Family Matters

My last post of 2014 is a couple of days late. That’s what a long holiday, too much TV football, and grown children returning to the hive will do for you. The computer keyboard gets shoved aside for a game of some sort, the kitchen countertops stay covered with artery-clogging snacks, and chaos reigns for days on end. Or so it seems.

But we love it all, and view these few wacky days as another example that sometimes, maybe all the time - family matters. Read those two words as an adjective-noun, or as a noun-verb, either way, family matters seem to dominate the end of the year around our house.

In the real world of right now, our older son’s beautiful young wife is expecting the birth of their first child in five weeks or so. The little guy will be our first grandchild, so we’re really happy. Meanwhile, two days ago, our younger son proposed marriage to a beautiful young lady with whom he has been smitten.

The big question came just after they climbed the narrow iron spiral staircase to the balcony in the historic 115 year old Lockhart Public Library Building. The clever lad carved a hole in the pages of a hardback copy of Wuthering Heights and hid the ring inside. Then he recruited an accomplice to stash the book on a shelf full of dusty old leather-bound novels. Happily, the sparkly ring survived an unguarded hour or two hidden in the pages of the gloomy Victorian epic of romance and revenge. The beautiful young lady said “Yes,” so there’s an April wedding ahead in 2015, paving the way for more grandkids.

By the way, “Wuthering Heights” is more than the name of Emily Bronte’s lengthy novel. It is also the name of the English country home in which much of the action in that novel takes place. Wuthering means blowing strongly, so here in Texas we’d call a wuthering height a real windy hill. A house up there in the 1860’s would probably look like the spooky house in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho movie, only dustier. And maybe without an old dead lady in a rocking chair.

In my American Victorian era Civil War tale, Tangled Honor, a good bit of the action occurs in the McBee family home in Lexington, Virginia, which can’t help but bring family matters into the story. The McBee house in my book doesn’t have a name since it’s in town, and is a widow’s home. I could have called it Widow’s Heights, I suppose, but I didn’t put it on a hill. There is an old lady in the McBee house, the Widow McBee, of course. And she has a rocking chair, but her heart was still beating last time I checked in on her.

Anyway, the Captain McBee Civil War novels have become as much a family story as a war story, which might be off-putting to some readers who enjoyed the purely military plot of my first book, Whittled Away.  Granted that family stories can get convoluted really fast, and those story threads in a novel can grow and take over more of the plot than the writer, at least this writer, first intended. On the other hand, family relationships have a way of blowing up or changing rather quickly and unexpectedly, and that’s not so very different from war.

Since we are at the end of 2014, I’m remembering that this past year has been the 150^th anniversary of the last full year of the Civil War. The year 1864 was an ugly year for America, a really ugly year for the South. The military campaigns of 1864 were exceptionally brutal as Grant and Sherman relentlessly attacked, and the Confederacy reached the point of desperation, yet dug their heels in, refusing to yield.

The states of Virginia, Georgia, and Tennessee in particular endured terrible months of the war impacting the civilian populations as large armies foraged for food, stealing whatever they could find to feed the soldiers, then destroying the farms. Small towns and large cities were targeted by artillery. I bet almost all of us remember the stunning panoramic film shots of Atlanta burning created for the film Gone With the Wind.

I’ve not written about 1864 in the McBee saga yet, but in June of ‘64 the little town of Lexington, Virginia was shelled and many of the buildings were burned down by Union soldiers with orders to destroy the Shenandoah Valley, the breadbasket of the Confederacy.  Any lingering attitude of chivalry, of keeping the war between soldiers-only, was long gone.

So, as my closing wish for the year, I’m promoting “Remember and Learn.” Remember because the 600,000 military deaths and untold thousands of American civilian deaths were important. They were too important to let drift away, forgotten in the fog of passing decades. Shame on us if we let the significance of those deaths leave our national memory.

 Learn because we certainly don’t want to again go down the nightmare road of internal war again. Us waging war against us, never again.  You bet we have huge issues dividing our country today, some of the issues not so different from the divisive issues of 150 years ago.

But now we know what happened right here in our heartland when politicians let stubbornness overcome compromise and reasonable debate. Now we know that even endless, repetitive, seemingly futile debate is infinitely preferable to picking sides and shooting at each other. Let’s don’t ever go there again.

Family matters. Noun-verb. Family matters, and we are a national family. (Pretty corny, I know. But I believe it.)

We need for 2015 to be a long happy year, not just a happy new year.