Memorial Day Events

The following remembrances are from my Mother's side of the family:

Gertrude Alcott Poetry

Down on My Daddy’s Farm

There’s just a little spring of water
Down on my daddy’s farm;
There’s a breeze that waves the tall trees
Down behind the barn.
I love to see the moon-beams play,
O’er a land so fair;
Now it’s all because it’s daddy’s home,
And I’m wishing I were there.

Just to hear the whippoorwill when it’s getting late,
Just to stroll on down the hill, and
Swing on Daddy’s gate;
Just to hear my daddy’s voice,
Calling up the pigs,
And to hear the horses running-
Breaking sticks and twigs.

Now it’s all because it’s daddy’s home
It seems a Loveland fair, and
Mother and daddy are there alone,
And my thoughts still wander there.
From thought I have painted a picture,
Which stays in memory still.
And when all is quiet and peaceful,
I roam o’er daddy’s hills.

Gertrude Alcott

Homeland (near Mississippi River, Arkansas)

I see a couple sitting there, resting in the sun-
Looking over a life well used, for all the labor done.
A full measure had the two, during those fruitful hours; When farmland was hard designed, for springtime’s flooding showers.

Gardens carefully tended, so that food was on the board
For four fluttering flitting robins, who were such a hungry horde.
Who would feel compelled to spend a life, heavily engaged in toil-
In a thankless marshy country, with every plan destined to foil?

Unless Love was there beside them,
Maybe quietly from the one;
And boisterously from the other,
While the Living was being done.

It might have gone unnoticed, by the un-observing soul,
That their every root and substance was to make that farm their goal;
Yet with all the lasting bitterness- that goes in fighting fate-
They have reached a new serenity, through that same ol’ garden gate.

Where every single memory, gives life a steely ring;
And where every year the robins come back to see the spring.

Harold L. Overton

Mother’s Day (1968)

Her nimble hands ran carefully over her work,
As she hummed a long forgotten tune;
And her soft footstep polished the grooved floor-
As the crazy quilt took shape ‘neath her fingers.

How her hands did fly!

The small ones playing ‘round her feet
Gave her Life-
In that isolated homestead,
With her strange patterned quilt.

Occasionally, she glanced outward, toward the garden
Or listened for a certain sound-
To find if larger ones were returning.
There was dinner to prepare;
But there was yet time,
To add a few more blocks
To that crazy quilt,
Which would warm some future grandson.

How Time does fly!

I would like to see that garden once more,
And hear that soft footstep-
As nimble hands work lovingly on strange patterns,
Which go to distant places.

Harold L. Overton