My Sad Christmas

Nine flowers standing in a row,    

God has said one must go.

Who shall it be said each one

Can it be him of who we are so fond?

On Christmas Day down came the hand 

and pulled the flower from the sand.

The sand was the suffering he must bear. 

God took him away with gentle care.

The other flowers they will weep

While down from heaven he will peep.

The flower was Jr. my little brother

He who loved both us and mother.

I know now he is happy and gay 

And he will remember the day he was taken away.

He had lots of toys from us

But he received a gift with no bother no fuss.

God knows best others say

But I will always remember that sad Christmas Day.

 

Dedicated to God's Darling Angel Jr who was just lent to us. 

Love, Jane.

poem written at age 11 on the death of my brother , December 25, 1950

                                                       

CHRISTMAS MEMORIES

A stiff, bristly, good smelling cedar tree, cut from Papa's woods. Shiny red and green punch-out ornaments from a sack of flour.

A string of lights, red and green and yellow and blue, and some spotted where the paint had peel off from the pointed bulbs. When one blew they all went out.

Each bulb unscrewed, replaced with a new one, and suddenly the connection is made and the lights, filling your lap and trailing on the floor, light up with the magic of Christmas.

A crate of apples, each in its nest of green paper. A bag of tangerines, so easy to peel. A box of chocolate covered cherries, mama's favorite, Pecans and walnuts to crack on the hearth.

A box of dried grapes, they were awful, your teeth grated on the seeds and your hands got dirty holding them, but mama always bought them.

Fat, rough skinned oranges, with holes cut in the top to squeeze the juice through.  The acid from the peel made our lips and around our mouths, red.

Daddy showed us how to use peppermint sticks for straws to suck the juice through, until the sticks became hollow and filled with little caves.

Cakes, lop-sided layers turned out to cool on brightly printed feed sacks. Coconut and chocolate and buttermilk filling decorated with pecan halves, carefully arranged on top. And always, an apple sauce cake for Daddy.

A red cellophane wreath hung in the window. It's light didn't burn and it was dusty and torn from spending the year on top of the chifferobe but it was Christmas and the old wreath was beautiful to me.

There were presents, a book, two tiny dolls in a blanket, a head scarf printed with dancing ballerinas, a play telephone and a wind up freight train that spit out sparks in the dark.

Christmas meant a visit from Uncle I. L. and Aunt Hattie. My uncle laughed and told his funny jokes. He always told me I looked like Eleanor Roosevelt and that my feet were so big they breathed and had guts in them.

Mama playing Christmas carols on the piano, Silent Night, O Little Town of Bethlehem, Hark the Hearld Angels Sing and my favorite, Away In A Manager.

The ride downtown in back of the truck, wrapped in old woolen army blankets, our excited breath looking like cigarette smoke in the cold air, on our way to see the Christmas lights.

And the Merry Christmas's came and went. And then one came bringing death, like a crushing hammer blow and all the bulbs went out at once and destroyed the magic of Christmas.

 

 

Letter G

This is my entry for the letter G. Gravestones. Taken in a cemetery in Marion, Ohio.

Mother's day continued

I did go home for Mother's Day, the year 1993. It was just like I had planned, the front porch swing and coffee and curling smoke and laughter and memories.  The old tree's trunk still lay on the ground, covered with a pretty green vine. There were no lightning bugs and we were too lazy and content to go to Sunday School but the red roses were blooming and I was not a wife or mother or friend but just Jane, my mother's daughter.

I did not know what the next Mother's Day would be like. If I had I would have lingered longer with my mama that day.

I can still see her standing in the road, watching,  as we drove off, her arms crossed over her stomach, the belt to her dress slipped up too high, her feet in her old shoes. I wondered as she stood there what she was thinking or seeing in her mind. Was she seeing that black hearse taking her little boy down that road, to bring him back in a little white casket? Was she thinking about the last time Daddy went down that road to the nursing home, leaving her alone in the home where we had lived for over fifty years.   I almost told my husband stop and go back as I saw her standing there.

Mother's Day

I want to go home for Mother's day. I must go home and look into my mama's face again and see her smile.  I want to sit on the front porch and listen to her memories flow like a song with the voice of the porch swing singing along.

We will drink coffee and she will smoke her cigarettes and I will watch the smoke curl away just like I did when I was a little girl, Mama sitting at the sewing machine making me a new feed sack dress while I lay across the bed, thinking how pretty I was going to look.

I will miss the silver popular tree at the corner of the porch, next to the rock wall, the tree where my brother carved his initials so long ago. When the dress was finished my sister Betty posed me in front of that tree and made my picture.

The tree blew down this past winter. I felt sad when Mama told me but now the morning sun will light up my old bedroom.

We will sit on the porch and watch the birds bathe in the birdbath and hear the trains go by on the tracks across the valley. The air will be filled with the smell of honeysuckle and if we sit late enough, we will hear the whippoorwills. If the lightning bugs are out I will jump off the porch and catch some before they fly too high. I will pinch their light off just at the right moment and put one on mine and Mama's finger for a glowing ring just like I did when I was little.

Yes, I must go home for Mother's Day and wear a red rose to Sunday School. I must go home and be a daughter, Mama's little girl, again.

Out Doors

When I was growing up, just about everyone I knew still had outdoor toilets. You could kind of judge people by their toilets. The shiftless, don't much care kind usually built theirs on a slope and let the waste pile up and tumble down the hillside.

My mama said that in her day, men came around town in a "Honey Wagon"and shoveled out the waste of the people in town.

The more industrious people dug pits underneath their toilets and from time to time put in lime to keep the odors down. My daddy built us a very fine toilet. He dug a deep pit and poured a cement floor around it. He took a big piece of pipe and embedded one end into the floor and on the other end he fitted a wooden seat just like the ones in the restrooms at the picture show. It even had a lid to let down.

 The seat was very comfortable and you could sit and think your thoughts away from the noisy house.  There was a bit of newpaper on the floor which had a story about a horse who fell into a cistern. The paper lay there for months and to this day everyone still living in my family can tell you nearly word for word about the horse and the struggle the people had getting him out.

It was very nice when we got a real bathroom, but I kind of missed the little house inside the pasture down across the road. I missed feeling the heat of summer and the occasional sound of gentle rain on the rusty tin roof. I missed the cold of winter and the sound of the blustering wind blowing around the corners and through the boards.  I missed the nosing around of the old cow who came to the door as if to say hello. And best of all, we never had to clean it.

superstitions

I did not want to go back into Mama's and Papa's room the day after the funeral. The whole house seemed scary to me. Yesterday it had been filled with people eating and drinking, talking and even laughing.

" How can they laugh?" I thought. " Don't they care that Mama is dead?"

Now the house was empty and quiet. The furniture  was still out of place. They had moved it around to make room for Mama's casket beneath the double windows. There were some petals that had fallen to the floor from the many flowers that friends and neighbors had sent. Shadow leaves moved across the walls as the sun came and went, shining through the big maple tree in the yard. It looked like it might rain. I was glad it didn't rain yesterday when we buried Mama.

My sister, Gertrude, was with me. Papa and the others had gone back to the cemetery. Gertrude was eleven, four years older than me but we still liked to play together. We played dolls and had tea parties on the back steps. We drank pretend tea from our Blue Willow tea set that I'd gotten for Christmas two years before. We would sit on the steps playing while Mama and our aunts sat on the porch and snapped beans or shelled peas. Sometimes they had peaches to peel and would give us little bites to go along with our tea. Mama put up all the fruits and vegetables that Papa could grow to feed our big family through the winter.

As the women worked they talked, their voices keeping rhythm with their busy hands. They talked about their husbands, their children, the neighbors, even about which ever sister happened to not be there that day. Sometimes they talked with words like "you know who" or "you know what".

One day Mama began talking about something called superstitions. She told us that if you pulled a tooth and didn't stick your tongue in the hole that was left, your tooth would grow back gold.  My Aunt Bertie said that if you cleaned your hairbrush outside and a bird wove some of your hair into it's nest, you would go crazy. Aunt Evelyn told us that she had heard that when a person died you could open up the pillow they had died on and if the feathers were in the shape of a crown that meant the person had gone to heaven.

Aunt Johnnie made us laugh when she said if you pulled a tooth and lost it on the ground and an animal stepped on it, your tooth would grow back like that animal's tooth. I could just see Gertrude with a big cow tooth in her mouth. Gertrude said, " What if a chicken stepped on it? They don't have any teeth."

But there came a time when Mama couldn't sit on the porch with her sisters and work. She got very sick and her sisters took turns coming to the house to cook and clean and take care of Mama. Mama cried because of the pain and the doctor gave her medicine but it didn't help much. He said he could operate but Mama said no, she was afraid of being put to sleep. She stayed in the bed all the time and when the weather got really hot, Papa moved the bed to the screened in porch where it was a little cooler. Aunt Bertie plaited her hair and pinned it up because it was so hot on her neck. One day they cut the plaits off and Mama looked funny with such short hair.

Mama was sick all summer, growing weaker and weaker. We hoped she might get better when fall came but she only got worse. She was skinny and her skin had a strange color to it, kind of yellow looking. Her room began to smell bad, like nothing I had ever smelled before. Papa went to the drug store and bought some disinfectant to use to try and kill the odor.

One day Papa came out of their bedroom. He had one of his handkerchiefs, wiping his face that was strangely wet. I noticed how dingy the handkerchief was, not bleached or ironed like Mama used to keep them. I think Papa was crying. I had never seen him cry before.  I knew why he was crying when he told us that Mama was dead.  I could not believe that Mama was dead,even though I knew that she had been very sick. How did you get by without a mama? Papa couldn't take care of us like she did. Besides, he had to go to work. Papa  gathered us all up in his arms and said we should pray and thank God that we'd had such a good mama. I didn't feel like thanking God. He shouldn't have let her die. So when everbody else was praying I kept my eyes open.

I thought about that as we stood in the house. I guess that's why I felt so scared. Gertrude was pulling at me to go in the bedroom.  I kept telling her, "No, I don't want to. I don't want to do it."

"Lillie Mae," she whispered to me, " I want to see. It won't hurt anything."

"But Papa will get mad,"I whispered back.

"Papa won't have to know. We'll hide it before he comes home."

She grabbed my arm trying to drag me through the door. I held on to Papa's trunk that always sat in the hall. It was full of important papers like the house deeds and his discharge from the army.  Although it was heavy and I held to one of it's leather handles, Gertrude was too strong for me. She pushed open the door and forced me into the room.

The tan shades were pulled down over the long windows. When the sun came out and shined through the shades, the room was colored with a brownish wash. The color came and went with the sun. I  could see myself in the mirror above the dresser. Gertrude and I looked like brown shadows as we stood side by side with our backs against the door. Gertrude looked scared now. Her eyes were wide and she kept biting her lower lip.

"Get the scissors, Lillie," she said to me.

I pulled out the dresser drawer where the scissors were kept but I couldn't see them in the dim light. I reached in and felt around until my hand touched something that made me snatch it away as quick as I could. It was Mama's braids. I wrapped my arms around me, trying to make myself as small as possible so I wouldn't touch anything else in the room. I wanted to run outside and hide in Papa's old junked car where I kept my favorite books and spent long afternoons reading and eating green peaches and plums.

Gertrude shoved me away and got the scissors herself. I watched as she slowly walked to the bed. The sheets and pillowcases had been stripped from the bed and the mattress and pillows were left in their blue and white striped coverings. I watched as she picked up a pillow, the feather pillow Mama had died on.

"No! No!" I heard myself scream as I rushed across the room and grabbed the pillow from Gertrude's hands.  I crushed the pillow to my chest and fell across the bare mattress. " Gertrude, please, I don't want to know," I cried.

Gertrude lay beside me, face down. I could feel her trembling as she began to cry. She cried with long deep sobs as if she was losing her breath. I felt her arm move across my shoulders and heard her say with a gasp, " I'm sorry, Lillie, I don't want to know either.

Exercise Three/Creative Writing Assignment

Huntingdon College 2001

 

BLACK SHEEP

 

 "When I was a little girl," she said," Every spring my father would let us pick a newborn lamb of our own to care for and then when it came time to sell the wool, we got to keep the money."

"Now Susan," he said, "Pick out the lamb you want."

"This is the one I want, the little black one. He is so cute."

" But Susan, the wool won't be worth anything. You need to choose a white one."

But she did not want a white one. So her father agreed and after thinking for a long time she finally named it Mckinley. She had heard her parents say the name many times. A man named Mckinley had run for President and her father had campaigned for him and he was elected. She thought it was a very nice name.

One morning the phone rang and her father answered it.

" What? Oh no! I don't believe it!"

" What's happened?" her mother asked.

"Mckinley! Mckinley's been shot!"

"And when I heard that," she told me," I threw myself on the floor and started kicking and bawling. My little lamb had been shot.

" I was so relieved when I learned it was the President."

 

as told to me by Susan Byrd

Denver, Co  1993