The Patterns of Life

There is a pattern, though at first we cannot see it.  Life brings in threads from the past, from the future too, to embellish the fabric we are weaving.  The design isn't something we have any real control over.  It just becomes.  And we take a breath and say "Oh yes, I see the design now."  I want to do a little reflective thinking for my Five today and hope Tanya at Willy Nilly Friday Five and Amy at Five on Friday and Cath at Fun Friday Favorites will give me the leeway to do so....And I will even link in to Wednesdays' Wit & Wisdom with this because it is a bit of writing....

1.  When I was a small child, I listened to the mournful call of the trains passing by my grandmother's house and loved that sound.  My mother had been raised also by those tracks.  In sadness I watched the world change from a place where trains were necessary and part of the romantic landscape.  I did not know a job as Coordinator of the Suffolk Seaboard Museum would be mine for three lovely years at the end of my working life.  That restored train station became a place of comfort for me.  A place of beauty, and a connection with the past.  As I sat in the office, CSX would barrel by just a few yards away on the tracks where once passenger cars had been pulled by steam locomotives.  It was a thread pulled into the fabric. (For an age-old post on my time there, and the station itself, please click HERE and for the Suffolk Seaboard Station website, click HERE and for some great photos HERE --one gives you the view of the tracks next to the station!).

2. When I was growing up, Mom listened to classical music and sometimes show tunes and popular tunes from the fifties.  Dad was the country music fan (and I still love the older country music) but Mom loved the classics.  My exposure to this music had a great impact on me.  We even went to see Van Cliburn in concert when I was about fourteen.  I have always loved to sing, and to listen to all kinds of music, but I never learned to play an instrument, even though Mom tried to teach we kids piano when we were younger.  It just didn't "take."  She had played since she was a child.  Still, I continued to listen to classical music over the years. 

When we moved to Texas, and my husband had a heart attack and was unable to start the job that had taken us there, I began to look for work.  We were living in a small town close to Giddings, and also not terribly far from the smaller Round Top.  Round Top was a historic little town with museums and shops and we went to visit one day and picked up a tongue-in-cheek little paper about the area.  In it was an ad for The International Festival-Institute located right there in Round Top!  In a tiny little hamlet in the Central/East area of Texas known mainly for its enormous Round Top Antique Fair event every fall...see the link HERE....there existed a wonderful music institute!  I applied for a job, and landed a position as Administrative Assistant to the Artistic Director and Founder (renowned pianist James Dick) and for the next five years was in absolute HEAVEN!  An older post of mine of my time there is HERE.  During the summer music students came from all over the world for six weeks to study under the best musical artists in the world, and to present concerts to the public.  During the winter months there were concerts by guest artists, and seminars on various subjects like herbs, architecture and art.  As well as working each day in the office, I was able to attend every concert and forum.  It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life.  I made wonderful friends whom I miss.  My life during a very stressful time of my hubby's inability to find any work there after the heart attack knocked him out of a lucrative flying position was greatly enriched by Festival Hill!  For their website, go HERE.  Be sure to take the Virtual Tour and see more photos!   (I was able to see James Dick in Tucson a couple of years ago when he came to perform with the symphony here, and that was such a great treat!)

Chandelier and carved wooden ceiling of the Festival Concert Hall

3.  When my husband Russell was in the Air Force, we were stationed in Tucson AZ from late 1978 to early 1981.  Our little daughter attended Montessori here and stated baby ballet classes.  We lived on the east side, and though my hubby was gone a lot, we enjoyed being here, though felt pretty oppressed by the summer heat (and our house only had evaporative cooling, no air conditioner, which does not work during the humid summer monsoon season....plus is seemed to break every time my hubby was TDY!)  When our grown daughter, only a few years out of high school, decided she wanted to move from Virginia "to the desert" I warned her about the heat; suggested maybe Colorado instead; and finally gave in and decided to drive her across country myself and set her up in an apartment here in Tucson.  That was about seventeen years ago.  Needless to say she met her husband here, a Tucson native, and had our only grandson....and when they (we finally decided) were definitely never going to move to Virginia to be close to us in our retirement years, they welcomed us here to be close to them!  We have lived her for five years and enjoyed it immensely (we DO have air conditioning!) but are just so sick of the oppressive summer heat and a few other things!  So are they....thus the upcoming move to Oregon!  That thread again as far as Tucson is concerned.  Oregon has it's own thread because Russell's older sister, and one niece already lives there, though that wasn't the reason Oregon was chosen. 

4.  My Dad was a Navy man my entire life...he was in Korea then came home to marry my Mom.  When I was a small child, about the age of our daughter when we lived in Tucson the first time, he was stationed in Washington State.  I was taking tap and ballet classes, and probably because we were little dancers at the studio I attended, my fellow baby ballerinas and myself were asked to be angels in the Sea Fair Ball in Seattle that year.  I remember Mom making a costume because it was tulle spangled with sequins and I think I was amazed at how special and dress-up it was.  I had a matching muff.  My photo was taken in that costume, but I think that was for my recital.  As angels we wore little sequined bathing-suit style outfits with attached wings.    Later I also remember being asked to climb a ladder and stick my head through a board so it would look like the angels were all in the clouds, from the other side of the board, and have our photos made again.  Only I have terrible claustrophobia, and it was quite an ordeal getting my head through that hole!  But I finally managed, and the picture was taken.  There is also a photo of we angels looking up at the Princess of the Sea Fair Ball as she danced with her escort, late the night of the ball (there was also a Sea Fair parade and I don't know if we were in it) but I don't remember being there late at night for those festivities.  The photo proves however that I was. 

Mom had had a new baby in Seattle, a little sister for me, and my dancing career ended when then a year later in Hawaii she also produced a son, my brother Michael.  With two little ones to run after, there was no time or extra money for dance classes (I did take baton later, and was horrible! :-) )  However, there is the thread....do you remember that our daughter took baby ballet classes here in Tucson?  Well, these continued with each place we lived after that, and developed into serious dance classes that produced summer classes on partial scholarship to Joffrey in New York.  She was eventually asked to come to Hartford, CT to be an alternate choice for new dancers for the Ballet Company there.  But, by then a lot of water had gone under the bridge, plus she wasn't being offered a job there yet and would have to move there and work till she could move up, and it was a long way from home....so she stayed in Virginia, which was where we were living at the time.   But her dancing was incredible!  She was SO talented, and we are very proud of those years for her.  Another thread.

5.  There have been so many more threads that have appeared and re-appeared.  I'm sure you can say the same about your own life.  I could keep writing....but I won't.  This is already way longer than I intended it to be!  Just a moment of reflection at a time when I needed a short break from packing and other concerns and am looking forward to this new chapter about to begin....  Have an awesome weekend, one and all!

The Quilters

For Linda Kay's Wit and Wisdom  (awesome writing meme on Senior Adventures!) I would like to share a special legacy....

My mother is a quilter.  My grandmother was a quilter, and every aunt and great-aunt and my two great-grandmothers and on back through my lineage.  It was fore-ordained that I would quilt.  The days of the quilting joys of my grandmother and great-grandmothers were born of necessity.  The quilts were used to warm their families against the winter cold, and were worn out after years of faithful use.  Not many of them survived.  They were made of scraps of clothing and of feed and flour sacks.  Nothing was wasted.  The batting was often hand-carded cotton.  Women's work was truly never done in those early days, and they went to bed to sleep under their hand made quilts, bone tired from the long days.  When the quilting was to be done, a group of women would gather around a frame suspended from the ceiling, to do hand quilting and visit.  My mother sat under that suspended frame as  a child and watched the needles go in and out, snaking across in long lines of loving handwork....it was the perfect fort.

Mom took me to the quilt shop to buy my first fabric for my quilt.  It was the early 80s and life had progressed to templates, and purchased fabric to be cut up into shapes, and sewing machines to put it all back together.  The rotary cutter was new also and soon became the norm.  Prices started soaring for expensive cotton fabrics needed to make heirlooms that would last for generations.  But, as I began to learn the techniques involved in piecing and creating quilt blocks, I also wished to pay homage to my roots...and make an old-fashioned quilt, hand-quilted.  My Mom often hand-quilted her quilts back then too, and she tried to teach me, but I just couldn't get the hang of that rocking back and forth motion that was needed.  So, as you can see from the photo above, I did my first hand quilting by going IN and OUT!  Not the most effective method, but I was comfortable with it.

What I love about the photo, is that the feed sack fabric the quilt is created from was some of my grandmother's fabric.  She was no longer quilting, and she gave me these pieces.  The frame was my Mom's....and she soon after gave it to me as she had moved on to using a hoop.  I love the feed sack quilt, which unfortunately I have never finished hand quilting (perhaps this is the year!) and I love the quilting frame.  Both are treasures!  I do my quilting on the machine now, because hand quilting by my archaic method was just too darn slow!  But I at least know how to properly hand quilt now.  I have made a few quilts, and several wall hangings or other small projects since that day in the 80s when the photo was taken, and I know I will quilt until my hands will no longer hold the needle that I can't see how to thread!  When that day comes,  I hope I will be happy with all I have accomplished.  I know it has given me great joy over these years.  After all, how could it not?  Me being a quilter was truly fore-ordained.

More Fun Hummers!

Once again a selection of hummingbird photos from my yard.  Love these little guys!  Sharing with Bird D'Pot and Wild Bird Wednesday! Also submitting a poem to go with the hummer photos for Wednesday Wit & Wisdom!

A Little Hummingbird Verse

 

Tiny friend, visiting me often, warding off all comers to the nectar treasure,

 

Hovering overhead to look me over, your feathers glowing and shimmering in the sunlight.

 

You are the treasure...your worth more than the rubies and emeralds you hold

 

Beneath your chin.  Thank you for sharing them with me.  Thank you for

 

The song you hum to me, bringing me nothing but joy.

 

 

Marie Carmean 2015

A Tribute

For the upcoming Veteran's Day I thought these would be appropriate (last two not taken by me) ....

 An Eagle Scout salutes the American flag as the motorcycles pass by the Moving Wall, Viet Nam Memorial.

 The flag at the cemetery where our dear friend and former Army Sergeant is buried, Prescott, AZ.

 Our grandson trying on his grandaddy's helmet from when he was an Air Force pilot.

 My husband in Viet Nam during the monsoon there, 1971.  I of course cannot take credit for this photo.

Honoring my Dad, Navy Veteran, retired after many years of service, who was at Inchon landing in Korea.  He passed away almost 5 years ago.  Also not my photo. 

And for Wednesday Wit & Wisdom with Linda Kay on Senior Adventures, here is my accompanying piece of writing:

                               Never Known Again
Young men, brave and frightened, certain and unsure
Remembering the accolades and garlands of past actions
With a desire to stand as tall, to be as worthy of their brothers
In the fray... those who became men on battlefield and women
Now too.  Facing Dante's hellscapes, blood and writhing bodies,
Weary oh so weary....wrung out in the devil's clutches, in body and in mind
Yet going on....going on.  Not remembering why they left
Their comforts but believing  it to be worth it all...somehow.
And now, no longer brave, no longer frightened....
No longer certain or unsure, coming back to what?
What is this place?  Where is my life?
Forever changed.
And surrounded by those who will
Never truly know them again.
                                                         Marie Carmean 2015

Wednesday's Writing...

Linda Kay's Wit & Wisdom is a beautiful place to share writing each week, based on a photo.  Here is a photo of me, age 3, sitting on the lap of my great-great grandmother who was 100 at the time.  Lou Ma Banks had given water to passing Union soldiers during the War Between the States.  The fact that I sat on her lap blows my mind....Sometimes we think that eons of time has passed since then, but this connection exists, a bridge over time much shorter than we could imagine.

Lou had gone to the spring to fetch water for their morning.  It was always her job in the early, sweet time of day to walk down to the spring in the holler behind the house and carry up bucket after bucket of the cold refreshing water to their Ma who would be cooking breakfast for the family.  She loved this task, dawdling along the trail to listen to the morning bird calls, and to pick wildflowers to tuck into her apron.  Ma loved these little fistsful of flowers to put into a cup on the windowsill to cheer the day.  In winter Lou sometimes brought Ma interesting dead leaves and pods she found.  But there were always treasures in the edge of the forest.  She never met other people down by the spring, and she enjoyed the quiet and solitude.  This morning was much like every morning there until she caught sight of a squirrel who, startled by her presence, began scampering away, and she followed him briefly, setting the bucket down at her feet as she watched him dash into the safety of the trees.

It was then Lou heard the unmistakable sound of horses chuffing and snorting up ahead in the thicket of the woods, and she ducked behind a tree to watch, leaving the bucket in the open.  Moments passed, and the sounds of the horses hooves on the woodland trail told her there were at least two, maybe three of them.  She hoped see would see their neighbors through the branches and trunks, but she gasped as she caught the color blue....Union soldiers!  She could feel her heart pounding in her chest and she tried to slow her breathing so she wouldn't be discovered in her hiding place. As the band of soldiers on horseback drew closer, suddenly one of them noticed her bucket of water.  The group stopped and one of the men came down from his horse and began looking around. "Who's there?" he called.  The men waited while Lou drew her courage into her limbs, and slowly emerged from behind the tree. 

Later, she told her story to the family, excited to have something amazing to share with them.  The soldiers had been very kind, and had asked that she share the water in the bucket with them, and then bring another bucket from the spring for their horses.  One of the soldiers had patted her on her head and said he had a daughter about her age.  He had given her a little carved whistle he had made for his daughter, saying he would carve another because he wanted Lou to have this one.  She showed it to them with pride.  "Weren't you scared?" her brother asked.  "No!" she boasted.  After they had their water, they moved on into the forest and left her.  Lou had refilled the bucket at the spring and had dashed home as fast as she could without spilling any.  She had been scared, of course, at first, but she'd never say that to her brother.  What a story she had to tell!

First Meeting

Time of Linda Kay's Wit & Wisdom....if you like to write, here is a chance to do a writing exercise based on a photograph!  It's fun!

This is Great-grandpa, his Grandmama told him but he wasn't so sure what he thought of this smiling face before him.  The love came through those strong hands though, the kindness and the caring and the baby smiled as he looked into those eyes, those warm brown eyes.  The voice was unfamiliar, yet it came on a wave of familiarity.  He could be safe in these arms, know acceptance and happiness.  He liked the face now.  It was lined with experience, browned with hard work; the hair grey and thinning.  But it was a great face.  Yes, this was Great-grandpa.  They would have adventures together, playing on a playground slide,  finding the gnawed tree trunks on the edge of the water where the beavers had been, visiting with the yard cat, posing in front of a scary stuffed bear, having a balloon battle.  But time would be so short, and be over too soon.  Great-grandpa would leave them slowly, and then go to his final rest...but so soon!  Yet, the little boy would always have the love in those warm brown eyes, the strength and kindness in those strong hands.  And he would be so grateful he had known this special man.  A fleeting time, a gift for always.

Trip of a Lifetime

For Linda Kay's Wit & Wisdom (thanks for this opportunity to share our writing!)....a true story

It was hard to sleep on the plane so we were up almost all night.  I couldn't tell if it was my excitement alone, or the discomfort of the seats, or both.  Well, perhaps the excitement was the most pressing factor.  We talked and watched the people around us in the three lines of seats, or looked out the window at the darkness.  My mother had invited me to come with her for ten days in Ireland, and I was filled with such happiness and anticipation of all that lay ahead.  Never having been across the Atlantic, and sensing that this might be the only time I would ever get to do so, I was so grateful that Mom considered asking me to join her...so grateful for this amazing opportunity!  We would see where our Irish ancestors came from, and my husband's as well. We would experience so many wonderful new things, and I was determined to do so at every level.  Mom, of course, had been to Europe a couple of times before, but not to Ireland.  This was a magical journey.

Our Aer Lingus jet sailed over the ocean like a huge bird taking us to a world of mystery and wonder.  I couldn't imagine all that lay ahead of us on our journey; all that we would see and do.  We would keep journals, and I would tape record the tour and we would take loads of photos so we would never forget a single moment.  We would make new friends, and have new experiences...taste new foods, hear wonderful music and sights. My joy swelled in my breast near to bursting.  And then as I gazed out the window next to my seat at the sky beginning to pale I began to look for the little island of our destination on the horizon.  We were almost there...I kept watching as the sky began to turn rosy and warm.  Mom and I spoke excitedly of our arrival.  There were rose madder and deep violet and scarlet painting the edge of the ocean, and then creeping beneath it like a black stain was a small area of land...Ireland.  There it is!  We're here!  The sun crept over it like a jewel.

The sunrise over the magical isle had been the perfect welcome for us and my heart began to race.  We touched down at Shannon and were finally allowed to set our feet down on this amazing place.  My chest was tight and I could barely breathe.  After we deposited our bags in our room (which we would return to much later because we had a full day ahead) I walked outside into the brisk October morning air to try to get some of it into my lungs.  Deep breaths, deep breaths.  God, please don't let me die until AFTER I have seen Ireland!  Is this what it's like to have a panic attack?  It must be, and yet it was the opposite of panic...it was unbearable joy!

Mom joined me outside....was I ok?  Yes, the heart pounding was calmer now, the breaths coming more normally.  Yes.  I smiled...oh what a delight the next ten days would be!

A Wednesday Poem

I was inspired by the poem posted on Mom's blog HERE (at Living Life on Main Street) about the passing of summer into fall. Though we are long from seeing fall-like temps here in Tucson, the seasons are approaching change in the higher elevations, so I wanted to celebrate that on Linda Kay's Wednesday Wit & Wisdom today.  Here is a photo from a past fall that I enjoyed in Virginia....

 Autumn Comes

The roadsides dressed in purple vetch add plumes of gold
That bob in soft nods with the breeze that caresses grasses
Sending them rippling,
And woodsmoke perfume fills nostrils
While meadowlark song fills the china blue sky with trill.
A child sits at the woodland edge and dreams of a summer that has
Somehow slipped away.

Marie Carmean 2015

Trees of the Great Dismal Swamp

It's been four and a half years since we left Virginia.  One of my favorite places to visit in the years we were there was the Great Dismal Swamp located close to the North Carolina line [info from online source:  The Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge is the largest intact remnant of a vast habitat that once covered more than one million acres of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina].  It covers more than 112,000 acres.  To learn more about this amazing swamp, click HERE. These are some tree photos from my archives for NF Trees & Bushes, all taken at the swamp.  I am also joining in with Through My Lens, sharing these photos.  Note too the wood duck boxes along the Washington Ditch Canal.  For that photo particularly also read the story that accompanies, where I also link to Wednesday Wit & Wisdom.

It was getting crowded in the box with his brothers and sisters stepping all over one another, and he was tired of it. Besides, where would Mama Duck go for so long?  He could see the light coming in through the opening in the wood, and sometimes catch a glimpse of things moving about in the air, and he wondered about the world outside.  Maybe it was a good place to be.  After all, that's where Mama was most of the time.  He struggled over the fuzzy bodies beneath him to climb onto the edge of the opening and gaze at the watery world beyond.  Then he heard her calling.  It was scary thinking about going to her, but he could stand the box no longer.  He wobbled, and hesitated, and shrank back inside a bit.  She called again.  Ok, he thought...ok, I'm coming!  And in a moment he was falling, falling toward the water, flapping his inefficient little wings briefly, splaying out his feet to break his fall, but somehow landing with a plop that took his breath away!  He hesitated just a moment and then began paddling with great purpose toward the sound of his mother's voice.  Behind him he heard another plop as his sister hit the water.  On he swam.  He was finally free of that warm, safe box that had become so crowded.  His Mama was just ahead.  His life in the swamp had begun.

Wednesday Wit & Wisdom

Here is my submission for Linda Kay's wonderful writing expression meme....Wit & Wisdom. You choose a photo and write a story, poem or paragraph about the photo.  It's fun!  Thanks to Linda Kay for giving us a chance to share some of our imaginative pieces!

The old woman stooped down and wrenched the white dense boll from the tough brown seed.  She raised the cotton to her face and touched her cheek with it, feeling the softness.  There were so many memories locked inside its fibers, broken free now and clouding her mind.  So many feelings that came back to her with its touch.  She smiled softly, her eyes filling with tears, and began her labored walk back to the car, the boll clutched tightly in her fist.

"You all right?"  her daughter asked from the driver's seat of the car.  She nodded and accepted the seat now offered to her by her grandson who opened the Chevy door for her to enter.  Once inside, and her grandson back in the front passenger seat beside his Mom, they sat in silence. Her daughter and grandson seemed to sense her need for a few moments to process her emotions.  The house was no longer there where it had once stood proudly, built by her young husband.  Her small children (older than this late baby who now sat behind the Chevy's wheel) had played in the yard, climbed the trees and chased the geese here, and in the quiet she could almost hear them again, calling and laughing.  She could also faintly hear her husband's voice, praising her cobbler, teasing her, loving her.  A tear slowly rolled down her dry, creased cheek.

"Did you pick some of the cotton, " her grandson asked.  "Can I see it?" She wiped her tear away and handed the boll to the boy.  "You used to pick these out of that whole field, Grandma?  By hand?"  She sighed.  He'd never seen cotton growing in a field.  Once it had been her life.

"We all did, " she said.  "Even the children.  We all had to work hard to get it all in. It's hard work.  You drag a sack behind you to gather it in, bent over as you slowly go down the rows.  And it's hot and dirty work.  Even the children..." her voice trailed away.

Her daughter reached back and patted her aging Mother on the knee.  "It was a hard life, I expect, " she said.

"Yes.  But a good one."

The car started and they began to drive away.  The boy was already putting his earphones in to his radio. She watched the old place disappear as they pulled back onto the main road, and she smiled.  It was a good life, this life she had built with the man she loved. She smiled again to herself.  I'd do it all again.

Wed. Wit & Wisdom--The Cabin

 Here is the photograph for this week's story for Wednesday Wit & Wisdom. Join us for this awesome meme of self-expression and write something to accompany a photo to share.  Thanks Linda Kay for starting this really fun meme:

Is there someone on top of that rock, Sam wondered, as he gaze across the canyon from the back rail of their new log home.  He shielded his eyes from the sun and stared, but the dark object never moved.  It must be a piece of dead wood, or something, he decided.  He leaned against the rough railing, forlorn, his arms now dangling lifeless from the edge, and stared at the ground below where the men who had come to move them into the cabin entered the front door beneath him with their belongings .  The family had moved into this awful place and he left his friends behind.  He didn't know why they had come here, only that his Daddy had found this abandoned cabin the year before and purchased it.  The family had traveled hundreds of miles the summer before to help fix the place up, while living in a small trailer they pulled behind the station wagon.  He'd mostly slept in the station wagon with his older brother that summer.  Now they could live in the house, but he wasn't happy about the fact that they wouldn't be headed HOME in a couple of months.  This was now home.  He sighed.

That first summer had been exciting, like a big adventure.  They had heard cougars screaming in the dark, and heard bears rustling around their campsite.  Daddy had warned them about food...bears can smell food from miles away.  So they had to be careful.  They had to watch out for rattlers too and couldn't wander far from the cabin.  It had limited their exploring, which at first the two boys had thought would be fun.  And their younger sister had cried every night, begging to go back home.  She knew before they did...maybe this would be less of an adventure and more of a disaster.  He finally decided it was a disaster, now that they were going to live here and his friends were an entire world away.  He sniffled a bit, holding back the tears that started welling up in his eyes.

"Want to see my pet tarantula?"  a voice asked, and Sam looked at the head of the trail below where the men were packing up their straps and loading their truck to leave.  A boy just his age stood there next to a man who had his hand on the boy's shoulder.  Sam's Dad was coming forward, shaking the man's hand.  His Dad looked up and called out to him.

"Come meet the neighbors, Sam.  They've been here a couple of years already and Caleb here wants to show you around!"  Sam dashed down the stone steps to meet his new friend.  A new friend.  He couldn't believe it!  And a pet tarantula too.  It was all too good to be true. Maybe life in this new place would be good after all.  Just maybe.

The Wild West

For Linda Kay's Wednesday Wit and Wisdom another story to go with a photo.  Check out her site, and join in, it's a wonderful meme...

When she was a little girl she always dreamed of this.  She had longed for the world that had opened up to her in books; the mystery, romance and hardship that was the world beyond her doorstep, the wonder and the joy of different lands and cultures.  Even the "wild west" had been on her itinerary of hopeful travel.  She imagined a family like her own, moving across the plains of North America in search of a better life.  She imagined cowboys and trail bosses, and Indians.  She would be a young woman in calico with her sunbonnet and a young cowboy would walk with her out onto the prairie with the huge sky above them and the hills of rolling grasses reaching toward the horizon where buffalo would be grazing in the distance.   The cowboy would crouch down and pick wildflowers for her.  Their hands would lightly touch as he handed her the bouquet, and she would blush shyly.  Her heart had swelled with the possibilities of a life that only existed in her imagination.  And as the years passed and she grew to be a young woman, a wife, a mother, a widow, she had little time for reading anymore as she worked hard to take care of her children.  The realities of life had crowded in.  But deep inside her heart she kept a kernel of hope that one day she would travel...maybe see the "wild west."

Now she was a great grandmother, widowed again, and frail and they rode in the car headed west.  She was finally going to see the west.  She marveled at the wide Mississippi River, and the Spanish moss hanging from the trees in flat, wet Louisiana.  She marveled at the endless miles of rough land across Texas, and was thrilled when her first sighting of a working oil well pump came to view.  Soon there were stretches of open desert, and rocky crags of buttes in the distances, and cactus replaced trees and grasses.  The family, her daughter and two grandchildren and a small great-grandchild, stopped at times so she could pick wildflowers on the side of the road and she carefully pressed these treasures.  She kept a small journal of their adventures just as a woman on a wagon train would have done.  Somewhere in East Texas they had actually seen a wagon train, and she had been delighted.  Yes, it was part of a tourist adventure that people paid for a chance to sleep under the stars and eat chuck wagon grub.  But there were horses and covered wagons and it looked like the wagon train of her imagination.  There were so many wonders to delight her on this trip; so many things she had only dreamed of seeing and doing.  She would see the Grand Canyon, and even spend the night in a tent there; she would see a beautiful old mission, looming huge and white from the desert sands. She tucked a small flower inside the notebook to press it, as a grand daughter snapped a photo of the horses in the wagon train, and she sat back against the seat and smiled.  This was the "wild west."  At last, she had made it.

Wednesday Wit & Wisdom 2

Another photograph with accompanying story for the meme Wednesday Wit & Wisdom, hosted by Linda Kay of Senior Adventures...thanks Linda Kay!

He had wondered, his entire young life, why he loved the water so, why he longed for the smell of salt air and the sighing of the winds in the pines as gulls called and complained at the break of day.  The ocean, rivers and marshy tributaries had always drawn him and he sat and watched the shore birds with his binoculars while he worried out the concerns of the day.  The sunset on the ocean brought him to the sand with a blanket while the sand crabs danced around his bare feet.  His childhood had been in a house of strife and tension, and to hide away from these torments, especially on the water,  always brought him a measure of peace.  But there was no real clue for this love of his until the day he drove his old hand-me-down car back to the place where his Dad had been raised.

The old man saw him wandering around on the waterline, picking up pieces of flotsam from the tides to examine an old bottle or piece of wood and stopping to gaze out across the mouth of the river where it fed into the bay.  The young man was startled when he spoke and whirled to face the frail old waterman.  They began to talk, the older man sitting on a nearby stump, and the teen moving up closer to him at the edge of the trees.  He had never met a waterman before, and the wrinkled hands, he learned, had fashioned boats from the pines, had hauled crab cages up from the silty bottom of the river, and worked heavy oyster tongs from a deadrise in the waking day.  As they shared the time, the younger man was carried back to a world not long past but real and honest and hard. But it was also beautiful, this time he was being carried to, and somehow a little familiar in the deepest recesses of his being.  The old man dug into his overalls for a red kerchief, and wiped sweat from his bald head and brow.

"I knew your Great-grandpa and your Grandpa, " he said suddenly.  Startled once more, the younger man was suddenly alert.  "Watermen like me, farmers.  Your Great-grandpa was a boat-builder."  How could the old man know who he was, the boy wondered.

"They owned this piece of land, young man, " he said.  "That big house yonder wasn't here then.  The new owners built that about twenty years ago.  Your people lived yonder inside the woods, on a small cove."  His mind swirled with questions, but he wasn't sure how to ask them, and then as suddenly as he had been aware of the the old waterman's presence, he felt their time was over.

"My boy will have the truck fixed by now up on the road.  He'll be wondering where I got off to."  And the old man slowly rose from the stump, and turned slowly to walk away.

"I didn't get your name," said the boy.

"They always called me Jester, " the elder man called back over his shoulder,  "I'm your Grand-dad's cousin.  We heard he died near thirty year ago.  That was a sad day.  Sad day."

And the young man was suddenly alone again.   He watched the waterman turn a corner past some crepe myrtles and call out to his son on the road. He didn't feel so alone anymore, somehow.  He knew for the first time a kinship with a brand of people who took their life and livelihood from these waters he'd been drawn to all his life.  He knew theirs was a dying breed, with only a few of them left in a world that was consuming their simpler life.  He knew his own Dad had never told him of the connection they had to this world.  But somehow that didn't matter anymore.  He felt that connection and understood it for the first time, and it gave him a sense of his place in the world.  And he was grateful to the old waterman for giving him something no one ever had before.  For the first time, he knew who he was.  And he smiled from deep inside.