New Changes, Old Memories

I am loving the changes I have made to the backgrounds of my three blogs. I must be in a nostalgic mood, changing to colors and textures that make me think of my childhood.

Potpourri makes me feel like the end of the school year, summer dresses, bare knees, and banging screen doors. Playing in the twilight, running with the neighborhood kids, getting sweaty and gritty, our parents laughing and trying to keep cool. Mom rushing to get four daughters bathed, get them to bed, girls sharing a room, me being the only one awake when the 11pm freight train rattles by the house.
I can smell the hot tar, feel the grass between my toes, see so many stars in the sky; it seems on fire some nights. Starched dresses for downtown excursions in the August heat. Begging Mom not to starch our slips any more.

Cooking in Nana’s Kitchen feels like the old church camp we attended with Grandma Vesta. The cabins were new, but had an old weathered look to them. Items brought to camp to make the cabin homey, left behind in the haste of packing to go home. Old cotton filled mattresses, smelling slightly musty, made up with fresh, line-dried white sheets, covered with one of Grandma’s quilts that smelled of her linen closet. Eating in the dining hall for dinner, but having breakfast and lunch in the little one-room cabin with the tiny wood stove in one corner. Easting Spaghetti-o’s for the first time. Uncle David loving us all, chastising us for our bad behavior in evening services, then easing our tears with more kisses and hugs. Singing the hymns we loved, standing on the bank of a river watching my mother being baptized, finding out the ‘angel choir’ was just the older girls singing from a rock high over the river. Being with my family in a way we did not interact at home.

Chic Daisy just feels like the old fashioned, Victorian, seed catalog. Seeds, hoes, plows, harnesses, patent medicines for whatever might ail you. Are there really that many types of beans, wanting to try a bit of everything, free offers when you buy another plant, free plants just to say, “Thank you” to a loyal customer. The clean, earthy smell of freshly turned soil, walking down the aisles between the rows to get the seeds in before the rain, damp and muddy from picking strawberries in the rain, hot soup in a thermos shared with Peggy in the back of the bus. Dry, dusty roads to fields of boysenberries smelling so sweet, picking the warm berries, dropping them into the halleck with a satisfying ‘thunk’. Little Debbie decorating crates of berries with wildflowers.

Travels I see in my minds’ eye. No one will ever see them as I see them. More is the pity. They are beautiful. But I hope my readers will connect with the new backgrounds in their own interpretation finding new connections for themselves