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    A Collection of Poems by Anna Switzer-Howard
    A Collection of Poems by Anna Switzer-Howard
    A Collection of Poems by Anna Switzer-Howard
    Ebook109 pages29 minutes

    A Collection of Poems by Anna Switzer-Howard

    By Anna Switzer-Howard

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    About this ebook

    This is a collection of poems written by my departed Aunt Anna Switzer-Howard. Aunt Anna was a housewife in the small rural community of Pawnee near Springfield, Ill. Aunt Anna raised eight children in the decades of the late 40s until the early 70s. Aunt Anna had the very busy life of a housewife struggling to manage a large household on a modest income. You will find a deep appreciation for the beauty and the symmetry of nature, and her respect for and faith in its Creator. Her poems are about love of family, strength of character, responsibility, Christian duty, and morality. They are about appreciating the simple joys that all of us are given, regardless of our station in life, but which many of us miss because we are too self-absorbed. They are about the love, heartbreak, happiness, and serenity of a woman who lived the life of a mother raising children in the heartland of America in the decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Hers was a life that was extremely well lived, and her poetry is not braggadocio or self-aggrandizement. To the contrary, it is honest, simple, appreciative, and loving – as she was.

    Her poems are a compliment to all of the women of her generation who mothered our generation so well. They are a salute to those who saw themselves as “only” mothers and wives, and did it tirelessly, faithfully, and rarely complained nor asked for accolades. Aunt Anna and mothers of her quality took selfless pride in the accomplishments of their children, and wept silently out of a sense of their own failure for their children’s mistakes.

    Aunt Anna died in November of 2005. She apparently wrote these poems over much of her adult life. They were not shared with or known to anyone until two of her children discovered them by accident just a few years before her death. They had been written on pages, scraps of paper, and were hidden away in a cedar chest in her bedroom.

    Please read Aunt Anna’s poems. Their simplicity of construction belies their beauty and elegance. She did not use the magnificent metaphor or the grand simile, or complex meter or brilliant alliteration. Rather, her unpretentious assembly of ordinary words creates poetic verse that flows softly, meaningfully, and with a comforting grace. Aunt Anna’s poetry should be a tribute to millions of American mothers in her generation who likewise shared her morality, her strength of character, her love of family, and her appreciation of nature, but lacked such an elegant voice to express it.

    I have copyrighted these poems per agreement with her children, my cousins; and am publishing them as way of paying respect and gratitude for her life by myself and my cousins. I plan to make hard copies available on demand.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnna Switzer-Howard
    Release dateJan 14, 2016
    ISBN9781311447517
    A Collection of Poems by Anna Switzer-Howard
    Author

    Anna Switzer-Howard

    This profile is of the nephew who published this book. The preface to the book gives a profile of the author, my Aunt Anna Switzer-Howard. .I am a retired technology manager and marketing director. I worked in the petroleum refining industry for 33 years. I began my college education by going to night classes at William and Mary college while I was stationed at Langley Air Force Base in Hampton Virginia. I loved English literature and history, however I felt engineering would be a better career. Not sure if that had to be true, but I was from a small farm in Illinois, and I didn't know much about the world then. I was discharged in 1966 and enrolled full time in the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Illinois. I did quite well in engineering, so well I got a Fellowship and went to graduate school at UC Berkeley. I started my career in research and development. I moved through various jobs in engineering design, business planning,management, a liaison to the law department, and spent the last 12 years of my career marketing refining technology. I took up flying and flew airplanes for 15 years on the weekends for recreation. I loved flying and going to airshows in those days. I met and married a lovely woman in China in 1999, and we were transferred tp Europe almost immediately. We saw every country in Europe and Scandinavia, Russia, and many countries in Eurasia, and most in the Middle Ease. After I retired, we moved to China to live in 2005. We lived there four years and I returned to my first love, English, and taught it at Dalian University. I returned to another love of mine, motorcycle riding which I had done throughout my college years and a few years thereafter until my youngest brother was killed on one. In China I rode across Xinjiang, on the old Silk Trail route, and across the daunting Taklamaken desert. When I returned to the US, I bought a couple of motorcycles and I ride long camping trips, usually 5000 to miles, at least once per year. I have ridden every significant motorcycle road from the western side of the Dakotas and north of Mexico. I have ridden in Alberta and British Columbia twice, but have yet to make it to Alaska by land. I have traveled to at least 60 countries, partly because my technology marketing job sent me all over the world for 12 years. I write poetry, some short stories, and I love history. I write because I like to write. I never wrote for publication, but now I think I will publish some of my poetry for sure, and perhaps some of my history essays.

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      Book preview

      A Collection of Poems by Anna Switzer-Howard - Anna Switzer-Howard

      Aunt Anna’s Poetry

      This book is a collection of my Aunt Anna Switzer-Howard’s poetry. I hyphenated her name to ensure that her Switzer lineage was known to her readers. Aunt Anna would never have done that. Her birth name was Anna Maude Switzer, the second child of Alva D. Switzer and Bertha L. (Mader) Switzer. She was born September 21, 1916 on a small farm that had come to her father from his mother’s side of his lineage. My mother was also born on that farm, and my father bought it from my Grandmother Switzer in 1947, about one year after the death of my Grandfather Switzer. I was raised on that farm from the age of two until I left home at the age of 17 when I enlisted in the United States Air Force. The farm was approximately two miles west of Winchester, Illinois. At the time Aunt Anna was born, Winchester was a town of approximately 1000 people. It was then, throughout my childhood, and remains today, a small rural town whose economy depends almost exclusively on the farming community surrounding it.

      This book is dedicated to Aunt Anna, and except for my introduction, it consists exclusively of her poetry.

      I suppose that Aunt Anna got her love of literature and poetic talent from her mother, our Granny Switzer. Granny Switzer did not write poetry to my knowledge, but she was a voracious reader and had a wit as sharp as a scimitar and wisdom of human nature as deep as a Death Valley water well. Throughout her life Aunt Anna enjoyed reading, although I would imagine she had precious little time for it until her eight children were mostly grown and out of her home. She graduated from Winchester High School in 1934. Anna may have had aspirations to teach, but opportunities for education for women born into rural families of limited means were almost nonexistent during her young adulthood. She did study for one year as a post graduate at Winchester High School, and she focused on poetry and literature during that school year. Anna left home shortly thereafter to live with and to care for her aged and invalid aunt in Kincaid, Illinois. She also did other housekeeping work while she lived with her aunt.

      Anna had been a member of the Winchester Methodist Church and while living in Kincaid, she attended a nearby Methodist Church. She was introduced to John Howard by a lady friend whom she met

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