I'm Hungry

This article started out as being hungry and wishing for the tables full of food we used to have at get togethers at my grandpas place up in the country.  I digressed. This isn't how the article turned out. It seems the food isn't what I was really in the mood for today.

I'm Hungry!  For? A get together at grandma sally's house where everyone shows up with a dish.

Turkey, Ham, bisquits, cornbread, mexican cornbread, sausage dressing, cucumber salad, sliced tomatoes, watermellon, home made dumplings, spring peas, seven layer salad, potato salad, sweet potato fluff, black eyed peas, butter beans, fried okra, baked squash casserole, sweet and sour chicken, pork chops, a relish plate with five kinds of olives, corn and pepper relish, apple butter, collard greens, turnips,  bread and butter pickles, sweet corn on the cob, a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Sweet tea that sat out in the sun while we were at church, Banana pudding, Coconut Pound Cake, Chocolate Pound Cake, Lemon bars, Million Dollar Pie, Better than Sex Cake  (which always made the aunts giggle) and fudge with pecans.  Ahhhh.   

While Mike and I have family with Bryan and the dogs and cats - for the most part it's just us three. Three is a hard number sometimes when I came from the number 42. 15 Aunts and uncles, 60 some odd cousins.

So today If time could be traveled, I'd be in Atmore, Alabama driving down that road looking for another dirt road off the main highway  just over the rail road tracks.  Looking for a green shingled roof you can barely see through the row of pines planted 55 years ago as a wind break.

I never got old enough to take my own dish and my own family to these gatherings before they stopped. I have no idea what my specialty dish would have become. 

Everyone is gone now. Long gone. Scattered to the winds or in various plots in cemetarys marked with headstones and markers that fall  short of telling who is underneath their concrete slabs.

Year by year I'm forgetting chunks of who they were and what they were all about. I check my memory sometimes to see if I can still remember how they said "hello" or "come on in" mostly to see if I remember their laugh.

  I check to see if I can close my eyes and remember their hands or the smell of their hair. Try to remember the last time I touched them. Hugged them. Kissed them.  I don't remember that anymore. I don't remember how they felt the last time I touched them. It's been so long.

The smell of after dinner dishes belongs to hot water,  Palmolive, and the smell of propane that drifted in through the window. Every so often I pop open a bottle of Palmolive Green Original dishwashing liquid in the aisle of the grocery store and check to make sure it still smells the same. So I don't forget. I never buy it and take it home with me. The smell belongs to other people, not me.

  I try to remember What Old Spice smelled like on Grandpa before church.  How the towels rough from hanging on the line smelled when I  used the rough cotton to dry off.  My memories?   are slipping.

I wish I could get out of the car, go to the back of the house,  scrounge the tomato vines for the perfect sandwich sized big boy and put it in my pocket. Search through a prickley vine for a cucumber not too young and not too old and yank it free without my hand breaking out in hives.  Then go on down to the chicken house to fluff up the chickens to see how busy they've been. It's fun to upset  chickens.

I wish today I could pull down that long driveway to see Grandpa sitting in his rusted out yard chair by the bench sorting through a pile of greens, pinching pulling, tossing.  He'd say, "where you been stranger?" 

I'd sit with him under his patch of shade until he put his fist to my forearm and slide it down with a thunk. Then he'd say, ''why don't we get some tea and sit on the swing? Sally's inside taking her nap."

And we'd sit with our tea in the swing.  We'd hear the familiar creak in the hinge and the slap of the chains moving against us while we swing back and forth. Watch birds come and go over a field of corn. Wonder who was in the occasional car going up the road.

His left foot would make the slight push that kept us moving back and forth.  My foot's job would be to not throw off his foot.

 We might  sit and swing and drink our tea and pass back a word or two.

We might sit and swing and drink our tea.

We might sit and swing.

We might sit.

We.

I'm Hungry.