The Magic of Ordinary Days / Ann Howard Creel / Prologue / Audiobook (2023)

Introduction

Olivia Dunne, a studious minister's daughter who dreams of becoming an archaeologist, never thought that the drama of World War II would affect her quiet life in Denver. But when an exhilarating flirtation reshapes her life, she finds herself in a rural Colorado outpost, married to a man she hardly knows. Overwhelmed by loneliness, Olivia tentatively tries to establish a new life, finding muchneeded friendship and solace in two Japanese American sisters who are living at a nearby internment camp. When Olivia unwittingly becomes an accomplice to a crime and is faced with betrayal, she finally confronts her own yearnings and comes to understand what she truly believes about the nature of trust and love.

Read by Zhuk Anastasia.

Music : It Came Upon a Midnight Clear by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Source: incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html

Artist: incompetech.com/

Video

Is the magic of ordinary days and hobbit krill prologue? I don't often think back to that year, the last year of the war its days, its decisions, not unless I'm out walking the dawn of a quiet winter morning when new snowfall has stunned into silence the lands around me when even the ice crystals in the air hold still on those morning of frozen perfection, when most living creatures keep to a warm bed or a deep ground hole.

I pull on my heaviest old boots and set out to make first tracks through the top crust and let the early dawn know I'm still alive and appreciating every last minute of her fine lavender light.

Then I remember I'll begin this tale.

On the day of my sister wedding, almost 24 years to the day after I came crying out onto earthy slippery soil, it was april 1944.

The allied forces were preparing to invade france and put an end to the worst war in history.

While back on the home front, some of us managed to go on with that might have been considered normal lives on a saturday a buttery spring day along the front range of the rockies.

My baby sister beatrice was marrying her high school sweetheart.

Then a newly commissioned army officer and leaving me the only done daughter not yet married, the oldest of three sisters and still unmarried.

It was an oddity that would not go unnoticed, especially by my aunts, as we waited in the receiving line.

Aunt eloise commented about the quality of the catches made by my sisters during the war offices.

Commanded the highest regard, an abigail nearest to mean age still held top rank in that department, as she had called herself a high ranking officer and a medical doctor to boot.

If only you hadn't always been compared to those sisters of yours and eloise, said aunt, pearl added, you might have been considered quite attractive by yourself.

My aunts were not cruel.

You understand they loved to talk and at every available opportunity.

They gave away their neatly wrapped presence of their thoughts, confident that no one would refuse them, and also I sometimes ached, to talk back to them.

I had been taught a well by my parents to respect my elders instead of pursuing marriage at summer's end and after complexion of only two more classes and the approval of my tithis, I would receive my masters in history from the university of denver.

My fascination with history started with the first lesson ever taught to me in grammar school.

As my teacher described the sea passages of christopher columbus, I could so easily imagine myself a stowaway girl on one of his ships.

I could see the promise of full sails below and out above me and fill the sharp tips of salt water veins.

If I had been there, I would have climbed the ship's must and looked out the horizon for new lands.

Myself formal study at the university had always seemed more destiny that choice.

Unfortunately, the war had forced postponement of my fall plans to travel overseas as part of an academic expedition because of a world going astray.

My path was thrown with the debris of war and my journey with archaeologists, anthropologists and other historians to study the excavation sites of the land of sealed, domes egypt and the ancient city of horizon of the aton would have to wait during bear's wedding reception.

My aunts pointed out to me that now more than ever, single girls had good odds of husband, catching from mps training in golden to airmen at lowry, air base and beckleyfield to medical personnel at fitzsimons, available soldiers filled denver, streets, usos and bars, but not just any private would do those in our social circle wanted to duplicate their sketch by latching on to at least an officer, perhaps even a doctor, like abby's, or a pilot that loved his catch in the yereshu of the uniform.

But I had never run my life in order to meet men or find romans.

Although I wasn't immune to those things either.

I'd always dreamed that someday love would come into my life in some spectacular fashion.

Probably it would happen in another country on border sheep, most likely it would unfold during one of my future treks to uncover a secret of history.

One side of me knew that these were the dreams of an experienced girl and yes, I was inexperienced with love, but it didn't bother me every day.

It didn't bother me secretly.

I hope to always disagree with my aunts.

That way.

I know I hadn't succumbed to the limited view of so many of their generation, but my dear mother, I could see how my aunt's comments wounded her recently.

However, I would convinced her to stop stepping in, on my behalf, early on, I had learned my place on the family wall and found it not such an uncomfortable place to hang my sisters and I wearing speechless motionless tulips or ferns in their pattern of wallpaper.

In the years of our girlhood, we could mingle and socialize during family outings abby bear and I often stood at the front of my father's church in the theater lobby at the country, club or museum, and we had become well practiced in the art of pastoral family presentation and after years span before others at the either perusal of relatives and friends.

I knew exactly what I was.

I was the practice drug among the navajo traditional viewers learn their art by first weaving a rough rug.

It is a chance to hone their skills.

The rock may contain loose theft, uneven corners and other flaws.

After this essential practice, however, the weaver may go on to produce masterpieces, and so it was with my family.

I thought of myself at the first rather average attempt at a daughter.

Then after my birth, my parents brought into the world two rare beauties.

I had the most common color for brown hair, a forehead a bit too broad and a small lima bean shaped birth mark.

Just above my upper lip, my sisters were masterpieces woman of warm wall, natural blondes with unmarked skin and real smiles, not painted on hot canvas, and they are where approachable, so that admires didn't hold themselves back.

So unusually blessed abigail and beatrice neither competed with me.

Nor did they gloat, despite the inevitable comparisons.

Mother always pointed out the good qualities.

I did have she'd say that my fingers were long and tapered that I always sat tall in a chair and that my teeth had come in straight and white like a row of dominoes, and you are as sharp as a tech.

You are she'd say with a hug someday you're going to go places as we grow up.

My sisters played with dollhouse and dreamt of futures beside successful husbands, whereas I became gripped by the past.

The stories and struggles of olden days worked their way from the crap paper pages of old books and under the seal of my skin.

I was the slow shown guide, sacagawea leading luis and clark on the expeditions, or I was a pioneer woman leading her clan out west on one of the first wagon trains.

As I grew into a young woman, a need to understand and experience began to drive me.

My whole body became part of the chase, the desire for a fresh, find sipped out of my every pore.

It was mother who understood she helped me fill in my application for the university and collect references she plotted out on the map with me all the places I might want to go.

But although many a learned woman wanted to deny its importance, even mother admitted that in our society, beauty was still prized about knowledge and wisdom in a woman despite female accomplishments that for the first time held us up in a place where our feet could walk the earth at the same level as our male counterparts, many men most wanted a pretty image hooked on their arms.

And yes, although a woman no longer needed a husband mother hoped that maybe someday I would want one one who could appreciate me mind and all mother's honesty was something I had always thought I would have.

I relied on it whenever I remember bear's wedding day.

I always remember the flowers before bear left for her honeymoon.

She gave me a white rose.

She had singled out and plucked from the bouquet before the bridal toss, and this I waxed and kept on the polished top of my dresser in the monsters that followed and on that day not only had the church and the country club been filled with lilies gardenias and roses, but outside on the city streets and in the parks.

The crabable trees had been blooming.

Every branch decked with blooms of pink white and fuxia.

So deep in color, it almost came to purple.

That's bring the crabable blossoms felt to the ground.

Over a period of several weeks, coating the sidewalks and streets with cupped petals, so sick, the concrete beneath them disappeared.

My mother had always loved the crabable blossoms and I like to believe their abundance.

That spring was gifted to her during the wedding and reception she held herself up well with plenty of smiles and gracious small talk in the face of compliments of for the wedding.

Once I had her that every person must complete something of importance before he or she dies and perhaps witnessing her youngest daughter's marriage had been just that for mother.

She smiled and chatted with friends and members of father's congregation throughout the long reception as if it would have been impolite to show any sign of her illness.

Father directed the event and would have tolerated little less than perfection.

Then afterward mother, slipped away over several weeks like water, in slow moving streams gradually sinks into the soil.

My sister is busy with marriage and my father preoccupied with church duties.

I was the one who left school to be with her.

I was the one who eased her away.

Perhaps it was mother's untimely death, perhaps because the cancer caused her to suffer so or perhaps another absence between us caused the cause of it all to change.

But after her death, even my father lost his typical stand: control in the first weeks he all but abandoned our two-story house in danvers park hill neighborhood that mother had always maintained with pride in our house.

Fingerprints had rarely lasted long on the furniture and any chipped dishes had been given away father, let stacks of mail pile up on the foyer table and he closed up other rooms to collect dust.

He submerged himself in even more work of the church, and although we kept two radius one in the kitchen and another in his study, father would allow no music in the house.

After all, a singer's voice might sound like hers and we couldn't have flowers around again, although at the time of her death, the gladiolas wear up their tall stalks stabbing the sky and their blooms open, silently screaming.

I've been often wounded even to this day.

Why, during painful times, some people seem to step away from themselves and make decisions that fall far out of their usual line of character and behavior.

Perhaps a natural reluctance to sit still in central or perhaps like the lesser animals instinct forces us to go on.

Even if grief has left us not up to the task, but no one could have guessed that the oldest the strongest, the most independent daughter, would be the one most altered by her death.

In the next few months, I put into motion the strange set of circumstances that would later find me losing my plans, the ones I'd mapped out with my mother.

In one fleeting moment, I stripped away the petals of my future.

Let them catch wind and fly away.