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Letter #42
Labor Day Remembered Monday, September
5th, 1977
- Hi Dad, - Mars kind of raised an eyebrow when I told her I had to double check the animals even though I trust Ernie to the max, but she was so exhausted by worrying about what other people would think of us if both babies started fussing while we were out with Sissy and her family that she practically shoved me out the door so she could bathe and change the babies and go to bed. She brought four different bottles of juice, some Cheerios in a plastic bag, and then she was afraid to put it on the tray the restaurant provided for public use. I can see that, but the more Sissy tried to reassure her, the more tense Mars became, like ‘Yeah sure, yours and every other baby in the world, but these are my babies and I’m responsible for them!’ If she keeps isolating herself from everyone who wants to help, we’re going to be in a real fix because I’m out in the fields all day! I don’t know what to say to her anymore, she’s so tired and snappish all the time, but I don’t need anyone else to remind me that she’s this way now because she’s taking such good care of me and the babies that I started in her, so I just try to stay as open as I can be. I hope it’s enough. Whatever it is, we’ll get through it together. But Sissy says, teething could last for as long as eighteen months! I used to look at the time we’d be together as just eighteen years, now a single week takes that long to happen. When do I get to enjoy my kids like they do on the t.v. Shows? President Carter is supposed to sign a treaty Wednesday giving away the Panama Canal at the start of the new Century. I can’t even think that far ahead, no matter how hard I try. First Vietnam, now this, why do we even bother to fight and die? Just like Rome, the politicians are going to give it all away. You know, I used to think you were just Whistling Dixie when you thundered about the rise in violence being a sigh of the End of Days, but I have to admit to a creepy crawling along the back of my neck when I tried to watch the late night news and heard what they were saying about Europe, ah, West Germany, I think that’s Europe again. A kidnapping of a big wig of some Union over there? They killed the three police officers who were escorting and his chauffeur and they’re demanding a political ransom for his return. Mars got angry because she gets angry at them anyway. If they have to go to another state or another country just to make sure there’s gory news headlines, they won’t hesitate to do so, in her opinion and she won’t allow it on when the babies are awake, for fear they’ll think that’s what their world is like, but I was already on my way to turn it off, not just down the way she assumed. I hope they return the man safely, but no one is ever going to give back the dead husbands or fathers of those men the terrorists already killed. Has life become so cheap since we’ve endured the hell of war in our lifetime, Pops? Has it conditioned us to think of this as the way to resolve things because tiny pointed eyes of cameras can make them look larger than lie? I don’t know!! It just makes me feel smaller and more helpless against a world that’s going to press down on my babies’ shoulders in another ten or fifteen years, should the Lord tarry, like you used to preach. The Islamic extremists in the Nation’s Capital, the two jumbo jets colliding in the fog in March, more death in a single month than I could see in twelve lifetimes! Now this, would they have bothered unless they knew their actions would be displayed across the world? …Yes, maybe so, violence begets violence, just like the Lord said….gosh, Pops….Has there been a single family whose lived in this house that hasn’t been faced with carnage and war? I want desperately for that to stop in time for my son’s life and for my daughter’s sons, but….never mind, I’m just depressing both of us. The Lord was killed, this Nation was formed in blood and combat, and we’ve been warned that wars and rumors of wars will escalate in intensity as a sign of His Return, but not to let our hearts be troubled. I haven’t figured that part out yet, dad, but I’m too tired to even think. Right now the moon is silent and full, I can almost hear the woods and the meadow and farm breathing in and out in contentment as I struggle against being so weary I can’t even raise my hand to turn out the new electric light overhead. But everything always looks the blackest just before dawn, right? Love you the most, Pops! If you’ll forgive my adolescent retreat into slang. Sincerely, Hank ◊ Letter #43 Baby Bumper bye-bye Tuesday, September 13th, 1977 - Hi Dad, - Gosh, I never guessed how fast a week could go! We have two more weeks till our harvesting is in full swing. After that we won’t be able to draw two breaths in together until we’re carving pumpkins for Halloween! It seemed to take forever when I was a kid. Andrew is already in First Grade! Can you imagine that! I always thought of him as Sissy’s ‘baby’ but he’ll be going our with the other kids for Halloween this year, his Mom and Dad wouldn’t let him go without them until he started school, and now he has! Go figure! I hope Chuck and Aimee don’t grow up that fast, but don’t Mars I said so, she’s dreaming of Potty Training already-it would sure save on the cost of disposable diapers, do you have any idea how much they’re skyrocketed since you and Mom had us? But what choice do we have? We aren’t linked up with any sewer system so all the soap goes into the ground, and that’s not a good thing as deep as our ground water runs in this part of the Flats. Small milestones. We had to take the cloth bumpers out of both cribs because Chuckey’s starting to use them to get his chubby little leg caught on the top rail of the crib! I was beginning to wonder if he was mentally slow or something, but he just seemed to be content to watch his sissy take the lumps and the bumps and now that he’s figured it out by watching her, he’s using those five extra pounds to get to mischief before she can! God love them! She’s having to say ‘no!’ so much that I even wince and pull back when I hear the sharpness in her tone, but even though we’re over the first thunderstorm of tears and wills by moving them into a room of their own, it’s not like we can ‘send them to their room’ like you did us. I used to hate that, but the edge in Mar’s voice is getting on my nerves. Luckily the babies shrug it off like water off a duck’s back and they coo and love on her so much when we feed them before their naps. Like I said, small milestones, but we actually get to hold one another and talk for a few minutes at night before we fall asleep. Things change, just like you tried to warn me, don’t they? I wish I’d listened more, but I was twenty-one, invincible and supremely arrogant in what I knew of my world. A kid…I know, I almost hear you say it. But ‘there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you outgrow it in time’, like Mom used to say, you know? Gosh I wish I could talk more, but I ache. Pops. Thanks for listening to me.
Sincerely, Hank ◊ Letter #44 La-la land for No-No Land September 19th, 1977 - Hi Dad, - Mars wanted to die because Chuckey’s pulling on his wee-wee. We all think we invented it, don’t we? LeAnne tried to help, saying that she had to have ‘the talk’ about ‘private parts’ with Matt and Andy when they were toddlers but the gentle consideration just drove them further apart-Mar’s says that Sissy is being condescending… Then she jumped on me because Uncle Sandy just came out with a new super-hero and he’s putting a portion of the money in trust for the babies, like he did with LeAnne’s three, and Mar’s is angry at me because knowing that they ‘have money waiting’ will ‘surely spoil them and they’ll never learn to work hard or be dependable’…How do I stay out of the middle of this time bomb, Pops, without giving offense to Uncle Sandy? Or worse yet, Cathy Baker? She’s another City Girl in training! - Sincerely, Hank ◊ Letter #45 The last Sunday of the month Sunday, September 25th, 1977 - Hi Dad, - You know, you used to tell us to be careful what we wished for, we might get it. Luckily, I know you have too much “sua~ve” to remind me that I wanted to be married and raise my kids on the family Homestead even when that seemed impossible because we’d lost the farm George Crowley ‘for the Co-op.’ So I’ve got nobody to blame but myself, and I was ‘honored’ when I was elected the youngest Treasurer in Union history, even though our own group is less than two years old, so all this weariness on my shoulders is my doing, but all these smiles and sun burnt places belong strictly to the providence of the Good Lord and your love for the land, Pops. I’ve never felt quite so right about anything as I do tonight. It’s funny to have one of our Fireside Chats with a roof over my head but Mars simply had to go bed, she couldn’t have kept her eyes propped open even with cotton swaps or toothpicks! I just needed and wanted this time with the babies asleep in my lap, you know? I can still taste the mustard Doc Sharon used on her potato salad, but I wouldn’t have said a word about it, if my life depended on it! She’s meant so much to our family even if she and Tom never got to be formally married before he died. I can’t imagine our portion of time in this house with her, anymore than I could picture Woodrow Harkness without either of his two wives, or Grandma Webb without thinking of how her French Quebec Papa who was eaten by a bear. So many hands have had a part of shaping this house over the generations, even the subtle changes and additions that Aunt Sunni made when she owned the house seem to fall into that hazy memory I have of visiting her as a boy while you and Mom were still together. My twins will play here their whole lives, the way Sissy and I got too when we visited. The furniture is new but its arranged close together in the same way it was for us, so we could grasp a `hold of it and pull ourselves to our little feet. And I guess, in a way, that’s what we’re doing as adults every time something whizzes past us in the night, like the guns yesterday. I asked around at the Autumn’s Start Social at Church but no one seems to know of any hunters out this early in the season, it must have been a city dude who can’t tell a turkey from a quail, no one else would be so foolish to shoot where they couldn’t see where the bullet would ultimately land! Speaking of land, George’s lawyers are trying to reverse the ‘gift’ of the farm to the Co-op for tax purposes as a means of negating our holding unto our own land when it’s been in our family for five generations, counting all the babies my generation has had, and we’re living on the land again, but then he didn’t spare the Cox Family and their great-grandfather helped to keep his great-grandparents alive when they first arrived in the family among the indentured servants, so why should I expect anything different from a man who seems determined to hate me, you know, Pops? But enough of that pond scum, I’m sitting here watching the fire in the fireplace across the room and I’m feeling the slow in and out of my daughter’s breathing as she snuggles in my arms, and I can feel the solidness of my son’s tiny body against my knees. He’s obvious taking about Maude Amy’s side of the family, not Grandpa Webb’s, he was as thin as a stick to the day he died. I can hear Poncho snore from his blanket beside the hearth and the slow, methodical tick of the Grandfather Clock over the mantle as it releases the used up moments of our lives. It kept time for Woodrow and Francis, and then was lovingly cared for by Grandma Caitlin, and I can ‘see’ their graces in the meadow from March when we returned en masse with all the new faces and the new babies to reinstate the annual family reunion, and your grave, and your brother Toms, and the path we have paved for this year’s reunion that leads to the cemetery at the bottom of the incline where Judge Vernon Emmet and his Mama are buried, along with nameless others who only had wood crosses, but who clearly belonged to this land as much as Guff and Sam, the Freedmen who built the cabin in the Meadow to begin with? And with any luck, regular cleaning and maintenance, even if we have to go to the Crossroads now, it will still be spewing out the used up minutes as my baby’s wife, or this cherished eight month old’s future babies pull at her breasts, and life will have it share of joys and sorrows. Of do’s and don’t, and a severe lack of ‘I should haves’ because Mars and I want to teach them what we learned from your generation, Pops. That life was meant to be lived, not merely lived through, and much of what happens, if not all of it, depends on what we did, or chose not to do. Father God? I’m going to need even more of Your help to be more as my babies need more and my wife turns to me for strength to guide and protect us. I know that I can’t do that on my own, these last eight months had knocked a lot of that false confidence out of me, but I’ve already learned that so much of what the Old Folks taught us about Life, about You, is so true. Help me to pass on that precious heritage too. In your Son Jesus’ name as soon returning King and Messiah. Amen
Respectfully, Hank Webb ◊ Letter #46 Too much, too late! Friday, September 30th, 1977 - Dad, - I love Aunt Heather to pieces, but she and Sissy are making Mars a nervous wreck! Now she has her nose buried in Dr. Spock’s book about raising babies until she slaps my hand away and turns off the light! It’s like trying to sleep with a pine tree in the bed next to me, with the bark still on! Why can’t people just leave us alone, Pops? GOD? I don’t know whose laying out that poison and I can’t stop them. If You’re real, YOU do it! Poncho’s death hurt us all! It’s a terrible way to die! - - Hank  |
Asia Rachael Cohen
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