Between the Lines

By Pauline Hayward

Between the Lines is a true account of a young girl who was told a story about a man who lived two thousand years ago. The story planted a seed in her heart and sent her on a search for something mystical that she knew was good and that she needed. Being raised in a happy Christian family that attended church, she learned all the rules of how to live a good and virtuous life. She tried, but failure was all too common. She grew up and fell in love, married, and started raising a family, but never forgot the quest of her childhood and the sense of an empty place in her heart. It wasn’t until two significant events in her life brought her face-to-face with herself and the object of her search did she find the answer. Admitting her brokenness, she founded her wholeness. She discovered that nothing in her life was wasted and that there is holy ground in the midst of debris and treasures in dark places.

Read between the lines of this story and perhaps you will see the answer that has been there all the time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jun 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781639614844

Book preview

In the Beginning

We all carry inside us, people who came before us.

—Liam Callanan

Leaving Long Island with devastation and death in its wake, and turning north toward New England, it roared as far north as the border of Canada. It was 1938 and hurricane season. Hurricanes were not named in those days, so it became known simply as the Hurricane of ’38. There was nothing simple about it. It actually was the result of two powerful storms in the Atlantic that came together to form a tropical like storm that unexpectedly turned north. Without the sophisticated weather tracking we have today, there was little warning of the impending monster headed toward Long Island. It was mid-day on September 21. The winds were clocked at 185 miles per hour, but it was the ocean surge that accounted for the most damage and loss of life. Thirty-foot waves tossed ships onto land and pulled homes into the sea.

Over six hundred people died. Most of the damage occurred in a part of Long Island, New York, known as the Hamptons, home of the wealthy elite as well as poor fishermen and their families. By 3 p.m. it was over, at least for the Hamptons. Instead of going out to sea as expected, the storm picked up force and headed for New England, tearing through its center as far north as Vermont and Canada. Some of the wind gusts there were recorded at 200 miles per hour. The hardest hit in New Hampshire was the Keene/Monadnock area, which is about forty miles from where my parents lived. I survived that hurricane by riding it out safely in the belly of my mother. My mom had always been fearful during bad storms, and this storm must have frightened her. She was four months pregnant with me. She told me later that, as a child, I was terrified of the wind and when it was blowing hard, I would hide under the pillows on the couch. She blamed that hurricane for my fear.

Five months after the storm, on February 28,1939, in Hanover, New Hampshire, a peaceful, picturesque village and home of Dartmouth College, I was born. After a week in the hospital with my mother, my dad brought us home to Springfield, New Hampshire. I am the third child of my parents, Russell and Irene Osgood. My dad was twenty-seven and my mom was twenty—younger then than most of you right now. The Great Depression was a very recent memory for my parents, and World War II was close on the horizon. We got our war news via a Philco radio, which was a piece of furniture and the centerpiece of our living room, sporting a 78 rpm record player in its pull-down front. Dad was particularly interested in the war in Europe because he was of draft age. It was a challenging time to be raising a family. Food was rationed, radios blared the threats of invasion and bombs. Hitler was a feared name; after all, he was responsible for the deaths of 43,000 people in the London Blitz.¹ The United States entered the war in 1941 when Pearl Harbor was bombed and from that point American men were sent to the battle, leaving women to take care of the home front. My dad was one of seven sons and many of his brothers served in the war, but because he had a hernia and flat feet, not to mention a wife pregnant with their fourth child, he was exempt.

Most of you did not get a chance to know your-great grandparents as well as my children did, so I want to make some space in this story to give you a picture of my parents, your Great Grandpa and Grandma Osgood.

Dad’s mother, Mary MacDonald, was Scottish and his dad, Hollie Osgood, was English with a touch of Irish. That heritage helped shaped my father into a stoic, hardworking, family-loving man. He was strong. He was quiet. That’s the first thing you would notice, meeting him for the first time. You knew he was strong by the size of his hands, and you would know right away that he was quiet because you needed to coax a conversation from him. You would also notice, especially if he liked you, a twinkle in his eye and a slight grin on his lips that told you his quietness was not a lack of friendship or kindness. It also probably meant that he had what my mom would call something up his sleeve. For instance, for me and later for my children, that was a tickle under our ribs when we walked by him. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine him fighting in a war. Although he was patriotic to his country, his manner was much too gentle to pick up a weapon. He was a woodsman. He spent most of his life with wood, loving the forests of Maine where he grew up.

For a little history of the logging industry in New England (I am a teacher after all), here are a few facts that will help you to see the kind of life that formed my dad. The logging industry actually began in Maine in the seventeenth century. England had depleted its own forests and turned to the colonies for the wood to build the masts of their naval fleet. They sent surveyors to mark trees for cutting and preparation for shipping to England. This became one of the grievances against England that set the wheels in motion for the Revolution. After the colonies fought for and gained their freedom, logging became one of the fastest-growing businesses in New England, mostly Maine and New Hampshire, for their abundance of soft pine. The Maine woods began to be filled with logging camps and by the 1830s over 9 trillion board feet passed through Bangor, Maine, causing the population to explode in four years from 2,800 to 8,000 people. The trees were cut with axes and, later on, saws. Horses and oxen dragged the logs over the snow and frozen lakes, stacking them on the banks of the Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot rivers to wait for the melting snow and spring rains to swell those rivers, enabling them to float the logs downstream to the sawmills.

There were various jobs available at the camps. My brothers surmise that our dad was a logger and/or a scaler or timber cruiser, one who estimated the board feet in a tree simply by looking at it. They came to that conclusion because Dad was so good at math, computing it in his head; he couldn’t look at a tree without mentioning how many board feet it contained.

Often, lumbermen doubled as drivers, which was a risky undertaking. One slip and fall into the icy waters, and being crushed by the moving logs could take your life. The pay for working in the logging business ranged from seventeen to thirty dollars a month. The men worked from sunrise to sunset; the work was dangerous and the living conditions in the camps primitive.² There is no record of the time frame Dad would have been a logger, but putting pieces together point to the years when he was eighteen to twenty-five years old. Because my dad’s father, Hollie Osgood, your great, great-grandfather, was also a lumberman, it was the likely thing for dad to do for work.

Dad also lived for a time in Cornish, New Hampshire, with a man known to me only as Crowningshield. Dad lived with Mr. Crowningshield and was paid to take care of his team of sled dogs. We have pictures of him with those beautiful huskies.

Childhood memories of my dad and wood are from the time he worked as the head sawyer in an automated sawmill. He sat in a caged-in area at the big circular saw and worked the controls as the logs moved on a carriage belt, cutting them into exact measurements. I loved the musky scent of the forest and damp wood chips that were on his clothes when he came home from work. The unique woodpiles in layered stacks and creative circles made us proud of our dad and also got the attention of some motorists who stopped their cars to take a picture. Dad’s wood piles were for the purpose of drying or seasoning of the wood that we would use to heat our home two years hence. Dad believed wood had to be at least two years dry to burn right.

Two things about my father took root in me. First, that he instilled in his children the importance of family. He taught us by example. Each of us was responsible for certain chores to make the household work, respecting one another in the process—simple things like the boys helping with shoveling snow, stacking wood, cleaning the yard, etc. The girls, of course, were expected to help Mom with her duties. Each of us was responsible to keep our things in order and not strewn all the over the house, Mom’s word for the clutter. That is actually the second thing he taught me by example: take care of my stuff. He took care of his vehicles and his property, even his clothes. My mom said that she never had to pick up after him because he put things where they belonged.

My father was raised in a family of thirteen children, two half-brothers from Hollie’s first marriage, and then eleven more when he married my grandmother. Can you imagine the stories he had to tell? The Osgoods were a closely connected family, so it is not surprising that a yearly Osgood reunion was birthed in the 1960s by my dad’s generation to honor their mother in her later years. That reunion is still held every year in Maine or New Hampshire at a place that has enough cabins for our big family. One of my favorite memories of those first reunions was to hear at night around a campfire, my father and his brothers singing The Old Rugged Cross. That was his favorite hymn, and dad had a beautiful deep tenor voice. After a few beers, the Osgood men became uninhibited and occasionally raucous, but never mean. They would also sing. Imagine seven men, almost all of them with a reserve and guardedness that fell away and made room for jokes, laughter, and story-telling. They played the card game poker in the biggest cabin where the sounds of laughter were heard until the campfire died out and it was time for bed. There might have been a few hangover headaches the next morning, but there was no disruptive or belligerent behavior. Another thing Dad did with his voice that I loved: I could hear him whistle when he was at his workbench in the garage or planting his seeds. It was a beautiful sound, and had a warble to it like the trilling song of a bird. My parents loved music, the jazz and love songs from the war years, played either from the Philco or the 78 rpm records that my parents collected was the music of my early childhood. Later on, country music began to dominate, the old country music from Hank Williams and Jim Reeves. Dad would whistle those tunes. My dad struggled at times with alcohol. Though he never drank during the week, on weekends, he seemed to need whatever it was that a few bottles of beer did for him. He did not go to bars, hang out with other men, or abuse his family, but it was sad to see him get lost from us, even though he always stayed home at those times.

Dad loved to read. I have that gene. He was not educated beyond second year of high school, but because he read everything he could get his hands on (once I found him reading one of my Nancy Drew books because he didn’t have anything else), he was self-educated. There were not many subjects that he couldn’t discuss with you.

In later life, after retirement, Dad had a greenhouse where he nurtured flowers to life and had hybrid roses growing in colors you couldn’t find in a flower shop—lavender, pale orange, soft blue—planted around the perimeter of his home. Though I don’t have his green thumb gene, I still like to see a neat and pretty yard. Your uncle Jeff, as a child, loved to follow his grandpa around the yard, watching him plant seeds, stack wood, or work at his tool bench in the garage. Hidden behind my father’s quiet demeanor was a solid commitment to take care of his family. As children, we took that for granted, thinking all fathers were like that.

*****

Sometimes the