Reminiscing
Invariably, when our thoughts take us back, they involve another person or more. Thinking back to my childhood, I know I was fortunate to live next door to my paternal grandmother (Mama) and her oldest sister, Aunt Lizzie, both widows.
These two were enterprising ladies. From a family with 14 siblings, all with one mother except the oldest, Aunt Nancy, and a father who had come home from the "late unpleasantness," the Civil War, these two women, from their childhood, were used to eking out a living where living in the South, east of Yellow River was hard.
Mama and Aunt Lizzie owned several small rentals, bought, I expect, with the small pension Aunt Lizzie received from her deceased Spanish American War veteran husband who was 25 years her senior. Uncle Will, who died before I was born, and Aunt Lizzie had no children. At the time and for several years, I was an only grandchild who spent countless hours with them.
Although Mama and Aunt Lizzie worked very hard, tending chickens, raising pigs sometimes, and smoking them in their smokehouse, milking a cow, seeing after their rentals, and being, in general, the "go-to" head of their large and expanding family of brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. Not to mention Mama's two sons–and me.
Many long summer evenings, after working hard all day, Mama and Aunt Lizzie, and I, enjoyed their large, wrap-around front porch, Mama, sitting in the large swing, and Aunt Lizzie, sitting in the rocker-settee, facing the swing. The porch faced the fenced front yard, overlooking what we called "the field." I usually lay in the swing with my head in Mama's lap.
They related stories about their and their siblings' childhood, growing up east of Yellow River, swimming in the creek, being followed home, more than once, by a bear, and hearing at night a panther "screaming like a woman."
Often Mama sang old songs that, later, I recognized as many being old Scottish ditties.
At about dusk, we often saw across the field where the land was marshy, a large ball of phosphorous gas, floating low to the ground from west to east. That was the direction it went each time we saw it. I was convinced it was a ghost, but Mama reassured me by telling me it was a God-sent angel, boding well.
When I stayed the night, I slept with Mama in her large bed with the feather mattress that had to be fluffed every morning. With windows raised, we clearly heard frogs croaking in the basin back of our houses.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Aunt Lizzy’s wisdom and Mama’s ditties