fess up to that possibility rattling around inside me, it feels right. It rests flawlessly in my spirit. It doesn’t rest quite as well in my brain, however.   

 In any event, reincarnation as a subject is titillating fodder for writers, me among them, as is the case in CRADLE OF THE SERPENT, my latest novel. The following is a synopsis of the story:

Fearful that her husband Jacob is embroiled in an extramarital affair, archaeologist Lily Light turns to psychotherapy, astounding consultations in which Lily often takes on the persona of a young maiden named White Flower, a member of the clan of long-ago American Indian builders of Ohio’s Great Serpent Mound.

When a gunman’s bullets leave Jacob permanently paralyzed from his shoulders down and a woman identified as Jacob’s mistress dead, Lily’s world is shattered. Through the example of her own life a thousand or more years before, White Flower reveals to Lily the unexpected path to her salvation.   

      Given 5 Stars by Readers’ Favorite, CRADLE OF THE SERPENT brims with “enthralling” journeys into the human psyche, romantic love, archaeology, American Indian history, spinal cord injury, its consequences, and its contemporary treatments, as well as “amazing” sequences of past-life regression, and unimaginable twists and turns in a long-term marriage. It is available in paperback and eBook at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, Apple, Google, BooksaMillion, and other booksellers.- Linda Lee Greene

Best-selling author, award-winning artist, blogger, and interior designer Linda Lee Greene is on social media at the following:

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene

Email: lindaleegreene.author.artist@gmail.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/#!/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/LindaLeeGreeneAuthor

Twitter: @LLGreeneAuthor

Blog:  http://Ingoodcompanyohio.blogspot.com

Also look for her at LinkedIn and Google+

My Talking Heart: Chapter One - MY MOTHER'S MILK by Linda Lee Greene

I came out of my mother’s womb kicking and screaming, and I didn’t stop carrying on until after I was weaned from my mother’s breast. The opinion of our country doctor, and of my grandmother, was that I had colic, which is defined as “a severe, often fluctuating pain in the abdomen caused by intestinal gas or obstruction in the intestines and suffered especially by babies.” I think I was merely hungry. I think my mother’s milk was insufficient to nourish me, because as soon as I was weaned from her milk and put on solid food, I settled down. Another possibility is that my mother’s diet tainted her breast milk. A modern-day treatment of colic includes eliminating caffeine, cow’s milk, and gas-producing vegetables from a breastfeeding mother’s diet. From the time of her teen years, my mother was a caffeine-fiend, and a main staple of her diet was vegetables grown in my grandmother’s enormous farm-garden. One of my indelible memories of my mother is watching her at mealtimes, her fork in her right hand and a freshly-pulled, cleaned, and trimmed scallion in her left hand, a bite from the fork followed by a bite of a scallion. I wasn’t yet a year old when my mother weaned me, and I was by then a precocious, curious, fidgety child, talking like a magpie, and wound up like the Eveready Bunny.

Another widely-held belief is that a colicky baby’s nervous system is immature at the time of birth, a phenomenon that renders the infant unable to handle stimuli outside the womb: sights and sounds, for instance.  At the time of my birth, my Dad was away at Navy Boot Camp. Mom had moved back to her parent’s farm for the duration, and it was there, in a bedroom of the farmhouse, that I was born. The household was a raucous one, as six of the eight young offspring of Mom’s birth family was still under roof, plus my grandmother and grandfather, and then me. Mom’s youngest sibling Dean was only eight days shy of seven when I was born. Other than during my young girlhood when I was still a chatterbox and a jumping bean, throughout the rest of my history, I have tended toward widely-spaced bursts of energetic chatter and activity, for during my adolescence, I discovered quiet, my quiet bedroom, and quiet people to whom I was drawn. I fell in love with quiet. And I just wonder if at the moment I first emerged into the world, if my soul was jarred by all the activity, as it still is. I can handle noise only for short spans of time. Recently my son Frank drove me from my home in Columbus, Ohio to Palm Harbor, Florida, and back, for a short visit with my sister Susan. Throughout the entire 36 or more hours of the roundtrip, my son entertained himself with blasting music on the car’s radio. This is his habit. It energizes him. It depletes me. And by the time the trip was done, the inside of my head was ringing, painfully, and my soul just wanted to hunker down in the luxurious, the deliberate serenity, the utter freedom of my home.

While I was my mother’s first child, she was not a novice in the care of infants, for she was the eldest female among her parent’s eight children. As such, Mom acted as backup mother to her younger siblings for most of her girlhood. In the attached photograph of Mom and her seven siblings, she is the teenager in the back row, the one holding her youngest sibling, the infant Dean.

As you might have guessed by now, the title of this chapter “MY MOTHER’S MILK,” is a metaphor for my relationship with my mother. That I am introspective is a given, as most highly creative types are. My reflections often center on my bond with my mother. Mom and I were devoted to each other, without question, and while outwardly it was unhampered by dysfunction and inadequacy, a Sherlock Holmes-type of investigation of it unearths a mother/daughter connection not quite so blemish-free. Strangely, the glitch in our relationship can be boiled down to one factor, one giveaway clue: my colicky infancy. The unfortunate truth is that like my mother’s milk that left me under- and ill-nourished, she was not enough for me in other ways, as well. This was the case during my formative years, at least.

I suspect that by the time I came into being, my mother was burned out on babies, on the work tied to babies and young children. She’d had years of it by then with her younger brothers and sisters. Then I came along, and rather than being the designer baby she had dreamed of, I bawled night and day, I bit her nipples with my sharp baby teeth in utter frustration toward those only instruments available to feed me, and getting little of what I needed from them. I’ve concluded that the breastfeeding interaction between us set up a psychological pattern that dogged us forevermore, one in which my natural need to be nourished by my mother was thwarted at so many turns, the consequences of which played havoc with her confidence that she was equipped to respond to my needs, sufficiently. I think she gave away her power to me out of guilt. Throughout the years Mom and I had together, her reliable response to me when I solicited her guidance on almost any situation was, “Why are you asking me? You’re smarter than I am.”

An adjunct to this whole thing is that I think the basic need of my mother’s soul was quiet. I think she craved serenity and freedom, and other than for a little while in the last years of her life, she was allowed very little of it. I inherited my need of those things from her. She has been gone now for 25 years, and still my need to feed off her is as strong as the day I was born. My only comfort is my belief that our story isn’t finished—and someday, somewhere we will be together again, and then we will get it right in every possible way.

***

“Guardians and Other Angels,” (http://goo.gl/imUwKO) is my novel of historical fiction blended with the true story of my maternal ancestors, including my mother’s girlhood, a story that takes place during the early to middle Twentieth Century. It has been compared to Pulitzer Prize winners, “The Grapes of Wrath,” and “Angela’s Ashes,” as well as to Jeannette Walls’ “Half Broke Horses.” 

Best-selling author Linda Lee Greene's latest novel

Best-selling author Linda Lee Greene’s latest novel CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV) is a story whose protagonist is a contemporary North American archaeologist named Lily Light. Her work centers on the “Great Serpent Mound” in Adams County, Ohio, USA. The book is written in the voices of Lily Light and her psychotherapist Michael Neeson. Lily’s therapy is based on her estrangement from her husband Jacob, also an archaeologist at work on a project in Arizona. Early in Lily’s therapy, Jacob is injured in a violent shooting at the edge of the Navajo Reservation there, and is left permanently paralyzed from his shoulders down. Lily also learns that a woman murdered at the scene of the crime was Jacob’s mistress.

During several of Lily’s therapy sessions, she experiences dream-states or time-travels in which she takes on the bearing of a young Indian female, a member of the indigenous clan of the mound’s original architects. Through her remarkable journey through time, Lily finds her way to the other side of her shattered life wrought by Jacob’s infidelity and its numerous catastrophic consequences.

CRADLE OF THE SERPENT, the new novel by best-selling author Linda Lee Greene

A fire glow in the clear and silent night sky points to the rim of the star-wound where I was born, and in my mind’s eye I transform into an archaeologist whose job it is to unearth the secrets of the early Indian civilization, the “Fort Ancient” American Indians, the bits and pieces of their lives contained within the great mound of the serpent lying there in the cradle of the debris of that long ago meteor strike. With the delicate tools of the trade in hand, I imagine myself beginning to dig. Will I find her? I wonder. Will I find that other woman, that Indian woman whom, like me, was born on the rim of this star-wound? Among arrow heads and shards of pottery, I imagine I find a small bone: a section of one of her fingers, then remnants of her jawbone lying beside a rock that reveals itself to be a pillow for her head. A group of four small and nearly matching stones fairly tumble into my hand when my trowel scrapes away a knot of finger roots of a tree. Each of the stones is punctured with a little hole at its center, the jewelry for her necklace, I realize. Yes, four stones: the sacred number of those early people—the number four symbolizing the four directions of the world—the four seasons. I declare kinship with that Indian woman, and in that new sisterhood, I feel buoyant and lifted, taken above and beyond this material world as our joined spirits float on the silver mist blanketing the panorama before me....

The above excerpt of the final pages of my novel GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS (http://goo.gl/imUwKO), published in 2012, and re-released in 2015, laid the groundwork for my current novel CRADLE OF THE SERPENT (goo.gl/i3UkAV),  a story whose protagonist is a contemporary North American archaeologist named Lily Light. Her work centers on the mounds of the Ohio Valley, with special emphasis on the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, Ohio, USA. It is an endeavor that sets my archaeologist on a remarkable journey through time to the prehistoric period of the American Indian architects of the mysterious serpent effigy, and specifically to White Flower, the young woman to whom I refer in the earlier novel. To this indigenous culture, the mound is not only a critical component of everyday life, but also a link to the stars, which they believe to be their pathway to immortality. 

CRADLE OF THE SERPENT is written in the voices of Lily Light and her psychotherapist Michael Neeson. A patient of Michael’s, Lily’s therapy is based on her estrangement from her husband Jacob, also an archaeologist at work on a project in Arizona. Early in Lily’s therapy, Jacob is injured in a violent shooting at the edge of the Navajo Reservation there, and is left permanently paralyzed from his shoulders down. Lily also learns that a woman murdered at the scene of the crime was Jacob’s mistress.

During several of Lily’s therapy sessions with Michael, Lily experiences dreamstates or time-travels in which she takes on the bearing of White Flower, and through the process, finds her way to the other side of her shattered life wrought by Jacob’s infidelity and its numerous catastrophic consequences.

I wrote the initial version of GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS when it was still generally accepted that the Great Serpent Mound was constructed by the Fort Ancient people. The current analysis, based on radiocarbon dating conducted in 2011 and made public in 2014, is that the mound was built by indigenous people of the Adena civilization about 1,400 years earlier than previously thought, making it as old as Aristotle of Greece.