Sitting Memories....

“Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you!”

Ogden Nash

I grew up in the South, in a little tiny rural town that had and still has a flashing red light at a four way stop, a railroad track running down the middle of main street, a couple of gas stations and more churches than you can count on your fingers.

We lived on the outskirts of town in an area

the locals called, "bean bottom."  I don't know why they called it that but rumor has it at some point the whole area was covered in beans.   As I got in high school we moved closer to the outskirts of the little town, but for most of my childhood, I lived in front of a train track that ran past our home.  My grandfather, known as Little pa, lived on one side of the small house my daddy built and my great grandparents, fatma and fatpa, lived on the other side of us with their large homegrown garden with a tiny path running from our house to theirs along side it, sitting in-between.  The grass was most often worn down on the path from the numerous times a day, my sister, brother and I traveled to Fatma's and Fatpa's.

Life was simple then.  Seems spring always brings me back to memories of flowers blooming, the smell of sweet honey suckle  mixing with the smell of freshly cut grass and cool breeze whipping through my hair.  It invites me to remember the slow days of childhood when often a day seemed like a year and in my child-like over developed imagination kind of way, I could move from being a queen on my throne to a cook in the the kitchen making mud pies, to some adventure seeking pirate climbing trees or astronaut swinging to the sky on my tree swing. 

 The landscape and the slow pace--coupled with the fact that our area of town only had good TV reception for the three channels available in the evening if you sat just right and held your mouth just right made playing outside and reading more appealing than the "world turns or guiding light" that my mama and fatma watched. 

Some of my favorite memories were sitting in chairs on my fatma's porch every afternoon.

Fatma would read the local paper from front to back. Fatpa would just listen and look out at the yard pretending like he was listenening to her commenting on what she was reading.  It seems the obituaries were often the most fascinating to her and it would not be uncommon to hear about the person's long lost cousin who married so-and-so's brother and moved down the hollar to so and so spark from the name of the person whose name might be listed in the obits.

I loved sitting there on the old porch, listening and talking and taking adventures inside Fatma's story telling tales.

We'd snap green beans while sitting or shuck freshly pulled corn and all the while, fatma would talk, telling me tales of

her mama and daddy and life back in the early 1900's. 

Sometimes we'd just laugh and joke.

Other times, we'd have one of those long winded "Sunday school" lessons about church and God and loving your neighbor and if we were real lucky--or not---Fatma would start to sing one of those fast paced church hymns in her southern twanged nasally way.

Sitting...

just taking time to sit and talk and think and be....

I miss those days,

miss my fatma,

miss the feel of cold iron from the chairs on the back of my short clad naked legs, miss the feel of paint chipped paint of chairs mixed with rust and miss the breeze that blew from the tall hickory tree next to the front porch.

Life was easy then.

Sitting easy...

The other day, while driving through a small farm town,

I spotted these chairs dotted up against a building.

I couldn't resist stopping for a bit,

touching them and taking a picture

and

having a moment...

to remember...

sitting kind of days...

sitting kind of memories...

sitting...

thankful for the flood

of

reflections of the past...

and thankful

for

a chance to sit.

May each of you

have a moment...

to clear your head,

stop for a moment,

smell the flowers and feel the breeze and

allow

the sacred to grab hold of the moment

and

invite you

to breath.

blessings to all of you tonight......