Just looked out my window to see kids playing in the dirt and kicking soccer balls. The sky is a crazy cerulean blue broken up by white, billowy clouds and the sounds of dogs barking, and recorded messages advertising propane gas and pastries. All strangely reminds me of pop beads and Richpond, Kentucky and digging for treasure in my grandparents' machine shed with Eddie and Emily. Sitting and digging in red dirt surrounded by worn timber, machinery, jars of screws and nails, and garden hoses. Waiting for Moc to call out: "Time for supper!" And of course, we'd dig for a few minutes more then climb over the wooden fence and run through the clanging metal gate next to the garden into the freshly mown yard past the well house over stone pavers under the covered patio that Dad built, past the old stone grinding wheel over two concrete steps up and through the screen door with the little green bean smudge on the door handle into the warm, wood paneled room past the old butter churn and Poc's chair, into the kitchen and onto a wooden chair at the round kitchen table where we used to help Moc separate the rocks from the beans. We'd sit down and eat white beans and cornbread with hamhocks and homegrown, sliced tomatoes with iced tea or iced water in pretty glasses...city water from the Stahl's, poured from clean, plastic Chlorox bottles. Everything tasted wonderful and we would tell each other stories. Moc washed the dishes then we'd sit in the den and watch Lawrence Welk and she'd sit next to the TV facing us, and she would tell us stories about her life on Hanging Fork Creek. We'd try to watch the regularly scheduled programs but her stories about life on the farm are the stories that stay with me...stories about children getting eaten by hogs or drowning, and of gypsies and Freetown and flying in airplanes. Stories, family stories, lots and lots of stories. I know them all by heart.
