Ascent—The Luna Moth

was also Scoutmaster for a Boy Scout troop sponsored by the Salvation Army for a few years. In 1968 two other employees and I organized our fellow employees at Wright-Bernet into a union. I was elected financial secretary of our local and served three years in that position until elected president, an office I held until my retirement in January, 1982. In 1978 our children were grown; two of them were married and the third had completed high school and got a job. My wife and I decided to part company. Two years later I got married again and my wife and I welcomed a beautiful baby daughter into our home in 1982. In 1980 I found I had emphysema, and my doctor recommended that I get out of the dusty environment of a factory. In 1982 I gave my resignation to both the shop and the union and moved back to Jackson County, Kentucky. During my thirty-two years in Hamilton, I always considered Kentucky my home. Most of my vacations were spent here and I came down on weekends as often as I could. Although I owned five different houses in Hamilton and had hundreds of friends there, Ohio never seemed like home to me. Ascent—The Luna Moth For weeks I'd found them everywhere in odd places. Fleshy green, marbled with yellow-flecked magenta and one pink eye, these things hung still and dumb from cherry trees and hedge rows, or lay windblown helpless in plush lawns. A couple were clamped tight in the glinting beak of a keen-eyed bird and a third squirmed panicked on the brick sidewalk by my home. There was nothing I could do for that one, nor for the one grasped by an ichneuman wasp, needle abdomen pumping the green thumb full of eggs that would hatch carnivorous—blind and hungry. I doubted any would survive. Then tonight as I sat on the back deck watching the thick-shelled June bugs stumble and barely lift themselves to the lamp beneath the copperwood, I felt the glimpse of one moth aspiring to the clear, soft moon in a certain, fluttering ascent. —M. F. Donakai So I came home. My father and mother, both near ninety, were invalids in a rest home. My father died in 1983 and I brought my mother home with me. My wife and I nursed her in my home until she joined Dad in 1984. 1 bought our old farm from my brothers and sister and plan to spend the rest of my life here. Most of the adults that I knew as a teenager here have passed on. I have visited many of the cemeteries around Jackson County and at each I see markers of people I have known. I am reminded of some amusing incidents that I remember about them or some kindness that they had shown me long ago. The hills are the same. The people are still friendly and helpful. My tractor got stuck in a swamp that I was trying to plow not long after I first came home. I walked to the house intending to call my brother to bring his tractor and pull me out. Before I got home a next door neighbor met me on his tractor. He had seen me stuck and had come down to pull me out. Another time my truck slid off the icy road and the first person who came along stopped and pulled me out with his truck. I had never met him before. These are my people, and this is my home. 51 ...