I'm missing my childhood. It's very easy to remember the early days, and quite difficult sometimes to recollect what someone just told me. Sad, really.
By the time I was about twelve years old, I was permitted to stay with my grandparents during the summer. That's what I miss the most. Then, there's the years we lived in the same, small town and summer became year round until I moved away.
I would ride to town with my grandfather in the mornings. He would get the mail and stop by the Brammer's to get a few groceries that Nan, my grandmother, needed and then we'd always stop by Mr. Teel's so he could shoot the breeze with a few other old timers. After that, we would go and deliver eggs to his customers. He sold them for fifty cents a dozen. My grandfather kept nearly a hundred chickens next to the house and it kept him in spending money and us in fried chicken.
We would coon hunt around his ten acre corn field and I'd play 'army' in the barn and use a big washtub, a stick and some string (using bread for bait) and try to trap as many of the feral cats that lived around there as I could at one time. I think my record was five. I thought it was so funny to hear them thumping on that washtub trying to get out. Yes...I was cruel in those days. What's your point?
I would climb up the china berry tree and pretend I was a pirate...I guess a tree pirate...and fill my uncle's tractor's gas tank up with china berries. He tried to get me to confess, but I knew it would be my certain death if I did. It took him all afternoon to stab those berries with a sharpened stick and he was not very happy.
The lightning bugs were very plentiful when I was a kid. I would take a mason jar and catch as many as I could and put them in it. Sometimes I could fill the jar and it was almost like having a magic lantern. On July 4th, I would buy as many Black Cat firecrackers as my grandparents would allow. That's when I declared war on the biggest fire ant mound I could find. There were a few occasions when I blasted them onto ME. This would cause me to create a new dance. None of them became a fad, but we didn't have YouTube back in those days.
Then, there was the food. You can have all the experience in the world as a chef or a cook, but if you don't put love into what you prepare, it will never taste as good as grandma's. My grandmother's chicken and dumplings was the cat's meow. Her homemade hamburgers were the best I've ever had....EVER. Thanksgiving was the bomb at Nan's. Talk about "puttin' on the dawg"!!! And never has there ever been a better batch of mayhaw jelly than what she could make. She would stand over a skillet for over an hour, frying a huge batch of yellow squash for me. The plate would be rounded over with this breaded delight and all I needed to do was add salt and pepper to taste.
Would I go back? No. I didn't even have to think about it. This journey of life is quite interesting and the things I've learned about myself and others...along with all the other knowledge and wisdom I may have acquired along the way...was not even imagined by me back then. No, I was a man of the wilderness, huntin' bar. Or, I would buy some comic books and lay down on the porch swing for hours and get lost in a make believe world. Even though I write mostly fiction, I do it because it's fun. But do I have a penchant for that realm? No, again. I like reality. In all it's forms, both beautiful and ugly. Still, I miss those times. They were simpler and less clogged with responsibilities and bills and work and so on.
The memories are enough. They're good memories, that bring a smile to my face. I think they are there to ease the weight of our reality sometimes. And that's not such a bad thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment