Posts Tagged With: Memories

Those things we can’t live without

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Life and all things love

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It’s funny the things we hold onto, the things we think we can not live without. For some, its old photographs of smiling faces and exotic places. For others, its handwritten letters, on yellowed paper, or pieces of antique jewelry; lockets and wedding bands, but for me, it’s clothes.

I still have my old cheerleading uniforms with knee-length pleated skirts and stiff vests, and all my prom dresses, useless and out dated. My Wedding Gown hangs in my closet, pressed and perfectly preserved. My late grandfather’s navy, plaid, button-up shirt is tucked neatly away in my bottom dresser drawer. The outfits my babies wore home from the hospital lie in keepsake boxes, still perfumed with baby lotion and milk, and for some crazed reason I can not let go of my maternity clothes and everyone else’s (psshh…that’s another post entirely).

You and I both know, it’s not the things we can’t let go of, but what they represent. Those articles of clothing, I am convinced I can not live without, do things for me that the mind cannot. Those clothes give me memories I can touch and feel, smell, and rest my head on.

The Prom dresses take me back with clarity to music filled nights spent in a sea of weaving bodies. The thrill and anticipation of the slow dance, full of clammy hands and clumsy feet. The smell of sweat and CK1 hanging thick in the air. My shoes long abandoned for comfort and lost among the shuffle.

My grandfather’s plaid button up, gives me something to hold, when I really want to hold him. It takes me back to all the times I saw him wear the shirt, special occasions, doctors appointments, and funerals. I remember the way the colors of the shirt made his eyes shine, so clear and so blue, a pool of deep waters. I can still see him, shuffling thru the yard, his button up blowing in the wind.

My Wedding Gown, I could live in. I never, ever, want to forget the way I felt the day I wore it. My heart pounding, my knees shaking, but I have never felt more sure, confident in the love that flowed between me and him. One scan of the hemline and I am instantly transported to our wedding night. I am a mess of emotions, a ball of nerves and jitters. He watches as my hands tremble, fumbling with just one, of thousand bobby pins, holding my hair together, in a nest of curls and hairspray. He lets my hands fall, and in a gesture so tender and so sweet, he lovingly removes each pin, one by one, never pulling a single strand. I am certain, he never saw the tears that streamed down my face, because in all my life, I had never felt more loved.

I know, in a way, I am replacing people for clothes, but don’t we all long for continuity. There have been so many moments in my life that I wish I could have stayed in forever; halted and frozen in a frame. Then there are people I loved dearly who are gone, and I can not see, but I can feel them in my heart and their shirts with my hands. On those days, and we all have them, when those pieces of clothing are just not enough, and we long for something more. I can rest in the assurance that someday, as a daughter of the King, I will lead a life that has no end. A life void of change and pain. A life without the need to cling to clothing, or anything, but him.

So, for now my closet is a little messy. What about yours? What things are you holding onto that you can’t live without?

Categories: Life, Mommy Tales | Tags: , , , , , | 8 Comments

What lays hidden in a bible

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Life and all things love

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage-to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.  
-Alex Haley

A bible, bound in black leather, and trimmed in gold, sat on my grandmother’s sofa table for years.  I assumed it was like any other bible; plain text in black, Christ’s words in red, nothing remarkable. For a multitude of years I ignored its presence.  Then one day out of boredom, I picked the bible up.  I leafed thru the pages with expectancy for the norm and I found something extraordinary instead.

In the very front  of the bible, my grandmother’s family tree had took root.  It’s limbs and branches were sprayed across the pages in a flurry of handwritten names under the headings; birth, marriage, and death. Within those pages our lives had been stripped of all the details, traits, and accomplishments that make each and every one of us different and unique.  Our lives were naked and bared to those three life changing transformations, reminding me of how much I had in common with every person recorded in my grandmother’s bible.  Someday, like the rest, my life will only be remembered in a series of dates.

I became enchanted by the bible.  It cast a deep spell on me, as if I had been pricked by it’s pages, binding my blood to its fibers.  It had stirred a thirst for knowledge deep inside me that I had never experienced before.  I longed to know more about the branches of grandmother’s family tree.  I needed faces to go with names.  I needed wedding gowns and vows to go with marriage dates.  I needed how’s  and why’s to go with dates of death, but most of all, I needed to know, that their live’s really did consist of more than a bunch of dates, scribbled in ink.

Over the next couple of years, my grandmother began to weave bits and pieces of life stories together for me, a small offering to a beloved granddaughter.  She spoke of her son Bobby, who felt the sharp knife of a short life; with tears in her eyes, a pain to great to revisit often. She told me about babies born without breath, with no birth recorded, just date of death. She set the stage for many wedding ceremonies, from the mediocre to the elaborate, to those that lasted and those that did not.  We spoke of my grandfather who died in October, forever leaving Autumn with a particular sadness that can not be described, only felt.

We bonded over the pages of her family bible, as she gave life with words, to those who have long been gone.  My grandmother will be 91 years old this September.  She’s been on top of the mountain and down in the valley.  She’s loved, she’s lost, and she’s still hanging on, but her memory now fails her.  She no longer has the family bible, my mother does, and I imagine it will continue to pass thru our lineage.  I pray that someday one of my great-great-grandchildren will trace their fingers along the dates of my birth, my marriage, and my death. I pray that the life I am living right now, will speak so much louder, than the way and the day that I died. I pray that I leave a legacy that can be remembered with more than a date in time, and out lives my death by far.

Categories: Life | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

All Play, No Work

Posted on July 15, 2012 by Life and all things love

Growing up, Summer meant everything wonderful and magical.  No teachers with god-awful red pens.  No sticking to a structured 9pm bedtime or else.  No more being holed up in your room because the sky dumped buckets of snow on your front lawn.  No, Summers were for having adventures, playing tag and hide and go seek, building forts, and making mud pies.  Summer was about all fun and it belonged to us, the children.

Looking back now, I remember all those things, but my memories are lined with a hint of guilt.  Guilt over things I didn’t do, or should have done more of, like helping my grandparents, when they obviously needed an extra hand or two, maybe three.

Every Summer for as long as I can remember, my grandparents worked a garden.  A massive garden 3-4 fields wide.  They grew everything from potatoes to sweet peas.  There wasn’t much they didn’t grow actually.

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Any given day of the week, as long as it was not raining, you could find them in the garden.  The hot sun would be beating down, the air hot and humid.  Granny would be bent down pulling weeds, her long cotton skirt teasing the ground, and her hair, the color of cotton, would be pinned away from her face and neck.  My paw, dressed in white cotton t-shirt and a pair of blue work pants, would be grasping the handles of Ole tiller plow, as it turned the earth from hard and packed to soft and supple.  Ever so often, my grandpa would pull a white handkerchief from his shirt pocket, and wipe the sweat beads from his forehead.  My granny would use the end of her apron to do the same.

As my grandparents worked, we played.  The only time, my cousins and I, would go into the garden would be to swipe a ripe cucumber or tomato.  One time we ate our way through a whole row of sweet peas, before grandpa found us, and shewed us out.

Years, have past now since the last time I saw my grandparent’s working together in a garden.  My grandfather passed away eight years ago, although their our days I would swear it just happened yesterday.  My grandmother is still living, but she is just a shell of the woman she once was.  She has Dementia.  There are days she knows that I am her granddaughter, Tammy. The one who would help her water her flowers and feed her cats. Then there are days my face belongs to stranger; just someone she once knew.  Her arms are now too weak to lift, and her legs are too shaky to walk.  She is confined to her bed, and has not stepped foot in a garden in years.

I am the one, now, that spends hours under a hot sun, in the middle of a garden, every summer.  You can find me wiping sweat from face with the back of my old t-shirt and silently asking myself, “Why do you do this?”  It’s not out of necessity.  It’s not out of love for the veggies.  I give most of them away.  No, it’s more than that.  I do it to remember, to hold onto my grandparent’s.  When I am slinging my hoe, pulling weeds, or following behind a plow.  I see them.  I feel them.  They are there with me.  There words,  “Read your almanac.  Follow the Signs.  Fertilize.  Fertilize.  Stick your green beans.  Stick your tomatoes.  Give your melons and squash room to run,”  I hear them.  I listen, now.  I miss them.  I miss them everyday.

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My Grandmother holding my baby boy

Categories: Life | Tags: , , , , , , | 5 Comments

I fell in love in South Carolina!

Posted on June 3, 2012 by Life and all things love

Eight days ago, I packed our bags, and headed toward the sound of the rhythmic melody of waves cresting and falling, and the brash smell of salt-laden air. I left a disheveled pile of worries at my door step; a job with mounting expectations almost impossible to meet, a blood sucking mortgage, and a vehicle on its last two wheels. I left them all behind and headed toward an Island on the east coast.

Eight hours later, I am light and spirited. I am coasting down bicycle trails under a canopy of trees heavy with Spanish Moss. I am watching two blonde-haired and blue-eyed children run across a hard-packed sandy beach toward the rush of lapping waves. I am gazing at my two-year-old son in awe and amusement as he reels in his first blue gill from the murky waters of our backyard lagoon, and I know a week is long enough. Long enough for me to fall in love with the heart wrenching and breathtakingly beautiful, Hilton Head Island.

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Thank you, South Carolina, for showing, my family and I, a good time in the low country and for sending me home to Kentucky with a suitcase full of lovely, memories!

Categories: Life | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Into the Mystic

Posted on April 8, 2012 by Life and all things love

I sat on my back porch swing, the wind barely a whisper, as I take a trip into The Mystic with Mr.Van Morrison.

We were born before the wind
Also Younger than the sun
Ere th Bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the Mystic

I lay back and take in all Spring has to offer. The Dogwood’s blooming white crescent moons, dandelions spreading like wildfire, and cricket’s singing me a sweet lullaby into the baby blue sky. I am in harmony with everything around me.

I let my mind wander. My thoughts scatter and run. They head straight for my childhood.

I am six-years-old riding my pink, Barbie Bike down a gravel road, dust flying everywhere. I am wading in a creek with my cousins, looking for crawldads, the cold water lapping my bare legs. I am in the hills, I grab hold of a grapevine, close my eyes, and take off swinging, cutting thru the sky. I am flying high. I am as light as a feather. I am free.

And when the foghorn blows I will be coming home
And when the foghorn blows I want to hear it
I don’t have to fear it
I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And together we will float into the mystic..

Thank you, Mr. Morrison for the ride..

Categories: Life, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

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