Posts

Warming of the heart

/in /by

The cold wind blew hard against the windowpane as I pulled the covers up above my head.
I could barely turn over with the heaviness of the quilts which seemed a foot thick above me.

The back room of Grandma Kitty’s house seemed a long way from the warmth of the stove in the living room.
At least the bedroom was off the kitchen, so when the sounds of rolling dough for biscuits and coffee percolating, most likely, would wake me from slumber before the house filled with the smell of bacon and eggs.

I would lift the covers up so the smells would fill in the gap as I watched my breath raise as I breathed in the smell of breakfast.
My grandmother’s cathead biscuits baking in the oven filled my room with enough aroma to evoke a desire to jump out of bed. Usually that effort would take a time or two. I would muster the strength to throw back the covers only to feel my bare feet hitting the cold floor, just to jump back in pulling the hand sewn quilts of patchwork back over my head.

Soon I would garner the courage to jump out of bed again finding my socks and shoes slipping them on after I pulled up my britches, then I would pull back the curtain to see Grandma Kitty making her way around the kitchen. In the corner sat the butter churn that the day before I wore out my arm on making the butter that we would put on the cathead biscuits.

Grandma was pouring the grease off the bacon and sausage getting ready to stir up some sawmill gravy.
I stood quietly watching the artistry of someone who had for 60 plus years raised before dawn to prepare a meal to keep a family working. Though there wasn’t as much to do and fewer to do it, she still went through the ritual with the joy that the eating would bring to the family as they gathered around the table.

Eventually, my quiet vantage point would catch her eye as she turned to place some meats on the table, and she would beckon me towards her and I would hug her and then find myself consumed with helping until the others joined us as she called everyone from slumber.
It is amazing how the cold outside seemed to disappear around the warmth of her table and the love that found its way seated around it. I pray you find the warmth of your heart as the cold wind blows on your windowpane.

As cold as I remember on one side

/in /by

It was already the dark of the night when I went out to the woodpile and gathered as many pieces of wood as my little arms would hold. I tried to get into the back door but could not manage to figure out how to turn the tarnished brass doorknob while keeping my load.
It was freezing outside, and it was not much warmer inside. I scrambled at the door long enough to see my breath fogging up the panes of glass in the door.
Perhaps that is what Grandma noticed as she opened the door and said, “Get in here boy before you freeze to death.”
“Yesum,” I said as I rushed through the kitchen into the darkened living room. There sitting about three feet from the wall was a pot-bellied stove on a large piece of metal on the floor.
I was in kindergarten when my Grandma Kitty moved to a smaller farm in a rural area outside Dayton, Tenn. This was our first winter visit at the old four-room house.
She was much closer to town and her brothers and sisters than before, but still the move wasn’t as joyous as one might think.
She left behind the place she and Grandpa had called home and raised their family. A homestead where our family had lived since the first family member crossed the mountains in his coonskin cap with a musket in hand and looked out and said this will be home.
As a boy I cherished any attention that my grandmother gave me. On the rarest occasion her cracked tan skin tightened revealing a smile that could wake up the sun. I knew in those moments that she had found something within her soul that reached up and shook her from beneath the 70 years of struggle, pain, and loss that seem to blanket her in those days after she said goodbye to Grandpa Bill.
I still remember hearing Aunt Duck saying as I dropped the wood in the box next to the stove – “ Randy did a good job. Didn’t he do a good job.”
I looked over my shoulder to see my grandmother leaning now in the doorway between the living room and her and Aunt Duck’s bedroom. The pale blue curtain that separated the rooms draped over her shoulder accenting the glimmer in her eyes as my mother opened the stove door and placed a log inside. Although it slipped away quickly like the heat gained on your warm side once turned from the stove, but for a moment, on her wearied face was a smile.
I don’t know if was having a little one trying to make his way in her world that drew her out or if in the flame of the stove she saw remnants of a memory in which she lost herself.
But for that moment for me, it was what I needed to see before crawling under 30 pounds of quilts in the back room bed and watching my breath rise above me. I moved my legs trying to warm the bed only to feel colder while all the time praying that I would not have a need to run to the outhouse.