War

Results of War, the threat of War and actual War has lurked in my life for all of my 84 years. From the time I was curious enough to ask ‘what and why’, I’ve heard of War. As a very young child, when I saw men with missing arms or walking with crutches because a leg was missing, I was told they had been in the war. On more than one occasion I saw men without legs sitting on boards similar to the skate boards of today. Being only a few inches above the sidewalk, the men propelled themselves along by pushing with their arms. I never saw them talking to people I knew; they were strangers passing thru town and I never knew from where they came or where they were going.

I have a vivid memory of an ex soldier creating mud sculptures on the river bank under a small bridge. After neighbor children excitedly told of a man making mud figures down by the river, my sister Adeline and I raced to join the crowd watching as the artist created mud soldiers in uniform with guns. The audience whispered appreciative comments about the details of the sculpture as they circled around to get a better view or drop money in a hat. No one asked the man’s name or where he was from. He was another ex- soldier passing thru town.

Adeline and I often visited our Girl Scout leader’s house and saw the photograph of her father in his Army uniform. In the large black and white photo, he stood straight and tall with his gun by his side. The man in the photo was quite different from the man we knew who wore overalls and went to work every day. We were always curious and asked what it had been like when he was in the war. Dad had been too young to fight in the war, but he and his brother showed their patriotism by getting American flag tattoos on their arms. They did so without permission but Grandma and Grandpa A had to accept the ‘fait accompli’.

I was in the third grade when I started reading the newspaper and browsing the photos. A great deal of the news was over my head but I skimmed headlines and read captions under photos. When the war photos of Japan and China began to appear in the paper I studied the pictures with curiosity. When Mom asked me to gather all the old newspapers and bundle them, I took time to sort thru the pages and look at war pictures. I remember asking Mom if she thought we would ever have a war in our own country.

In the lower grades at school we learned about the Civil War. Because Mom came from the North and Dad’s family were Southerners, the drama of freeing the slaves took a prominent place in our imaginations. Our childish perception of the War Between the States came from Abraham Lincoln’s Proclamation Emancipation along with stories of the Underground Railroad and songs like My Darling Nellie Grey.

Comprehension of the Civil War became more profound as we got older. Our family history is deeply rooted in that struggle since we had members fighting on both sides of the conflict. One year, during Dad’s three week vacation, Grandma and Grandpa A. and uncle ‘Bus’ from Middlesboro, Kentucky, took us to see the old family plantation in Virginia. I was 15 years old and in high school at the time. I joined the adults in meandering the grounds and woods while the younger kids headed for a wide creek at the bottom of a small hill. The slave cemetery, enclosed with a wooden railing, was small, only 4 or 5 graves, but it made a big impression on me. Grandma’s father, Caleb, had been born on the place. He had been taken prisoner as a confederate soldier and sent up the Ohio River to a military camp. He later escaped and hid in a cave for three days before getting to safety.

I was still in high school during Italy’s war with Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War. Volumes have been written about the devouring of Europe by Germany, the attack on Pearl Harbor and the years of WWII. The horrors of war were finally behind us but peace agreements were no sooner signed, than we went to war with Korea, then Vietnam. The first Iraq war was a prelude to the Iraq war we are now embroiled in. The Muslim attack on the World Trade Center in New York was the beginning of our War with Afghanistan which continues as we fight the Iraqis. I would not be at all surprised if there weren’t plans afoot for a war with Iran and another with North Korea. After all these wars, is it any wonder that I have become anti-war?!!

Weather

The weather has always been a topic of conversation; probably because it affects us generally as well as personally. It’s always with us, there’s no getting away from it. You can’t change it. It just IS. Weather comes in cycles and I think about it the same way. It certainly has my attention when warning reports of severe climate changes are due, but I barely acknowledge it when days of pleasant weather continue repeating.

I do take notice of particularly fine days when the air is soft and breezes balmy. I enjoy brisk, cold but sunny days that seduce one into long walks. Fog can be spell binding and mysterious while fresh fallen snow is often a delight.

Floods, cyclones, hurricanes, sand storms, drought and ice storms are the dreaded weather patterns of destruction. I’ve never been in a flood, but I remember how concerned my parents were in 1936 when the Ohio flooded Louisville, Kentucky where Dad’s parents and other family members lived. From Iowa where we lived, we listened intently during each radio broadcast describing the situation. Fortunately, none of the family suffered direct flooding. Later when we visited Grandma and Grandpa A., aunts, uncles and cousins in Louisville, Uncle Alvin showed us water marks on buildings in the flooded area indicating how high the water reached.

Back about the time I was in the 3rd or 4th grade, I woke one morning to find Mom and Dad along with several neighbors looking at Mom’s new ringer washing machine lying on the grass in the back yard. It had been on the back porch, but during the night, a cyclone blew thru the area. The wind took off the porch roof and one of the side walls and pushed the washing machine almost into the neighbor’s yard. Cyclone became a new word in my vocabulary.

I once experienced a sand storm when my daughter and I were driving toward a border crossing on our way to Mexico. The pinging sound of sand against the metal and windshield of the Corvair van I was driving grew louder as the sand got thicker. I had heard stories uncle Chester told of sand pitting the windshield and taking paint off his vehicle, and I worried that it would happen to the van if we continued driving. I looked for a safe place to park the van so the windshield could be pointed in the opposite direction of the blowing sand, but there weren’t any places to pull off the highway. Obscured vision required driving slowly, but eventually we passed thru the sand storm with little damage to either paint or glass.

The drought during the depression certainly helped to give my early years a universality of understanding the human condition. Day after day the sun shone with never a rain cloud in sight. The radio news of weather was anxiously awaited by farmers and town people alike. Newspaper accounts and photos of withering corn and wheat fields, of dirt clouds blotting out the sun and farmers pulling up stakes and leaving behind what they couldn’t strap to their model T fords as they headed west to better climes, are childhood memories still vivid in my mind.

Ice storms are exquisitely beautiful. The brilliance of sun reflecting off ice crystals is so sharp it’s brittle. Where fog obscures and hides, ice coats and delineates shape and size. When the weight of ice on tree branches make them break, the cracking sound is like a gun shot, quick and piercing. The freeze often causes undo hardship when there are broken water pipes, downed electrical and phone wires and icy highways. A few years ago I lived thru an ice storm in Texas that caused an eight day electrical outage. I don’t know which is worse, an outage of long duration or broken water pipes and being last on a plumber’s ‘fix it’ list.

I have saved old letters from family members who lived on farms in the Midwest and in the south. Along with their state of health, they always mentioned weather, the state of the crops and the wish that good harvest weather would hold. Aunt Lily, who lived in Nebraska, also described her kitchen garden and told how many jars of fruit and veggies she was canning.

Because the family is so far flung, I have devised a way of using daily weather temps to let me know how those near and dear to me start their day. On my computer home page I have a long list of the following cities with daily a.m. temps: Houston, TX; Hollister, CA; Baton Rouge, LA; Groesbeck, TX; Santa Clara, CA; Oskaloosa, IA; Canton, GA; Yuma, AR; Paulden, AR; Mt. View, CA; Long Beach, CA; Buena Park, CA; Norwood, MO; Lancaster, CA; Loma Linda, CA