Autumn Reflections: Seventeen Short Stories

Autumn Reflections

Published by Jack W. Boone at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Jack W. Boone

GOING HOME

It is said that we spend half of our lives trying to get away from home and the other half trying to get back. Man has always had a homing instinct that forced him to try to see life through a rear view mirror. It is a desire to resurrect the past as it once was, to reclaim the good memories that are no more. That is forbidden by the future. History is our catalog of memories, to be cherished individually and very personally. Why can't we just leave it that way?…JWB

Fall was in the air as each mile brought me closer to the end of my trip. I was finally going home. Not where I live today, but my boyhood home. I had traveled two thousand miles for this moment, and now that it was at hand the apprehensive feeling in the pit of my stomach intensified. As the last few miles slid away under the wheels of my car, I had time to think. I knew what I hoped to see, but at the same time I was fearful of what I would find. For the past few miles I had begun to see occasional reminders of the past, like Miller’s Store, now closed with the porch falling off. I remember when, on Saturday afternoons, it was the gathering place for men and boys from miles around.

I just passed the crossroad where I caught a ride early one morning on a summer day when coming home after an all„ night fishing trip with my buddies. There is an old sign leaning at a precarious angle near the road. Only a few words can still be read. It is advertising a product that no longer exists. As I drove along I noticed several other sights that triggered memories of a time long ago.

My objective was to recapture the high points of my life as a youth with my family and to refresh the store of pleasant memories as my own life winds toward its inevitable end after eighty„one years. As I got closer to the end of my journey, details began to come back to mind, each episode clear with memories of events, the private moments and the good and bad times. Some of these were the Sunday dinners after church when the whole family would be around the table. I could see them clearly in my mind’s eye. I even remembered where everyone sat. Then there was the excitement of packing for a trip on a train, or the turmoil of the family preparing to go to a ball game or church picnic, or some other function, always taking a basket of cold fried chicken, potato salad, deviled eggs with pickles, sandwiches, cookies and other delicacies for desert like homemade syrup cakes and pies. Food seemed to taste better when eaten off a tablecloth spread on the grass, even if an occasional ant tried to steal a bit.

There were the sober moments when one of the young people announced a pending marriage, and the excitement and preparation that followed as the whole family joined in getting ready for the big event. Sometimes there was the death of a friend or distant family member, or my mother going to help a sick relative during a time of crisis. Occasionally there were anxious moments when sickness invaded our own family.

During the winter, being the youngest boy, I would be sent to meet the postman with several handwritten notes, asking him to drop them off at certain houses on his route. The notes told of a quilting party that was to be held at our house the following Friday. He did that free. That was a part of life in the country.

I couldn't help but smile to myself as I remembered that tired and satisfied feeling after a hard day's work in the fields and the shock of cold water on our backs after working in the hot sun. That was something no one could ever forget.

There was the thrill of the last plowing before the crop was laid„by to wait for harvesting. The watermelons were kept in the shade of the yard trees to keep them cool. I could nearly taste the sweetness of the bright red meat.

As I continued my drive I remembered how the wind blew across the wheat, making it bow and sweep back and forth in great, gentle waves. Then there was the rustling noise made by the drying corn fodder as the breeze blew through it just before harvest time. Hearing our hunting dogs chase some animal late in the afternoon and their bark echoing across the pasture. Even if you were talking to someone else, you had one ear tuned to the dogs, wishing you were there. All of that was music to the ears of a farm boy.

I just passed the old dilapidated ruin of the Robert’s home place. I was reminded that in those days neighbors were true friends, and you were comfortable with the prospect that if you ever needed them, they would be there for you without reservation, and you for them. Nobody ever said it out loud, nobody had to. No farm boy can ever forget animals that had become a part of the farm family being sold to the stockyards. We knew where they were headed, and somehow, I think they also knew. My brothers and I would go fishing before the truck arrived to pick them up.

Then there were the few times when we had to face the sad truth that to let a sick or lame animal live in torment and pain was unconscionable and it had to be destroyed. That's a part of farm life, we were told. We would still get watery eyes and look away so the others wouldn't see. We would get over it in time and realize that it was the right thing to do.

Most of all, I wanted to remember our family where I knew them best„„in our home. To see where my mother planted flowers with loving care in carefully tended beds. I smiled to myself. Maybe I would be able to collect pecans from the trees planted by my father so many years ago. I wondered if the remnants of the fenced lane my father built to guide the cows home for milking would still be there. In my mind's eye I could still see them walking in single file down that lane headed toward the barn at milking time, their udders full and bouncing off their legs. We knew each one by name. They knew which was their stall and went to it without a word being said by any of us.

I wondered if our state of the art corn crib still stood. My father, brothers and I built it one winter. It was rat-proof, according to the farm journal.

I longed to taste the sweet water from the deep, cool well that served so many purposes, like keeping milk cool and butter from melting in the summer. Nobody gave a thought to whether it met purification standards or not. Our gauge was that nobody got sick or died from drinking it and it tasted wonderful, so it must have been okay. It was my job to keep the dirt banked up on the side of the well house to keep out ground water.

There were the arguments between my brothers and me about whose turn it was to fill the water trough for the livestock while the others filled the wood boxes.

Monday was laundry day, if it didn't rain. It was my job to build a fire under the black wash pot in the yard after I had half filled it with well water. Tuesday was ironing day. I was relegated to the task of keeping the stove wood box filled so the fire would keep the hand irons hot.

It was easy to remember the winters, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were the most memorable and my favorites because the family seemed to be closer then. We would hover around the log fire in the big fireplace, cold on one side and hot on the other. Mother would have a shawl over her shoulders while she sat in her special chair. We children would turn around and around in front of the fire to keep from toasting one side too long. There were winter evenings when we roasted peanuts and a few chestnuts in the hot coals. Occasionally we ate pecans, even after being warned by Mother that to drop a piece of a greasy pecan on the floor would bring a fate worse than death.

Crop working days usually began before daylight with the sharp noise of the hand„cranked, coffee bean grinder in the kitchen. It was the signal to get up and wash your face and hands. Soon came the clarion call of breakfast is ready from Mother with the built„in threat not to be late or suffer the wrath of God. She reminded us regularly that, If I took the time and trouble to prepare it, you had better come to the table and eat it. Nobody was exempt from that mandate.

When we walked into the dining room, our nostrils were hit with the smell of hot biscuits fresh out of the oven. On the table were preserves made from the fruit of our trees, fresh butter, churned the day before from our cows' milk and syrup from the sugar cane grown in the low area next to the blacksmith shop and cooked by my father and brothers each fall.

As soon as everyone was seated, my sisters would bring platters piled high with fried eggs that were laid the day before by the yard hens. That was followed by the platter of sausage or bacon and ham and, of course, those pans of piping hot biscuits. There was fresh coffee for the grown„ups from the enamel pot on the back of the stove and glasses of cool milk for us children. Who could ever forget the marvelous smells from my mother's kitchen?

Top that with cheerful conversation and instructions about the work assignments for the day, and you have a picture of how our day started on our small farm.

A particularly pleasant time was the bright spring mornings when the mockingbirds started the day off with their own good morning song.

Then there were the Saturday nights when the ladies and gentlemen from nearby farms would gather at our house for choir practice. The church was several miles away and we had the only pump organ. I can still hear the old hymns with my mother's shrill soprano voice as she played the organ and led the singing. As a child, I could never understand why our neighbor, Mr. Fred Morgan, stopped them in the middle of a song to fuss about something then make them start over. Anyway, it would all be forgotten by the time practice was over.

It was during this time when you wished life could go on forever just as it was, with the same people in the same place, but you knew it couldn't. As you grew older, there was the deep-seeded apprehension that someday you would have to face the inevitable. It would change.

After we went away to school, life at home was never the same. Graduations were particularly important to us because they were the turning point in our lives. First one chair would be missing from the table, then two, and so on until the family was a skeleton of its former self, only coming together on special occasions, and then each of us had our own family. It was not the same. Finally, after a third of a century, just the old folks were left. The cycle had run full circle. They started it and finished it alone.

As the years rolled by, all of our lives changed. The old people looked older every time we saw them, and there was no spring left in their step. They seemed content to sit and watch rather than participate.

A particular moment of sadness swept over me as I remembered my brother going away to war. The look on my mother’s face as he left to catch the bus will be etched in my memory forever. I think she had a mother’s intuition that he would not return. It was a year later when the sheriff came to the house late one evening with a telegram from the Navy telling my parents that John had been lost at sea and was presumed dead. The sorrow was bottled up inside my parents for the rest of their lives. They seldom mentioned him, but we knew that there were wet places on my mother's pillow many mornings.

The little banner with the gold star on it that the government gave her hung in the front window of our house until the day she died. I pinned it on her blouse when she was buried beside my father.

No one would remember all of the tender and close moments that took place in our home when a child was sick or a new baby was born. Those memories were sacred and reserved for the close family.

In those days it was always good to have visitors come. They usually brought the latest gossip, and the issues of the day were discussed in detail by the grown folks. Even as friends, they couldn't know the intimate details of a close family. Nobody could. No storyteller can impart the attitudes, the feelings, the happiness, the atmosphere, the love, the periods of sadness and sickness, the financial concerns when a crop failed and all of the many other little untold stories that worked themselves in and out of our lives daily with no record left to remind anybody that they were ever there. Our lives were irrevocably linked by those episodes and the times.

Then came the inevitable time when one of the heads of the household could make it no more. The time span between death and burial was only a few days, but the deep well of love was always there. It would last a lifetime for those left behind. Everyone knew that life would go on, even if abbreviated by the loss. Nature would see to that. The mate left behind was tranquil to the eye, but that could not transcend the loneliness that comes in the wee hours of a morning when formerly someone was there to hear or see and touch, and now the realization was very graphic that the recent past abruptly had become history. The thought clouded my eyes with tears for a moment.

Suddenly, I was home. I stopped my car just before rounding Chandler's curve and parked on the shoulder of the road. I decided to walk from there. I wanted to see our old home place appear gradually, just as it had done when I walked home from the school bus so many years ago. I wanted to see the wheat field in front first, then the quarter mile of dirt road that led up to the front yard and finally the house.

I sat there for a few minutes wondering if, after all these years, I could actually recapture some of the golden moments of my youth spent on that little farm. I had thought about it so many times as small incidents in my life triggered memories of the past, some wonderful, some sad.

I got out of the car filled with apprehension. Using my now necessary walking cane, I walked into the curve stopping every few feet to look. I saw the wheat field. It was filled with a combination of scrub brush and weeds. It had not been worked for many years and looked deserted, with no purpose to exist. There was the old dirt road from the highway to the house, now overgrown from disuse. Connecting the highway to our road was the bridge that my father and I built one winter long ago, but some of it had rotted away. I had to be careful crossing it.

The house looked so small. I could tell from a distance that it had deteriorated to a shell of its former self. I had always thought that maybe a house shriveled up a little when a happy family moved away, leaving it empty. I believe that now.

The fear of seeing the past this close flooded my emotions. I stood for a long minute looking at the scene from the road. I had considerable apprehension about going up to the house but something drew me to it. It would have been like abandoning an old friend if I didn't. I had to go.

As I walked, I noticed that the fence that once surrounded the vegetable garden was gone except for a scattering of cedar posts on the ground with a few pieces of rusty hog wire still attached. All the rest had disappeared. As I got closer to the yard, I was surprised to see some of my mother's flowers still blooming. After all of those years, they had propagated themselves by dropping seeds. The periwinkle that she always thought was so pretty was the only one that I could recall. I well remember her warning us not to trample on them as we played catch in the front yard.

Upon reaching the yard I stood still, listening for any sound that would be familiar. The only sound was the wind blowing through what was left of the old house. I suppose I wanted to hear the clear, soprano voice of my sister calling us to come home for our big meal at noon. We called it dinner in those days. What was left from it was always covered with a tablecloth and warmed over for supper.

The barn had caved in and was nothing but a pile of rotted logs. The cow shed was gone. I remembered the excitement of watching new calves play in the pen and occasionally a young colt try to stand on shaky legs too soon after being born. Baby pigs were always a delight.

It was over there by that stump of a shade tree that our old dog, Sparky, would stand and bark like crazy as we came up the road from the school bus. His aged eyesight prevented him from identifying us at a distance, then the wonderful way his whole body wagged his tail when he finally recognized us as his own family.

I decided to venture inside the house. It was dangerous to walk on the porch because of rotten floorboards. I made my way carefully into the center hall. The floor groaned with each step as if it was tired, each groan indicating that it didn't need this punishment anymore.

The old house had not been occupied for many years. The tin roof over the kitchen, where my mother had prepared those memorable meals, had blown away leaving only a few fragments to flap in the breeze. The windows were broken. In some the putty had given away to time, and the glass had fallen out on the ground. The wallpaper in the front hall had detached itself and hung in shreds, bleached out and pitiful. I remembered many years ago when that same package of wallpaper came from the mail order house, and how excited my mother was when we finished hanging it with wheat paste.

Many of the little things about the house that I had forgotten came flooding back to mind. The bedrooms seemed so small now that they were devoid of furniture and occupants. The fact that there were no closets, only the special high shelves in the girls' room for their hat boxes. The sand blown, decorative glass in the front door, now cracked, was still there. The old pressed„metal escutcheon around the lock on the front door was rusty, but still in place. I couldn't remember that there had ever been a key to the