Little Valley of Germania

About the Book

He mused as he sat there, as he often did, and his mind took backward flight.

They were young then, young man and woman; beyond childhood, but only by the slightest of measure––––only by a scant few years.  They met so long ago, in a renowned municipality of the Midwest arrayed on the banks of a great river. It was Kansas City.  On this evening two young girls were leaving a busily frequented pharmaceutical which housed a popular soda fountain and coffee shop that lured people of their age in droves, the most compelling attractant being a setting of small circular tables where between the hours of six and ten the young crowd gathered to talk and laugh and be with one another. 

"I'm Jonathan Ashley," he said.

"And I'm Katrina Annaheim," she replied.

"Who is this girl?" he queried to himself.  "Is she Roman, is she Indo-European, or is she Persian?"  He had read that young women of these lineages were the most beautiful in the world.  She looked of European strain, her dark eyes absorbing and dazzling and dazzling even more as she moved slightly into the glow of street lights,

They strolled the river's shoreline that evening as the water glimmered from the overhanging moon and the city lights from the bluffs above, and threw pebbles and rocks as far as their strength would allow, tracing the ripples in chase of one another, the first pursued by the second, the second pursued by the third and so on until all faded into darkness.  Katrina sent a cord of amusement high into the air––––bursting with jubilance as her echo resounded from the opposite shore.

Such was their beginning, the kindling of a romance they thought would always be, but fate, as it sometimes strangely does, intervened, and they went their separate ways.  Said Jonathan of this once in his recollections, "How could something so perfect fade into nothing, something so supposed to last forever?  It was likened to a dream, a dream though which did not dissolve abruptly, as if a twig suddenly broken, but slowly,

imperceptibly, much as the sinking sun which descends with infinite graduation towards the horizon so that when it dies––––when the horizon swallows it up––––when there is no more glow, no one can say that its descent was measurable in inches or mili inches, or measurable at all.  They can only proclaim that it sank before their very eyes and saw not one movement.

In time, waiting hopelessly, Katrina married.  She was an exquisite prize for any man.  As Jonathan reclined to those days with her, though so brief, he admonished himself with all the severity that his heart could muster for letting her slip his grasp. "The fault was mine, not hers," he acknowledged to himself.  Did he believe her heart would wait forever? No one should expect as much, for not even the most tenacious heart can do that.  He pursued her too lightly, going for stretches far to gaping without calling her, without writing and without––––and this is the worst––––without being with her, holding her, loving her, saying love words that she yearned to hear.  Oh he had written, but not enough, he had called but too infrequently and as far as she was concerned never returned to be with her.  He was too busy, too engrossed at climbing the proverbial ladder of success, as does many a young man until realizing it is too late, too late to turn around because what he is turning around to is no more.

It was so, he supposed, that she suppressed his image into the deepest recesses of her consciousness and that in the coming years she was as a good mate should be, loving, caring, and devoted.

About the Author

Joseph W. Morris was born November, 1930 in the small town of Atwood, Tennessee.  It was at the height of the Great Depression and as many families were in that era, his family was poor.  They were sharecroppers.  At a young age, due to his father's failing health, he shouldered much responsibility as the family breadwinner.

 His fascination with literature took root in elementary school, where he heard for the first time the ancient story of Beowulf, and then in later school years, by then an incessant reader, he opened the pages of Ivanhoe, Lady of the Lake, and Silas Marner.

 As World War II got under way a different form of subject matter commenced to attract him.  With a flourish of enthusiasm he began to follow the daily accounts of the military struggles in the European and South Pacific theaters, which ultimately led to a keen interest in geography and history.

Literary artists whose horizons he would thoroughly penetrate included Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and a myriad of Russian novelists, all of whom influenced him greatly.

He obtained college degrees in Texas, Tennessee and Mississippi, with the doctorate earned at the University of Mississippi, where on occasions he saw the enigmatic William Faulkner, his idol, milling around the Courthouse Square in Oxford studying the people he so often wrote about. 

After a long career as a university teacher and administrator the author has now turned toward a life-long love of writing, a result being "Little Valley of Germania," a poignant story of true and everlasting love.

He has the heart of a dreamer and romanticist and his characters, at one and the same time, reflect idealism and reality.