2, Brandon, Wisconsin 53919
There is a possibility that I should wait a few days longer
before I start writing this column. Perhaps some one has found my
wild myrtle in their woods at one time or another and haven’t
had time to write to me about it. Already one letter has come from
a lady who helps ‘to get the Iron Men Album in the mail’
about my wild myrtle.
It is amazing how unexpected things come into our lives,
however. I have not given up on this at all. On a recent Monday
morning I looked out of my south window, and here were some strange
dark birds in the flowering crab tree. They were gorging themselves
on the little dried-up apples which were still clinging to the
tree.
‘What,’ I said to myself, ‘are those?’ Here was
this crest on the head which could only belong to the family of
waxwings, but this was no cedar waxwing, I decided. Our daughter
Mary was at home for semester break and she was as interested as
her mother. So here were two women who went walking most carefully
on a winter morning, creeping up to these unknown birds with the
stealth of an Indian on the path of a scalp he wanted.
It must have been a strange sight but this didn’t deter us
in the least. We were so afraid they would take to their wings as
we approached but we found them not the least bit wary. I wondered
if, perhaps, they were a bit groggy from the over-ripe apples for I
had read where robins occasionally get a bit intoxicated from
eating berries which have aged on the wood. They posed for us with
their crested heads cocked saucily to one side. We decided they
liked us.
Mary, becoming very brave and exceedingly friendly moved to a
spot directly underneath the tree. ‘Oh Mother,’ she said,
‘There is a light brown patch underneath their tails.’
‘Well, we have something to go on now,’ I remarked,
‘Now for the bird book.’
The bird book revealed that they were the Greater Waxwing and
that they have roving, erratic personalities. They travel in groups
and are often spotted in trees with left over apples. However, you
see them, and then you don’t, and I, for one, feel richly
blessed to ever have seen them at all.
It was on a Monday morning when the mail brought something even
more exciting than what we had just been watching.
In July of ’66 a letter came to our rural mailbox from
London, England. I was quite curious as to its contents. Hurriedly
I slit the envelope open with my husband’s letter opener and
the contents were soon in my hands. It was an invitation to enter
international competition in poetry. One was to write under a
pseudonym and put your real name in a sealed envelope. The poems
were to be a matching pair of poems on freedom and captivity. Could
I do something like this, I asked myself? Well I tried, and on the
same day the Greater Waxwings visited us I received a book award
from England. It is a book of poems by Taras Shevchenko and is
entitled SONG OUT OF DARKNESS. He was a Ukrainian poet who lived
between 1814 and 1861. He was a writer for freedom throughout the
years of oppression and his poems warm the heart.
Upon looking over the enclosed papers I learned that I had
received seventh place in ‘the matched pair’ class and had
come out twenty first in the final competition. I was overjoyed
that I had accomplished what I set out to do, write a pair of
matched poems. And the prize book is a positive jewel to add to my
library.
Sorrow came to us as a family in early January. One Sunday
morning I was called out of Sunday School to learn that my mother
had quietly passed away. So another chapter in life has ended, but
as I go over the diaries she kept faithfully for over forty years
what a wealth of memories flow back to bless me. She left us a
heritage of cultural interests, old fashioned honesty, ambition,
cleanliness of mind, and a hundred other things we can never quite
enumerate. How does one evaluate a good mother? I don’t think
it can be done, for their price is ‘above rubies.’
I shall not try to evaluate, only count my blessings, and by no
means is the end in sight. They continue to flow from day to day.
She was eighty nine years of age and had been unable to be on her
feet since last April. But she was so sweet and cheerful the last
half year, like a happy child, -so shall I remember her. And as the
book I am writing takes final shape I find her on page after page.
She was my ‘Mama Maaike’,-this was her Holland name, and I
cherish it in remembrance. She kept this same house I am now living
in for seventeen years, and the old one which it replaced for
seventeen previous to that. Now we have been here for thirty years.
The roots are deep, and pleasant, and fruitful.
