June 1944

L.J. Hurst

1944

     My grandfather joined the Army on June 21, 1944. He served in the 134th Infantry, Company G in General George S. Patton's Third Army in France and Belgium. He was warded the Purple Heart for wounds he received during the Battle of the Bulge inside Germany in the early morning hours of January 1, 1945.  He also received the American Service Medal and European African Middle Eastern Service Medal with two Bronze Service Stars.  

    He didn't make a habit of discussing what happened to him during the war, but one summer afternoon when I was ten years old we talked about it. The conversation started because I heard my mother say something about the scar on his face. Honestly, I had never noticed that he had a scar, or at least never recognized that the star shaped mark on his cheek was a scar.  The two of us were rocking in the glider on the front porch when I asked him about how he'd gotten it. He told me that he was in the Army during WWII and he'd been sent on a ship overseas to fight in France.  He said that it was very cold over there which meant he and his buddies spent most of their time trying to stay warm.  The night he was wounded he was in a foxhole in the woods. He told me that he had just fallen asleep when there was an explosion and a piece of shrapnel hit him in the face. He spent almost three days lying in the foxhole before anyone came to help him.  He said that if it hadn't been so cold outside he would have bled to death and if his friend hadn't been in the foxhole with him he would have frozen to death. His friend died before they were rescued.  Even at ten I understood that him telling me this story was a big deal. 

    As for leaving to enlist in the Army on June 21st - that was my grandparents' wedding anniversary and rather than tell my grandmother that he'd enlisted, he let her believe that he'd finally been drafted. He once told my mother that part of the reason he enlisted is that he was working in Knoxville delivering ice and someone called him a draft dodger and asked him why he wasn't serving his country. He spent the summer and fall of 1944 training at Fort McClellan and Fort Meade.  On November 25th, he boarded a transport ship and sailed for Europe.  He wrote in a letter that he didn't know where he was going but it must be someplace cold because they'd given everybody heavy underwear and a heavy coat.  He arrived in Marseille on December 8th and by December 25th he was in the town of Metz. Sometime after he was wounded, he wrote in the pocket diary that on December 28th he was sent to the front lines "where they beat off three counter attacks and took a small town and then dug in on a hill overlooking that town".  At some point on the night of December 31st/January 1st he was hit and then he spent three days trapped behind enemy lines.  The injuries to his face and jaw were severe and he rarely talked about what happened to during the war.  Other than that one afternoon on the front porch I don't ever remember hearing him talk about being in the military. He did write it down though and my hope is that all these years later he wouldn't mind that I'm doing the same thing. 

Oh Canada

My Dad and Me

Somewhere in Canada

Summer 1993

   In the summer of 1993 my parents and I traveled to Canada to attend a family reunion for my dad's side of the family.  My dad's mother, Mary Walsh Maguire, was born in Canada and immigrated to New York, where, among other things, she became a nurse and got married and had six children.  As for my Canadian ancestors, my gggg-grandparents, Donald Bah McDougald and Catherine McKinnon McDougald immigrated to Canada from Scotland and acquired a homestead on Lot Number 5 in the 4th Concession of the township of Kenyon in 1790-ish.  In 1993, my dad's Canadian family were celebrating 200 years at 5/4 Kenyon so we loaded up the car and drove from Tennessee to Alexandria, Ontario to be there.  I'll admit that at the time I was a just a little bit reluctant to take a several weeks long car trip with my parents to Canada, but am so happy now that I "agreed" to go. As it turned out, this was the last trip my parents and I took as a family of three (Joel and I started dating that fall) and the weeks we spent in Canada were the last we had before my mother was diagnosed with MS (her doctor waited until we got back to give her the diagnosis because he said he didn't want to ruin our trip).    And I did have fun, in spite of my twenty-two year old self.

My Mother and Me

Shortly before she told me I needed an attitude adjustement.

That's my cousin, Edward, there on the left.

One and One Makes Two

Wendy Jean and Julie

East Tennessee State University, 1987

     My cousin Wendy headed off to college at East Tennessee State University in the fall of 1987.  When she left, it was the first time I really thought about the fact that when we all grew up we might not always live only five minutes from each other.  It made me sad.  Wendy lives in California now with her beautiful family.  Her sweet daughters graduated from preschool last week and are headed to kindergarten in the fall.  Wendy is also graduating this spring, with a Master's Degree.  I am very proud of her, mainly because I thought graduate school was difficult enough when I was there and I only had myself to worry about - she went through graduate school while raising a family.  Way to go Wendy Jean!  Your Tennessee family is so very proud of you.  What a wonderful accomplishment!

Magic

    In the early summer of 1980 my grandfather bought this beautiful little horse from the stables where I was taking riding lessons. I have no idea what her name was before she was mine, but I named her Magic.  I spent several summers riding her around the fields at my grandparents place, usually bareback, because when you put a saddle on her she had this quirky habit of going one time around the pasture and then stopping (probably a consequence of all that time teaching kids to ride at the stables).  To get her to go again you had to hop off and hop back on.  I was convinced for a long time that she was the result of the wish I made when I blew out the candles on my ninth birthday cake.  That year I closed my eyes and wished wished wished for a horse that was all black except for a white star on her head - a few weeks later there she was being unloaded at my grandparents house.  If you look closely at the photo below you can see her white star peeking out from under her mane. It wasn't my grandfather's way to be overly indulgent with gifts and material things, a fact that has made this memory from my childhood grow sweeter and sweeter over the years. 

The Girl in the Water

The Girl in the Water

As told to me tonight by my daughter, Sarah. 

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived near the water.  One day it starting raining.  It rained for a long time and all of the little girl's toys got washed away.  She was very sad because her crown got washed away too.  There was another little girl and she was kind of like a mermaid, but not a mermaid, but she had fins on her feet and she could swim really fast.  She heard about the little girl who lost her crown and decided to swim down to the bottom of the lake and bring it back for her.  She took a big basket too because there was money at the bottom of the lake and she thought the little girl who had lost all of her toys could use some money too.  And that's how they became friends.  The end.

A Flood Story

     I made a new friend last week.  She's one of the many people who live near me here in Bellevue that suffered massive damage to her home when the Harpeth River flooded on Sunday, May 2nd. She and her husband bought their first home in one of the newer subdivisions that is connected to Boone Trace, the neighborhood where Joel and I bought our first home. While I was doing what I could to help her salvage her Christmas Village collection, we found out that we have a lot in common, most notably that we are both married to attorneys who are crazy marathon runners (although her husband is deployed in Iraq right now which means that she is dealing with this clean-up effort without him here). The main divide between us seems to be that she lives in a place in Bellevue where the Harpeth River flooded her house and I live in a place where I watched all the flooding happen.  My story of surviving the flood is laughable compared to hers.  I endured it, she survived it.

   If you read my blog post from May 5th you may remember that between noon and 2pm on Sunday, May 2nd,  Joel and I realized that we were marooned in our neighborhood.  At about that same time, my new friend realized that she and her dogs were trapped on the second floor of her house with no way out.  She yelled for help for 15 or 20 minutes before she heard a man call back to her.  He told her to keep yelling because he was coming to get her. He swam to her house from two streets away.  He was wearing a life jacket and brought an extra one with him for her to wear.  The only way out of her house was from her second story window. She had to jump out into the swirling murky water of the Harpeth River and she had to leave everything behind, including her three dogs, because she was swimming out of her home. She said that swimming in the river and the pouring down rain wasn't too bad as long as they stayed in between two houses, but once they got away from the houses, out where the streets used to be, the current was incredibly strong and you just had to go with it as you made your way across or it would take you under.   When she finally made it to dry ground she stayed on the bank of the rising river repeatedly asking for someone to please please rescue her dogs.  After about an hour of waiting she saw a boat coming towards her with one of her sweet dogs standing in the front, his ears flapping in the wind.  When she was reunited with her dogs she said they started walking up the hill but they didn't really have any place to go, they were just walking up and away from the floodwaters. Her house was flooded and she didn't have her cell phone or her car or anything and even if she'd had those things, there was no way out of her neighborhood.  At some point she saw a man and woman standing outside their home watching all that was going on and she walked up to them and told them she needed some help.They took her and her dogs in for the night. I met them while I was there last week. They had walked down the hill from their house to see how she was doing.

       By the time I showed up to offer some help on Thursday afternoon, a tremendous amount of work had already been done deconstructing her house.  Water logged  floors and walls and doors and cabinets and furniture had been ripped out or removed and were piled in her front yard.  I spent some time bleaching door knobs and light switch covers and socket covers because an effort was being made to save anything that could be saved so that it can be put back into the house. Flood damage is expensive. Over the course of the afternoon I heard her say that her grandmother's rocker and a silver engraved frame that had her wedding photo in it were missing and she assumed that they had been washed away when the river flowed through her house.  She had found her great-grandmother's silver, although it was already rusting from being submerged in river water.  A few of us took it from her and went to work wiping the rust stains off and drying it out.  One or two pieces may be permanently damaged but we all agreed that she should keep those and maybe someday she could use them to tell her grandchildren about the The Great Flood of 2010.

Saving the Silver

    It was humbling to be there and see the amount of damage caused by the normally tame Harpeth River.  The Red Cross was there handing out supplies and neighbors were continually bringing food and water and making themselves useful wherever they could.  I heard many people say that those of us who live in Bellevue whose homes were spared are very lucky and I know that we are, but when such a large portion of your community is flooded it's hard to really feel lucky.  It's hard to just "feel" anything - I've got to do something and because I live right here, right in the middle of this natural disaster I have the opportunity to get out there and roll my sleeves up and get to work.  My challenge is to keep finding ways to do that.  What I would like to encourage you to do if you are reading this and don't live in the Nashville area is donate to the Red Cross or some other organization providing flood relief.  If you haven't heard much about this flood, go to youtube.com and watch one of the many videos that have been posted about it.  The local media is reporting that this is one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit our country. The damage numbers that are being reported are massive - $1.5 billion and climbing - too massive for me to get my head around. I still don't know how this isn't national news, how this isn't a bigger story, but it isn't and at this point it probably never will be.  So, I'm doing what I can and I'm telling you and anyone else who may happen to read this one family's flood story - one story out of thousands.

Enough Dog

I am a dog person and in saying that what I mean is that I bring my dogs into the house and let them lounge on the furniture (when no one is looking) and jump on our bed and give them extra snacks so they'll love me more and basically let them have the run of the house. When Joel and I bought our first house in 1998 it didn't take long for us to bring home our first addition. Cole was an eighty pound eleven month old black lab puppy when we adopted him in October 1998. Over the next few months he continued to grow and grow and by the summer of 1999 he had reached his full height (he could easily rest his chin on our kitchen table) and weight (right at 105 pounds).  He was a lot of dog, some would say enough dog.  Joel definitely thought he was enough dog.

In late September 1999 I was out walking when I ran into my neighbor who was also out walking and she had the most beautiful golden retriever-ish puppy I had ever seen. I fell in love with him at at first sight - I mean absolutely totally overcome with love for this sweet-faced puppy the minute I looked at him.  I knew she fostered pets for a local pet rescue and I was so happy to find out the puppy needed a home.  When Joel got home from work later that afternoon I mentioned the puppy next door.  Joel said we had enough dog.  I thought about what he said and decided that we did have a lot of dog, but I wasn't quite sure we had enough dog.  These things are a judgement call when it comes right down to it and Joel and I judged differently.  That's why when Joel got home from work the next afternoon the puppy from next door was there - strictly on a one-night trial basis.  And that's how the words "trial basis" became a running joke at our house for a long long time.

The first thing we did was brainstorm to find a name for our new puppy.  Our neighbors were calling him Chase, but Joel and I agreed that either way you thought about it "Chase" was a terrible name for a dog.  After much discussion we settled on the name Sam, although it took a while for that name to settle on him.  He was a dog of a thousand names - Sammy Sosa, Sam-I-Am-a-Sam, Sammy BluePaws, Sammy the Raccoon, Sammy de Pantaloons, Fluffy, Fluffinator, Little Dog and Haji.  Yeah, that last name is a long story. Actually, many of his names are long stories. As an aside I'll tell how he got his most infamous name - Sammy BluePaws. Sam was on our bed chewing up a blue ink pen. The pen exploded, which must have scared him because he jumped off the bed and proceeded to leave a trail of blue paw prints from our bedroom into the hallway and down the stairs and around the living room and back up the stairs and through the hall and into the bedroom and back up onto the comforter again where we found him sitting in a puddle of blue ink.  His paws were blue for days. The carpet still had faint blue paw prints on it when we moved out a year later.

Sam was a dog's dog.  He liked to be outside, he liked to drink from the toilet, he liked to dig holes in the mud and lay down in them.  In his younger years he hunted birds and turtles and rabbits and on two memorable occasions brought his catch of the day into the house, I can only guess as presents for us.  He was Cole's Little Buddy.  We told people that "This is our dog Cole and this is Cole's dog Sam." Cole was our dog who needed people.  Sam was our dog who needed another dog.

We shared almost eleven wonderful years with Sam and although we weren't ready to let him go, the last year had been difficult for him.  His buddy Cole passed away very suddenly in early March 2009 and in the weeks after Cole's death Sam seemed to age considerably.  We adopted a new dog, Jack, partly as a buddy for Sam and partly to try to fill the huge void that Cole's death left in my life. I think that Jack was good for Sam.  We had wondered if Sam would take the lead dog role when Jack came into our lives but Sam wasn't interested.  Jack wasn't interested either and Joel and I laughed that Sam and Jack were waging a "race to the bottom" to see who could be the least in charge. On his last morning with us there was a terrible storm at our house.  About 5am a loud clap of thunder sent Owen and Sarah and Sam running for our bed.  Our sweet Sam snuggled right between me and Sarah until the storm was over.  He passed away later that night.  Joel was sitting on the floor with him at the emergency vet clinic and I was on the phone talking to him until he was gone. 

Sam and Jack

Summer 2009

So, we are a one dog family again and much like Cole, Jack is a dog who needs people.  Joel and I have discussed that Jack makes a good "only dog" and we've both agreed that he really is enough dog.  I still miss Cole every single day and he's been gone for over a year.  I haven't even begun to miss Sam yet.  The two of them together helped shepherd Joel and I through the early years of our marriage and becoming parents and so many other things.  We had the pleasure of watching them grow from playful pups to contented middle agers to sometimes curmudgeony old men and we are all the better for it. They were loved very much and they loved us in return and as my cousin's wife said so eloquently, I'm sure my boys are in doggie heaven "running and playing with youthful speed and young hearts." 

Cole (1997-2009) & Sam (1999-2010)

Our Boys