A COUNTRY COUPLE

 Do you sing as you are milking a cow? Do you talk to the cow and ponder your thoughts? I wonder if the young farm girl was thinking about a certain young man? On that long ago day, the cow knocked over the bucket of milk on Gretchen just as J.B.H. came walking up. She stood up to speak with him. They had been given permission to go courting. At a proper time, he would propose marriage, the young couple just nineteen and twenty. Of course, she said yes, wet apron and all. My family has always celebrated the eleventh of November 1917. 

He was tall and good looking and she was pretty and petite. "I am going to marry that girl, someday," Papaw told his brother when he first saw Mamaw. He and his brother had come over to her community to help clear wood after a bad storm. 

The old time courting often occurred at "singings", a day long get together at different churches. Most churches had itinerant preachers traveling to different communities. The neighbors would sing shaped notes from hymnals, breaking for dinner on the grounds. The young people would group up and walk down the road or climb in a wagon for a ride. Another courting activity would be simple "play parties" given at family homes. Being God-fearing, Christian folks, there weren't any shenanigans going on. 

Mamaw and Papaw married inside her family home. She wore her best dress. When I was a teenager, I taped a great interview with her about her early life. But being that has been a few years ago, I can't place my hands on it. Of course, tapes will last forever and there will always be tape recorders. I wish I had written it down. 

She told me about the party after the wedding vows. The whole house was filled with family and friends. For several days, ladies in the community had helped the family prepare food, especially cakes and sweets. Mamaw often made a delicious Jam Cake for our visits home. I have made one or two from her recipe. I like to think a Jam Cake was among the bridal offerings. 

This was their beginning, making life on a small farm in Southwest Arkansas. My grandfather would be called to Little Rock Camp Robinson until WWI was over. Armistice Day. Then they began raising a family of four children to adults. A curved glass picture of a sitting infant hung in their living room. By the time I realized young ones might pass through a mother's arms, the mystery and sadness kept me from asking her the story. He was just whispers and buried in the family cemetery under a marble stone topped with a little lamb. He was their firstborn.

We celebrated their Fiftieth Anniversary on November 11, 1967 with great fanfare, a house of family and friends. A real tiered wedding cake and this time, a beautiful dress especially made for the occasion. Papaw stood, still handsome and proud just as a new groom. 

Well-wishers poured out onto the large porch, often carrying wrapped presents with gold-themed gifts such as sets of golden towels, glassware, a clock and even the heavy gold-wrapped Family Bible usually gifted from the family. A guardian of pieces of paper or written recognition of weddings, births and deaths. The dash - the living of waiting minutes, hard hours and happy days rarely written down except in family letters in boxes on my top shelf. 

I can see the bright yellow leaves of the nearby Hickory tree reflecting in through my office window at late morning. The soft golden glow is temporary but enough to catch your breath. To change the thoughts of the hard days our community is walking through. Other communities have courageously  walked before us, showing strength and perseverance, to help us find our own peace, our own Armistice Day.  

SEVEN FALLS

SEVEN FALLS

BabyBird,

Your story begins with a pile of leaves from the red maple trees

growing in front of Mama and Daddy’s home.

A world away, I was just starting school.

A student was raking leaves for the BSU at the U of A.

He caught my Mama’s eye,

and she was not the type of Mama who had ever been caught

worrying over beaus and grooms.

She just handed him a broom.

On a Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer

she was reading the paper.

I heard her say, “There’s my friend.”

I could not have known then

when she first said his name—

the road we traveled would be the same.

When he told Mama goodbye and handed her the broom—

the unsuspecting groom—

none of us ever would have guessed.

Seven falls down the road would find we three—

our family—

dancing with you in our arms

beneath the glow of the red maple trees

where he’d raked leaves seven years before.

 

Amy Holt Taylor 2005

 

 

 

MANIC GUMBO

 

                                                                        Dinner at 8

I have Mardi Gras beads festooning the ingredients, skirting so ever lightly not to touch the thawing chicken breast. Nothing touched the raw chicken. Yes, there are many things about this Covid era gumbo which need forgiveness. But I never expected to write a blog in the next nine days so I think Gumbo is a good place to settle. Even though I am not a professional, I'm giving it the old try. With a nod to an old friend, Frenchie, who regaled me with tales of the color of roux as he was a true Acadian with many stirred pots to his name.

Butter, bacon grease and flour compromised my roux which guarantees a smooth, palate pleasing broth even if it does not win the Justin Wilson Award of Cajun inspired PBS fame. I have made many a beurre blanc to pour over potatoes and the occasional salmon, pasta, scallops and my favorite fresh Halibut (wish) and anything else needing butter sauce in adequate quantity.

While my house is adequately stocked, this is a surprise gumbo and I am not stocked with file or gumbo. I almost quit but I know I can create something delicious. I told my Sous Chef this will be one of the finest things he has ever tasted which is a tall order for all he has sampled in his years. Tonight it will go into the garage fridge and marry. We will not peek.

In no particular order, my ingredients include the Trinity, thinly sliced grilled turkey kielbasa, small pieces of grilled chicken, curry, Tabasco, salt, ground pepper, garlic salt, chipotle, lots of tomatoes, Old Bay Seasoning, Hungarian Paprika, splash of Coca Cola (if you have to ask we've just been introduced) garlic, and the shrimp which brings in the manic phase. Rapid cycling. 

I was so thrilled to have shrimp until the pass it by date of almost two years ago. My Sous Chef can eat anything but my delicate system would know the shrimp had been sitting in the back of the outside freezer for a spell. Ever resourceful, he moved the end of the world food supply in the freezer and came up with frozen, cooked with shell on shrimp with the proper due date. I have been told I am too picky about such dates but they can get you into trouble.

Continuing to be helpful, he thawed and shelled the la crevette just as they needed to pop into the bubbling brew. Perfection. Tomorrow over hot, buttered rice. At the last moment, we remembered a canned okra, tomato, corn dish we like. Now we have almost gumbo. 

Please do not judge my attempt at shrimp gumbo. The broth glistens like golden red silk. I will give myself points for not jumping off the deck when I discovered the missing ingredients and lack of the purest of quality in the back of the freezer. We also located a heavenly iced pastry which needs to be brought to room temperature, baked and frosted in butter. This will be a feast for another day.

FOR THE FRIVOLOUS DAY WE LIVE IN

 My sister and my sister-in-law both make the very best chocolate chip cookies. You can't eat just one. And the disgusting part, they can make the cookies in their sleep or two minutes after company arrives between chip and dip. They are also beautiful enough for a magazine layout but the cookies would never make it to the first shot. Snatched up.

Regular Saturday, kinda. Laundry, laundry, laundry. Button that top button. Fold and stack. Still not finished. One of my running buds, in high school and in college, led The Life. Her mother kept her pantry supplied with Nestle's Semi-Sweet Chocolate. My sister and I had to order them months ahead and then wait for the royal key for dispensary. I would go to my friend's house and her mother would say, "Let's make chocolate chip cookies." Not usually heard in my world.

Making the cookies is a rite of passage. It is that first cooking experience the novice can manage without ripping a wall out. There might be a bit of shell. But three or four girls can whip out some good cookies and feel proud about it.

Beautiful fall day. Slept with the windows open last night. Chilly. Wish we were camping because we haven't camped in twenty-five years. We have all the gear.

I haven't baked in six months, barely cooked. But without thinking about it, I was having my non-Covid day except I wasn't wearing make-up to fold towels. My non-Covid day consist of bathing, dressing nice and wearing make-up. Probably just staying home or going to the Post Office. You can almost pretend you are in September 2019.

I was ready to bake cookies. I had plenty of supplies. We still had a bucket of pecans which were a Christmas gift from our Aunt and Uncle several years ago. Stick them in the freezer. Thank goodness I had just the minute before dust mopped the floor.  

And in the freak of nature, those pecans lost their lid and about half of a half empty bucket hung in midair and crashed to the floor. Well, what was I going to do? Pick them up and blow and keep the dog away.

This is how my cookies began. No other mishaps, no shells. Actually, very tasty cookie dough. How do you know if you don't sample?

Then I went to pick my purse up off the table and I saw three masks on the inside. Who would have believed? A Covid Day. How can I be making cookies and listening to Bob Seger and the Hamilton Soundtrack and it feel like a normal day? Like my country is not 'upside down'. That one of the most brilliant women ever in the world was not even given the decency of twenty-four hours as the vulture knocked at the door with a folded shroud over his arm. I had to say it.

That a normal day is not marked by 200,000 deaths from a deadly virus that is not a hoax as perpetuated by no one in charge.

Do I enjoy a cookie? Keep folding sheets? Sit on my pleasant deck while good, Evangelical politicians have no manners, wearing their ballcap in the funeral home.

I don't want it to be us or them. I want we. We are Americans. I have watched the Musical Film Hamilton twenty-three times. I am drawn by the desire to build a free nation, seeing this cast become their characters, carrying me along with them in the struggle and the hope that started with risky pickets. With tremendous loss, but beyond that the tremendous effort to come out from under England's thumb and build what all of those freedom loving men fought and died for. 

So I have had a frivolous day unknowingly, until I turned on the news. My day had not been a day of mourning. Mourning Justice Ginsburg,  mourning 200,000 fellow citizens who died of Covid-19 or mourning for this country I love so. 

I need more Covid Days to keep my mind on the muddle our lives have become. Who would have believed the hard fighting education situation, patriot teachers fighting for their beloved students.

Nurses and Doctors dying because of an oath they took many years ago. 

A black man being murdered in broad day light with cameras rolling, by four policeman, three standing by and watching, people on the sidewalk begging for help for George Floyd.

These are not frivolous days.  

   

FIFTY SEVEN YEARS LATER

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the first people I want to meet when I get to heaven because he dared to have a dream.  The God-given hope and direction of a man who was a gifted preacher and prophet filled the nation’s Capitol fifty-seven years ago today.  What a wonderful world it would be if we could all have even a sliver of that same hope. 

 The walk on Washington was not a particular memory for me at the time.  I was too young to understand.  My mother does remember watching it on television.  However, the event four months later would become my earliest, defined memory.

 In my earliest years, I do remember watching riots on the television and seeing dogs attacking people and water being used to subdue and disperse crowds.  These images were disturbing for a child.  One of the best gifts my parents gave me was a love for all people and a living example of The Golden Rule.

 When Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, I asked my mother what a “negro” was.  She told me that M. was a negro.  M. worked for my grandparents and I had known her all of my life.  “Oh, her skin is a different color.”  I was already being raised to judge a person by the content of their character.

 Although it was not for good, I have been judged by the color of my skin.  Neither were pleasant experiences and both were desperate attempts to gain power.  One was to make sure I was white and the other was because I wasn’t black.  This was at a time of great racial tension in the education system, when integration and busing were struggles in every community.  I was living in a different state each time.

 In this day and time, I think most people have been judged by the color of their skin.  Our country has a rainbow of colors.  A few years ago, my family toured The King Center in Atlanta.  For me, it was a reverent time of reflection, reminding me again of the importance of Dr. King’s message.  I felt the same feeling of reverence when I went to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  These places stand as more than a monument to history but also as the twisted reflection of the human soul when hate takes anchor, pulling a nation downward.

 I stood in line that day in Atlanta, waiting to sign a book of reflection.  A young African-American woman was in front of me, writing a few sentences.  She stepped away from the book. Imagine my shock when I looked down and read her racist comments.  I wrote a few words and came away, amazed that she didn’t get the message which was all around her.

 Things have not changed. New York, Minneapolis, Ferguson, Nashville or Kenosha. Those are just a few of the sinews stretching taut across our nation. Like the South. 

 Every Sunday morning, fine Christian men tuck their shirts into their pants, held up by the Bible Belt of the South.  I have heard their ugly whisperings, directing their hate at an image on the television, judging a man by the color of his skin.  However, their judgments are made impotent by the lack of content in their character.  These same men and women lifting their praises to God on Sunday and whispering their racist bitterness at lunch the next day.

 Many years ago, a senator from Illinois came to town, stumping for a fellow politician.  My Daddy had been following the politics of this young man.  We sat on the steps of the Capital, at the foot of the casual podium, listening to this brief speech.  When you are close enough to hold eye contact with a man, in that brief second there is a bond of relationship.  My Daddy began the last year of his life watching this Barack Hussein Obama take the oath of office as President of the United States.  My father cried tears of joy.  He carried a New Testament in his briefcase and The Prayer of St. Francis in his wallet.  And Jesus in his heart.

 Hate is easy because it is natural.  Love is not easy.  But love is the answer today just as it was fifty-seven years ago.   We all want equality. Wake up from the dream and make it real.  But in the middle of a bad dream, you can't breathe. You can't breathe.  

 

 Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi

 

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.


O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen

 

 

PRAY THE LIST

The phone rang this afternoon. I picked it up and I said, "Hello, unknown caller." I was quite unprepared for the recorded message. "Press 1 for prayer. Press 3 to hang up." The deep voice sounded like Charlton Heston as Moses telling the Red Sea to part. "I pressed 3 and then wondered about 2 and hoped I hadn't hung up on God. Did I miss my hotline to heaven? I don't think so. But I am curious about the prayer I missed and the organization involved.

Last year I read the book praying for strangers - An Adventure of the Human Spirit. The author, River Jordan, has always been big on resolutions. But on this holiday she doesn't care. She can only think of her two sons getting ready to go off to war. Bam! She is in the kitchen and a resolution "dropped right down in her soul...New Year's resolution - pray for a stranger every day." Due to God's guidance, her days will never be her own, as she walks right up to strangers and asks if she can pray for them.

        "Schoolgirl young. I don't want to frighten her...I explain my purpose.

                She whispers, "Thank you."

            "Need a prayer for anything special?" 

                "My mom...she's bipolar and..."

           Her words trip, stumble and retreat back....I tell her I'll pray for her mom. Then I add, 

           "But you should know, I'll be praying for you, too." 

            Home is supposed be a safe place...she may walk through the door and find that things have                    changed during the day. I have friends and family members diagnosed as bipolar...There are                    seasons in their lives that are relatively peaceful and seasons without a blink of sleep or peace. 

            My heart bends a little as I pray for her...needing to be an adult before her time. To try to fix                    things, to keep things quiet and running smoothly."

            Praying for Strangers  by River Jordan

I wake up in the middle of the night. These days. The hours I truly toss and turn, awake. Anxious. Sometimes I sing hymns like The Doxology, probably the first I learned. All creatures here below. Praise. Not easy. The tune is 469 years old. That's a lot of praising by a lot of people going through the not so easy time. Or lying on my pillow, hearing in my head, the anthem The Majesty and Glory. I think of my father and our hallelujahs the day he almost died, not knowing he was just minutes from heart failure. But even the hardest. Became the best. Never alone.

Oh no. I haven't prayed the List. I try to before I go to sleep but sometimes I forget. Middle of the night I am awake, comforted, starting my List. I start with the parents and my cousin. Giants in my own life. Lord, watch over them and protect them and keep them safe. I visualize every person as I go down my list. And sometimes mid-prayer a memory pulls me away about a happy time and then that can send me down another path. 

Maine mid March, before complete thaw. The fall scenes I am familiar with are now whites and greys and sages and blues, purples, browns, silver. Moving into an apartment in December before we knew what we didn't know. A bright yellow sofa cheerful against a wall. Cozy. Standing in a cul-du-sac looking down the drive way at a pretty yellow house full of treasures. A plaid sofa in a welcoming room full of celebration. A cranberry room with coffered ceilings, tall, full of light, the smell of apple pie and potato soup just waiting for admission. Sunset over Colorado mountains. A lunchtime meeting at the airport. Two cousins dancing. The black and white kitchen floor of a seasoned home. The home of toddlers sufficiently decorated. A home of neatness and perfect routine. Precious in my mind. Every face. Every prayer.

In the middle of the night, I find hope. Hope is for the asking. Hope is walking on tiptoes across the floor in a striped blue shirt, color of the sky. Or the puffy bottom of the baby pool, stilled except for a summer bug skating across, it's outline in round, connected dots four or six. An exquisite silhouette against the blue. Hope is splashed remnants covering the deck as white blue hose water fountained over our heads. Even now hope is here.

I am amazed by River Jordan's ability to walk up to complete strangers and ask to pray for them. I do find myself looking but only praying silently for a stranger, not approaching them. I read somewhere those are like shooting stars. She kept her strangers in her mind and continued to pray for them. Amazing the load God helps us bear.

Pray The List. 

Let's put the tossing and turning hours to use. Pray The List. Before you go to sleep, Pray The List. Make your list. Add to your list. Add a stranger. Remember a cousin. Think about happy times. Before long, our prayers will be hooking up like a paper chains. If we all do this, think of the lives that will be touched. Our lives will change. Hope is out there as blue as the soaring sky. Be apart of something bigger than yourself. 

Pray The List. 

The Front Line

 Dear God,

Please watch over my front line essential workers in Atlanta and Rome, Georgia and Fayetteville, Arkansas. I remember their eagerness when they discovered the calling. A good teacher doesn’t put herself first. Her goal is to serve knowledge in such a way that the child grasps a piece of learning to call her own, which excites them about the world around them and lights a fire inside to dream dreams.

The days ahead are unknown. In the world we had been living in, unwarranted self-assurance kept the keel even. Each day could seem the same. The sidewalk had the same cracks and a tree was just a tree, as always.  And then, to quote my favorite musical “The world turned upside down.” Now we are hanging onto the tree tops, feet dangling in the sky. We have never done life this way.

You know every name. Whether they have the advantage of well-equipped COVID preparedness or a smaller school hovered over by the community and the backbreaking work of every able body. The color of every bookbag. The character tennis shoes. You are a God of detail. You know us.

We won’t know until we know. If anything will work or parts of plans or computers at kitchen tables.

What to do about the empty tables of millions of our entrusted children in this great wealthy nation?

How education will look in this new era.

Temporary. Anxious. Hopeful.

The grace of God covering every teacher and child.

Amen

CORNERS

I have written one sentence since the beginning of our pandemic. The sentence was about a battery-powered dinosaur rounding the corner and  making havoc in a child’s bedroom. Just a little toy. But on the floor, looking up, Teacup shivered in the approach.

I don’t know what to say. I haven’t been able to write one word and then a complete sentence for my children’s manuscript jumps into my head. Let’s just see what happens.  

I transferred to a new university for my last two years of college. My parents had moved to this college town the previous year. Their “new” old house had a basement apartment on the finished side. The basement stairs came down into the unfinished side, a concrete floored, laundry area with three basement windows and one walk out door. Home to the ancient heating and cooling system which breathed with metallic popping noises. Boxes of souvenirs, my father’s Naval trunk, and a badminton racket propped on a stud were just a few of the items filling the space.

The apartment was much larger. My mother had painted the bath preppy green.  The wall phone, with a long cord, hung next to the always open apartment door. Two love seats flanked a fireplace. One long wall held two full length closets appropriate for my college wardrobe and then some. A twin bed and nightstand were next to the wall. Three full length windows and a back door out into the yard were on the outside wall. A small, quaint kitchen was in the middle of the outside wall enclosed in a small bar with a swinging wooden gate. A gas stove and a single sink with counter tops and cabinets. My mother’s wrought iron furniture was in the middle of the kitchen, a round table with four chairs I don’t know why it wasn’t outside. But it gave me good entertaining space for my friends.  

A ping pong table was in the opposite corner of the room. There were two fun facts which no one failed to mention to me when selling the idea of home life.

Free renter beware. The window mullions in the apartment had been extensively chewed by a dog. That was a new discovery for everyone. Desperately wanting out? Why? But the best part were the letters painted on one side of the long closet wall. Again. No one noticed? Jagged and at a funny angle. At first and second look, I said, “Oh, muy dey. Muy dey.” But not. The Y’s were R’s. That changed the picture.  The wall was repainted and the word completely went away.

I have never had a brave bone in my body. “The Shining” by Stephen King was the scariest book and movie at the time. I had seen the movie. (By the way, he waved at me in an airport but that’s another story.)

I was also an Alfred Hitchcock fan like a moth drawn to a flame. Beginning with “The Birds” and ending with “Psycho.” As a young girl in 1969, the Sharon Tate Murders captured my attention. Anything I could find to read about the tragedy. And I don’t like the dark. And murder had been painted on the wall. Last but not least, I have quite an imagination.

The nightmares began almost as soon as I begin sleeping in my apartment. I had a new kitten for fortitude. He slept up near my head. I can hear the noises even today. It was a dream but I was really “awake.” I could hear the iron table being pulled across the tiled floor, the legs scraping, coming closer and closer. The long closet wall kept me from seeing into the kitchen.  

The terror of the nightmare was the unseen presence of someone moving the furniture. They were coming closer to my bed. I had a nightlight on in the bathroom but it was useless. They were just around the corner. Always just around the corner.  

I didn’t tell my parents. Everyone knew I was the fraidy cat in the family.

Sometimes it was the table moving. In my dreams, I could hear the heavy chairs being lifted up off the floor. The terror was just around the corner. The fear of the unknown getting ready to stand at the foot of my bed. My parents were sleeping on the second floor. They couldn’t hear me cry out. I would wake up confused. The kitten had run away. I moved up to a second floor bedroom at Christmas. I still had the apartment for parties but I didn’t sleep there anymore.

Corners. Usually hiding something. The screeches of those nightmares. Fighting to wake up.  The fear of the unknown. We absolutely cannot see what is just around the corner. Fear.  

*

 The new baby was home from the hospital. She had been petted and loved on by her brother. My nephew looked amazed at this new addition. After months of talking about a new baby coming to live at his house, it was another matter when the little girl was being held by his mother. But she had the softest skin as he kissed her gently. His mother reminded him of being gentle with the baby because she was still so new to this world. His father said he was already a good big brother and he would always take care of her. It was bedtime and he could see her in the morning. Mama picked her up and carried her back to the baby’s room. His Daddy took his hand and he went to his room, jumping up on the bed, waiting to read a bedtime story.

He was listening to the story when there came a terrible noise, just around the corner in the kitchen. He jumped up and flew around the corner. His Grannie was standing there. He looked around and walked back to bed.

Later, after settling the boy in his bed my brother-in-law walked in and told my mother.

“Graham said the strangest thing tonight in his prayers. He said thank you God, Grannie dropped the chicken.”

Just around the corner. Splat. A chicken falls out of the refrigerator. But in the seconds’ fearful leap, the unknown. What if?

A lot of corners these days. Thank you, God, for chickens. What a relief to have You standing in my corner.