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My Fourth blog on WDC |
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Welcome to Almosta Blog, the stories that happen every day here on Almosta Ranch. Come on in and be welcome, draw up a chair and set a spell on the front porch with me and my sweet wife, Melinda, better known as Mel. What you will find here are stories about our many animals, and our daily life on a working ranch. Not the most riviting of subjects but I will try to hold your interest. |
| People of a certain age, like myself, consider childhood memories as precious as gold or diamonds and when one comes to us unbidden we cherish it. We hold it close to our hearts because to gaze upon it transports us back to a simpler, happier, time. So it was with me yesterday when I happened upon this little gold nugget laying in the river of my memory. The image came to me of my grandmother’s front yard and her sweeping it with her old, straw broom. You see the concept of well manicured grass lawns did not really begin to gain favor until after World War Two, during the building boom that followed all those returning G.I.’s. In the mid-fifties, in rural Texas where my grandmother lived on a small farm, all the yards were dirt. Hard packed and baked by the harsh Texas sun and dry climate, these yards had the consistency cement and every evening my grandmother could be found sweeping away any errant leaves and twigs: “Giving the yard a good polishing,” she would tell me with a wink and a grin. As for myself I cared little for how “polished” it looked, that dirt yard was my personal playground were I would spend hours pushing my toy trucks. The only time I was not allowed in the yard was after a rain. Most of the water from a light rain would just run off the hard ground but enough soaked in to make the dirt soft and the one thing granny hated more than an untidy yard was mud being tracked in by some careless child like myself. So after a rain I would content myself to sitting on the front porch and watching the chickens scurry around the yard collecting grubs and worms that sought the surface in the softened ground. By the time I reached my Teen years granny had sold the farm and moved to town with her son and that idyllic little farm passed out of my life and soon, from my memory. Many years later my wife and I returned to Texas and drove around my home town. I was showing her where I grew up and I decided to find that old farm. It took some searching but I finally found the place. I was disappointed in what it had become. The dirt yard was gone, replaced by grass, the old frame farmhouse had been added onto and changed completely and the whole thing looked so small and shabby, giving credence to the words of Thomas Wolfe: “You can never go home again.” That is why the memory that came to me was so precious. I saw the old place just as it was when I was a child and, in my mind, I strolled through each room of the house and once again stood in the kitchen watching granny churn butter after milking the cow. Everything was just perfect and, yes Mr. Wolfe, you CAN go home again. That’s the gold in the memory. So the next time you discover a small, gleaming nugget lying on the bottom of your own Memory river, pick it up, examine it and hold it close. You will be richer for doing so. |
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