Client-fathered, your
child: you took her to a new
life. Grown, she wed a
farmer---preacher's son; they gave
you thirteen fine grandchildren.
Kyakuchuu
Author's Notes/Comments:
I believe a lengthy note may be appropriate here. This Tanka is based on family legend; and those who witnessed the events are not longer living. They tell me that my great-great grandmother, Amy, fled her family's farm in Indiana when she was fifteen, and went to New York, where she found work as a prostitute. She was very small of stature (my father called her "little grandma"), which, at that time, was considered to be an ideal tyoe of beauty for a prostitue---small statured and adolescent, or looking adolescent. A client by the name of Michael Adams fathered a child upon Amy, a child she named Lucinda. Amy fled from New York to New Carlisle where she met and married the son of the owner of several grist mills, and this young man (I believe he was twenty-two when the married) raised Lucinda as his own child (they had no others). When she reached adulthood, Lucinda married the son of a local preacher, who had rebelled aginst his father's wishes by become a farmer. They operated a prosperous and pleasant farm---to which my father often went to spend whole summer months with them---and they gave Amy, and the old Preacher, thirteen grandchildren. Amy outlived her daughter by one year, and had spent her elderly years on the farm being cared for by her daughter and son-in-law and all those grandchildren. The farmer, my great-grandfather, had thirteen "wind-up" clocks with chimes, one for each room in the house, and when he became old he distributed these two his grandchildren. My father was one of them, and his clock is now on my mantle. I do not know what room of the farmhouse my clock was in, but it was there when my great-great grandmother, Amy, lived there.
