The best parades on Memory Lane...

“Mint Tea & Tar Bubbles”

too hot for shoes...

an adaptation of a Native American teaching, by S.L. Gilbert

My Grandpa was part Cherokee. 

We’d sit out on his old clapboard porch many hot ‘n humid days, sipping mint tea and watching the tar bubble on the road. We were patiently waiting for some kinda traveler to part the air.

Lulu would eventually wag her way across the yard bringin’ the day’s collection of ticks and burs, but rare was the passing of more than two motorized contraptions.

Usually a grasshopper would tempt fate and shoot like a cannon from the grass, 

only to land on that blistering blacktop.

I didn’t know it then,

but Grandpa’s life was unwinding with black lung.

His breathing was getting’ as sticky as that road.

One day, as we swayed up a breeze on the metal rocker, I told him how I was going to put the hurt on that Huber kid come fall, for getting me kicked out of second grade and missing Ms. Lucy’s ice cream party; I’d thrown ink on his new Reds ball cap, cuz all the girls were thinking he was so swell after show ‘n tell.

“What‘d you expect to happen, tarnishing that boy for no reason?”

“That Huber kid always got new stuff. I never got nothing new.”

Grandpa took his thick, tobacco-stained hands and placed mine in ‘em.

“A fight is going on inside me,” he said.

“It’s a terrible fight. It’s between two wolves.

One is sneaky an snarling.

Rabid and evil.

Every footstep he creepin' and lurking with anger, and envy.

He howls only sorrow and regret.

He is greedy, and self serving. He’s full of self-pity.

He’s so very boastful yet every word is a lie. 

He poisons everyone who'll listen, with resentment.

The other Wolf is golden white; strong and good, his face’n tail speak joy and love.

He gives without expecting a thing.

He is hope, and kindness. And humility.

Compassion, truth, and the faith in his heart guide his every step.

He don’t need to sport any new things.

You know something else; that same fight is going on inside of you- and every person you’ll ever meet.”

I thought about it for a few minutes; that Huber kid didn’t have any grandpa, or pappy, and he wore glasses.

I watched the grasshopper jump again from the middle of the road towards the huckleberries.

“Grandpa, which Wolf is gonna win?”

He put his arm around me and said,

“That’s up to you.

Which ever one you feed.”

"Argonauta"

Kona-Kohala coast, Hawai'i

  

 “Argonauta”

Excerpt from “Gift From The Sea” 

by Anne Morrow Lindberg

On this island I have had such a glimpse into the life of the Argonauta.

After my week alone I have had a week of living with my sister. 

I will take from it one day.

I shall examine it, set it before me as I have set the shells on my desk.

I shall turn it around like a shell, testing and analyzing its good points.

Not that my life will ever become like this day – a perfect one plucked out of a holiday week; there are no perfect lives. The relation of two sisters is not that of a man and a woman. But it can illustrate the essence of relationships.

The light shed by any good relationship illuminates all relationships. And one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life – the mythical life, maybe, of the Argonauta.

We wake in the same small room from the deep sleep of good children, to the soft sound of wind blowing through the casuarinas trees and the gentle sleep-breathing rhythm of waves on the shore.

We run bare-legged to the beach, which lies smooth, flat,

and glistening with fresh wet shells after a night's tides.

The morning swim has the nature of a blessing to me, a baptism,

a rebirth to the beauty and wonder of the world.

We run back tingling to hot coffee on our small back porch.

Two kitchen chairs and a child’s table between us fill the stoop on which we sit. With legs in the sun we laugh and plan our day.

Drifting Dogwood Petals

Drifting Dogwood Petals

s.l. Gilbert

waiting to sail upon the perfect breeze.

Another petal landed on the stoop.

The dogwoods swayed slowly, bending to the front porch to watch the next cascade of white blossoms float across the lawn. 

A chickadee pounced on an unsuspecting bug, and just as quick he flew his catch back through the whiteout of petals, disappearing up in the canopy of green.

The old crimson path from the mailbox would soon be swept clean for the second time this morning, mindfully, as if each brick was sacred.

Mrs. Adams sat rigid on the straight back porch chair, her back not touching the spartan support available. She stared at the pollen-covered deck. The high-gloss gray was again powdered over, with the fine yellow rights of spring. So to, the porch swing, the rockers and the railing. 

Mrs. Adams didn’t notice the robins on the lawn, or the mockingbird’s morning tribute. She didn’t see the squirrel heading to the telephone pole along the house line. See didn’t see Robby wave as he peddled his tricycle to the corner, nor Winker, the old mutt leading him nose low, tail high. Mrs. Adams was looking, and listening hard, but she wasn’t present; She watched a few random moments waft in. She was captured, taken somewhere in a distant time, again floating around the gift of her own experience. 

To most passers-by she was all but invisible. With her brown eyes glassy, cast towards the porch deck, she was frozen, waiting, like a blue heron fishing for something in her backwaters. Mrs. Adams was presently absent in her long, blink-less drift.

It’s a beautiful porch on a tidy clapboard cottage.  Cream yellow with white trim. The stoop is only three steps; but they’re wide, deep steps. Flanked by mossy urns spilling with geraniums, the deep treads hosted many a clay pot, bucket, and bum.  Decades of kids came and went. And many summertime lunches and homemade popsicles met their fate on this stoop. 

If you could just replay the sounds stored in the worn tongue and groove decking, you’d recognize shortly what season, or year, it might be. The noise being of school shoes, gym shoes, and bare feet; always accompanied by the toenails of a wet-nosed tail-wagger. 

Mrs. Adams porch is old and wise and a place well traveled.  And still well tended. It is usually ready for unexpected company these days, but, hopeful as that may be, there are mighty few who are near, or even still here. Nevertheless, she still borders the azaleas every year, with salmon-hued impatiens. 

Maybe as she sits, she’s thinking about her once little girl, Mary, singing about moonbeams and swinging on a star, to no one in particular.

Or perhaps Mrs. Adams is thinking about Kent, her other child …and how Mary shared her jar of pill bugs. Pill bugs that the children seemed to find every other day, under every other stone in every corner of the yard.

Perhaps Mrs. Adams is listening to Kent crawling under the azaleas, following the dog, following the neighbor’s cat.

Or perhaps, she is listening to her husband, again scolding the children about the sticky mess they made:

“…every shuga ant in tarenation is on my porch!”

Time is a mystery. It seems ever more so when that unblinking memory unfolds right in front of our eyes. The memory soaks us, and removes the bodies’ driver from the present, yet the clock seems to leap forward while we inspect every angle, sense, and emotion.

Maybe Mrs. Adams is thinking why people these days are too busy to walk, or even say hello. 

Maybe she’s wondering why Kent stayed in Vietnam.

The sound of a freight whistle cut into her reflection. It was as if a new partner was nudging, seeking her embrace on the dance floor… the whistle sounded again and with it came the lost echoing bell of that old streamliner, as it approached with a line of Pullman cars.

A little girl is waiting trackside; she is at the depot, in her Summer Sunday best.

The black porters, in unison with the conductor, step from the slowing cars.

Into the hissing, sunlit vapors, black-capped men set foot stools, and with gloved hands,

they guide passengers gracefully onto the ground.

“My, my,” Mrs. Adams heard her grand pappy call, “there’s my angel honey bunch!”

And then, that one dogwood petal crossed her gaze.

Landing on the porch in a bit of a tumble, it twisted a telltale track across the fine powder before she snapped back.

She took a small breath, then smoothed out her wrinkle- free apron.

She stood slowly, summed up the task, and gathered the straw broom from the corner.

Mrs. Adams stepped down off the porch for the second time this morning, 

to sweep the brick path to her home.

The memories of a once vibrant community have again, been adorned with dogwood petals, and pollen, and again, the aging boards must be dutifully kept clean. 

Some one might stop by and step up on the porch,

just to sit a spell.

A Winter’s Porch. 1957.

Don, Bob and Lynn.
August eve on the Gilbert porch. 1952.

With my tiny hand in Dad’s, I experienced ice for the first time.
I think I was three. From a big car door to street, to curb, to glazed snow on grass, across the sidewalk and up the steep steps we went. Don’t remember how many steps, more than five I’d bet. Grandma and Grandpa’s house was on top of a knoll, typical of so many homes in Norwood, Ohio, especially on Lyle Lane.

I couldn’t reach the handrail, so Dad steadied me as I watched each footfall slide every which way. My point of balance was miraculously maintained by a one-armed yank, vertical. Handfuls of sand scattered about the steps, most likely by Grandpa, made sure Dad’s footing was sturdy. Yet, for me the ice was so smooth my mittens and boots flew on it. It wrapped everything. So onward, upward we climbed towards their glowing home that winter eve. (Some day I’ll find a photo and count every step.)

The porch’s welcoming, with cozy light from the front door windows, was a couple of stoop steps further. The inside oasis just a few slippery moments away. The wooden porch decking, tongue-n- groove ribbons painted battleship grey, crunched with each footfall. The tranquil, frozen elements connected everything on our trek. The bushes, trees, clapboards, windowsills, porch chairs, all dipped in a fine glaze, and all sparkling from the streetlights.

Here, there, everywhere, an ice-covered world, cold and dazzling and non negotiable to little feet. A new sensation and fascination that could only be explored by sight. Dad’s car way down there, pink and white with frosted windows, the tire tracks from where we’d come. Pools of shadow and light and houses huddled underneath, framed in twinkling ice all the way around the corner to the mailbox and bus stop. 

The Gilbert porch on this winter’s eve was not a warm place to play or sit, as it had been the last time I was there. It was calm and static, my breath puffed away like a steam train, but it wasn’t the place to play tonight. It wasn’t the place where all my uncles sat on hot summer nights enjoying their incredible fraternity, laughing over beers and smokes with Grandpa. It wasn’t the place where my cousins Lynn and Denny ate juicy watermelon. Grandma wouldn’t be singing Pony Boy and rock me on her knee here tonight, but it was the safe harbor of this journeys end.

And how did Grandpa know we were almost at the door without a knock? In my mind that was another reason he was magic, bigger than a king, as he opened the door.  With the smell of cornbread, and boiled green beans, potatoes’n ham, his hearty "howdy strangers" lassoed us in. Transom crossed, the frozen floorboards glowed golden and warm again, it always did when Courtney and Jewel stepped out on their porch.