Random thoughts sometime come in my mind and stick around for a while… and they have me thinking back through the days of yonder…
Like…when I was a little bitty thing, back on Horseshoe Bend….during the summer mornings, sometimes mama would let us take a quilt outside to lay on the grass . After carefully making sure all the rocks and sticks were cleared away, we would lay that quilt down …and plop down on it…just to gaze up into a magnificent blue sky full of puffy white clouds floating lazily by. We would have such a good time seeing what we could make out of those clouds…faces, animals and such.
If I think hard enough, I can still smell the clover and the green grass beneath that quilt and hear the chickens cackling and the bees buzzing around us…feel the kitten’s soft furry bodies that always seem to be nuzzled up against our cheeks as we drifted off into sleep…lying out there on our quilt.
Those days come back to me frequently…in thoughts and memories…I can very distinctly hear my mama calling….“here chicky chicky, chicky”…as she fed our chickens in the back yard. I can see her now bending to scatter the feed from the old Rex lard can onto the dirt yard near the wooden smokehouse….or see her using that ax to split a huge piece of wood on the stump near the well, to be able to put it into the old potbellied wood heater so we children would be warm in the cold days of winter.
When that heater went out during the night , we were huddled together three to a bed and yet we still shivered from the cold…It galls me now to hear children moan and groan because they do not have their own room…heck, back then we never had our own bed….much less our own room…There was one bedroom where that heater was and we ALL slept there…and guess what….we survived.
We had no running water back in those days…no paint on the old wooden pine walls, nor rugs on the old wooden floors …Yes, we were poor…much poorer even than I am now…My children have never been able to even fathom how we use to live when I was small…they quite simply would not believe me when I tried to tell them how it was back when I lived on Horseshoe Bend.
Maybe that is a good thing…I don’t know…but sometimes, hard times in your life…well…if they don’t kill you…they will surely make you all the stronger for it…more able to stand doing without.
The way the economy is now…and the way people have hardened their hearts to the true poor of this country…there will be a lot more folks doing without.
I just read a quote in Time Magazine from Andre Bauer; lieutenant governor of South Carolina and republican gubernatorial candidate….he said; “My grandmother was not a highly educated woman, but she told me as a small child to quit feeding stray animals . You know why? Because they breed.”
He was criticizing policies that extended welfare benefits to the poor.
I find serious fault with such a biased remark.
Now, first let me make it clear that I do not get welfare benefits…Even when I was out of work for over three months I did not get ANY help from welfare…my niece did, however, buy me some groceries God bless her heart….so no, I am not on welfare…but I do take offense at these words from Mr. Bauer.
I find it hard to believe that anyone could be so callous as to say something such as this. For him to utter those words and not clarify them, is outrageous.
Sure there are many, many people on ‘the system’ that do not deserve to be there…illegal aliens being number one…I feel that if you have not paid into the tax systems here in AMERICA , why in the hell do you think you deserve any of the benefits that those tax pay for??? Become an American citizen and PAY TAX like the rest of us for gosh sake.
But there are some truly needy people…people, that for some reason or the other, do actually need help…
Our elderly population that only receive Social Security, and that have no other resources, being number one on the list…so yes it makes me livid to have read this quote from Mr. Bauer.
Oh, and another thing that crossed my mind today…
There wasn’t a stray animal, nor for that matter, a stray human being, that my poor mama didn’t feed or at least try to…and she barely had enough to feed us or herself…
And you know what???
I wouldn’t have wanted her to be any other way.
GOD BLESS YOU MY MAMA FOR BEING SUCH A LOVING AND COMPASSIONATE HUMAN BEING..
GOD BLESS YOU ALL.
