Chelsea, Oklahoma, December 31st, 1956
Having now come to the end of the year, Marie has faithfully been writing thoughts into her little book every day for a week now beginning on Christmas Eve. She tries to come up with what to write for this very last day of 1956. It’s quiet now in her two-story home in Chelsea, a small town about an hour east from Tulsa. Christmas celebrations are over, the children and grandchildren have all returned home. Walter is resting in his favorite chair.
Walter Turner, Marie’s younger brother, has been living with her ever since she returned to Oklahoma in 1927. Having him there had been comforting in some respects. Still, he had not been easy to live with at times. Like that time, quite a few years before,when Walter and another brother Andy had been brewing their own beer in the attic of her house on Walnut Street in Cushing. Oh, they knew very well how she felt about liquor, but to make it behind her back and hide all those bottles right in her own house was deceitful. If it hadn’t been such a hot summer day, bottles popping their caps in that overheated attic, home brew soaking and dripping through the ceiling, they might never had been found out. What a mess that was, and, oh, the smell! These days Walter’s just an ornery tightwad, but he does bring in a paycheck. He really ought to have married.
Hmmm. What to write... Marie looks over at Everett’s portrait photograph in the slender-edged frame on her desk. She remembers an earlier December 31st. That was so long ago, but 1915 doesn’t seem so long ago. And so far away, but Oregon isn’t really very far. She begins to write
Dec. 31, 1956...
