Joy

(Note from April Joy to Michael)

To My Nephew and his Beautiful Daughters (my last surviving kin),

I'm too old to get maudlin now so I'm not about to start some dreary crap about my long life and how I've made the clubhouse turn & am racing to the finish line.  You'll have plenty of time to read my attempts at prose and poor tries at wordmanship.  As you'll soon see.  But more about that later.

There's a will somewhere.  That old hippie, Joel, has it.  Actually hippie isn't quite right for "hippie" was after his "time".  He was more a beatnik, if you know the term; a coffee house weirdo long before the first hippies found sex, drugs, and rock & roll.  By then he had already cleaned up, was in three piece suits and had somehow become a lawyer.  By the time hippie days came, it was too late for him, but not for me.  I fell into those times as naturally as can be, though I wasn't no spring chicken.  But I could damn sure hold my own with those little dopehead hippie girls.  Gawd damn.  Those were good days, but then, I've had plenty of those.

This isn't supposed to be a roll down memory lane.  I just wanted to tell you what I left you and why.  And maybe what to do with it.

Of course, I left you all my crap - all the usual worldly possessions stuff. But there's a couple of special things, too.  I just wanted to tell you about them.

In my old wardrobe there's a small walnut writing box.  Inside is a small brass key.  That key will open the old cedar trunk at the foot of my bed.

Inside are some treasures that no knows about.  Well, no one with any sense would call them treasures but me.  You'll understand.  They are treasures to me and I know at least one of them will be a treasure to you.  I'll let that one be a surprise.

You'll find a foot high stack of old notebooks that are the journal/diary that I began writing when I was 16 years old and in love with that no good bastard Harold Wade.  They go through WWII, the Fabulous 50s, my hippie days in the 60s, thru the boring 70s and worse 80s, and on to the turn of the century.  All glorious days I didn't expect.

I'll warn you now.  I told it like it was - sometimes in detail.  I flipped thru some of the pages a few years ago and read a little.  I read about Ralphie Torn and I sneaking into a Baptist church one night.  The blue ink was so old on those pages it had turned brown.  But the memory of Ralphie and me in the ice cold water of the baptismal is still in living color.  Whew! But I don't need to be thinking about that.  I started to tear those pages out and many others besides those, but then I said to hell with that.  I've shown my ass plenty of times and in plenty of ways.  No need to stop now.

So it's all in there for you.  In a way it's my legacy.  Oh, there's plenty of antiques and stuff with the old house to say nothing of all the things I collected thru the years.  But that is just stuff.  All those old book have my life in them.  And my memories.  They're family memories, too.  I want to leave them with you and I hope you can find a way to share them with your girls.  You may want to rewrite things here and there.  Maybe the real adventures ran a little raw in places.  Lord, Lord, did I have some times...  I want your girls to know me like I was when I was young and full of ginger - when I was the prettiest girl in town, not this old hag they see now when they come to visit.  I want them to know the glory and to know that once I was just like them - young and beautiful with all of life's adventures ahead of them.

Well, crap!  I guess I got maudlin after all.

Share my words and life with your girls.

Love,

April Joy

P.S. I almost forgot your real treasure.  In the trunk is a beautiful ebony box.  It is locked and I lost the damned key years ago.  Break it open.  The treasure is not the box.  It is what is inside.

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My memories before I was seven are all fuzzy and a bit out of sequence.  The earliest are at about age five.  I read somewhere that we don't have selective memories of childhood or they would all be happy.

We lived in southeast Texas in the country about a mile off the main road.  That meant walking two miles each day just to get the mail, and going into town, which was ten miles away, every Saturday for groceries.  I always got a special treat on Saturday, a box of Cracker Jacks, which cost four cents, and once in a great while we got to go to the movies.  They were always westerns with Hoot Gibson or Tom Mix, but that didn't matter. They were magic to a little girl before the days of television. We worked until noon on Saturday before we went into town, so Sunday was the best day of all.  That was the day we belonged to ourselves.

We all went into the fields to work.  I was too small to work, but I couldn't stay home alone, so Mother took a quilt for me to sit and play or sleep.  The work was hard and the days were long, even to a child who had nothing to do.

I was five when Mother and my two older sisters went into town one day and, in one of the dry good stores, we were watching a woman try on shoes. When Mother had what she wanted, they left the store without realizing that they only had two little girls, instead of three.

When I looked around and didn't see them, I just stood there for a few seconds, too scared to do anything. I started to cry, but not aloud, and I didn't say a word to anybody. I began to walk around frantically looking for my family and then started out the front door. One of the sales people stopped me and told me to wait there, that someone would be back for me. She didn't ask why I was crying. She just looked at my face and knew. I didn't believe her for a minute, but she held onto me so I couldn't leave and that scared me even more. I could just see them driving away leaving me all alone forever. It seemed like a long time before they came back. Mother laughed and said there wasn't any reason to cry. I should have known they would come back, but I didn't.
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Everything Changes

I am old.
I say the words
And know that they are true.
But I don’t remember them.
I feel the same as yesterday
And forty years ago.
Somehow I cling to youth
Without a conscious effort.
And, then I see my own reflection
In a stranger’s eyes.
I’m still a bit surprised
To find the marks of time
Upon my face.
And harder still to count the ghosts
Of family and friends now gone.

Everything changes.
The girls who envied me
The men who loved me
Are dead and gone.
I have outlived them all.
No one remembers now that once
I was the prettiest girl in town.
My beauty, too, is gone
And once it meant so much.

Everything changes.
And with each change we close a door
Knowing we can never again
Cross its threshold.
But for every door that closes
Somewhere ahead another opens.
And life goes on.
After snows have melted
From barren trees and dead brown lawns
The gay, young daffodil
Will raise its head
And little sprigs of green
Show us that there will always be
A new beginning.

And so I face tomorrow
Unafraid.
I fill my time
With memories, bright and clear
Colored by the warmth of love.
Without impatience, I await
The bright new dawn,
For it may bring to me
My new beginning
For everything changes

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