Potpourri: Down Memory Lane

During her tenure as the Society, News, and Lifestyle Editor for the Plainview Daily Herald newspaper, my great grandmother, Myrna aka Mimi, wrote two decades of articles for her “Potpourri” column (which I explained in this post, as part of the #52ancestors challenge).

I’m excited to share her articles through blog posts and on Instagram. So, without further ado, please enjoy my first Potpourri post!

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Memory Lane

I traveled down memory lane this week — my long curls flying in the wind. I seemed to have a tryst with a quest for childhood memories. The stage was perfectly set for a rendezvous with the past.

The sage brush, the one great tree that is left and the stub of the old lilac bush all were making preparations to pull on their new spring garments and fluff out their skirts. “If the Father deigns to touch with divine power the cold and pulseless heart of the buried acorn and to make it burst forth from its prison walls, will He leave neglected in the earth the soul of man, made in the; image of his Creator?”

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I HAD A BREATH of home on that land in the southwest part of Oklahoma, which became the 46th member of Uncle Sam’s family in November of 1907 only four days before my dad took his new bride to that strip of land which he homesteaded in Indian Territory.

Shifting years have brought many changes. The old half-dugout, where he first lived while he cleared the land to make preparations to wrest his living from his new prize, was caved in and filled with tumbleweeds. 

Though long dissembled, in memory the old house stood on that cracked and crumbling foundation that the two had planned together so many years ago when they were able to have something better than the two-room house with the lean-to.

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AGAIN I WALKED those sage brush clothed sandhills with my fast-gaited dad who slowed his steps to.mine when he would let me go with him to “drive up the cows.” The winding trail is still visible. And in memory I heard the cows lowing in the evening dusk and the squeak of the windmill as it turned with the wind to bring forth cool, pure drinking water for the cows and horses.

In my mind, my sister and I again sat under the shade of the china berry trees and played house while mother and daddy plowed the “back field.” My dad was never a farmer in the truest sense, mother always was a better farmer and better carpenter than he. But, he loved the land and had courage to try, and added to his land. He loved the land the same way he loved his work horses. When they could no longer plow the fields, he didn’t get rid of them, they were turned out to pasture and fed until they died.

But he could match the best of them with a six-shooter or a rifle. He had to in the early days of settling and later when he left the farm to spend the rest of his active days in peace officer work.

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THE JOYS and sorrows, and good things and bad kept marching through my mind. My mother could make the best bread and sew the straightest seam, and I thought, could play the old pump organ or piano better than anybody. Her fingers were always busy.

As love and faith are presences we feel and cannot see, the family again had time to sit and rest and talk on the front porch that was there only in memory. All the world seemed to stop, except for the wind’s whisper through the leaves of the cottonwood trees, while we looked at the million stars, and they told me again about the Milky Way and helped me to find the Big and Little Dippers. 

I couldn’t help but look out that front bedroom window again as the humid air and wonderful smell of the wet ground, refreshed after a brief shower, came in. I remember my mother told me that the beautiful rainbow of colors flashed across the eastern sky was God’s promise to mankind that the earth never again would be destroyed by a flood.

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AS WE DROVE away, from what actually is a very desolate place now, and into the sandy road, my memory also changed to another time when I was no longer a child, but a teenager. I was walking that sandy road toward the railroad track, with my little niece’s hand in mine. This was an every afternoon appointment that we had. We walked down the track about a mile and then back. On the way back we walked west and talked about the beautiful sunset — and what was beyond, and had a number of secrets from her mother and my mother.

Then, a pang of sorrow. These things are past. The one who taught me to shoot, the one who listened to my nightly prayers and the one who seemed like my own, has been laid to rest. These are some memories that anchor the past to the present and help pave the way to the future. I came away with a renewed faith in the resurrection and a life beyond the tangible.

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It was Rousseau who said: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.”

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