The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Jeanne Dunn has knack for writing
Jeanne Dunn: Memoir details struggles, triumphs through the years
CANASTOTA » Jeanne Dunn recalls her most wretched Christmas Day in her memoir, “Where Once There Were Thorns.”
Her kids Eric and Rebecca were toddlers during that holiday season in the mid-1970s as the phone rang on Christmas Eve. Dunn suggested it might be Santa Claus calling as the children excitedly turned their attention towards the telephone. She answered with a cheery, “Hello and Merry Christmas!” only to hear a voice on the other end of the line that delivered some bad news.
“Not Santa,” she mouthed as she tried to hide her own dejected emotions from the children.
The caller on the other end of the phone was her mother, Joan Wilhite, telling Jeanne that she and the kids were invited to Christmas dinner. Then mother added the heart-breaking demand, “But that man is not.”
“I don’t want him to be around our family,” the caller said sternly.
“That man” was Michael Dunn, Jeanne’s husband. She cried and prayed to find an answer of how to respond to that ultimatum, Jeanne said, and she even asked Michael himself what he thought she should do. He told her it was up to her to decide.
Jeanne took the kids to her parents’ house that Christmas morning. But she would not stay for dinner, knowing Michael was home alone, without her nor his children on Christmas Day.
Wanting to preserve her history so her grandchildren’s grandchildren would know about her life and her faith, Jeanne decided to tell her tale through “Where Once There Were Thorns.” She recalls how she fell in love with Michael, her high school sweetheart, back in the mid-1960s when she was 17, much to her over-protective mother’s dismay.
Jeanne was a very studious young woman, dedicated to her school work. Michael smoked cigarettes and wore a leather jacket. One day, Michael offered her a ride home, and then asked if she would go on a date with him. She ended up quitting col- lege at SUNY-Brockport at the beginning of her second semester because she missed him somuch.
When they were engaged her mother showed up at the door one day with a threat.
“I will stop this wedding if it’s the last thing I do,” Jeanne was told.
That marriage indeed took place in 1969, although that still didn’t ease her mother’s apprehension. But Jeanne says now that she knows her late mother only wanted what was the best for her.
“I love my mom very much, and I know she loved me,” Jeanne said. “It was all for the love of me that she did the things she did. I know she would be proud of me now.”
Jeanne’s mother’s parents had divorced when she was young, and she was sent to a boarding school, she explained, while Jeanne’s father grewup in an orphanage. Mom only wanted to make sure she didn’t have that kind of a life, Jeanne figures.
She stresses her memoir indeed ends happily, as through God’s grace and her faith they finally come through their animosity before her mother passed.
After taking 14 painful years to write the book, “Where Once There Were Thorns” came out in 2015. Her second book, “Collecting Moments: A Gathering of Po- ems & Paintings,” was released in 2016. Both are published under her full name of Jeanne Wilhite Dunn and available from her or through Amazon.
“Collecting Moments” combines Jeanne’s love for writing poetry with her own watercolor artistry. There are nearly 50 of her poems in the book, illustrated with her paintings. Much of her poetry is about nature and aspects of the world she has seen through her traveling -- she and Michael have been to seven continents in their life together, she said -- and although she only classifies herself as a “beginning artist,” her love for that work shows through as well.
She said her penchant for the written word goes back as long as she can remember. Even growing up, she never watched television shows like “Lassie,” she said … she was more interested in word game shows like “Password.”
“I love words,” she said. “I love their wonder and their power. In the bible, it says that God spoke all of creation into being … words are powerful.”
Today, Jeanne is retired from Oneida Healthcare as a registered nurse after 34 years, their kids have grown, and the couple live on their Frog Hollow Homestead hobby farm in Canastota. She admits she isn’t trying to get
rich from sales of her books; she simply wants them to inspire others with her story of faith through life‘s many twists and turns.
“I am just a Canastotian, and happy to have lived a
blessed life,” she said.