Remembering Memorial Day and always

It is a dreary wet rainy day here in La Crescent,  the weather gives me a respite from the heavy duty outside gardening, trimming, hauling, etc myriad mighty physical chores I have been hard at these past few glorious spring sunshiny days.  Rain gives me a chance to rest, that is to do inside domestic chores that are never ending.  But so goes life here, while Jerry is recovering, maybe, although he has ups and downs, and lately more downs than ups???  On Thursday, we drive to Mayo in Rochester where he will see more lung specialists, to determine why he cannot process oxygen keeping him tethered to tanks and hoses.  His primary life outside the house is three days a week at pulmonary rehab where he is strengthening his muscles, but his lungs are not working.  Who knows what lies ahead anymore,  his attitude is not the best, because he feels useless, unable to do much of anything.  So this leaves it all up to me and as a friend said today, "good thing you are healthy and able to do so much."  Yes I am thankful for that, but it would be good to have a rest now and then and not always have the next task beckoning.  Being a compulsive person with only 2 settings either on or off, I spend all day doing so that night brings me exhausted to bed.  Jerry has little interest is even riding somewhere and it is really rough to even get a semi conversation out of him. He never has been one for talking much, but this all leaves me worn out too.

Greenwood Cemetery, Lower Burrell, PA
Hillside family graves plot

Still as I started to write it is Memorial Day and I feel badly that I did not get to PA again this year so far to tend to my graves and to visit my 2 friends there at Greenwood Cemetery too, Dana and Carlie passed last year.  Really I know more dead people than living folks or so it seems.  This is the cost of aging.  We survivors, left behind to remember.  I wish there were a florist I could contact in PA to have flowers delivered to my graves, I say my graves because it is only me who is left to care for them, a duty I feel deeply.  And yet when I am gone, there will be no one, so perhaps the graves are being prepared for the coming neglect.  

My father and Combat Crew 193

My father Lewis S BallAdd caption

Today I remember my father, US Army Air Corp 2 Lt L S Ball, B-24 pilot, gone forever disappeared somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean with his entire combat crew 193, June 1944, months before my birth.  The father I never knew but knew of, the young  man I would now outlive by many many years, he is standing back row, this photo  on the far left with the crew members. .I would learn later in life through my membership in the American War Orphans Network (AWON) that there were  many, some 185,000 of us WWII kids, deemed "orphans" by our own   government, yet Mom never acknowledged the word"orphan", she said she was alive and that I was not an "orphan." I never knew anyone in my situation growing up, how I wish I had, because I have learned so much through AWON, we share so many similar feelings.  A time when  little was discussed contrast to today when everything is talked beyond reason.  I always wanted to get to Charleston, SC to look out at the Atlantic ocean from there where the plane departed, never to return, but so far as  with other things I want to do someday, no Charleston trips have materialized.  This photo shows him, gazing out there toward the ocean that would consume them all.  Oh how different life could have been.  I have no grave to visit for him, no cemetery plot to leave flowers, only the vast Atlantic.  Because no trace was ever found of the plan and crew, my paternal grandmother went to her grave always believing he would return some day.  I have learned about the German U boats that p[atrolled the east coast, and there was speculation, what if on that return flight from Nassau, as they radioed that they needed fuel, what if, a German U boat surfaced, bam, and disappeared.  My late uncle Henry, his brother believed there was something to that and  perhaps there was, it was a different country, time, place.  much speculation, no definitive answers except that he would be gone ..

"Wally", in my dad';s writing

.Another mystery to me was this photo of "Wally" that I found in 2004 when Mom died and I was clearing out her closet.  There among a suitcase of mementos and documents of my father along with letters she had received from Hap Arnold, founding General of the US Air Force, was the photo.  I would learn much later, several years back now from cousins I never knew and have yet to meet,  in Taunton, MA that Wally was the only child of my father's aunt Margaret, a sister to my paternal grandmother.  Walter Kudzia, KIA in the Battle of the Bulge in Germany, 1945 months after he had turned 20.  His body would be returned to MA in 1947 to be buried at home, as his mother wished.   Wally was a rifleman, US Army, enlisted right out of high school.  Part of his tale is told in a recent WWII magazine.  It seems that my family paid dearly the price with fatalities in WWII.  Something I will be asking the good Lord about at the end of my time here, "why"  I pause to remember them, the ones I did not know.  I suppose the answer could be, "why not"  

Walter's death WWII magazine

And so Memorial Day, wet, rainy here, pausing for some time at the computer, I have posted all this and more onto Facebook, where I will get comments from my AWON family for sure.  This blog writing that I do so sporadically, is almost a private diary for me. 

Today another friend sent this You tube link, nicely done, A Soldier  Died Today, it brings tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat     ttps://www.youtube.com/embed/eEs4ke7cdNQ?feature=player_detailpage%25&fbclid=IwAR08yZr3tMz4dpapnxg0DJn2qTVkqT4f15jp-Vi6Eoh2MvXzf4VdjTuTCT0   If you are not moved, you are heartless..Here in La Crescent there is no more Legion building where the old guys go to gather and talk, instead it was sold out, the building had gone to ruin, sold for a pittance of a room in a Community Center, the big deal for the town.  Many of us think this will be another waste of money and become a burden on the property tax payers in the future but for now it is welcomed by the community.  However the Legion is no more, gone with it are the reminisces and the multi thousands of $$ donated to this town and the entire community over the years.  The event Center, bah humbug!  I know I am aging, I do not like these changes, I am comfortable with familiarity.