THE BEAUTY OF A MEMORY...

I stood leaning against the gate, fingers absently tracing the age lines of the slick silver cedar post...

The memories were everywhere; like the trees, they seemed to draw nutrients from the earth, pushing themselves to the forefront of my mind just as the new greening leaves pressed themselves from the tree tips making me take notice of them after the weight of winter shadows had lifted... 

 I didn't decide to move, didn't want to, but before I knew it, I was walking through the gate...

Winding my way along the old stone fence on a feet familiar rut that led to the old home place...

It drew me like a magnet, around the bend to the top of the rise and finally descending the hill that led to childhood.  Each footfall was like stepping into beauty.  The beauty of the natural landscape...

The beauty of the unexpected...

(The fire bush beside what was once a stack of stone steps and a postage stamp porch still bloomed)

The beauty of a memory...

(Where an old green shingled roof covered a silver gray sliver of a house that sheltered some of the most precious times of my life)

The rusty hinge of my memory bank loosed itself...

Swinging open and shut...

Like the damper on granny's old wood burning cook stove, letting in droughts of beautiful swirling airy scenes accompanied by whispers of voices and noises of the past.  The beautiful sound of squeaky old bed springs...

Accompanied by childish laughter and fits of giggles, the fleeting feeling of flying, long hair splayed out like wings, bouncing higher and higher on granny's old iron bed.

What is it, I think to myself, that keeps drawing me to this pile of rubble?

 My heart quickens as I realize it is because I am of the last generation to remember.  Its stories and times and memories will fade when I and the cousins do, we are the last with the ability to step into the beauty of seeing not what is but what once was.  We are the barer of its tales.  We are the keeper of its secrets.  Although it pinches my heart I must respond to urging whispers that guide my steps.  I am compelled to tell the old houses tales, the ones that I can remember at least.

I believe that every life, even the most ordinary one, is like a good book, a page turning tale that unfolds day by day, and is just waiting to be remembered or told.  Each life is full of twists and turns, secrets and surprises, a narrative of threads that weave themselves into a fabric of intersecting lives.  My story revolves around an old house nested on the steep edge of a hollow in the Foothills of the Ozarks where primitive living in modern times created some of the most beautiful childhood memories imaginable.

I come here to pause and listen.  Somehow sitting with the rubble, listening for the whispers of my personal past, opens my heart to the tenderness and exquisite beauty of life.  It teaches me cherish what I have or who peoples my world in any given moment for far too quickly those things change.

The old tree that used to overshadow my play house holds out its hand for me to take...

 Inviting me to fill my heart and head with memories of profound joy.  The past and the present converge in those quiet moments, I step forward and clasp hands with my childhood playmate.  My story, our stories, will continue.....

blessings,

Sandy