Life in Havenwood – The Miracle of Mister Walling

HAVENWOOD TALES ~ BEGINNINGS 

“And as predictable as the cycles of the moon, you felt immensely alive and fortified in his presence, imbued somehow with your own capacity for higher understanding . . .”

–

Mister Walling was a world of his own.  And he was different from anyone anywhere I’ve been since the days of Havenwood . . .

Truth be told, I rarely ever saw him. It happened in the course of my living that the journey itself would absorb me more than my quest for truth.  And yet Gabriel White Cloud Walling became an indelible part of my life, as necessary as my dreams and the ground I walked on . . .

He never intimated there was anything out of the ordinary about his appearance.  And I really enjoyed looking at him.

His condition seemed so natural, it never occurred to me to ask if there might have been strange circumstances. Or an accident at birth. Or any other meat-brained question I already knew wasn’t the answer.

And because he conducted himself as a quiet and unassuming, good-humored creature and I’d heard no one complain or say he was odd, it seemed to me, initially, that folks around Havenwood had accepted him for the miracle he was—until I realized that he was never spoken of.

Miracle of Spirit

Photocanvas by D.J. Houston

The best I could track, Mister Walling had lived deep in the same patch of woods past the north shore of Silver Bear Lake for well over half a century before I even met him.

He didn’t seem to me to be what folks could call a bona fide recluse; he just preferred to keep to himself, choosing his people and causes of his own accord.

Hindsight might prove that his legacy lived in the stories he shared with a privy few of each new generation. And that those whose lives he touched would know in their hearts that a visit with Mister Walling promised them, if just for a moment, a freedom from the stream of time—something sacred, eternal and true.

“But the reason he seemed so special to me as a child was that whenever you arrived to him, he already knew why you were there.  Whether you knew why or not . . . ”

   Excerpts from HAVENWOOD TALES Beginnings

D.J. Houston, Author

Copyright©2006, 2016 D.J. Houston. All Rights Reserved.

Mystery Novel – Life Journey – Paranormal Intrigue – Visionary Fiction – Inspirations

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Paranormal Stories – Inspirations of Gifted Children

A new peek at the novel HAVENWOOD TALES Beginnings by Author, D.J. Houston

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Continued from Havenwood Tales Surprise – Gabriel White Cloud Walling

 “I like all your names, Mister Walling,” I assured him, and that pleased him very much.

Then he told me the story of a loyal Irish setter named Buddy. And how, when he was a boy, Buddy laid down one day and never got up.

He told how his father had lumbered off on a spotted mule with Buddy’s body draped behind him over the mule’s rump.  And for seven years after, a bright orange butterfly flitted and danced above the cornfields where Buddy and he used to race the sun together.

Mister Walling never said life goes on. And all I did was listen . . .

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Mystery Christmas Dinner – Heartland America Style

. . . He called her his Lily of Liverpool.  She called him her Yankee Doodle.

She liked to say she married him because he made her laugh.  And that with so much opportunity and freedom in America, surely she belonged here, too.

Ladened with crates of Julia’s family heirlooms and decidedly English furniture, they set sail on a passenger ship in the spring of ’46, arrived by train from Boston and bought the old, abandoned Butler place in Rainbolt Hollow, ghosts and all . . .

CLICK to READ

“English Christmas Dinner in America“

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Excerpts from the novel HAVENWOOD TALES Beginnings

Copyright©2010, 2012 D.J. Houston. All Rights Reserved.

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Mystery Story Intrigue – Freedom, Inspirations and Wisdom – Havenwood School

PART II of  the excerpt from HAVENWOOD TALES Beginnings– “Spring in Heartland America”

Missed PART I ? – CLICK HERE

*

I must say, I had the most godawful urge to stick my tongue out at spiteful old Miss Hickey, the Latin teacher. Her mission in life since before she was born had apparently been to hate anything and everything new and different; that much seemed obvious. But I’d figured out enough about human nature to know that it probably wasn’t really me she was mad at. I just didn’t know who.

I did put an end to her using me for a firing range, though. Daring, considering she had that willow switch hidden under her desk. But it was easy!

One day, I hung outside her classroom door with my arms stacked full of fresh library books till she sniffed me out. And when she huffed over to shoot me the daggers, I just gave her my goofiest grin.

Now, nobody EVER smiled at Miss Hickey. So after both her eyes popped out of her head and rolled on the floor like gumballs (. . . that’s how I saw it, anyway), needless to say, she never bothered to glare at me again. Blame it on the power of imagination, if you like.  But, hey — Mission accomplished.

In that glorious Spring before I turned seven, little could suppress my urge to learn. I had given myself free rein.

With reading treasures I culled from Havenwood School’s library and the books of her own Miss Greenlee loaned me — books filled with beautiful illustrations and intriguing photographs that could tell their stories without even needing words — the whole new world Mama promised me when I first started school was mine to explore every day.

Through books, I could marvel at masterful statues in London and Greece, canal boats in Venice, four seasons in Paris; explore Ireland’s pastoral sheep farms, and scamper with wild goats in the Scottish Highlands.

Aboriginal Dreamtime

I could wonder at the linear depictions of skinny Egyptian queens and kings and track the hieroglyphic stories of their lives. I could listen to Dreamtime Story spirits of Australia’s Aboriginal people, and feel the throbbing rhythms of African Zulu warriors dancing the hunt as their pictures came alive for me. And I could dream of my life’s journey carrying me across the vast oceans of earth, to make friends with fascinating people in foreign lands.

Through books, I became enthralled with the art and culture of my Native American ancestors, and amazed by the genius of Renaissance Men in America. Benjamin Franklin, George Washington Carver, witty Samuel Clemens with his pen name, Mark Twain, all spoke to me. 

And I would later come to know the Founding Fathers of my nation, and realize–after the dark years that followed my own generation’s folly–how much the character of these great men and others of their ilk helped shape a Neo-Renaissance awakening.

And in my youth, their foresight, will and wisdom inspired me to believe in my ability to help in this world, and fueled my determination to visit my friend Mister Walling again, even if it had to be a secret . . .

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C O N T I N U E D  – C L I C K  for Surprising Part III

Author D. J. Houston

Copyright©2011, 2014 D.J. Houston. All Rights Reserved.

Magical Mystery – Social Commentary – Coming of Age Story – American Literature Treasures

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Holiday Stories and Celebrations – ST. PATRICK’S DAY – Luck O’ The Irish

Luck O’ The Irish To Ye from Havenwood Tales!! 

HAPPY ST. PATRICK’S DAY!

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‘Tis said that Saint Patrick’s Day brings out the Irish in everyone 😉

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A holiday originating in Ireland over a thousand years ago, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated in many countries around the world each March 17th.

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And since Havenwood Tales’ young narrator, Trudie Beth McAfee, hails from English and IRISH ancestry. as well as Native American, I’d be remiss not to share some Irish adventure and wisdom with you 🙂

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Wisdom from Mystery – The Truth About Monsters

“When people are willing to look at evil deeds for what they are and forbid them, then evil can’t hide anymore.”

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CONTINUED from Life Lessons – Truth and Autumn Dreams

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“Your grandmother Meda used to bring me to this place when I was a very young girl.  We could talk about anything here.”

My mother’s mother, Meda, left this world before I was born.  She was a full-blood Shawnee Indian, the daughter of my majestic great-grandparents whose keen eyes still watched over us from their tintype photograph high on our living room mantle.

Instinctively proud of my Native American heritage, I felt honored to be part of a ritual she had once shared with my mother on that giant rock overlooking the stream in the hidden woods . . .

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Halloween Costume Parade – circa 1940s Celebration – Havenwood School

“My mates and I poured out the door and scattered into the blustery autumn wind like a flock of well-dressed scarecrows . . .”

Halloween was due on a Thursday in 1946.

As school was dismissing on Wednesday, Miss Greenlee made another one of her famous announcements – only this time with an added caveat that would change life as I knew it before nightfall the next day.

The innocuous sounding part was, “Anyone who would like to wear a costume to school tomorrow for Halloween may do so.”

That in itself was enough to conjure a roomful of mixed emotions. But the caveat was the kicker.

“You will please design your costume by yourself.”

And that was the rule. No cheating.

Miss Greenlee wasn’t forbidding us to scroll forward in time a few decades and buy costumes from store aisles that didn’t exist yet. She was just saying we couldn’t let anyone else make creative decisions for us. And we only had a few hours to decide.

We’d already spent the week swapping ghost stories on the playground, thinking we’d have some orange cookies and punch on Thursday and call it a Halloween. So you can imagine, on such short notice, how many straw-hatted farmers toting buckets and rakes and sheet-clad ghosts and high-heeled, beaded ladies stumbling over their mothers’ dresses were likely to show up for the “Extras” cast on Halloween morning.

But refreshingly, most of Miss Greenlee’s students managed to notch up their level of costume design to suit the “Supporting Role” category . . .

Villains and War Paint

Bobby Blackstone and Teddy MacDougal played villains, of course. They’d rubbed coal all over their faces and wrapped themselves together in a big. black funeral parlor awning.

They wouldn’t have said how they came by the awning, so nobody bothered to ask. But they were more than prompt to accommodate anyone cheeky enough to sneak a peek at them, baring their teeth and hissing in campy, Bela Lugosi voices, “We are the vicious two-headed spider and we’ve come to eat you up!”

Me, I just wanted to keep it simple.  And I sure wasn’t wearing a dress . . .

I had my fantasies about turning into a butterfly, but that wasn’t happening yet. Not according to the mirror, at least. My stubborn habit of dressing like a “tomboy” (as the gossips put it) wouldn’t permit such a delicate appearance in public on my part, anyway.

But the usual braids and overalls didn’t qualify as costume in Havenwood. So I got the idea I might use the occasion to honor my Native American ancestors, tied a strip of buckskin around my forehead, two mockingbird feathers in back and said I was an Indian. At least it was easy.

And as it turned out, I was also glad I’d declined Mama’s offer to borrow her lipstick for war paint. Katy Winthrop’s cheek rouge was enough for one day . . .

When I guessed correctly that Katy’s cheeks were meant to look like big red cherries to compliment the plastic fruit piled on her head, you’d think she’d just won the lottery, the way she squealed and carried on to thank me. But I must say, for a shy, plain girl who sat in the back of the classroom and kept to herself, I had to admire her daring on that headdress.

In my opinion, Katy was clearly the star of the show. And since Miss Greenlee’s other rule was that nobody could make fun of your costume, I figured she’d be safe in that respect.

Righteous Miss Hickey, however, was so offended by the blasphemy of such a thing as anyone ever wearing a costume (let alone to school) that when Mister Attabee gave us permission to stage a costume parade over lunch time, you could practically see locomotive smoke shooting from Hickey’s ears.

As we single-filed, smiling and waving in our disguises, past the open doors of the cafeteria and classrooms along the hall, older students whistled and cheered and teachers waved back and applauded.

Quilt by Susan Propst

Some played like they were afraid; others looked duly impressed, especially with Blackstone and MacDougal’s two-headed whatever-it-was. Even the weird science teacher, Mister Salamander, raised his eyeballs off the jar of brains on his desk long enough to refocus on mad-cow Clayton and the Siamese spider twins.

But all Miss Hickey could do was sputter and fume and claw at her breast, like she was being murdered by the very brazenness of it all. And I’m sorry, but that was downright entertaining . . .

All told looking back, it was a day to remember . . .

And when the final bell rang to end it, my mates and I poured out the door and scattered into the blustery autumn wind like a flock of well-dressed scarecrows, clutching our spooky artwork to share with home and family.

~

Excerpts from HAVENWOOD TALES Beginnings

by D.J. Houston

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MORE HALLOWEEN MEMORIES at “Halloween Art – School Nostalgia“

Copyright©2007, 2013 D.J. Houston. All Rights Reserved.

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Halloween Art – School Nostalgia – Funny Stories

Sometime around mid-October, with lots of spookiness and a hint of mirth in her playful voice, Miss Greenlee made a terribly important-sounding announcement.

“Halloween is coming! It’s Halloween! We must prepare!”

Naturally, none of us farm-country kids who’d come up during the war years had ever even celebrated Halloween. We didn’t have a clue where to start. But Miss Greenlee’s exuberance was, as always, contagious as the pox, and the whole class went saucer-eyed.

My own ideas were limited.

On Halloween night the year before, Mama and some of her women friends from the Sand & Gravel plant drove Timmy and me to a harvest festival on a farm way out in the boonies.

We played at dodging shadows and bobbed for apples floating in a big washtub along with some other kids, while the grownups traded pumpkins and baskets of corn and nuts and such around a roaring bonfire in the dark. But other than sensing somebody watching me from behind a tree and the hair on my arms standing up, it was pretty uneventful.

As for the idea of trick-or-treating on Halloween, it usually got too cold at night by late October for kids to be running around outside begging candy from Havenwood folks. Nobody had kept extra candy during the war and the habit stuck, and the houses were too far apart for any big hauls if they had any.

But in that freer world of 1946, nothing said we couldn’t celebrate at school . . .

Spiders, Bats and Hump-Backed Cats

With the able tutelage of Miss Greenlee, our gang launched into the spirit of things and learned as we went along.

After a titillating, quick study of the history of Halloween in the Old Country, we created a host of orange and black construction paper silhouettes for decorations, American style. Hairy spiders, hump-backed cats, witches on brooms and flying bats and toothy jack-o-lanterns got traced and cut and tacked around the classroom walls to leer at anyone who dared to look.

The boys from Shop Class brought in a ladder and hung some from the ceiling, dangling from lengths of feed sack string that let the creatures sway and swirl whenever a draft blew in under the door.

And there were times when they moved all on their own – I know it’s true, I saw it happen with my own eyes. And I wasn’t the only one.

Tales about the figures moving on their own, however, were classified as top secret, and could only be embellished amongst ourselves. That was the rule.

So our whole class had to swear a pact of secrecy. We swore in the Shop Class boys and Miss Greenlee, too, for good measure. And with abundant giggles, loud shushes and plenty of bad acting, we pretended the source of all those spooky decorations was surely “a mystery.”

“Gee, they were just here when we got here.”

“We have no idea.”

“Honest.”

And so the story went for any outsider who might inquire, especially the older kids who thought we were cute and would drop by before their classes to play along. And our impishness and those innocent thrills only fueled further collusion, as the camaraderie between us swelled like a fearsome juggernaut.

The Halloween Muse

The Halloween Muse had sequestered our lives and rendered us unstoppable — a force to be reckoned with.

We kept cranking out spooky artwork until we ran out of the whole semester’s supply of construction paper.  Without skipping a beat, Miss Greenlee assigned us to gather up all the fabric scraps we could scavenge and bring them to school. And from every description of colorful cloth, we proceeded to cut out strange-looking trees shapes, people and animals and their various habitats, gluing them onto long panels of brown butcher paper with homemade flour and water paste.

Prissy ran the glue factory crew at a table hidden in the trees behind our building, keeping us well supplied with buckets of yeasty-smelling paste. And while others cut and I designed, the old hardwood floor of the classroom protested our messy business in grumpy silence.

Hand-painted touches were added to make the whole scene look more Halloweeny with hoot owls, ghosts and gravestones. Sketches of skeletons, scary skulls and three pairs of glaring wolf eyes, courtesy of the hooligans Bobby Blackstone and Teddy MacDougal, completed the work. And panel by panel, the kaleidoscope final mural depicting our very own Halloween Village — our masterpiece — was spread across the windows, wrapped around the walls and covered both sides of the door.

We were beyond elated! Life was a Halloween party!

The rest of the school would have killed to know what we were up to. And predictably, the whole happy scenario infuriated the dickens out of dreadful old Miss Hickey.

~

From the novel HAVENWOOD TALES Beginnings

by D.J. Houston, Author

Copyright©2008, 2013 D.J. Houston. All Rights Reserved.

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Havenwood Tales Beginnings – Secrets of Gifted Children

“. . . the magic of that last, abiding summer of my freedom before the era of my schooling years began was too often lost in longing to see Mister Walling . . .”

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INSPIRATIONS from the novel HAVENWOOD Tales Beginnings

by Author, D. J. Houston

For all its endless sunny days and amazing Milky Way nights, the magic of that last, abiding summer of my freedom before the era of my schooling years began was too often lost in longing to see Mister Walling.

It took more miles than I could walk in a day to reach his secluded cabin and still make it back home before dark.  But I didn’t dare ask anyone to drive me there.  I had decided that his and mine was a private friendship, and revisiting his world would be a journey I would have to make alone.

And although I would cling to my childhood for as long as I could get away with it, that decision marked a clear beginning of the end to it for me . . .

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Life in Havenwood – The Miracle of Mister Walling

HAVENWOOD TALES ~ BEGINNINGS 

“And as predictable as the cycles of the moon, you felt very alive and fortified in his presence, imbued somehow with your own capacity for higher understanding  . . .”

–

Mister Walling was, pure and simple, a world of his own.  And he was different from anyone anywhere I’ve been since the days of Havenwood.

Truth be told, I rarely ever saw him. It happened in the course of my living that the journey itself absorbed me more than my quest for truth.  And yet Gabriel White Cloud Walling became an indelible part of my life, as necessary as my dreams and the ground I walked on . . . . .

He never intimated there was anything out of the ordinary about his appearance. And I really enjoyed looking at him.

His condition seemed so natural, it never occurred to me to ask if there might have been strange circumstances. Or an accident at birth. Or any other meat-brained question I already knew wasn’t the answer. And because he conducted himself as a quiet and unassuming, good-natured creature and I’d heard no one complain or say he was odd, it seemed to me, initially, that folks around Havenwood had accepted him for the miracle he was — until I realized that he was never spoken of.

Miracle of Spirit

Photocanvas by D.J. Houston

Yet the best I could track, Mister Walling had lived deep in the same patch of woods past the north shore of Silver Bear Lake above Havenwood for well over half a century before I even met him. And he didn’t seem to me to be what folks would call a bona fide recluse; he just preferred to keep to himself, choosing his people and causes of his own accord.

His value sprang from the stories he shared with a privy few of each new generation. And those he touched knew in their hearts that a visit with Mister Walling promised, if just for a moment, a freedom from the stream of time — something sacred, eternal and true.

I think another reason he was so special was the fact that whenever you arrived to him, he already knew why your were there, whether you knew why or not.

And as predictable as the cycles of the moon, you felt very alive and fortified in his presence, imbued somehow with your own capacity for higher understanding—if not of what had happened, then surely of things to come . . .

Excerpts from the opening of HAVENWOOD TALES Beginnings

D.J. Houston, Author

Copyright©2006, 2014 D.J. Houston. All Rights Reserved.

Mystery Novel – Life Journey – Paranormal Intrigue – Visionary Fiction – Inspirations

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