Katy
North Dakota, leaving and returning • a TWO-MINUTE Memory
Leaving, 1936
He was an immigrant, an uneducated German-Russian farmer. He knew how to manage his large family. He knew his duty as a father, a husband, and a man. He had the God-given right and responsibility to keep his wife and his children in line, and often beat them with his belt. He had the right to bully his five young sons, keep them out of school and work them like beasts in the fields, the right to humiliate his wife and abuse his only daughter, Katy. He was, after all, the master of his house.
Without any concept of hypocrisy, he piously went to mass every Sunday at St. Boniface to kneel and pray, to genuflect and intone — a man with a clear conscience, absolved by the priest, and absolutely oblivious of any personal commissions of sin or cruelty.
When Katy, at age 16, suddenly disappeared, he was dumbfounded.
Returning, 1955
Katy came back to the family home after many years, but nearly everyone and everything was gone. The house, was an empty frame, the symbol of a family long since disintegrated.
She stood remembering the long days of her childhood, of tending cows, digging turnips, shoveling snow. She remembered washing overalls, harvesting, the long days of threats, the nights of fear.
She stood before the persistent wind that blew across the heated fields, and listened to the voices in her memory. She breathed in the sweet fragrance of grass and knew that all danger had passed.
Sarah McLaughlin sings about hope and rescue In the Arms of the Angel
To read more about the remarkable life of Katy, and how she fared living on her own in Butte, Montana after leaving her difficult family, click HERE for the special Katy Memoir section of 🌿Leaves.
That picture of Katy at sixteen, looking into the distance toward a brighter future--just touches my heart.
Having the need to leave home and return years later finding resolution and peace is priceless.