What Really Matters - LJ Idol Homegame
Shall we call it a question, or a list? That which brings us comfort and joy, and that we would never change about our lives, NO MATTER WHAT.
A Countryside Childhood: Just the weekends, really, and sometimes a week in the summers, at my grandparents, just across the driveway from my cousins. Out in the country, my grandparents owned a little roadside domestic farm - not like the big fancy ones. It was a barn garage, at the end of a gravel driveway, between 2 large fields, that ALWAYS needed mowed. Yes, the garage ALWAYS needed cleaned out. A mowing tractor, and years of things that would never be used again; old hand tools they don't even make anymore. A HUGE garden in the back, and a barn, to the side, for chickens and a horse. We never bought eggs. A little white farm house with a HUGE porch and shed attached, the biggest German Shephard you ever saw, named Ringo, who wouldn't hurt a fly. Stray kittens and neighboring dogs always sniffin' around, an apple tree that always needed pickin' and a weeping willow we constantly got in trouble for swinin' from! "Go pick you're switch!", was the command if my cousins ever got in SERIOUS trouble, and being the countryboys they were...they did. "I'll turn ya over my knee!" was grandma's threat to keep us good. Woods and a creek to play in, behind it all, and an old man's pond to fish in behind those. We ran wild and played for hours and hours all day, and fished many evenings away, hiding behind the cattails, so the old man wouldn't catch us. Snapped green beans with grandma, and chucked corn for grandpa. Ate apples off the ground anytime, and snuck in a few swings on the willow every chance we got. Running in the woods to feel the cool air on our faces, beebee guns and slingshots firing through the trees. Racing barefoot across the fields and gravel driveway to beat a summer thunderstorm to the porch, and reeling from the gravel we swore we could jump across in a rush. My grandma & her lightning white hair in flowered sundresses, sitting there with a glass of suntea, and veggies from the garden fixin' to can or freeze. Grandpa sippin' a cold beer after workin', "for his nerves", he always said, while grandma GLARED a hole in the back of his head. LOL! Pussy willows and grandma's irises all along the fenceposts, camping out in the fields, just to see the stars & wake up with wet sleeping bags, from the dew. "Never did I ever..." think it would end.
These are the days and the memories I cherrish. There is NOTHING about this beauty in my life that I would ever give away, or change for anything. Days like this are just not had anymore. Nothing will ever replace them. All BEFORE the days of cell phones and digital cameras. Faded photographs. These are what I have of these cherrished days. There is almost something as valued and magical about those, as there is about the memories. Would I really want them captured any other way? Odd, I guess to say, No. No, I love the way they are captured, just right, in my memory, and the smell of her cooking on burners, both on the kitchen stove and the old wood burning stove in the tiny living room. Such a tiny white house so old you could feel how thin the uneven wooden floors were. Sometimes you walk a little up the room, sometimes, a little down. They certainly don't build them like that, these days, and especially NOT on purpose. LOL! No, just the way it was, was just perfect, for me. The cousins lived in a little doublewide across the driveway with a few modern conveniences, because my uncle was a trucker, with a few dollars more than his pop, but not much. For all that we didn't have, we never missed a thing. We had our good days, and bad days, and laughter and tears. Not a lot of people have such freedom in their childhood. I miss my grandparents so much!