The old cotton mill right above my house.
There are certain days, certain things, certain thoughts that bring back memories…
Memories, that although they may be of happy times…
(But also because they are of happy times),
make me realize what I have lost.
I have this journal to write down my thoughts, my feelings, and my day to day life and I would be remiss if I didn’t write down yesterday’s.
But to make it understandable, I must go back…
Back to the days on Horseshoe Bend …
My grandmother had four children…My mama, my two aunts ( now deceased) and my Uncle Tommy (now deceased) ….He being the only son, my grandma doted on him and he lived with her all his life. Sadly, he died at a young age, (somewhere in his thirties), of a brain tumor.
Now that I am grown, I realize that my grandma never fully got over losing him.
what use to be the old mill pond in front of my house
After he died,being alone, my granny came to live with us out on Horseshoe Bend in that little four room house. We were crowded before she came in that little house….practically sleeping on top of each other. But back then, in those days, family took in family…no matter what…at least mine did.
Poor mama…she already had us six kids, and now she had her mama too. It is never easy to live with family, and as poor as we were, and as depressed as Granny was, I am sure it wasn’t easy at all on mama, to say the least.
It wasn’t easy on us kids either. I was only around five or six…but I remember…
on the side of my house
Granny slept next to the old potbellied wood stove on a ‘fold-up bed’. She also had a platform rocker that she sat in, crocheting doilies during the day.
Granny’s hands were never still…she was either crocheting or doing crossword puzzles, or writing little odds and ends, bits of memories, down on her Blue Horse writing tablet.
I felt, even at only 5 or 6 years old, in my little heart, that it was my job to keep Granny’s mind off Uncle Tommy. I loved her and I hated seeing her cry. She did pretty good at holding up…
Until it rained.
Yesterday- can you see the little birds?
When I was a little thing on Horseshoe Bend, I hated to see it rain…because I knew that granny would start sobbing softly. The harder the rain got…the harder the sobs got. We could hear her whispering throughout the sobbing…“it’s raining on my on my boy.”
No amount of pleading or trying to reason with her by my mama , nor me hugging her, or trying to talk to her, would stop the flow of tears…
They only ceased when the rain did.
I remember on the day of Danny’s funeral, a storm came up…
This was no ordinary storm….On Feb. 02, 2006, there were huge booms of thunder and long streaks of lightning…with tornado like winds and hail bouncing off the roof as I was saying my final goodbye to Danny at the funeral home, before he was taken by hearse to our church for the services.
As I stood on the church steps, waiting to go in, huge pelts of rain and hard pellets of hail began falling as the lightning flashed and the wind howled…I remember someone came up with an umbrella and held it over my head…and the thought that was going over and over like a broken record in my mind was… “Lord, please don’t let me be like Granny and cry every time it rains…please don’t let me dwell on such things.”
The first time it rained after Danny had been buried…I sat and I watched it out my window…then I eased out the door to my porch and I sat sat out there…and I waited for it to come…It being the sobbing that my Granny did.
It didn’t happen…God had heard my prayer, and I was able to actually enjoy the mild rain that was pitter-patting on my tin roof.
But then again, I do not believe that my Danny lies beneath that mound of grass in Greensboro Cemetery…
I believe Danny is with God.
my car, right after it started snowing
Yesterday, it snowed here in our little town.
Now, we down south, here in Georgia very rarely get snow.and when we do, it is a treat usually…Because we know, unlike our northern neighbors, it is probably the only snowfall for a year or so. The town closes, the schools close, and the kids and adults alike, have a ball playing in it.
Yesterday’s snow was beautiful. A good 4 – 5 inches of soft and fluffy white stuff, not the usual wet and heavy kind we usually get.
Anybody that knows me, knows that I have always loved the snow. While everyone else may be saying that they hope it passes on by…
I was always the girl singing… ‘LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW, LET IT SNOW’
So, there I sat, at my desk yesterday for most of the morning, alternately watching the weather channel, our local channel, and watching the radar screens…
Waiting for the snow.
I could feel that something was wrong within me…I found I was not excitedly waiting for it, but that the closer the blue blob on the radar screen got to our town …the angrier I got.
It was very disturbing to me and I could not put my finger on it. It was as if something had taken control over me and had killed off the girl who had actually prayed for snow before.
Wyatt, squatting down on my picnic table. I only got to see him a minute before they had to go back home.
When I saw that it was almost upon us, I got up and decided to go to the grocery store about a mile or two away. I needed to get the dry cat food that I had put off getting Saturday night when I got off work.
Before I was even half way to the store, it started snowing big huge flakes, and it seemed like the ground was white in an instant. My windshield was layered in it and all the windows and the back windshield were completely covered before I got to the store.
Once there, I hurriedly ran in, got the dang cat food, paid for it and left to get back into my car. Once I cranked the car, I found that I could not see how to back up…But after rolling my windows down, and taking my time, I was able to back up and I eventually made it back home, fussing the whole time.
Dan was with me and after hearing me fuss most of the way home, he said, “ Mama, what in the world is wrong with you…you usually love it when it snows…”
It is then that I started crying…and it made me so mad, because I sounded like Granny…and I had sworn I wouldn’t do that…not in front of my kids anyway.
After I got in the house and settled down a bit, it hit me….Down here, it only snows once…maybe twice a year if we are lucky…sometimes not at all. So every time that it had…we …my little family, had made it an extra holiday of sorts.
Danny would always be the first one out the door to build a snowman with the kids and throw snowballs. Not only with our kids, but usually with all the kids from the neighborhood, because all kids loved Danny.
He would take us in our old truck over the snow covered streets and we would end up at his mama’s house…where he would make sure to see her…and start the snowball fight all over again in her front yard…
We made snow ice cream…
We were a family.
I realized that I was crying because I miss that so much….and yet oddly enough, it is also because I can see him so vividly in my mind, that it hurts so bad….I miss seeing him in the snow….and I was angry because he wasn’t able to be here playing and having a good time….
I know this will not make sense to some, but it is the way I felt yesterday…and after I got over my crying…
I was okay…
Sort of.
GOD BLESS YOU ALL.
3/11/09
