Notes from the Spring Creek Arts Guild

If You Live Long Enough

A couple of weeks ago I heard a song that was new to me. The lyrics that really caught my ear were, “Babies grow up and houses get sold, And that's how it goes, Time is a thief, pain is a gift, The past is the past, it is what it is, Every line on your face tells a story somebody knows, That's just how it goes, You live long enough and the people you love get old.” (People Get Old by Lori McKenna). Those words speak to something that has been on my mind a lot in the past few years. Then a few days later, the hits started coming.

My mother texted me two Monday mornings ago to tell me that Readyville, Tennessee, the place where my grandfather lived while I was growing up, had had a tornado and had basically been leveled. I know now that my Papa’s house and barn are gone, along with nearly all the structures in the town, including a water-powered mill that had been rebuilt in the late 1800s. Miraculously, there were two people with only minor injuries. Papa’s house had long since been sold to someone else and a few changes had been made to it—I know this because I drove by to look at it two years ago. On down the road was the Justice house, where my Aunt Lola’s in-laws lived. The day before the news of the tornado, I had posted a picture on my FaceBook of Lola and I on the front porch of that house in about 1983. I have not heard yet if the Justice house is still standing.

On that same day, one of my little hens disappeared. This may not seem like a big deal to most people, but I love my chickens. This connects back to Papa, too, because every day I spent with him, we would go out to that big old barn to feed the hogs and collect eggs. We would get dried dent corn out of the corn crib and rub the kernels off the cobs into a bucket to feed the animals. Of course the hen who disappeared was one of my friendliest ones. By eight in the evening I had had enough so I took a bath and went to bed.

Yesterday my husband and I went up toward Fort Worth to help some friends who are clearing out their late parents’ home in preparation to sell it. The parents were friends of my father-in-law so my husband grew up thinking of them as an aunt and uncle. The woman was my first best quilter friend and was the one who really got me started quilting. We went to the Quilt Festival in Houston for many years before she became ill with Alzheimer’s. We came home with one of the quilts she had made, many things from her sewing room, an old cast-iron skillet the husband had restored, and many other things to remember them by. I asked her daughter if this cleaning out was still emotional or if she was just tired by this point and she said, “Just tired.” She had lived with her mother in her final few years—I would imagine she is exhausted.

A bit of advice I have heard many times from older people, which is a class to which I now belong, is “Enjoy it now because it goes by so fast.” And it goes faster and faster as the years go by. Y’all get busy enjoying it, please.