January 30, 2013

• Pinkhoneysuckle; An Old Friend’s Tears

  We hear the expression, “That if you can count the number of good friends on your fingers at the end of your life; then you have done well.”  I feel sadness when I have gotten news from home the past few years, for it is always the loss of another mother or father of the small group of people who were my neighbors and old friends.  I stop whatever I am doing, then and there, and some I just pray for, and some I cry for, because we were a small community, and everyone’s mother and father had some affect on you no matter the path; For good or want, for rich or for poorer, for that is the way it is when the nearest neighbor is fields or hills away from you, and I think a lot of us have a much harder time facing the superficial nature of so many others we will meet.

  I almost feel sorry for the person who has never known country life, for as  hard as mine was; There were rare souls we would pass whose names we did not know.  My friend Joanie is still grieving her mother, Mrs. Marie, and when I heard her mother had died, I wept all day.  Mrs. Marie was an avowed New Testament Christian, and she lived her faith.  Come twice on Sunday and then on out for Wednesday night services, and Joan would drive her after Mrs. Marie did not feel comfortable to drive anymore.

  I checked in on my old friend about a week back, for with her Mama gone, and they were, “Mama,” and “Miss,” or “Mrs.” to  southern children, and it turned out to be a good time to check on her, for it seemed that after Wednesday night service, Joanie would lay her head on her steering wheel and simply cry, and she remarked, “I can cry if I want to,” as if she needed permission.  I told her to let the tears fall, for we had so few to turn to when the storm clouds threatened, or when we had to get some help, and Joanie’s Mama took care of her family. She lost her own mother as a young woman, but Mrs. Marie would soon have an angelic other mother who I knew through out my growing up years///.  It was that way — just a few folks along the hollows which have now built up, but much of what was nice has been taken away, because those coming in had different ideas about keeping places up, and the fields where Joanie and I would play became parking places, many times, for second hand and abandoned house trailers.  Mrs. Marie had her rules, and one for certain was; “We may be poor, but we are still going to be clean,” so my friend, Joan learned from the best.

  But I wanted my friend that she could stop any where along the way and bury her head in her arms, that these were special relationships born out of being on the back roads when the only people we might see for days was a neighbor checking on a fence or bringing over an apron full of green beans, because another had plenty.  It hurts to cry, to sob, to wail, and to feel you just want some peaceful old afternoons back.  My Joan did not know that a lot of us were not allowed to touch homework, while Mrs. Marie and Mr. Leon, her Daddy, they were going to see that it was done and done well.  I find that Joan in pure innocence believed that we all lived as well as her family, partially because when you had company; Somehow you gave them the very best that you had.

  Country grief is sometimes harder, and a few of you will disagree with that, but with a Hospice background in nursing, I can tell you that it is harder, for you are connected from dawn until dusk, and my regret is that I have not been able to go back and help my friends in times of sorrow, for most times; Someone is dead and buried before you have any faint idea that they are gone.  So I try to help them knowing how we got through the first year or two of being old orphans, but I know the old, old story — That you must grieve until the grief leaves you and your slumber, and it is not our way to just let go — For how can they leave us growing older ourselves?  So we mourn, and now I can safely tell people that there are a few safe medications to help you get through the worst of it, for it is a depression like no other.

  In high school Joanie and I would go our different ways.  She will laugh herself silly to know that I thought she was the most pure and virginal girl in the county, the girl every one counted on as being the best in our class.  I believed that she stayed away from boys, and I never knew that all of those girls were dating, and most would marry soon after high school, and if a baby was not in the oven before, then it was going to be before a year was up, for girls dreamed of having lovers who looked like John Wayne, when he was younger, or Elvis with his shirt off, and the truth was that I may have been the only girl in highschool who hadn’t been felt up.  I did’t know anything about getting to bases, and I heard that some few would be seen in the local town driving around the old grill, and that way you were warned of who a couple was and was not.

  I never bothered to ask Joan and her friends what they did, for if I saw anyone it was at church.  True, my fear of men at the time was so great after my grandfather that I would have been terrified for a boy to even hold my hand, for was that another way of spreading diseases depending on where those fellows had last been sticking their hands.  It has taken me 64 years to learn that other than the fact my friend, Betty Ruth and I were reading her brother’s college literature to realize that Joanie needed to have talked to me more about such things, for she was so wise by my way of seeing things.  High school has been a long time ago, many relationships before, this long long marriage, but no one told me that I was what you might call, “Pure.”  Good Lord, I would have been a Mother Superior ten times older if the nuns, and there were few, had known this young woman was so afraid of boys and men that she immediately began to stutter and endeavored to bring them to our, “New Testament Faith.”

  I was the perfect Catholic daughter, so maybe that is why Mama would half beat me to death — To get the Catholic orders out of my head.  It just made me curiosity grow stronger about all of these faith groups which were not ours.  I cannot wait until Joan and I can sit down again to get some idea of what she and her high school friends did, for Betty and I had tunnel vision for college, and I am positive Betty was more enlightened than me, but she was probably the most academic among us.  You do not know me, and you do not know these people, so why in the heck am I writing any of this?  Maybe I need Joanie and the more mature girls from our class to make certain I am not missing out on something really important again.  Maybe I wish that I was them, and I could be near what is left of the old town, the share croppers, the roads which led to no where.

  Right now though, My old friend needs some comforting from me, so I will write little notes, and I will let all who have gone drift in and out of my vision,, for when the time comes; I know they will ease our pain.  I see them all in an afterglow, and I to not want to worship death when there is life; But let me take some of your pain, for as the back home girls with any dignity do, then we hope to lift people up, and to dry their tears.  We want to let them know that we will be there when the storm clouds rise, and thank you; A Lynchburg Lemon Aide would taste just fine, so let’s all go out and sit for a time, for we want to hear the news from up the road.  That is who we were, and who we are in some ways, even as I sit on the edge of California. 

  Maybe if I get back that way Joan and I can go pick some blackberries, make some pies, and have the old friends tell us what really happened on those weekend nights.  Who is lost; who is gone, and  was 1966 a very good year?

  Barbara Everett Heintz, “Pinkhoneysuckle,” Amazon, Kindle, and Create Space KDP

   

  • 6:15 am
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