Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Cold Moon<\/p>\n
Night again.\u00a0 Lying on my desk here are some items sent to me by my cousin Kristen.\u00a0 She’s a devoted genealogist and packrat.\u00a0 Right now she’s redistributing some of the things gathered from various sources over the years.<\/p>\n
This packet from her includes an obituary in a Shelby County newspaper for my mom:\u00a0 Mrs. Ellis, 46, Dies in Hospital.\u00a0 A small card with a stained glass window covered with white lilies has moms name inside, Gertrude\u00a0 E. (Trudy) Ellis.\u00a0 It also contains the name of Karl M. Kyle funeral home, which sat catty-cornered from our house on Canal Street.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This was all 46 years ago.\u00a0 That’s strange.\u00a0 46 years later these documents of a family disaster have come home.<\/p>\n
A small package of photographs show mom in uniform.\u00a0 She was, an enclosed brief news piece says, a private in the Women’s Army Corps.\u00a0 This notice said she had arrived at Allied Headquarters in Algiers after having been left behind with sprained ankle.\u00a0 She looks happy, formally dressed, but ready, eager.\u00a0 In another photograph she leans against an iron railing at St. Peter’s dome in the Vatican State.\u00a0 The year, the back of the photograph says, is 1944.\u00a0 In this one she stands behind a jeep, posed again in her uniform, now in North Africa.\u00a0 Still 1944.\u00a0 She sits at a table with sharp bands of light falling on a wide checked pattern on the table cloth.\u00a0 She’s half hidden behind a carafe while a friend seems to be speaking to her and smiling.\u00a0 In the last one she a friend, Paty, lean against a small iron fence.\u00a0 They both have on long pants that come up to their waist, blouses with two pockets in front.\u00a0 Here the writing indicates Paty and me, Rome, ’45.<\/p>\n
Shards of a life, pot shards with a piece of her life’s design.\u00a0 How to fit them into a whole?\u00a0 How to place them in the life of the woman I knew?\u00a0 I don’t know Paty.\u00a0 I’ve still not been to North Africa, nor Algiers.\u00a0 I have a hard time imagining my\u00a0 mom as a single woman in uniform traveling Italy, going to Capri, then onto Algiers.\u00a0 She spoke often of gay Capri.\u00a0 She loved the song Three Coins in the Fountain and recalled the Trevi fountain with fondness.<\/p>\n
She was my mother for only 17 of her 46 years.\u00a0 We talked about the war years, of course.\u00a0 Mom and dad met at the end of the war, both having served its entire duration or pretty close.\u00a0 Those were conversations all predicated on the assumption that there would be plenty of time to flesh them out, a life time.\u00a0 But the life, her life, was cut short.<\/p>\n
A photocopy from 1934 completes the material.\u00a0 This one talks about Benjamin Keaton, my first ancestor to live in the Morristown, Indiana area.\u00a0 It has several oddities.\u00a0 I’ll cite two here.<\/p>\n
It starts with these two paragraphs:<\/p>\n
Thomas and Rebecca Young Keaton, the grandparents of Aunt Zelda Haskett, were born in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Later, this note about Benjamin.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Imbolc\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Cold Moon Night again.\u00a0 Lying on my desk here are some items sent to me by my cousin Kristen.\u00a0 She’s a devoted genealogist and packrat.\u00a0 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 … Continue reading Memories<\/span>