Thanksgiving Greetings!

 

Thankful for My Hometown of Blanford, Indiana:

 

A Month–Not Just a Day–of Thanks, Week 4

 

by Alice Jane-Marie Massa

 

 

For a short while after my dad served for four and a half years in the Army during World War II, my parents lived in Indianapolis.  Although my dad had lived and worked in the capital of Indiana prior to his enlistment in the Army, he, in late 1945,  no longer cared to reside in a large city; he and my mother decided to return to Vermillion County where they had “grown up”–Dad, in Klondyke, and Mother, in nearby Blanford.  Fortunately, they chose to make their home (of eventually almost fifty-five years) in the small, rural town of Blanford.  This Blanford house, where we had celebrated so many holidays and happy times, seems now to me like the granting of a wish after I had been pulling on the right side of the turkey’s wishbone.  Even though I now prefer living in a city with sidewalks, I am ever so grateful that my parents chose to raise their two daughters in a small, rural Hoosier town.

 

Since my dad had a cerebral hemorrhage on the Sunday morning of November 16, 1997, and did not pass until two weeks later on December 1, my mother, my sister, my cousin Carole, my first Leader Dog Keller, and I spent Thanksgiving of 1997 at Union Hospital (Terre Haute, Indiana) to be near my beloved father.  That saddest Thanksgiving of all for us only makes all of the other Thanksgivings of a lifetime shine brighter and happier with a cornucopia stuffed with gratitude.

 

So much of my perspective on writing and much of my style of writing comes from my hometown of Blanford and its Jacksonville Grade School.  On April 9, 2012 (coincidentally seventy-one years to the day that my dad entered into his Army service), I wrote the following twenty-seven-line poem for the Hadley School for the Blind (now Hadley Institute for the Blind, Winnetka, Illinois) course “Elements of Poetry.”  The challenge of Exercise 13 of the sixth lesson of this course was to write a one-sentence poem with enjambment, and my one-stanza poem of only one sentence and with enjambment is:

 

 

Biography of a House in the Heartland

 

by Alice Jane-Marie Massa

 

 

In a locket

 

in my heart,

 

I keep and remember this

 

precious place

 

with clumps of lilies-of-the-valley clinging

 

to her east side like pretty paint on toenails while

 

the perennial porch swing, successful hummingbird feeder, and wrought iron

 

bedeck the large front porch from where

 

three points of the compass can offer a view of

 

the lawn, west of the white-rocked driveway, sinking

 

(due to the abandoned underground coal shaft filling with water), along with

 

the field of Christmas trees, the wheat fields and corn fields and some cattle

 

to the north until the east span is revealed

 

between the blue spruce and the gob pile of shale

 

atop which is unveiled the southern vista of

 

the field that rolls back to the small woods from where

 

one can easily walk to the back door of the house

 

built by my grandfather in 1914

 

(the year his youngest, my mother, was born)

 

and lived in by my parents from after

 

my dad’s four and a half years in World War II until his death at age 84 when

 

my mother walked circles in the snow until a neighbor came to help at this house

 

where a cerebral hemorrhage took away all

 

but the memories

 

and the heart

 

of a house

 

in the Hoosier heartland.

 

 

May your house be filled with gratitude, grace, and happiness this Thanksgiving Day,

Alice and Leader Dog Willow

 

November 23, 2016, Wednesday

 

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