The Romancing of Evangeline Ipswich (20 page)

I was never required to help outside except for getting in the kindling, coal, and water. My dad was a staunch believer that women’s work was in the house and maybe in the garden but not out in the cold tending livestock except in an emergency, and not working away from home. He seemed to have a feeling that his mother literally had been worked to death after they moved from Kansas to Colorado. She died at age 62 of a stroke.

Christmases were great fun at our house. Santa Claus bought us each a nice gift and filled our stockings with oranges, candy, and nuts. Mom and Dad always gave us each a couple of small gifts, usually clothes and some little trinket.

The Christmas of 1954, my senior year, I got a Lane cedar chest, which I still have. Sharon got a piano, which she still has, Wayne got a .22 rifle, and Russell got a pair of boots, a black cowboy outfit, and a toy gun belt with two holsters and toy guns. After Dad started managing the Lemon’s Feed Store, he got a bonus twice a year one of which was around Christmas. This year I’m sure most if not all of his bonus went for Christmas. I don’t know how much they paid for my cedar chest, but I do know Sharon’s piano was $90.

Other gifts I remember receiving from my parents are two
Shirley Temple
books and
Patty O’Neal on the Airways
, which I still have. Another book they gave me at some time was
The Swiss Family Robinson
. These may have been birthday gifts. These are the only books I ever remember owning until recent years except for my scriptures and some church books and
The Little Red Hen
, which Aunt Opal gave me while we were still at Westcliffe.

Other Christmas gifts I remember receiving are a Bible, which I requested, a jewelry box, a string of “pearls,” and a pink sweater set. The last three were all received at one Christmas I think in 1953. Normally, we never received a lot of gifts like so many do today, but it was a lot to us. I also have the remains of a big baby doll that still cries but whose two front teeth have fallen inside. She also has a broken leg. My sister stepped on it. Guess I should have kept her off the attic floor
.


As another rambling, pointless sidenote—the baby doll my mom mentions is in my possession now. Some twenty-five years ago, I couldn’t stand the thought of the poor baby doll being buried in a trunk out in the garage! I mean, how on earth was she able to breathe in there? Nightmare, right? Knowing that her smothering baby doll in the trunk horrified me so, Mom dug the precious doll out of the trunk so she could breathe more easily and gave her to me. That old, banged-up composite doll with the shattered and then glued-back-together leg had now been a part of my own family for over twenty-five years. Today she sits in our front room, in an old wicker dolly sled, wearing a pretty Christmas plaid dress, a white baby bonnet, and a white faux fur cape, with her small, well-loved hands tucked into a white faux fur muff. Although the poor little thing kind of always creeps out little kids (even my own kids when they were really little), my little eighteen-month-old grandson seems to love the baby doll and probably thinks she’s real—because for about six months now, whenever he’s over, he always talks to her, rocks her little sleigh, and gives her a kiss on the mouth! Is that adorable or what? When my mom was still able to remember that I had the doll, she always told me that she was so glad her baby doll was out where she could breathe well and be loved. I love my mom so much!

Snippet #8
—And now for my final snippet, which is me endeavoring to leave you with some added loveliness! Finishing
The Romancing of Evangeline Ipswich
found me feeling liberated of sorts. I’d spent almost two years in that same venue of writing (western, same basic characters being the Ipswich family), and I was more than ready to move on to a new project. And so, I leave you with the poem that I included an excerpt from in the beginning of this author’s note—because it uplifts me and is such a beautiful piece of beauty and respite to me, and it helped me in finding my enjoyment in writing Evangeline’s story. That’s how thoroughly I love the words James Whitcomb Riley put together so eloquently in that poem. Thus, being that the poem is public domain, and therefore I’m able to print it here for you, I have! I hope you’ll take the time to savor it—and not just once but anytime you feel your mind, heart, and soul need a lift.

*I’ve listed a few words, and their definitions, that may be unfamiliar to you because they aren’t commonly used anymore to allow you to read the poem more smoothly.

Kine—“Cows collectively.”

Bobolink and Killdee are both birds.

Freak—in this instance means “to fleck or streak randomly.”

Mascadine—“wine grapes.”

Shallop—“a sailboat.”

The South Wind and the Sun!

O The South Wind and the Sun!

How each loved the other one

Full of fancy—full folly—

Full of jollity and fun!

How they romped and ran about,

Like two boys when school is out,

With glowing face, and lisping lip,

Low laugh, and lifted shout!

And the South Wind—he was dressed

With a ribbon round his breast

That floated, flapped and fluttered

In a riotous unrest,

And a drapery of mist

From the shoulder and the wrist

Flowing backward with the motion

Of the waving hand he kissed.

And the Sun had on a crown

Wrought of gilded thistle-down,

And a scarf of velvet vapor,

And a raveled-rainbow gown;

And his tinsel-tangled hair,

Tossed and lost upon the air,

Was glossier and flossier

Than any anywhere.

And the South Wind’s eyes were two

Little dancing drops of dew,

As he puffed his cheeks, and pursed his lips,

And blew and blew and blew!

And the Sun’s—like diamond-stone,

Brighter yet than ever known,

As he knit his brows and held his breath,

And shone and shone and shone!

And this pair of merry fays

Wandered through the summer days;

Arm-in-arm they went together

Over heights of morning haze—

Over slanting slopes of lawn

They went on and on and on,

Where the daisies looked like star-tracks

Trailing up and down the dawn.

And where’er they found the top

Of a wheat-stalk droop and lop

They chucked it underneath the chin

And praised the lavish crop,

Till it lifted with the pride

Of the heads it grew beside,

And then the South Wind and the Sun

Went onward satisfied.

Over meadow-lands they tripped,

Where the dandelions dipped

In crimson foam of clover-bloom,

And dripped and dripped and dripped;

And they clinched the bumble-stings,

Gauming honey on their wings,

And bundling them in lily-bells,

With maudlin murmurings.

And the humming-bird that hung

Like a jewel up among

The tilted honeysuckle-horns,

They mesmerized, and swung

In the palpitating air,

Drowsed with odors strange and rare,

And with whispered laughter, slipped away,

And left him hanging there.

And they braided blades of grass

Where the truant had to pass;

And they wriggled through the rushes

And the reeds of the morass,

Where they danced, in rapture sweet,

O’er the leaves that laid a street

Of undulant mosaic for

The touches of their feet.

By the brook with mossy brink

Where the cattle came to drink.

They trilled and piped and whistled

With the thrush and bobolink,

Till the kine in listless pause,

Switched their tails in mute applause,

With lifted heads and dreamy eyes,

And bubble-dripping jaws.

And where the melons grew,

Streaked with yellow, green and blue

These jolly sprites went wandering

Through spangled paths of dew;

And the melons, here and there,

They made love to, everywhere

Turning their pink souls to crimson

With caresses fond and fair.

Over orchard walls they went,

Where the fruited boughs were bent

Till they brushed the sward beneath them

Where the shine and shadow blent;

And the great green pear they shook

Till the sallow hue forsook

Its features, and the gleam of gold

Laughed out in every look.

And they stroked the downy cheek

Of the peach, and smoothed it sleek,

And flushed it into splendor;

And with many an elfish freak,

Gave the russet’s rust a wipe—

Prankt the rambo with a stripe,

And the wine-sap blushed its reddest

As they spanked the pippins ripe.

Through the woven ambuscade

That the twining vines had made,

They found the grapes, in clusters,

Drinking up the shine and shade—

Plumpt like tiny skins of wine,

With a vintage so divine

That the tongue of fancy tingled

With the tang of muscadine.

And the golden-banded bees,

Droning o’er the flowery leas,

They bridled, reigned, and rode away

Across the fragrant breeze,

Till in hollow oak and elm

They had groomed and stabled them

In waxen stalls oozed with dews

Of rose and lily-stem.

Where the dusty highway leads,

High above the wayside weeds

They sowed the air with butterflies

Like blooming flower-seeds,

Till the dull grasshopper sprung

Half a man’s height up, and hung

Tranced in the heat, with whirring wings,

And sung and sung and sung!

And they loitered, hand in hand,

Where the snipe along the sand

Of the river ran to meet them

As the ripple meets the land,

Till the dragon-fly, in light

Gauzy armor, burnished bright,

Came tilting down the waters

In a wild, bewildered flight.

And they heard the killdee’s call,

And afar, the waterfall,

But the rustle of a falling leaf

They heard above it all;

And the trailing willow crept

Deeper in the tide that swept

The leafy shallop to the shore,

And wept and wept and wept!

And the fairy vessel veered

From its moorings—tacked and steered

For the centre of the current

Sailed away and disappeared:

And the burthen that it bore

From the long-enchanted shore—

“Alas! The South Wind and the Sun!”

I murmur evermore.

For the South Wind and the Sun,

Each so loves the other one,

For all his jolly folly

And frivolity and fun,

That our love for them they weigh

As their fickle fancies may,

And when at last we love them most,

They laugh and sail away.

~James Whitcomb Riley

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