Now I'm sorta piecin' the story together.

Remember last June, June 1939, when she was so sad about some kind of breakup and wrote several poems about it? Well Grandmother Madge seems to have gotten back together with whoever that was and I suspect it was my Grandfather Harold. Read and decipher:

Mood

Happy?--

No,

that is not the word

to name this mood;

Nor contented,

for that means all is well

within the heart and mind

and within my heart and mind

there lies a tempest

as under

a calm and heavy gray

the sea is at rest

before the fury of the storm

shakes and heaves,

destroys and crumbles,

leaving

wreckage and heartbreak

before returning to her

monotonous living of tide after tide,

day after day.

Madge Hall

June 1, 1940

(And now this one:)

Love's First Anniversary

One year ago today

my heart was sad,

But free;

Today my heart is glad

though it is a slave

to thee.

Madge Hall

June 2, 1940

Madge Hall, soon to be Madge Thomas. She married him. I suspect that's who she's writing to in the poems of June 1939. It would have to be, as my mother was born in November of 1941. Unless Harold Thomas swept Madge off her feet in the fall of 1940 and they got pretty busy in about January or so of 1941. That would be the only other explanation.

I just wonder who the 1939 poem guy was. Who was he? I might never know. It's a story with a lot of blanks left behind. Just like in that crazy limerick she wrote out with the blanks in it. Just who and what and who and what?

One more piece of the story, also dated June 2, 1940:

Crisis

Close in your arms you held my trembling self

Close to your heart my whirling head you pressed

Your strength and will flowed into me that hour

And passion passed. Our love has stood the test

And is made stronger. We wait and love until the right hour comes

To lose ourselves in each, to yield to passion's right bequest.

Madge Hall

I mean I guess she just told him if he likes it he bettah put a ring on it, n'est-ce pas? I mean that's what it seems like...maybe she told him she couldn't have kids because she was sick and whatnot, and he left her the year before, or maybe he went to the war and came back, and then he said he was gonna marry her anyway, whether she could have...you know...relations...with him or not...who knows? It's like a movie kinda, only with these ghost scenes in it. You can't really see them, but you sort of can feel like they're there somehow, and you can kinda piece together the story.