When I was a child I loved visiting relatives out in the country. Way out there. Where highways were distant, houses far apart, and there was only one gas station that doubled as a small grocery store. And one bar (there’s always a bar.) A few abandoned buildings were around which were fun to explore (the town died down after the 1929 crash). I especially loved the old-fashioned cash register still sitting on the counter of an abandoned store.
And at my uncle’s house (where my mom once lived with their whole family) the attic was a treasure trove - but only part of it admissible - it was dark and scary (no electricity up there!). I’d go through the rooms where sunshine entered, discovering an old telephone (the kind with the oblong speaker you held to your ear, the separate box to talk into). There were writings from another uncle (he went to college, wrote a book, became a civil servant). I wish I’d kept those things. They’re all gone now - so is the house.
Also in that town was a two-room schoolhouse, with old-fashioned roll-top desks, all facing the chalkboard. It sat there for years - decades - but it too is gone now. To think my mother and uncles and aunts went there. Got their education there. Sat in those rooms, likely longing to be out in the country, in the fields. My mom actually used to pick cotton out there in her youth!
The old cotton gin was another place to explore in my youth. On weekends when no one was there, my sisters and I would climb up the ladder and dare each other to jump into the bale of cotton below (complete with those hard crisps still sticking onto them). It was a delight to jump onto the softness of cotton, even though we were scratched in the process.
I always wanted to live there in that tiny Texas town. That was my childhood dream. But it never turned out that way. I still dream of it. Sometimes in my dreams the house is a little different, but family is still alive, the fields still call to me, to run with the local black Labrador who would go through a tank (small ponds) and fully wet come running right towards us only to playfully pass us by, splashing us silly with water! To hear the crunch of walking on gravel roads, finding pieces of flint rock to marvel at the sparkle.
In studying my ancestry this was a not too distant place that I actually had visited as a child, but very little of it exists now. Even the land my relatives had owned have been sold off.
But in my mind, my dreams, I’m there. I’m a part of something from the past that brings me to the here and now. It’s all relative. Theresa M.
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“No Answers”
There I sat on the old school’s steps--
gazing past weeds and bugs
and hazy air,
Towards the low sun making its way to rest--
that day.
A part of my mother’s past, sitting quietly behind me
in a one-room school
With oak-wooden desks and a chalkboard erased
over and over,
Filled with lessons still echoing--
repeated till one learned enough
in there.
Getting up from the steps I take another look
behind me through
the old paned windows
That let children just like my mom
see the weeds and fields and life
out here.
While numbers, words, dates, times and nursery rhymes
all vied for attention from
youth so eager to come live
out there.
Now through the glare and tint of evening’s colors
I see the empty chairs;
desks drawn closed;
Words in white smeared over the
answerless slates.
The children gone, now adults somewhere someplace,
where weeds grow tall
across fields of endless space.
Life as it was
in there
Left more lessons to learn
out here
repeated and repeated,
before being permanently
erased.
Theresa M.
