Through the Window of the Past: Happy Memories

The Barn I Played in As A Child

From my old journal:

Old barns, Front Porches, & Lightning 31 October 2013
 
It is not always easy to reach for and pluck a happy memory from my childhood, but the fondest ones come from exploring the thick woods behind our house, playing in the old red barn we had, and hanging out on the front porch. There was a lazy little creek deep in the woods filled with frogs, crawdads, water spiders and other living things I didn't have the names for but was still fascinated with watching as they skimmed their dance across its surface.We had all kinds of critters living around...deer, bunnies, squirrels, foxes and my favorite, a family of skunks that lived in the barn. Aunt Mattie would take table scraps and put them down by the barn in a compost heap that helped nourish our huge garden and often a lot of the critters, including our cute mama skunk with her babies, would visit to feast on our leftovers. I'd climb up onto the kitchen chair  and stand, looking out the window in eager anticipation of whatever animals I'd be able to catch a glimpse of. I was always secretly hoping, however, to see that mama skunk and her babies. One day, while Aunt Mattie was cooking at the stove next to me, I was waiting for feeding time to commence when a huge bolt of lightning came out of nowhere and struck the apple tree right by the barn. It blew off the entire side of part of the tree. I jumped down from the chair, and like a shot, raced to Aunt Mattie's bedroom hiding under the bed for over an hour. A couple of summers later, while playing with Barbie's out on the front porch, lightning struck the house and went down the grounding wire right next to where I'd been playing. The ground "exploded", dirt flying everywhere. These two traumatic events (well, traumatic for a little girl not yet six) created a terror for thunderstorms that stuck with me until I was grown and had babies of my own. Before the girls were born, whenever I could hear a storm brewing off in the distance, I'd come close to hyperventilating from the fear bubbling inside of me. When my girls came along, I didn't want to transfer my fear of storms to them, so I shoved it down into the deepest place in me, a horrible habit that has dogged my footsteps my entire life. During storms I'd force myself to remain calm, telling the girls how beautiful Mother Nature was and that there was nothing to be scared of. I said those things to them over and over again so many times that finally there came a day when I did, in fact, find them beautiful.
 
The best feature of the house I grew up in was always the large front porch. It was stereotypically the gathering place on a lazy, hot day with a cool glass of water and the hope of a stray breeze, or at evening time, snapping beans, watching the lighting bugs dance through the maples and pines. My cousins and I spent many hours playing there, and I always gravitated to it when I needed some serious "thinking time". Every now and then when I drive by that house now, just seeing it brings Mattie to mind. It is a spot my mind associates with her perhaps more than any other. She and I had many talks sitting there on that porch. She'd snap beans or shell peas by the bushel, her apron dirty with leaves and debris from the garden, while I peppered her with a million questions. I know I fired them at her like wild bullets in an old spaghetti western gunfight, but she patiently picked through each one, answering them as best she could. "Why can't we see God? Are angels real? When babies die, do they automatically go to Heaven? Why does God let bad things happen? Does my Daddy love me? Why doesn't he want to spend time with me? Why is Mommy jealous of me? Did I do something to hurt her or make her angry? Why did they leave me?" On and on it went, her answers gentle and kind, even though I know many things I asked made her angry. I believed her answers without question, her word the only I trusted as the "truth". I'd ask her, "But how do you know (insert whatever we happened to be talking about)?" She'd smile and say, "Because it feels right to my heart. It fits." Once I became a mother, I started to question not just her words and philosophies, but others around me as I worked on what my own "truth" was supposed to look like, feel like, what felt right in MY heart. She'd like that I did come around to thinking for myself. I'm sure taking her word as law was a lot of pressure!  I can't image what it must have been like for her trying to make sense of a world that made no sense at all to a small girl that wasn't her daughter, but she happily treated as such. And the one thing that sticks out in my mind the most about her is, when questioned about why I lived with her instead of my parents, which was always my most frequent question, her answer remained as simple as, "...because I wanted you." That was a good enough reason for her. I am eternally grateful she felt that way.