Is it spring yet? If you live in warmer climates, it may just be. My mom sent me photos the other day of the yard and neighbors’ yards. How my heart is filled with love for spring. In my Momo’s yard it was fully yellow and white, the smell so strong you could smell it from my house across the road. The big tulip tree that my nana loved so much was blooming and blossoming already and they had a huge freeze after the fact. Somehow the flowers survived.
These memories of flowers just are the start of all the lovely spring memories. If I close my eyes, I can smell the honeysuckle blooming and the daffodils fighting for the top lovely smell. Spring was when the dirt got turned over for spring planting which would be summer vegetables. It was beginning to be light out enough to play outside after school. The four-leaf glovers cover the playgrounds and any field not taken care of. Babies all around, new little calves, birds, deer… Living where I did grow up was really a blessing. Spring showers always smelled the best. People were just happier in Spring more specifically March and April were really the only month of perfect weather.
I lived exactly 8 miles from both towns in either direction, you took a road off the main road, then took the left side of the split, then you come onto a dirt road lined thick on either side with trees, You turned down this red clay and gravel road and you would drive right up on to my house, across the road my Nana’s first cousin My Momo, then you go on past those houses and you would run into my Great aunt and Uncles house and then even further down was one of my other great uncle and aunts house. Then at the end of the road was a man the locals called pistol-packing Earl. He had what I now know is PTSD from the war. He carried a gun with him everywhere he went and he mostly walked to get anywhere he was going. I was not scared of him but never the-less my mom and nana refused to let me run amuck if he was out and about.
I think I must romanticize where I grew up. I do not remember feeling it was that special when I lived there. Then again, I always saw beauty in little things like how water run in the ditches and the small patch of sugar cane that randomly grew across the road. The sparkly-ness of a new load of rocks on the road, the briar patches up and down the road, the little cans you could see through one patch of woods that were from when I was a little girl having pretend-tea in the woods with my Momo.
I was lucky. I had free range of a beautiful strip of road that had been in my Nana’s family since she was a girl. I loved having my great aunts and uncles close by to spoil me. The experiences I had with farm life, animals, and growing our own food. I learned so many valuable lessons that kids may never know now. I did not have a perfect life but a large majority of it was really good!
I wanted to share these thoughts with you because maybe you are reading this and it triggers a memory of your past, or maybe you are born in and still live in a city and these are all things you know nothing about but for some small smidge you wish you did. Let me tell you now thinking about all those things I did not like about country living it is nothing compared to how much I loved it. Of course, none of where I grew up looks the same except that old tulip tree. That is enough for me to remember what it used to be.
Even this girl who loves city life and misses NY so badly can still remember all the positives of the country.
Yee-haw I was a country girl. Now I prefer the city but oh remembering those good ole days will never get old.
Finding Evie 