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Letter #70
“ Blessed and Giving Thanks “
November 28th, 1946
THURSDAY - Dear Sir, -
We broke down and bought a local turkey already dressed. We had many hands in the kitchen even though I had to sit
with one arm on the table ‘supervising’ the laughing women. My Penny, Molly Bea, Sharon, Freda, and Laura MacCafterty,
while Queenie played outside in her new apron, spoiling it and the two new puppies with her relentless enthusiasm, God love
her. Each woman brought a unique family history, a sense that this was the ‘only’ way a thanksgiving turkey should
be stuffed, and yet in the genial and yielding, if overheated atmosphere of the kitchen, even with the window over the sink
open and blowing in November’s icy breath there was a festive forgiveness that bounded us in a way I can not adequately
describe to You, so I’m glad that You were there, dear Jesus. We had Catholics, Baptists, a Protestant in me, and a
cautious atheist, although Laura is hedging her bets in case the brimstone and hell fire-breathing evangelists her mother
craves to confess too might prove right in the end.
Although the turkey dressing was a compromise, each woman was allowed complete autonomy over the dish she best remembered
her mother fixing at family dinners. I got the gravy that MUST have precooked giblets diced into miniscule bumps; mostly to
disguise the flour lumps when I started cooking. Amanda always had a cook and two chore girls in here, although I don’t
remember the kitchen seeming so small when I barely looked over the flat cooking surface of Old Betsy!
Johnny was out in the front room listening to the
radio and arguing with the men folk at the top of his lungs, amongst much laughter and revelry I thought a mite rough, but
a man’s got to develop a thick skin to survive in life, and it seems as Richard and sandy in turn gave back as good
as they got, and they shushed as being ‘boys’. There was a whole lot cooking and simmering today, wasn’t
there, Lord, come to think of it?
I had a knit shawl over my shoulders, such as I despised in my youth, having seen my mother in a jade green one for
most of my adolescence, but I have a problem regulating or even keeping heat, so I simply thanked Freda warmly for her thoughtful
‘hostess gift’ and then pretended I was wearing it just in her honor. It’s lined with some slick and lovely
rayon, so it feels like a silk cloak, kind ‘a like making me a true ‘queen’ of the kitchen, you know, as
in : “ A man is the king of his castle but a woman is… “ You know!! They probably said it in Nazareth too!
Sharon’s
hostess gift was a box set of exotic teas from around the world. Each of the nine paper boxes inside bears the flag of the
country their from, and we sipped sugarless green tea in front of the fireplace as Amos Dear hastily attempted to gather up
all the newspaper that the boys had strewn around in their careless pleasures. I pretended not to notice, although Sandy,
he did, at the end, a little red faced try to help his Pa stack them, but Richard, he was lost in another world, putting together
the balsa wood air plane Freda gave him. [Sandy she gave a new sketch book and a fresh set of charcoal pencils with a malleable
gray eraser that allows him to clean remove a line without tearing up the paper like the pink school erasers tend to do.]
It was their job to pick it up, but how could I scold them in front of the ‘other’ men? When
my nose and my eyes started to run from the strength of the rubber cement he was using to fix some of the stable parts, no
one had to tell him to take the mess and put it in his own room, Richard, he saw that for himself, and giving me a kiss of
apology on the cheek, he asked his brother’s help in helping him to ‘clear off the table’. I didn’t
expect him back in with us until the bird was finished cooking and his older sister drug him out of his room by the ear, the
way she did when they were kids, but to my delight he come out on his own and shyly joined the men folk around the radio.
I tried not to stare too hard in his direction, but I couldn’t stop that big smile from taking over my features!
Pa’s hand grazed mine as he reached over to pat Laird’s head as the old dog got up from his blanket with
a groan. I knew just how he felt! I looked up at Amos Dear and I was shocked at the love shinning so sweetly in his eyes since
most of the time he is a deeply private man and I felt as if I swallowed up and there was only him and me and our love in
the room for the longest second, Jesus! Then I looked back to Laird who’d placed his muzzle hard against my knee, and the weight of it told me he was asking permission
to be walked outside. The puppies terrorize him with their leaping on him and he is too much of a gentleman to snarl or snap
at them, the way he might if’fn they was in the house making on with such fool shenanigans. Before I could say anything,
Freda put down her cup, with tears in her eyes and chirruped for the old dog to follow her to the back porch. I ain’t
never seen him move quite that fast! His toenails clicked on the wood in the space on the wood floor between the rag rugs
and I ain’t got the strength to hold the nail clippers in my hand like I used to do. Time was he worn them down going
for walks with Tom and his wheelchair. I guess that’s true for all ’a us. But for everything lost, something is
gained if’fn we take the time to look for it and to count our blessings.
Like feeling as though we’d just settled in with the Normal Rockwell painting family as we bowed our heads in
gratitude and prayer, as I do now. Ord, you are something awesome!! -
Respectfully yours,
Maude Amy Webb . ◊
Letter #71
“ I couldn’t call New York City Home.
December 21st, 1946
But it’s a Great Place to Visit ~
THURSDAY
at least once in your life – and its
closer than Mars and just as strange! “ - How do I ever begin, Lord? It ain’t like You weren’t with us every step of
the way! -
Still and all, Sir, maybe by talking about it I can cough up some
of this spangle and star-dust and get a decent night’s sleep, unlike last night by the time we got back to the hotel!
No wonder they call New York City ‘the city that never sleeps’ and it isn’t just the taxi horns
and the fire sirens, for a fact honest!
Whoa! Where do I begin? It was such a joy to spend the week of Christmas in such and usual and set apart place but
Johnny, he was acting so strangely before we left the farm, as giddy as a kid and he and Sandy kept looking at each other
from the corner of their eye, and giggling like they was both twelve years old and him not a twice married, forty something
year old man! And Richard, he kept a straight face and walked around like a little tin soldier just to keep the laughter locked
up inside, so I made him fess up. Then I was beside myself with joy! Pauline and Willis
honeymooned in New York, and he took her there to see the best doctors, but I ain’t never… haven’t ever
… even crossed the state line of my own home state! We was to fly over several of them, all the way to New
York City, just like in the movies!
When he told me he was taking all of us and Penny Acres for an East Coast premiere of a new Hollywood Movie I could
hardly believe my own ears! We wouldn’t get to meet Jimmy Stewart of the lovely lady actress who played his wife in
the movie, but we would attend a party even the Rockefellers asked for an invitation for, and we were going for free! But
oddly, and ain’t all human emotions, odd? When I heard the name of the new movie “ It’s a Wonderful Life
“ all the anger I thought I’d cured flared up again within as hot as Hades itself? I thought
I was over my anger, but I thought to myself, “Yes, isn’t it! But I won’t have any more of it! “
I thought I’d found a measure of peace in simply accepting that this was something over which
I had no control. It wasn’t like my eventual end overtook me by surprise or it was something new!
You didn’t invent it just because You had a bad day and wanted to get back at me! You’ve
spent millennia since creation knowing that You had to die! You who are God! As the days grew near,
did it weigh on you too? Did You go through what Sharon calls “The Five Stages of grief? “ From dismay and denial,
to anger, to helplessness, mourning the life you could have had until You found the peace that You’ve given
me these last few days? In one way, I hope so! Because this tenderness that wells up inside me is the closest inkling I’ll
ever have to understanding your love until we meet Face to face.
We rested for two days after we got there. I think I need that time just to get my body adjusted to flying without
wings! We got put into a limousine Willis hired, even though he choose not to go with us so he could have some private time
with his niece and her husband before they say goodbye to America for good. But he hugged me around the neck at the airport
and thanked me for standing by him and Pauline when no body else would when he first come to the Valley. Him hiring her for
an English teacher because no one could understand him for his thick German accent. And I just hugged him back. I didn’t
have any words to say how dear he is to me, closer than my own blood ken, because of the way he stood by our Pauline even
in times of sickness! Even when she had to have a surgery to remove both her breasts in a failed hope of saving her life.
I still have that last picture of her and I, our faces crowded close together, cheek-to-cheek; apple rosy, open mouthed with
laughter. Her in her knit cap to hide that all her hair fell out after the radiation and chemical treatments against the cancer
that still killed her, and me in a pony tail like we was young again, my daughter’s age, in pigtails! That joy came
from the hope in her heart from knowing how much she could trust him – a full head of hair or not! There aren’t
many men like him. Or women like her. I miss her terrible too.
Then on the morning of the nineteenth of December, Johnny rented a private boat for a tour of New York Harbor [calling
him “Mister von Stratton” seems so formal after he’s made himself so much a part of our family in such a
short time], a day we would normally be out raking the manure into piles to have it hauled off before the snow and ice
chilled it to its core and made it rock solid despites its natural tendency to promote internal heat by decay, [Willis’
hired men were doing the chores till we got back] while we women were instead being ushered through coal black
snow and sleet on bustling city streets to a beauty parlor sal-lawn` to be pecked at and pushed around by eighteen-year-old
something’s half our age with black rimmed eyes like a startled raccoon in the lantern light! Time was, to get a permanent,
you had to be hooked up to this Martian headdress with a hundred heated curlers hanging down from their own electric cord,
like a milking machine gone mad! But now-a-days, all you need is a pair of scissors and a clothes pen to hold your nose against
that terrible rotting fish smell from the purple goop they put under the thin tissues of aluminum foil and spell under an
electronic hair dyer! But when it was all said and done, I stared at the stranger in the mirror occupying
the same chair where I sat, wrapped in a plastic bib that covered my shoes. While the girl dressed all in black smiled for
the first time since she was assigned to me and began o snap her fingers in approval. I couldn’t get the smile off my
face either, not when I was wearing me new dress for the first time in nearly six years! Until we had to step back outside
into the cold wind and rain to catch a cab back to the Midtown Hotel! I figured my hair was ruined under the plastic bandana,
but when we got to our rooms my hair hadn’t moved a strand out of place nor drooped in the rain like it does in the
humidity and we were further treated to having a meal brought up to our room to eat. [New Yorkers can be funny particular
about being alone so much less’n their on the street when they push up against one another cheek to jowl without speaking,
or even a fine how-do-you-do when they walk on your toes!]
Maybe New Yorkers are used to such things as this, but my jaw sloped southward somewhat when the man who runs the place
in the lobby came up to make sure we had enough to eat and the vittles was to our satisfaction. Pa allowed as how it wasn’t
what he was used to at home but he rightly enjoyed himself. High praise, coming from that man, whether they know
it or not. But I’m just a country girl, so I almost stepped on my jaw when he snapped his fingers like a head waiter
and the door opened with a rack of clothes and fur coats were pushed in that took two men to do it. One to push and one to
steer. I bet there hasn’t been that many furs in one place since the last Hudson Bay pow-wow when Manhattan was an island
still owned by the Indians! Black, white, brown; Fox, Mink, Sable, even a stripped one that put me in the mind of our Lynxes
back home; rushing my heart right up into my throat with a sudden wash of homesickness. They was to be rented for the entire
week, but I feared enough touching them for fear I’d leave a hand streak and they’d expect me
to pay for the dry cleaning! It was hard to sleep that night! First the bottom of my intestines striking the roof of my mouth
every time that plane it dropped so suddenly when we hit ‘a pocket of air’ getting here, and now being called
“Mrs. Webb” and “Ma’am this” and “Ma’am that”, every one of them costing me
a quarter I would have preferred to keep in my own pocket, not the gloved hand that snaked out to expect it! But….oh
my, Lord! That alone would have given me memories enough to last twelve lifetimes! But
the next day, after walking around town till my knees aches almost as bad as my feet, we had another polite knock on the door
and I sent Penny Acres to answer it, though I couldn’t think who knew to look for us in this city! It was Johnny. He
was so handsome in his beetle-shelled suit, but not near as handsome as Pa! He checked the boys who kept fidgeting with their
ties and demanding to know if they had to wear “Abe Lincoln top hats’ like Pa was testing out? They seemed eager
to please him. Grateful that they’d been invit4ed to join a late night adult’s night out when we all thought we
was just going to see a movie, you know? I was so proud of them! From the crown of my head to the tip of my toes as both my
boys acted like adult men, allowing me and their sister to go out the door first.
Johnny, he presented me and his startled wife with a large velvet box each. Hers was to keep but he reassured me that
mine, which looked fit for a queen, had only been rented for the Gala since he knew I had no place to wear it at home feeding
the chickens and cleaning out the barn after the goats! He motioned to Pa, who had a gift that was mine to keep as a keepsake
of our journey. Here to New York and through our long life together. It was a small ring box, but the ring inside almost fractured
my eyeballs when I first laid eyes on it! Even the boys were impressed. It was a yellow gold diamond with glints of fire inside,
like an opal. The wedding ring Pa and I could never afford! Johnny, he saw too it that we had a few minutes alone together
after that, and I for one, was profoundly grateful for this thoughtfulness! Maybe white-white ones are better or ‘smarter’
or more desired, but this was cut in an ‘old fashioned setting’ of ‘The Twenties’ which was
when we were married in just our teens, and to me, those years aren’t history but the happiest days of my life! It was
a diamond he sold to Tiffany’s and then paid to have faceted in a way that drew out the fire and breathing life from
the otherwise cold stone, and he couldn’t have picked a better gift if’fn he’d crawled inside my skin and
looked around for his self! Then
as we came out the elevator doors we was catch up in a swirl of perfume and slim dresses that made my head swim until we was
safely out into the cold again, waiting for out turn at a cab to drive up and open its door like Cinderella’s orange
pumpkin carriage! I’ve been content to wear cotton and linen my whole life, but for just this once in my life, I chose
a dress like I saw the ladies wear in those fantasy escape movies of the Nineteen Thirties. It was gold Lamb A and it looked
like I was picked up by the head and shoulders and dipped into liquid gold and all I was wearing was the part that didn’t
drip off? But I felt more wondrous blessed than the Queen of Sheba with all her tribute to King Solomon! But I paled as we
walked down the damp red carpet into the theater building. My babies’ eyes they glowed, slack jawed as we ‘mingled’
with important looking people who sought out my son-in-law until I thought he was the Shaw of Iran in disguise! Most of the
glittering stones around their necks came from the store that purchased his raw diamonds and turned them into dreams. No one
seemed to need to ask for my name so I assumed they all knew I was just his mother-in-law ‘from the sticks’, but
that’s just as well, I was too awe struck to have answered anyway. Then musical notes were played and we began to file
in find the chairs that match the numbers on our tickets. I don’t normally like to sit up front, close enough to see
the goose bumps on the screen, I usually let the boys run down there to slump in their seats, so I never guessed how much
bigger and real all the floating images appeared. And that close to the screen, you don’t notice the blue-white light
from the projection tower on the back wall neither!
The fact that the ‘real’ screening was happening simultaneously, with movie stars and hot lamps pointed
skyward to rake across the clouds on the other side of the country and they were ‘stuck’ here ‘in the City’
had seemed a predominate theme among the women that swirled around us in the ornate Art deco restored Lobby, but they’d
sighed and shrugged in condolence to one another, implying that their husbands were too busy and too rich to drop everything
to merely fly to ‘The West Coast’ for the ‘mere screening’ of a film in Hollywood. As though that
were something ‘boorishly crass’ as I heard one woman say, but imagine my surprise and delight to see the picture
actually begin with two invisible angels talking to one another about a humble man in a ‘small town’ that was
four times the size of Indian Wells! The images and broken promises of a well meant well really resonated with me! Especially
the part where the little girl leans over the soda fountain and whispers in his ‘bad’ ear that some day she’s
going to marry him, he just doesn’t know it yet. Cathy Baker! I found myself really caring for the
man and wanting him to get away to make his dreams come true, like I got to do, and yet knowing all the while, he’d
never make it! But when “Uncle Billy” accidentally gave all their money to the bad guy, my heart
dropped so low in my chest I couldn’t even find it! This whole time I’d thought we were watching an uplifting movie and instead, the Old Master
had given us one of those bleak new anti-hero stories! Till the angel jumped in to force him to keep from jumping in? I’m
not sure how that works, but it made sense at the time, you know? Anyhow, he saves ‘the man’s life’ and
while their drying their clothes off [when it would take all night in my world] the angel gets to introduce himself and announces
that he’s been given his wish, he’d never been born! And I struggled with the concept even as it was being acted
out. All the change in George’s world that made it bad because he wasn’t there simply living out his own life. The hitting the boy in the ear and the real looking
blood coming out of it still makes me cringe! And I began to see what the writer and filmmaker and the actors were trying
to say. I don’t know if the rich men and women around me got I, or if they identified more with the cruel Mister Potter?
But the movie, even before it ended with his life restored to him so he could appreciate it now, and Donna Reed a happily
married matron with small children again in her own decorated home instead of a chilled and a miserable spinster, but in my
heart I was already rewarded with a sadness like unto beauty. I couldn’t bring my son Tom back, but I saw now his short
life had a purpose, an impact I hadn’t suspected when I was so tired up in my grief at missing him. That Pa and I, in
raising our brood and keeping the Homestead alive, had played a role that exceeded the sum of our small life together. “Zazu”
was alive, her rose intact, and I…I cried in the dark. And I wasn’t alone as her tiny voice rang out excited
because the silver bell sounded and that meant an angel just got his wings! At that moment I didn’t want a philosophical
debate about whether humans ever became angels, or ever lived mortal lives first, I simply believed. I believed in joy, I
believed in good, I believed in my fellow man….and You. For if angels exist in heaven, looking over the actions of
man to ponder and understand them, how then can anyone deny You, who created the, us, and the world we take for granted?
Oh and my I’m tired! I’m sorry I pulled on your ear over long, but oh Lord, oh! Such sweetness of memory
and hope sustains me as I rock in Grandma Caitlin’s chair and I listen to the hiss from the burning logs as snowflakes
managed to make it all the way down the hole in the chimney to fall on the flames. What a terrible toss
to me if I had never been born! If I hadn’t been there to help my ailing mother, if I hadn’t endured the ordeal
of childbirth so my children could sleep now waiting the final strokes of the clock to ease this transition into a whole new
year. New dreams, new experiences. When one trial ends, another begins. That’s Life. But I don’t think I’d
trade it now for a dozen reels of cellulose. Thank you, Jesus! It’s truly been ‘ a wonderful
life’ and there’s still as much more of it to come as You will for my old man and me. That’s enough. For
now. It had to be. But I listen to Laird snore as he lays on his side on the blanket. It smells of old dog and ashes. But
they’re no longer the ash4es of broken dreams. In the morning when I rise, Penny Acres will drive up. Leaving tire prints
on the new snow and another bright and wonderful day will take place as she reads to me and we exchange dreams, women to woman.
I’m so proud You saw fit to lay all this to my responsibility. That’s something the empty years can never take
away! I’m kind ’a sleepy now. Can we finish talking later?
- Respectfully yours,
Maude Amy Webb . ◊
Letter #72
“ A New Family Christmas Tradition “
December 25th, 1946
WEDNESDAY
- Dear Morning Sir, -
How blessed it is to have this time together with You as a family
reunited. That isn’t to say we won’t argue and fuss again one another, but I believe we’ve rediscovered
what binds us together when Life’s care seems overwhelming. I see as many changes in Diane as I do in Penny. Marriage
has softened and strengthened her, and I have to admit her young Spanish Don occasionally sets this ole heart a ‘flutter
when he looks at me. So many people look past you, or near you, but he is strong enough to risk inviting people
in. I wish I were! But
that is one of my last few regrets remaining as my spirit gains strength my body sheds like heat. He and
James have made a friendship that takes my breath away, being former combat soldiers and because the
Spanish Don has a gift for listening I envy. He seems to soak everything up and it doesn’t spill out to
others as gossip. I don’t understand what it is he sees in Diane, but perhaps a haunting echo of our dear Pauline which
I know is what shapes her and holds her close to her dark husband. He reminds me that the loss of both her parents in the
car accident at an early age made her incapable of easy trust but as she has remained friends with my Penny, she cares deeply
and is as solid as a rock for those who have earned her trust, which, he adds with a shy smile, includes Pa and me as well
as her beloved Uncle who calmly raised her without raising his voice.
The calm of the snowy landscape around us is almost as brilliant as the moonlight reflecting back from the sleeping
earth. I never realized that beneath the treachery of unstable balance on ice hidden by mounds of fluffy snow, there is a
Purpose to winter. It calms our souls as well as offering rest to the land. It seems like the speed of life shot ahead like
a man catapulted from a circus cannon since ‘Post War Prosperity’ replaced the lacks and needs of ration books
and the starkly haunting reminder of the years when America starved and the crops lands burgeoned only with dry dust! I wish
I could say I was above all that, but…sigh…as the cold and the quiet seep it, it’s like the past mistakes
don’t even matter for this moment, this
frozen instant in time. Amos Dear just
closed his fingertips tips against my arm in question, and I’m shocked at the depth of love I see as I turned to smile
and reassure him. I’ve done nothing to be worthy of what he offers me, and yet, Lord, I now realize as I snuggle closer
to him, that I wouldn’t be capable of environing Your love if’fn I wasn’t shown how real it is by the love
I share with my beloved and my family! I would think it a child’s fairy tale, some impossible dream. And yet it is true.
Amanda had it for Pa. I never understood that till this moment. Or why Willis, he never married after twenty-nine years of
loving our dear Pauline! When a soul is cleave to yours and you may respond, then you begin to sense there is something beyond
what may only be seen or felt or touched. There are so many forces working against that, I’m glad that I’m
not GOD! I couldn’t bear to have my love turned aside while my children were taught they sprang from the loins of an
ape! That we are merely more cleaver animals than the animals around us, how sad! But as long as two hearts can merge into
a strength grater than either can find alone, the truth will be glimpsed. As long as the birth of Your holy Son is celebrated
in men’s heart, the truth will be glimpsed. And even then, in the midst of such profound spiritual darkness as Your
words warned is to descend on the sons of Man, the truth will be glimpsed.
This year we put tinsel on the tree. We baked bell-shaped sugar cookies and coated them with red and green sprinkles,
and even Harlan and George exchanged gifts at the party this morning. In this, Your love is glimpsed. James putting his one
good arm around Molly Bea and her feeling secure enough, even in a mother’s sorrow, to lay her cheek against his shirt,
I am overwhelmed that I have missed so many secrets of Your love what’s surrounded us even when we were too busy with
‘life’ to take notice of it. But it wasn’t until this moment, as the silence and distance sealed with the
new snowflakes that are cutting short our merry caravan that I realized the immensity of it all, the past, the present, the
future, this world, this universe and the millions of others now crowd in with the discovery that so many tiny flecks of light
amassed in the night sky are themselves immense galaxies all swirling in one tiny shirt pocket of Your being, dear Lord! No
wonder the Palmist gasped in discovery and questioned, ‘What is Man that Thou art mindful of him?’
Enough to come down and join us as a tiny baby to a teenaged virgin, willing to grow up as we do, losing your earthy
father at a young age, having to take care of a widowed mother and brothers and sisters who must have fought You as much as
Tom and I did in vying for our mother’s love, and now this. A graceful ending to a long day. A long life. With those
that I love gathered round me in careless disarray instead of mourning. I’ve been told the Chinese cry at a baby’s
birth, knowing what lies in store for them, and celebrate their departure, knowing what they leave behind….that’s
all right too. But it is the time in-between
that I marvel at as sleep overtakes in the arms of the one I love. If we can love like this, imagine how You do!
Happy Birthday Jesus!…and…Thank You! - Respectfully,
Maude Amy Webb of Slumberbrook Farm
. ◊ Last Letter
“ As for Me and My house… “
December 31st, 1946
TUESDAY
Dear Sir,
I’m so cold and I’m feeling so poorly, I suspect the next time we talk will be Face to face. Please help
me to be ready for the Judgment, the review of my life and the choices I made that now seem so far, far away, while we walk
hand in hand beside the crystalline waters flowing freely between the twelve trees of healing, each bearing fruit in their
season! Just like my life. There
is so much I have left undone, so much I have left unsaid! But my only real regret is that I leave behind my dear old man,
my sons, and my daughter to grieve me. I guess that’s about the best that can be said for anyone’s life. Please
hold me as I fall asleep into death to await that glorious morning to wake with all whom I have loved and been loved by in
return standing beside me. Eternal joy, eternal Life, without the sorrow or strife that’s marred this one, to be shared
endless at Your side, Lord Jesus for all the mornings to come in eternity’s passage toward the reward you have in mind
for us to share Until then, good night my king, my savior…my Friend!
Respectfully, Your loving daughter,
Maude Amy Webb formerly of Slumberbrook
Farm
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