Waiting

By Kaye Kimbro Rosenthal

In her compelling memoir, Kaye Kimbro Rosenthal pulls back the curtain on her life in order to allow future generations to glimpse an unforgettable time through her eyes. Richly illustrated with photographs and evocative of the period in history, Rosenthal shares the story of her sometimes turbulent, often joyful journey through life and the subsequent lessons she learned.

A passionate artist and photographer, Rosenthal infuses her memoir with sincerity, wit, and an honest writing style that encourages others to look at their own lives with a new perspective. She begins by detailing her childhood in rural Kentucky, where she played by day in back of the horse barn and at night read by the light of an oil lamp. Time moved slowly for Rosenthal as she grew up, but it was not long before she entered adulthood without abandon, eventually relocating to Washington, DC, where she soon learned that love has a will of its own.

Waiting chronicles the poignant journey of a wife and mother as she navigates through life and ultimately learns how to love unconditionally, forgive, and heal from even the deepest and most painful wounds.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462012947

Kaye Kimbro Rosenthal

KAYE KIMBRO ROSENTHAL grew up outside Bowling Green, Kentucky. Her photographs have appeared in newspapers and magazines and are on permanent display in many collections both in Chicago and along the West Coast. Kaye and her husband live in Northern California, where they enjoy spending time with their children and grandchildren.

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Copyright © 2011 by Kaye Kimbro Rosenthal.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Cover photograph by Kaye K. Rosenthal

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-2243-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1298-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-1294-7 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 11/22/2011

Contents

DEDICATION

Acknowledgments

Author’s Preface

DEDICATION

To the best of sons,

my eldest, Gary, for whom I spent a large part of my life waiting

and his four brothers,

Robert, Richard, Steven, and Jim.

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt of gratitude to my editor, Paul McComas, for his editorial criticism. He guided and advised me from initial conception to final punctuation. His patience and brilliant perceptions were invaluable.

I am also deeply indebted to my many friends who read the manuscript and offered suggestions and encouragement.

I am most grateful for the support and encouragement given to me

by my husband, Herb; my sons and daughters (their wives);

and my many grandchildren.

Author’s Preface

Memoirs inform us about who we are. The most powerful moments in this journey were when I suddenly recognized something about myself of which I had not been aware until I saw it in writing. In such a moment of self-realization, one becomes very humble. Very spiritual, too.

The stories I’ve told in this book will go on being told in our family. That’s why I wrote Waiting, to keep the memories—both good and bad—always alive. I have tried not to use selective memory or to color events favorably, but instead, I tried to recount them as they happened… or, at least, just as I remember them.

Gore Vidal said, A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life. Will Rogers put it another way: A memoir means when you put down the good things you ought to have done and leave out the bad ones you did. Both notions are true, and both have found their way into this story.

The inborn desire of the human mind for coherent narrative, for meaning, often warps the way we remember things. Most often, we manage to turn our memories into good stories. True, memories can be self-serving, partial, or faulty, as we strive to spring the corroded locks of our recollections. History, after all, is fungible; as I changed, my future changed, and so, in a sense, did my past. As an event unfolds, no two people experience it in exactly the same way; likewise, no two people will recount an incident in exactly the same way.

The basic story I tell, though, is true.

My intention in pulling back this curtain on my life is to allow future generations the privilege of looking back, through my eyes, at a time now long gone—the opportunity to see that life and, at least to some degree, to experience it.

Kaye K. Rosenthal

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Every tear

         I ever cried

Turned to pearl

        before it died.

Every pain

        that in me burned

Forged to wisdom

        I had earned.

Joan Walsh Anglund

The rambling, old brick house stands to this day on the highest of the rolling, green hills, where sugar maples and ancient, knurled oaks dot the landscape. Built with slave labor long before the Civil War, the house retains an aura of sadness, along with its great antiquity. The walls are more than a foot thick; the red clay bricks were made from soil from the farm, shaped and fired just feet from the front door. The rooms are large and high-ceilinged, with fireplaces and dark wooden floors. All the wood in the house came from surrounding oaks—the predecessors of those that stand there today.

My grandfather purchased Glenn Place in rural Kentucky around 1915. (This is not meant to be historical fact; it is family lore as I remember it.) Although it was smaller by then, the acreage suited his purposes. In time, his youngest son, my father, restored the house and divided the wide, green lawn with a white-gravel walkway. There were large beds of pink peonies, masses of old-world roses, and many purple lilacs. Towering above, the huge, old sugar maples cast deep shade, causing wide swaths of grass to curl up and turn brown in the summer heat. In the back, Grandfather planted lush, green gardens that rolled gently down to a large pond with cattails and lily pads. With its freshness and warmth, Glenn Place now seemed to be waiting for a family, our family. My father brought his bride, my mother, to live in the brick house on the hill; and so my seven siblings and I were born and grew up there, with our parents and our paternal grandparents.

In those distant times, the beautiful, spacious porches found on most of the old Southern mansions were the centers for social and family gatherings. Glenn Place had two porches. The front one had stately, white Corinthian columns reaching up to the second floor, and the back porch, which was larger, had two comfortable swings, each festooned with brightly colored pillows. At an early age I claimed the swing on the south end of the back porch. This was a hanging haven into which I could escape for hours on end; sitting curled up there, I dreamed, read, grew, and built myself a life. It was also, I found, the only place where I could take comfort while my broken arm healed.

The injury occurred when I went to get my horse from the barn. The day was overcast, with a storm brewing, and the horses were restless; they snorted, stamped their hooves, and snapped their tails. I figured that I could get a quick ride in before the storm hit. I finally calmed my horse—a handsome reddish-brown bay named Prince—got him outside, coaxed him over to the mounting steps, and hoisted myself on. Just at that moment, before I had a chance to slip my feet into the stirrups, the ear-splitting sound of my brother Teence’s new whistle pierced the air. Prince lunged forward, and off I fell. A spindly pile of legs and arms lay there in motionless silence—a silence broken, finally, by my brother’s cry of alarm.

How I didn’t break more bones is a mystery. Perhaps it was because I was only nine; children can be preternaturally resilient. At any rate, as I recall, I stayed in and around my swing for months, departing from it only to sleep in my bed at night. Mother served my lunches out there, and one of my four brothers—whoever was in charge of collecting our drinking water at the time—grudgingly set a full glass on the little table by the swing, beside a stack of books and a small pile of crayons.

It was no surprise, then, that I was bored. One day when my brother Harley gave me water, I smiled sweetly, drank it down all at once, and asked for another glass. He looked surprised but took it away and returned with a full glass; I gulped that one down and asked for another. His eyes widened, and he bent forward as if to inspect me. I was ready to burst out laughing, but I held it back. Suddenly, he realized I was joking, though I could see he didn’t think it very funny. I laughed like a hyena, but not for long; all that water, all at once, had made me a little sick! Perhaps the joke was on me.

Our drinking water came from the sweet summer rains; it was collected in gutters, then filtered and piped into a large underground cistern. Hand-pumping the water was an assigned duty that rotated among the boys. I, too, was often sent underground to fetch canned foods. The entrance to our ancient root cellar was just outside the kitchen door. The cellar was damp, dark, and scary; and yet, as I descended into the dim interior, a kaleidoscopic array of bright colors played along the back wall, reflections and refractions from the cellar windowpane and the jars stacked in front of it. I kept my eyes on the variegated changing patterns, made my selection, and ran up the steps as fast as possible.

As I write about those days now, I find my memories rich, the events and images of my past clear and vivid. I hear the crickets of summer. I smell the fragrant, pink peonies of spring. I see the orchard in fall, trees hanging heavy with fruit, and I wait impatiently in our big, open kitchen for Mother to dust the apple fritters with cinnamon. I feel the cold of winter, press a fingertip toward the window, watch the glint and glitter of frost crystals dancing in the sunlight.

I remember the family meals. I see us seated at the table. Twelve peckish faces are turned toward my father; each head bows respectfully as he asks the blessings. My mother is there on his left, near the entrance to the kitchen. I hear the words to that prayer: the same invocation daily, year after year, even the same inflections.

When the meal is finished, my father leans back in his chair, thoughtful and content. Now, he wraps his hands around a cup of hot coffee and eases into a discourse comprising of neighborhood gossip, family happenings, current events, and his political philosophy. At times, when these family discussions became too painfully long, one of my brothers would make a funny face, and the younger children would be overcome with the giggles. That usually caused Dad to excuse the young children and ask hard questions of the older.

We all listen attentively. We know that when he pauses and glances around, he will expect us to have comments and questions; just a nod, or a certain tilt of his head, grabs our attention.

We didn’t have electricity in our rural district at that time; consequently, many of the old ways persisted. To keep our food fresh, we used an ice box; the ice man came twice a week with big, clear blocks. At night, we did not have the glare of light bulbs by which to read, but the warm, soft illumination of oil lamps.

Dad loved the printed word. He devoured books and newspapers, and he made a study of history and places heavy with history. The Civil War, and how it might have been avoided, was one of his favorite topics. He was an abolitionist, but he had many disagreements with our sixteenth president.

Our play yard was behind the horse barn, near an old, scar-covered oak. A rubber tire swing, suspended on a rope tied to a limb of this tree, was strong enough to support us on our trips to the moon, and the rutted earth beneath the swing attested to our many imaginative flights there.

A long split-rail fence spread across the south side of the pasture. It was far enough away from the house for me to go there, sit on the fence, and talk privately to the horses. As an introspective nine-year-old girl, I naturally regarded myself a victim of grown-ups’ indifference. The horses, though, seemed to understand; they were my friends. They listened to me as I poured out my formal allegations against parental discipline, pain, and dissatisfaction in general, their doleful, brown eyes at times downright sympathetic. At the end of each recitation, I rewarded their patience with carrots or big, tasty apples. Lingering there in my special sunset often made me late for supper, but it was worth it.

We had two large, brown barns with dark, wood-shingled roofs: one for the horses and one for curing the tobacco. The horse barn was our special place to frolic and romp in the heat of summer. We played hide-and-seek in the hay loft, and we even invented our own primitive version of bungee jumping. A strong rope was tied to a rafter high up in the barn; the knotted end of the rope hung down a few feet in front of the hay loft door, which was on the second floor of the barn. Jumpers grasped the rope, pushed off as hard as they could, and swung out, in the process gaining enough momentum to swing back to the jumping-off place. If we missed, the rope could be released far enough to let the jumper down to within a few feet of the ground—and to utter humiliation.

There were acres and acres of wheat south of the pasture on the flat-topped hills; the golden crop jutting up into the blue sky was always beautiful to behold. The fields were divided into wide strips, and the wheat was planted on every other strip; the land between the planted strips was our summer fallow. The purpose of leaving these strips idle was to allow moisture to accumulate in the subsoil so that it would be available for next year’s crop. Snow was a very important source of moisture; a slow, level snow melt was most beneficial for wheat. Crop rotation was essential to improve the long-term productivity of the land; my dad told me that this preserved the minerals and nutrients in the soil. When the fields were bursting with ripening grain, the combine crews came with their big machines and harvested it. The grain was weighed and readied for market, and the fields were left fallow the next year.

In March, when the beautiful purple hyacinths were in bloom—their dense spikes filling the air with a sweet fragrance—the planters came to prepare the tobacco beds and sow the seeds. Tobacco was the main revenue-producing crop on our farm. The seeds of this plant are almost as fine as dust particles; in order to sew them evenly, they have to be mixed in with soil. In mid-May, the planters came back to transplant the tiny plants to the fields. Then, all through the long, hot summer, the dark green fields were dotted with the bobbing, yellow straw hats of the field workers. They came early and left late, their work shirts sweat-stained and sticky from the residue of the tobacco plant.

At harvest time, the same workers came back yet again—this time with sharp knives. They cut the tall green stalks, split them down the middle, and laid them in the blistering sun to wilt for a few hours. Later, the plants were placed on long tobacco sticks and transported to the appropriate barn, where they were hung up, row after row, up and down, floor to ceiling, until the barn was literally filled with tobacco. When the leaves dried and turned a leathery brown, it meant that they had been fully cured.

Finally, in the cold of winter, the men removed the tobacco from the barn, stripped the leaves from the stalks, and tied the leaves in bundles of ten; these bundles were then sent off to the warehouse to be sold. Sooner than you’d think, the entire process began all over again, for there is a very short period of time between the sale of one year’s tobacco crop and the planning and preparation for the next.

I don’t recall ever having seen my father work with the field hands, but my grandfather seemed to feel it important to go out and labor on the farm. He liked early morning best; before anyone else in the house was awake, Grandfather had already gone for his long walk. He was a man who enjoyed his own company, perhaps because he was never truly alone; he had memories that surfaced on those walks.

Not all of those memories were happy. For years, my eldest sister told me, my grandparents’ life was one long odyssey of striving to hope their way through a near-hopeless situation. One after the other, their children were dying. Weary and heartbroken, they made long, arduous journeys to warmer climates, searching out mineral springs that were touted by their doctor to provide medicinal benefits. In these pools of clean, clear mineral waters, their beautiful sons and daughters bathed, took treatments… and continued to weaken. The disease came on slowly, but it came—and it took its toll. From a family of ten, only my father and one uncle survived consumption, a progressive wasting-away of the body from pulmonary tuberculosis. Not one of the other eight—five handsome sons and three beautiful daughters—lived to the age of twenty.

I was a small child when I first heard these sad stories. It made my heart ache then, as it does to this day. How could one family endure so much anguish yet remain loving, pleasant people? I questioned how the human mind goes about the business of dealing with such excruciating pain. As I grew older, I could see the ripple effects of those tragic memories: my father, my uncle, and my grandparents all had, at times, the same haunted expression on their faces. My father, left in the wake of the tragedy, tried to assuage his grief by living life to the fullest. He often went foxhunting with his friends and would be absent from home for several days, or sometimes for a whole week. No one questioned his time with his friends—not even my mother—as far as we knew. He was always the apple of Grandfather’s eye. It was often said that the two of them looked like identical twins born thirty years apart.

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My earliest recollections of my grandfather were of a tall, thin man with unruly, gray hair and a big mustache. To me, he was the epitome of what a grandfather should look like, as well as what a grandfather should be like: quiet yet sociable, firm yet kind. He bore his great loss with a quiet dignity and displayed a joy for living that made him pleasurable to be with, and so he had many friends. I can see him, still, in his dark-blue sweater-jacket, his ocher corduroy trousers tucked into knee-high, well-polished brown leather boots, a bright-colored handkerchief visible in his hip pocket as he saddled up for his daily horseback ride.