Coffee Chat: Shortcake Season

Hello all...

I've started to chat three or four times now and time keeps slipping away so quickly as I am interrupted multiple times and I lose the pattern of my thoughts.  So frustrating but so normal these days, as well.   So this one may be short and sweet as time has slipped from me this morning and I really must get myself together.

John was off to work this morning and I sat down long enough to work up the bill box since he gets paid next Monday and I like to know about where we are and what's coming up.  How pleased I was to realize that I shall be able to pay off that loan we took out prior to our going on vacation next month.  Joy joy!  It makes me happy to see that while I might be stretching pennies I am getting them to stretch to cover necessities and pleasures alike.   I won't say it's not been a close fit but John's overtime has covered all our needs extended as they are at present.



Sunday it rained, poured, filled the yards and water buckets and bird bath and flooded the carport.  I briefly missed that cement flooring we'd meant to put in but then again, God had other plans for that money and who am I to argue with him over where to put the money he so generously provides us with?  When I came home again from church, I noted that there was a space just big enough to park my car and allow me to step out on dry ground.  Just.  I chuckled over how good He is to provide enough even when it seems unlikely there could possibly be enough of anything.

I brought home strawberries Sunday after church because Josh had been told they would take him to pick strawberries on Saturday and they got busy with the house and then Sunday the heavens poured rain down and the orchards closed.   He and I had been talking about strawberry shortcake for days and how we'd make one when they brought berries home.  I went right on Sunday afternoon and made a shortcake.  Rainy day though it was, it felt right to go on and make it and enjoy it.  My but it was good!

Sam told Josh how I used to make a Strawberry Shortcake Supper for them when he was growing up...and I did!  As tight as things were back then, when strawberries were in season and inexpensive I'd buy two quarts and make two huge shortcakes and that was what I fed the kids for supper one night, usually on a lovely sunny spring day.   They were allowed to eat all they wanted.  Just one more of those things I did when we were so broke we could afford few pleasures.

We look back now and then, John and I and wonder why our kids felt those days were so good but I do believe that the illusion was created by those few rare things we could do and so we did them rather than act fearful of what we might have to give up later.    I say this because I was once in company with another woman who cried daily over all that she must do without and how difficult things were and she'd no idea when she might ever have anything new ever again... 

I felt so sorry for her!  And you can imagine what a turn it gave me to hear one day her pique with a relative whose plants she'd overwintered in her heated greenhouse and how she'd had to make do with a five year old fridge when she'd had her heart set on a new one last year...Here I'd been feeling terribly sorry for this woman who had so many complaints over her lack and she was heating a greenhouse while our own home was often barely heated in one room in winter.   I don't for one minute doubt that she saw her lot as a terrible one but I never spoke of our own life struggles and as it turned out,  they were a great deal harder than hers!  It made me very aware that hardship is in the attitude towards life overall isn't it?

Now then, you see?  Here it is evening and I am typing up the rest of my coffee chat, determined to send it out to you all...

Shall I tell you what I did today?  It was a lovely lovely day and very restorative.  I was meant to go out with Mama today but she begged off, as she'd made a lunch date with a nursing friend.  I wasn't in the least put out.  I drove to the little old church I attended as a child and into my adult years.  My purpose was to go roam about the graveyard which I confess was a lovely place in my childhood.  There was a great deal more decorative wrought iron fencing, and graves whose facades have since deteriorated.  There are trees missing.  Many graves had cedars planted at the head to mark them.  Many of those have since been cut down, as has the old cedar that was filled with honey bees.

The ancient magnolia that once stood center of the graveyard was so large that nine children holding hands couldn't reach all the way round it.  I do not know how old it was.  We came to church one day and it was gone.  A woman who attended the church loathed the tree for some reason and had paid men to come cut it down.  How grieved I was to find it gone!

I admit that overall the whole place seemed terribly small, even the church which has been doubled in size since my childhood.  I walked about had looked and talked to myself about things that had changed, of memories I recalled as I walked, of graves I missed most especially and structures.  I walked carefully as the grounds are filled with 'sinks' places where old graves are hidden.  This graveyard was the original graveyard for the city that is nearby, from the earliest days of the territory being settled.  The history of that graveyard is my history.  My family lies there.  I played there as a child and felt I belonged and now I know just why I did but I didn't when I was so young.

For one moment, as I turned to go back to my car, I saw me, age 9 or so, sitting atop the steps at the side door, looking out over the graveyard and church yard and the people I'd always known and loved milling about.  I felt a sob rise up and blink hard to hold back the tears.  How I longed to go to that child, to counsel her and tell her to hold on through the sad and bad things to come because it would all come out lovely in the end.  But I couldn't...So I left her sitting there, content in her world, as I am content in mine.

Well I figured I might  just as well go for broke.  I made the whole day nostalgia of some sort.  Out the old roadways to Big Mama's old home site, though I can't go to the house itself because it's barred by a very massive and impressive gate and fence now.  But I know that there was once just a lovely wooden farmhouse with proper farm outbuildings and sandy drive circling about the front yard and back out again.  And I remembered something I seldom recall, when I was a young woman, newly independent and one of those rare fall days came with a very warm sun and a very cool breeze brisking the air.  It was so delicious in a very sensual way that mix of heat and cold.  I wandered through a field of sedge, silken  and blonde and down into the woods to a creek that ran amber with tannin from the leaves that littered the ground.

I might not have walked the property again, but I reconnected with that part of me, as well...but I left that girl too to her time and kept myself to mine.

Out to Big Mama's church where construction work had gone on and I saw a disturbing sight of old headstones broken and pushed into the wooded edge of the church yard and rather neat and dismaying new stones stood at many of the graves.   I found great great grandparents and great great greats but not Big Mama nor her sister, Mama Lee.

I drove along road ways filled with sunshine and quiet, true quiet.  So quiet I could hear birds trilling songs all along the way.  I felt the weight of days of weariness and too much noise and too much of all melted off me.  I felt in touch with myself in a way that I haven't for a long while.   I did not end my day at that point but took myself to lunch and had my favorite cookie (any guess as to what my favorite is?) and then I drove to the little village that started my genealogy hobby and drove up and down the tiny narrow streets wondering just how and why my great great great grandfather came to be there and why he moved to this county.

I'd had a bit of nostalgia, a bit of family history, peace and quiet...I wanted to end the day with writing and more time to myself but that is not the life I have at the moment.  I came home instead to help prep supper, offer to take the baby for a bit while Bess got out of house with Josh and listen to the mayhem that is two boys and two adult children and a gramma in a small house.

But I found something today.  I found myself, at various ages, and I recognized that despite all the stuff life throws at us over the years, despite all the stuff we get ourselves into and out of again, despite the dreams that didn't and won't come true and the lack of time ahead, the essence of me is still the same.  I don't feel a stranger to myself.  I know me.  I know me.