adieux

On this dreary spring afternoon, another piece of my childhood slipped quietly into eternity.

When I was a little girl, one of my favorite places in all the world was my Uncle Gene and Aunt Ella Jean's house. It's amazing how many of my memories are tied so firmly to their farm on the hill beyond my parent's house.

As I sit here alone, watching the clock tick off the minutes, I can't help but think of all the pieces of the puzzle of my life that were spent in my uncle's company. Dimly, I remember the phone call from the hospital that announced the birth of my new baby sister. I was not even three, but I have a hazy picture of standing on a step stool talking into the phone mounted on the kitchen wall, my aunt and uncle and cousins close by.

I remember sweet, homemade ice cream and saltine crackers, and riding horseback clinging to his overall straps, and tart, green apples not quite yet ripe from the tree in their yard.

They always had a cedar for Christmas in the old, farm house hung with glass ornaments, streaming icicles and big, incandescent bulbs that even now I use on my front porch at Christmas and remember. Next to Christmas morning at home, Christmas Eve there was the highlight of the holiday season.

In my mind's eye, I can see, even smell, the barns where my sister and I raced across the floor on creepers Uncle Gene and the boys used to work on the farm equipment. We played in wagons full of soybeans, shelled popcorn, and jumped, in the last breaths of summer, from hay bale to hay bale.

The pictures are idyllic, no doubt. But they are mine. Precious and beautiful. I saw their house as a place of refuge when one cold, winter day school let out early and finding my parents gone, In my little red coat, I trekked across the field to their house where my older cousin watched over me until my mother, frantic with worry, found me there, unscathed after all.

It was there that we stayed the one awful summer when my mother had to work, there that I learned I would bend and not break under the sorrow that precipitated that change. Beside their fireplace, I filled pages and pages with adolescent yearnings and mourned innocence and anticipated adulthood.

So many days. So many memories.

One of the greatest tragedies of adulthood is how those childhood attachments unravel and slip away in the business of school and jobs, marriages and parenting. The people at the hub of our infant universe are often relegated to some distant galaxy, remembered at Christmas or encountered at a restaurant or church event. Life intervenes and we never sense the loss until a rainy, spring afternoon when it's too late to say...thank you.