Summer Days Remembered

As a child I didn’t think much about those lazy days,
Where fresh laundry snapped in the summer breeze.
As my grandmother carefully took the towels and sheets off the line
And placed them, oh so careful, in her wicker basket.
In my mind, I knew that later she would stand for hours
Ironing the very same sheets she so painstakingly folder.

I recall the honeysuckle bush,
With its vines growing across the back of the shed,
Engulfing and framing our path to the pond.
Along the way granddaddy’s golden, yellow sweet corn drooped
From its stalks waiting to be picked.
Along side over ripe tomatoes that I often ate right off the vine,
After having washed them off at the well house.

When the fish weren’t biting in the pond,
The homemade rope swing beckoned me to sway back and forth,
Careful not the kick the dog.
As on old rubber mat scrapped under my feet,
So not the wear down the grass.
The mat was my granddaddy’s philosophy,
On just how things needed to be done.

My grandmother, always a tireless worker,
Often sat slathered in cocoa butter
Along the winding sidewalk, made from spare cinder blocks,
Pulling the weeds form tiny cracks
With only her bare hands and trusty butcher knife.

I can still hear the screeching of the twelve o’clock whistle blow,
Signaling its small town pause for lunch.
Just the other day I wondered,
Does the twelve o’clock whistle still blow?
It was then that I realized that the whistle was a part of the past,
A part of my past that has long since disappeared.

I asked my husband
“Did your town have a twelve o’clock whistle,
When you were growing up?”
He replied longingly, “Yes it did.
I haven’t thought of that in years,” he said,
As he looked away in the distance.
 

Faria
Trigg Co. High School

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