Paying My Respects To Joyce
Summer is almost over. Fall is approaching. I'm feeling the urge to take a day trip to Cumberland. Cumberland is the small,very small town where my mother was raised and where I spent some time when I lived with my grandparents. It's home for me, more so than the place where I was actually raised and went to school.
Most of the people I know in Cumberland are gone. They have either moved to a larger city or are buried in the church graveyard. The house I lived in with my grandparents has collapsed as have all the other farm buildings. Trees have been planted over the fields where the crops used to grow. It doesn't look the same.
Still ,I want to go back there. I need to pay my respects to my cousin, Joyce. Joyce died about three years ago from an aggressive and painful form of cancer. My mother and Joyce's brother helped to care for her in her last days as her husband was dead and her sons could not be bothered.
I'm estranged from my mother and most of her family. Had that not been the case I, too would have cared for Joyce. She was special to me.
Joyce was sort of a misfit in her time. She didn't care about clothes or hair or farming or any of the other "proper" things a girl should care about. She and my mother were cousins and the same age. They went to school together. I remember seeing Joyce's picture in mother's high school yearbook. Joyce always looked like an unmade bed. It wasn't that she was slovenly, she simply didn't care about such things.
Joyce was a gifted writer. She went to college, a very strange thing for a woman to do at that time. She studied history. She wanted to be a writer her whole life. Instead she married Asher, who was the worst pharmacist I've ever worked with. (I only worked with him once and refused to allow him to work with me again.) They had two sons. She wrote poetry and short stories and children's books. As far as I know nothing was ever published.
She's special to me because I was like her as a teen. I was an outsider and not interested in things that other girls were interested in. I wrote too. I wrote poems and some really horrible short stories. My mother sent Joyce some of the things that I wrote. Joyce wrote back to me and paid me the best compliment I have ever been paid as a writer. She said, "You paint pictures with words." I never forgot that. 30 plus years later, I still remember. We wrote to each other for awhile but then both of us got busy and we didn't stay in contact.
I went on to college and pharmacy school and she started working. She had an interesting job. She would go to school and daycares dressed as various fictional and historical characters and tell stories in the character. I don't know how she got that job or even how good she was at it.
When she died my Dad and I went to Cumberland to find her grave. It was winter and the graveyard was covered in snow. My Dad went back for another reason and did find it. He told me where it was.
I'm finding it a little odd that I would want to drive nearly 100 miles to see a patch of grass and a stone. My religious faith tells me that she's not there. Only the mortal remains are there. Her spirit, what made Joyce who she was, has gone to whatever rest Heavenly Father has for her. Maybe it's the Italian heritage that makes me want to visit graves of those I knew.
All I know is that I have to make a road trip sometime before the snow falls. I want to drive to that graveyard, find Joyce's grave and tell her thank you and that I'm sorry that I didn't stay in touch. I want to tell her that I write this internet column. I want to tell her that she meant something to me. She was an influence. It is ok to be a misfit. It's all right to be different. I want to tell her that I'll paint pictures with words for as long as I can. I want to tell her that we'll meet again.......
Nice post KC; I too feel nostalgia for the place I grew up in Long lake MN. They say you can take the boy from the farm, but not the farm from the boy. How true that is in my case. The old farm is now part of the Hennepin county park reserve with paved trails running through several parts of it. I walked some of the trails several years ago and was surprised at how much of it has either overgrown or disappeared. I also write short romantic stories for women who have been abused by divorce, beaters, cheaters, drunks etc mostly in foreign countries. I am surprised at how many women are abused by men in Eastern European and Asian countries. I have introduced the Church to some of them and some have joined. As I get older I think of old friends and relatives who have past on and wonder what they think of us and the things we are going through. I think of the tough life they had when farming was mostly by hand with not as much machinery help as we have now. I think of the corn stalks that were piled like little tents where we played inside like little forts and the pumpkins that farmers used to plant along with the corn and harvest in Octob er along with the corn. Funny thing about writing, It's almost a compulsion when you get excited about an idea for a story and you feel you must write it down. My stories are more like the writer Charles Bukowski, if you remember the series of books he wrote about ordinary life. He has a cult following now since he passed on several years ago. It's strange the way we get inspired sometimes to write a fictional story. I happened to write to a woman in Greece who in the past was a 'Miss Greece contestant' and won. I was impressed to dream up a story called "Princess and the magic donuts' She was so touched that anyone would write a story with her in it that she got teary eyed about it. Best compliment anyone has ever given me.
ReplyDeleteSaturday is the Harvest Moon. Perhaps I'll write a story about it....Jer