Imbolc Waning Cold Moon
Night again. Lying on my desk here are some items sent to me by my cousin Kristen. She’s a devoted genealogist and packrat. Right now she’s redistributing some of the things gathered from various sources over the years.
This packet from her includes an obituary in a Shelby County newspaper for my mom: Mrs. Ellis, 46, Dies in Hospital. A small card with a stained glass window covered with white lilies has moms name inside, Gertrude E. (Trudy) Ellis. It also contains the name of Karl M. Kyle funeral home, which sat catty-cornered from our house on Canal Street. Ed Grant did the service, the same Ed Grant who had the early morning study sessions on the Screwtape letters that seemed so adult and intellectual to me. This was all 46 years ago. That’s strange. 46 years later these documents of a family disaster have come home.
A small package of photographs show mom in uniform. She was, an enclosed brief news piece says, a private in the Women’s Army Corps. This notice said she had arrived at Allied Headquarters in Algiers after having been left behind with sprained ankle. She looks happy, formally dressed, but ready, eager. In another photograph she leans against an iron railing at St. Peter’s dome in the Vatican State. The year, the back of the photograph says, is 1944. In this one she stands behind a jeep, posed again in her uniform, now in North Africa. Still 1944. She sits at a table with sharp bands of light falling on a wide checked pattern on the table cloth. She’s half hidden behind a carafe while a friend seems to be speaking to her and smiling. In the last one she a friend, Paty, lean against a small iron fence. They both have on long pants that come up to their waist, blouses with two pockets in front. Here the writing indicates Paty and me, Rome, ’45.
Shards of a life, pot shards with a piece of her life’s design. How to fit them into a whole? How to place them in the life of the woman I knew? I don’t know Paty. I’ve still not been to North Africa, nor Algiers. I have a hard time imagining my mom as a single woman in uniform traveling Italy, going to Capri, then onto Algiers. She spoke often of gay Capri. She loved the song Three Coins in the Fountain and recalled the Trevi fountain with fondness.
She was my mother for only 17 of her 46 years. We talked about the war years, of course. Mom and dad met at the end of the war, both having served its entire duration or pretty close. Those were conversations all predicated on the assumption that there would be plenty of time to flesh them out, a life time. But the life, her life, was cut short.
A photocopy from 1934 completes the material. This one talks about Benjamin Keaton, my first ancestor to live in the Morristown, Indiana area. It has several oddities. I’ll cite two here.
It starts with these two paragraphs:
Thomas and Rebecca Young Keaton, the grandparents of Aunt Zelda Haskett, were born in Philadelphia.
The United States capital at that time was in Philadelphia, and Rebecca, then a small child has often related to her children how her mother carried her to the window to watch the presidential parade go past at the time George Washington was inaugurated president.
Later, this note about Benjamin.
On the 14th day of December, 1837, Benjamin Keaton and Mary Spurrier were joined together in the holy bonds of wedlock by a minister who was a stranger and soon after took his departure.