One Daughter's Journey
My father, Keith, fought in World War II. The inscription on the
photo above reads, "To the little girl who is so much more than a wife
to me." My father was a generous, sensitive, quiet man, proud of his
Celtic heritage. He helped restore the Welsh Pioneer Church founded
in the 1800s on land donated by his emigrant grandparents.
My dad has been gone so long, I sometimes have to find something that belonged to him to evoke the memory of his voice, his dry sense of humor, or his smile. Sometimes it's the smell of pipe tobacco, or my walking in a farm field that brings him back to me. He was raised on a farm during the Depression, and worked hard all his life so his family would never know the kind of struggle he knew growing up. That Century farm is gone, the home replaced by a building that housed a chain supermarket for many years. He used to tell people he was born in the frozen food aisle. His legacy of laughter lives on. He used to say, "You ought to apply to the Writer's Workshop in Iowa City. You know Tennessee Williams once walked the halls of the University of Iowa." And I'd wonder why he'd be so insistent . . . when I was studying so hard to be a dancer.
He always encouraged my mother to remarry should anything ever happened to him as if he knew somehow that he was living on borrowed time. He died while on his first European vacation at age 56. It wasn't until decades later that I learned he'd had rheumatic heart fever as a child.
To learn about WWII see the Historical Text Archive.
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Copyright (c) by Catherine Tudor, 2006. Catherine Tudor founded One Woman's Writing Retreat in 1996 in order to create a network for writers at all stages in their careers. She is the managing editor and webmaster of One Woman's Writing Retreat. Read more about her here. |
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