Annie & Jennie

When he was little it was Jody but before the teen years he shed that for Joe. He denies being an artist but he is. Linda’s mother was gifted in most any medium an artist works in, painting still lifes, landscapes, portraits, abstract. From early childhood Joe has been artistic too and he exercised it constructing models ranging easy to very difficult. I could do snap together plastic cars but Joe built incredibly complicated models of all sorts.

After Patty died he built a 1935 Chris Craft runabout, beautiful, detailed design, intricate construction, operating mechanics. Months and months of work, evening and weekend hours. Last summer he brought the boat when he came to visit and we ran it in the Bay down front and in Lake Caroline. Most boats are named for girls or women we love. Joe christened her Miss You Patty.

Joe is a thoughtful, kind and loving person. Very concerned about my risk in having open heart surgery, he said he’d rather have his dad as I was than risk losing me on the operating table and he came to Cleveland to see me and be with his mom just in case. He knows of my affection for my Uncle Alfred and my sense that if Alfred had not died we would never have lived, family history bears that out. I live in Alfred’s house, sleep in Alfred’s bedroom, enjoy spring, summer and fall breakfast on Alfred’s upstairs porch looking out across the Bay to Shell Island. 

Alfred drowned on a bitter cold stormy night in January 1918 and his death changed the course of our family’s history. People who know me know that. The twin-masted schooner was wrecked, one of my grandfather’s fishing smacks, the Annie & Jennie, caught in a violent storm, grounded on a sand bar and dashed to bits outside the Old Pass leaving St. Andrew’s Bay enroute to Carrabelle. Pieces of the schooner were scattered eastward for miles along the coast and my grandfather walked among them for days looking for the body of his son. Eventually finding him, Pop brought him home and my father remembered Alfred's coffin by the fireplace in the front room here. Several months ago we did research about the size, design and coloring of the A&J and then Joe built a model. For me. A gift of love for me. 

The first week of May my aunt Mildred and a friend are coming to stay with my mother while Linda and I drive to North Carolina for the wedding of Patty’s daughter Lauren. Joe is “giving her away” and I am officiating. While we are there Joe is giving me the Annie & Jennie he built. Unlike the Miss You Patty this one is not motorized, it’s all sail. Joe says he expects it to be sailed in the bay not just on display in the dining room. 

It’s a beautiful creation

A gift of love

And life.

The Annie & Jennie.

TW+