In My Mind.....

Occasionally my mind takes me back to Carthage. I'm on the front porch of a tiny three bedroom house on Price street. My bare feet are playing around on the old, worn out, green astroturf type material used to cover the concrete. Picture a freshly cut Brady yard, but on the porch.

The chair I'm sitting in is an old wood lawn chair with plastic padding that used to be green with flower prints covering one side. Next to me is my grandmother on a matching chair.

It's quiet. Only the sound of birds. My grandmother loved birds which is why she had several humming bird feeders and an antique bird bath with a ceramic frog that sat in the center.

When the breeze flows through the trees you can hear the sound of leaves, like thousands of soft-pieces of paper being crumpled up at random intervals. It begins and ends as it pleases.

On the porch, to my left, is an old aluminum pan used to feed the stray cats that need survival food.

Hanging from the awning are nondescript windchimes. Hanging down the center is a simple piece of hard plastic cut in the shape of a circle. You sit there long enough and the trance created will make you not even notice the chimes clanging away.

To the right of my grandmother, just off the porch, is her rose bushes. They still put out a few roses a year, but not near as much as an earlier time before her legs began to get tired from years of taking care of people. But the remnant are just as pretty as during their glory years. Mostly yellow roses, but a few pink and red still linger.

A couple of times a week an elderly person will drive by in a tank of a car and decide to stop and get out and pay a visit.

"Well hi-dee," my grandmother would say to the visitors who would then say they were just passing through and decided to stop and say hello. I think when you get old you do that even for acquaintances. That's the beauty of living a long time. You get to be in a club where the ordinary rules of who you hang out with no longer apply. People who just knew each other in passing decades earlier become visit-worthy in their seventies and eighties.

Perhaps we should start that earlier. Why don't we visit each other more often, without calling? What are we afraid of?

But back to the scene I'm trying to remember.

"This is my grandson. He's my youngest." Which always made me proud. My cousins have kids that were her grandchildren of the great variety, but I got to be her "youngest." In the course of her life as a grandmother almost all of her grandchildren lived with her, stole money from her, took advantage of her on at least several occasionas. But not me. And because of that I think I gained the status as her favorite. She would never say that, but the look in her eyes gave it away.

When the visitors leave she'll head back in the house to pour both of us a glass of her homemade iced tea, enough sugar to give you diabetes within a couple of days.

As she sits down she'll begin to shake her tea glass. When I was real little I wondered why she and my Paw Paw did that. She said she figured it was just old age. But then I realized the secret. Homemade iced tea was always served hot, poured over ice. Most of the ice would melt leaving warm tea on the bottom with a few ice chunks on top. The shaking of the tea glass helped distribute the cold throughout the glass. It really is sheer genius if you ask me.

We sit on the porch after lunch. Then lunch. Then a nap. Then we head back out to the porch to sit some more until dinner. Inside for dinner and back out to sit until the sun goes down and the first mosquito bite.

This is my memory that I wanted to share with you.