Riddle Riddle Ree...I See Something You Don't See...

Peace

Have you ever had a special place that whenever you are not feeling well that you think of that place and you are at peace?  Well that place was my grandparent's farm.  I say "was" because the farm was sold years ago and most of the buildings on the farm have been torn down.  But luckily, my memories of the farm are as vivid in my mind as if I had just visited there yesterday.  I am flooded with so many memories as I try to determine which of the many special places on the farm to share.  So, Riddle Riddle Ree, let's see where my memories takes me.

Walking up to the house there is a creek rock path and there on the porch are my grandparents.   Do you see them?  My Mamaw is sitting there in her light linen house dress which moves slightly as the breeze stirs around to cool her.  She is holding a dish towel in her hands which tells me she is taking a quick break from her chores.  My Papaw is sitting in his chair with overalls and a long sleeve blue button up shirt. He is mumbling under his breath about something he just heard on the radio.  The little radio sits inside the screen door on a shelf in the kitchen.  I open the screen door and hold onto to the inside handle to make sure it doesn't slam closed.  The spring on the door never worked as long as I can remember.  But if I let the door slam, my Papaw would grumble, "Hold that handle!"

As I cross the kitchen into the dining room, I check to see what Mamaw has cooking on the stove.  I lift the lid slowly to let the steam hit my face and fill the room with the aroma of the food.  The smell of the fresh farm veggies cooking and the fried chicken make me instantly hungry.  Placing the lid back on the pot, I see out of the corner of my eye that there is a lemon meringue pie sitting on the counter.  The pie with the tall fluffy meringue is cooling from just coming out of the oven.  Knowing that it is still about an hour before dinner (which is lunch in the country), my cousin and I go through the dining room to the living room.

There in the corner of the living room is a step up and then a door.  It is always eerily quiet in the living room, because almost everyone is sitting on the porch to cool in the breeze.  It is always too hot in the house.  But there is the door; the porcelain handle is waiting to be turned.  No one had opened the door since our last visit. There is something both inviting and scary about opening the door, so we turn the handle slowly and then swing open the door.  The breeze pushes the door open and I can feel the sweat that beaded on my forehead start to evaporate.  I count one, two, three, four steps and then turn to the left for five, six, seven steps.  At the top of the steps, I stop to look around first.  I am checking to make sure that there are no snakes, birds or other animals in the attic.  The attic is my playground.  The unique thing about the attic is that there are two windows on one side of the room and one window on the direct opposite wall.  The house sits on top of a hill so the summer breeze enters the room through the two windows.  But the breeze can't just escape as easily as it came in because there is only one window across the room.  So the breeze whirls around the room and cool us as we explore and play.

There is the source of hours of entertainment, the trunk.  The trunk sits behind the roll away bed.  So we drag the trunk out from behind the roll away bed and then inside we find our treasures.  The dresses that our mothers and aunts wore to dances, proms and weddings are neatly folded in the trunk.  Since our mother’s didn't have much money they made their clothes.  The memories of the dances and the weddings are with the dresses.  There are also the dried flowers and corsages that engage our imaginations to wonder how our mother’s felt when given the flowers.  My Mamaw had finally let us start to play with the dresses.  This was only after when she realized that no one was ever going to wear them again.  Since the dresses are really special to her, we always place the dresses back in the plastic bags that she had them carefully stored.  We pretend that we are in high school.  We act like part of the attic was the school and my cousin pretends she was the teacher.  Then we pretend the other side of the attic was our house.  We put the dresses on and pretend we are at the dance.  We play until we are called down to the kitchen for dinner.

We watch our mothers serve our fathers.  Our fathers just came in from the fields and need to eat and rest before going back out to finish the work.  I see my father and wonder if he remembers the dress my mother wore to her prom.  Does he know that it is upstairs?  The mothers fix the children’s plates and send us out on the porch to eat.  Finally, the women clear the table from the men and fix their plates.  The men go back out to the field to work.  The women settle in at the table to share their stories with their mother, their sister and their friend.  I listen to hear the sisters laugh with their mother, for them to reminisce about those years gone by.  Then my cousin and I go back to the attic and open the trunk, the memories of the dances and the weddings are with the dresses once again.

Riddle Riddle Ree… What Do You See?