Hello, world! I'm back!

 

                The title sounds egotistical, I know, but stay with me for a bit. From Valentine’s Day—after a trip to Conway for one of my writers’ groups—till Sunday, February 22, I didn’t get out of the house, except to retrieve the papers (when they came) and the mail (when it came).

                On Sunday, February 22, I accepted a ride to west Little Rock’s St. James UMC with a choir member who lives in the Congo-Avilla area. The liturgical season of Lent had begun—this was the first Sunday of the 40-day period of contemplation, prayer and preparation to coincide with Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness.

                I needed to sing great hymns, to listen to the bells and the anthem, the sermon and the organ postlude, which was scheduled to be a Bach piece. Bach and organ equal heaven on earth for me.

                As soon as we walked into the sanctuary about 10:30, of the four folks already there, I knew three of them!  Talk about blessings! Felix and Martha Lynn Thompson, they who started the well-known and beloved hand bell program at St. James, were already seated.

I knew Felix when we both taught music in the schools. At that time, we were in the same Region, so we saw each other at Festivals (called Contests now) and at various music-reading clinics.

I knew of Martha through her hand bell arrangements, some of which I used during the first decade of this century.

The third person I knew was Joyce Potts Faulkner, who grew up in Benton, but who now lives in Little Rock with her husband. Though we attended different high schools, we both took piano lessons from Mrs. Lorene Houston. I had seen and visited with her once before at a concert. We visited again on this day and I met her husband.

Folks were coming in quickly by this time, so I headed back up the aisle and sidestepped into Martha and Felix’s pew. It filled quickly. People visited with each other as happens in all churches.

Long story short (so I can tell another story), it was an uplifting, praiseful, joyous service. But during the postlude, I sat while the other worshipers sidestepped beyond me to the center aisle.

Finally, I arose and moved down toward the choir door to wait. Lo and behold, here came another person up the same aisle. Not realizing until we got closer who we were walking toward, when recognition hit, we screamed (well…) each other’s names and hugged. Turns out that we had talked via email a day or two before. She’s a poet friend of many years.

A wonderful experience; a wonderful day.

Not until Friday, February 27 did I venture out again. The snow had melted except in north-facing patches of shade. This trip was to Bryant for the “Bryant Bunch Lunch,” a half-dozen friends who meet monthly.

While I had been hibernating, gasoline had risen by 25 cents a gallon; buildings at the monstrously-large Hurricane Village mall had gone up; streets had been laid and curbs built. 

Last Saturday, two outings were scheduled: one, a breakfast meeting of a group of 1954 Bryant girl grads, and in the afternoon, a meeting of the local poets. Since I was the speaker, I had to be ready before the breakfast excursion. After poets, I stopped at Sue’s to deliver some information, and we enjoyed a great, rare visit.

Again, a wonderful experience; a wonderful day.

                Bored? Cabin fever?  Not on your life?

A fictional tale based on a true story

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                During the early evening of Valentine’s Day, two young women dressed in red frocks stood in the side door of Gram’s farmhouse. They’d heard something outside, and chattered like crickets.

                “There’s somebody . . . in that tree!”

                “That’s just a cow that got out of the feed lot.”

                In the dark, neither wanted to investigate and the men were in the back room sprucing up.

                Next Monday, Uncle Budd would be leaving for the Navy and Uncle Rollo, the Marines. Tonight, they were taking their girlfriends to a dinner-dance.

                A light snow had fallen since noon, whitening the trees, garden, chicken yard and outhouse. The lane to the main road was still safe enough, Gram said, for Uncle Budd to drive.

                Because the women said something was outside, I crawled into Gram’s lap. She rocked fast and hummed loudly. It would be morning before I knew why.

                I slept with Gram. The front door of her old unpainted house opened into her bedroom, and every night, she forced a table knife into the door frame for protection. Grandpa had died years ago.

                I awoke to breakfast smells. Bacon sizzled, and Gram’s coffeepot stuttered on the wood stove. Biscuits baked. Gram was humming a song I had learned in Sunday school: “If I have wounded any soul today; if I have caused one foot to go astray . . . dear Lord, forgive.”

                A sob grabbed her voice. Tears rippled down and dripped onto her apron. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and turned away when she saw me looking. I drank my cocoa and bit my lip, trying not to cry myself, hoping it wasn’t anything I had done.

                From the kitchen window, I could see my uncles out by the oak. They bent down, pointed, and then tracked through the snow out to the lane.

                The women came out from the back room, bundled for a trip to the outhouse.

                When the grownups came back in, Uncle Budd was carrying a pair of snowy shoes with holes in the soles. Someone HAD been in the tree, and he’d left his shoes on the back porch.

                Gram couldn’t hold her secret any longer. “When you were getting ready last night, Mr. Ubergang came to the door hoping to get warm. He was in such a state he could hardly talk. I was afraid and shooed him away.”

                The old dairy farmer must have walked from his home in the woods, across the nearby creek, past Gram’s, up the lane and then down the highway to Tucker’s Grog Shop. A neighbor said the owner had closed down before the weather turned bad, and that Tuck had sent his customers home.

                Mr. Ubergang had stopped at Gram’s and when she refused him entry, he lay down on the lowest tree limb. Sometime during the night, he must have found a spot on the back porch out of the wind, taken off his shoes and lay down.

                At daybreak, Mr. Ubergang had trudged home in his stockinged feet. My uncles followed his footprints to the low-water bridge.

                We heard later that his feet had frozen and had to be amputated. 

We never told Gram.

Seasonal preparations continue

by Pat Laster

Little by little, slowly but surely, Couchwood is beginning to look more like Christmas and winter. Sunday night I washed the last two windows and laid “blankets of snow” on the frames where upper and lower sections meet. On the “snow” are freshly washed pieces of cobalt blue glass--the light-weight ones ballasted with marbles.
Monday’s task was to organize the loose papers from the library table, one end of the buffet-cum-cabinet and the work table in the middle of the room. My BFF Dot (dothatfield.com) wrote on her blog last week about kudzu. My flat surfaces are kudzu-ed for sure.Here it is Thursday and those papers are still a mess.
When I told people that I was taking a break from church, one person said, “But the Christmas music! You don’t want to miss the Christmas music, do you?”
My CD and cassette players, the radio, the two bell symphony music boxes Billy (and his mother) bought me, the Christmas VHS movies, the piano with all the Christmas songbooks out of the bench and onto the ledge—how can I miss Christmas music? (OK, writer friends, I know I used Christmas five times in two paragraphs, but…)
Oh, and I was lucky enough to get invited to ride along to the River City Men’s Chorus Christmas concert last week. Talk about beautiful music! But a downside: the next morning, I had a fresh cold, a sore throat, as well as all-day sneezing and dripping, the first such malady to hit in many years that lasted longer than 24 hours.
Alas! My paperback dictionary finally came apart at the “o”s. (If I were on Facebook, would that be the kind of information I’d post?) Keeping to the trivial, I have something in common with Taylor Swift, who at 21, is the same age as grandson/ward Billy: “I love a good flea market,” she told Parade magazine.
Parts of Arkansas woke up to a surprise snow last week Check out my blog, pittypatter.blogspot.com to read some poems that developed from it.
Records for a one-day rainfall fell in five Arkansas towns on December 5. Amounts at Adams Field in Little Rock broke the record set in 1936 (my birth year). In North Little Rock, the last record was set in 1984. In Hot Springs, in 1996. At the Jacksonville/Little Rock Air Force Base, rain shattered the old record set in 1984. And in Batesville, the record set in 1943 was broken. I still haven’t dared look in my basement to see how high the water is.
Billy auditioned for next semester's Henderson State University Chamber Singers and “made it,” he told me last week. Color me proud, again. I missed their concert a Sunday or three ago. It was raining and I didn’t want to drive in it. Color me cowardly. He said me there was a link to viewing it, but he’s yet to show me where.
Hot Springs’ son Eric “didn’t get even one shot off” during this deer season, he said. None he saw was large enough to produce a “trophy.” But his 10-year-old niece (my granddaughter) Emma killed two in Mississippi. There should be enough venison to go around in the Paulus-Laster family in 2012.
May it be so with you and yours.