Here are some more of my mother’s letters that I finished transcribing today 060609.

These 1957 letters, written between my parents as my father was already in Alaska and mother and children waited in Los Angeles for Army orders (he worked for the Army Corp of Engineers as a civilian) that would allow us to join him there.  They present aspects of my mother’s thinking patterns PRIOR to homesteading.

These two 1960 letters were written after homesteading had begun, though we lived mostly in the Eagle River ‘log house’ while my mother carried on her nursery school.

The 1961 letters reflect the stress and turbulence of that troubled year, the year that a 5^th child was added to our family.  (Please also note the previous posting of mother’s 1961 diary.)

This is a single 1962 short note from the Mother’s Day card my mother sent her mother, written on the baby’s 1^st birthday..

These 1963 letters begin with our family living in the ‘log house’, moving the trailer down from the mountain to be painted, scrubbed and sold to pay for back rent, a move back to the homestead, ending with my mother driving down the Al-Can (Alaskan) Highway alone without my father in August.  Again, turbulent, chaotic, distressful times….

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Well, here’s the ‘special treat’ I discovered among the papers I am sorting my way through.  First I found one sheet of ‘random’ paper with the first half of this poem on it – transcribed it – and went on with the other letters.  Eventually I found a second piece of paper that had the end of this poem on it, and can now begin my grandmother’s pages.

Evidently this recipe for marital bliss either wasn’t or couldn’t be followed.  I find it interesting that the ‘shades of liberated women’ that both my maternal grandmother and great grandmother were, found itself into this poem regarding pay for one’s work at home for the family.  My mother’s parents divorced around 1930 (about unheard of at this time and created an embarrassing sense of shame within my mother) just after the stock market crash.  Grandfather Charles had been a successful stock broker who lost all in the fall of 1929.  After the divorce, my mother’s mother went to work and used her master’s degree in psychology, 1918, to support herself and her children.

My sister, Cindy 1953, will be sending me copies of my mother’s mother’s brief beginnings of her own autobiography that were recently discovered.  I look forward to also adding them to the grandparent pages that are dedicated to our understanding of how patterns transmit themselves through parenting practices down the generations..