Under the August moon… Where memories bloom

​The little park that holds a lifetime…

The focus begins on the moon. It has watched oceans and mountains, cities that never sleep, lonely stretches of Prairie, and little towns that hardly anyone outside Missouri has ever heard of. Then it begins its slow descent slipping past the clouds, finding Missouri, finding Macon County, coming to rest on one little city park in Bevier, Missouri. To a stranger, it’s just a park. A band stand. Grass. During most of the year a person can stand there and honestly wonder how Bevier Homecoming could ever fit inside it. It doesn’t seem possible that one city block can hold carnival rides, Nashville entertainers, family reunions, class reunions, parades, baby shows, lawn chairs, politicians, hamburgers by the thousands, and nearly everyone who has ever loved this little coal mining town. 

And yet, every August, that’s exactly what happens.

That’s one kind of Homecoming magic. The other kind takes a little longer to discover. If we sit beneath that August moon long enough, something begins to happen. At first we simply notice who’s there this year. Friends wave from across the park; children dart between the rides; teenagers circle the midway flirting a little, pretending not to notice one another. The smell of onions on Homecoming hamburgers drifts through the warm evening air, and a country song floats over the loudspeaker. Then, without realizing it, we stop looking with our eyes. We begin looking with memory’s heart. We don’t just see who is there. We see who used to be there. —The grandma digging through her purse for another dollar for one more ride. A friend who quietly hands your little boy a whole roll of ride tickets. The teacher who always worked beside you in the homecoming stand. Some are gone now, and some are sitting only a few rows away. Under that moon, time gets wonderfully confused, and the little park becomes larger than life. Homecoming doesn’t simply gather the people this year, but it gathers every version of ourselves that ever came before.

The Homecoming begins days before anyone hears the music. Carnival trucks rumble into town, and giant rides arrive, folded into impossible – looking puzzles of steel. One by one the rides unfold until the Midway takes shape. Workers string lights, and extension cords snake across the grass. We can barely wait to see this extravagant festival finished. The “Welcome Home” banner goes up over the stage.

Away from the park … Homecoming begins with brunches in small cafés, family reunions spilling out of restaurants, and classmates standing around, laughing over stories they have told 100 times. Around the community groups decorate floats, parade cars, bicycles, and little trucks. Many times children are already counting the tickets in their pockets.

The natural order of growing up can be explained by the way children navigate the Midway at the Homecoming. At first children walk with their parents. A few years later, parents  congregate nearby while their children go from ride to ride— within eyesight. Much later parents tell those children that they can just check back every hour. Eventually those little “toddlers” miraculously start arriving at Homecoming in their own cars, and they drift over to see their parents who are sitting in lawn chairs and bleachers in the crowd. 

Like moths to a flame, people come to the Homecoming for many reasons. Sometimes it’s the carnival, sometimes the parade, sometimes the Nashville performers. Many come because it’s the one weekend every year the family can count on being together.

The stage has welcomed some wonderful entertainers through the years: “Little” Jimmy Dickens, TG Shepherd, Ronnie McDowell, Kitty Wells,— others whose songs became part of the soundtrack of our summers. Many of those performers came to Bevier and almost became part of our families. They smiled, visited, signed autographs, laughed with people, and made everyone feel glad to be there. Just a very few acted as though they were doing our little town a favor by showing up. People remember which was which, and kindness has a much longer memory than fame. 

However, if I’m being perfectly honest… The greatest entertainer ever to walk across that stage never had his name on a poster. He was just five years old. On the night of that performance the official program for the evening had ended, but homecoming wasn’t finished. Homecoming never really ends when the last concert is over because many crowds stay, sit in lawn chairs or on the bleachers, and talk until the wee hours of the morning. Their children run themselves nearly to exhaustion. We can all remember little toddlers stretched out on the hard, wooden bleachers, a carefully tucked sweater spread over them, the dew gently falling on their sleeping faces while the grown-ups laughed and visited beneath the stars. On this particular night my little hot, sweaty boy wandered up the steps of the grandstand and ventured out center stage.  My little boy reached for the microphone, and then we realized no one had turned that off. Suddenly, clear as a bell, rang the voice of Bruce Springsteen.

“Born… In the USA…”

Now, I can’t carry a tune to any recognizable conclusion, but my son could. Even then, he wasn’t pretending to be a singer. He simply was one. He settled himself right in the middle of that great big stage as though he’d been performing there all his life. Then he sat down, crossed one little ankle over his knee, sang with complete confidence.  when the chorus came, he stretched the microphone toward 30 or more grown adults.

He boldly sang— “Born…”

We naturally responded— “In the USA!”

He grinned. A little louder. “Born… “

“… In the USA!” Soon every one of us was singing backup for one little boy who had us completely eating out of the palm of his hand. For years afterward Homecoming never let my son live this down. As he grew older my son was a wonderful, friendly, optimistic young man, but he was also just private enough that he probably would’ve been perfectly happy if everyone had forgotten about that night, but nobody ever did. He told me he couldn’t walk 5 feet through homecoming without somebody laughing and saying, “Hey! Aren’t you that little Bruce Springsteen?” 

The reputation of a homecoming hamburger has grown through the years to dynamic proportions. The concession stand is a legend in itself. If you’ve never wrapped, cooked, or sold a homecoming hamburger, you’ve missed one of the finest examples of organization you’ll ever see. Workers in the little kitchen may line up 30 hamburgers in wax paper, place in the warmer, stand back and think that they have things covered. Then someone says that they’ll take 12. Another voice announces they will take five, and somebody reaches in and announces that they have sold four more. Looking down, the worker realizes that 30 hamburgers have completely disappeared in a flash. 

I worked in the kitchen with fellow teachers on Saturdays after the big parade. It was blistering hot inside that screened kitchen the health department required, and by afternoon we all looked as though we had been cooked right along with hamburgers. But I’ll tell you something.

Theoretically – and I’m only speaking theoretically – stepping into that walk-in cooler for a moment with an icy cold Diet Coke in one hand and a hot Homecoming hamburger fresh off the grill in the other hand might have rivaled just about any vacation I can imagine. Only in theory, of course!

At night the lights come on across the Midway, and Homecoming settles into its evening rhythm. The Ferris Wheel turns against the sky, and children carry prizes nearly as big as they are. Wednesday night brings an ice cream social. Thursday night delivers local entertainment, the queen contest, little Mr. and Miss contest and other delights. Friday and Saturday bring Nashville entertainment. 

Many years ago my little gramma celebrated a birthday during Homecoming. She announced that her big desire was to go see “Little” Jimmy Dickens perform on stage in Bevier, so we set off with our lawn chairs to make that happen. I thought we’d leave after the first concert, but Gramma had other ideas, and we stayed until after the final drawing. My gramma, Minnie Herrington, was not much over 4 foot 11. By the time this particular Homecoming came around, she was well into her 80s, and we would’ve understood if the night had worn her out. My gramma had other plans. As we drove home, she announced that she believed she could stand a little birthday cake. I had the cake at my house, so we stopped and enjoyed it, and then she saw her presents in the corner of the room. Grandma decided it would be OK to open some gifts. Now grandma always took her pains opening presents, and she never hurried. I think we finished Homecoming birthday celebration about 3 o’clock in the morning.

Bevier knows how to put on quite a parade. On Saturdays an hour long extravaganza has just about every kind of entry you could hope for. We find floats displaying hours of work, hometown tractors, the fire truck, queens waving from convertibles, and decorated cars put together with imagination and inspiration. My son was always thinking of a new way to appear in the parade. As a toddler he and his cousin dressed in lederhosen and traveled in a little wagon covered in grapes to display their German heritage. One year we created a posterboard costume that looked very much like a ladybug, but my son insisted it was a “boy bug.” Walking with him through the homecoming parade route was a hot, overwhelming task. Most years he talked my dad and his into creating a vehicle wrapped around our lawn mower. He was Radar with the MASH Jeep; and he drove the “Heavy Chevy.”

Homecoming makes me think of lifelong friends, and I have to remember my teacher /lifelong buddy Doralee. She might be sitting at a brunch before the Homecoming with a familiar happy smile. She might be decorating her Camaro for the upcoming parade, or she might be displaying a ribbon proudly after riding with former students in the parade. And she might just be laughing and flirting in a flapper-fringed dress with Ronnie McDowel on the homecoming stage. People who know her story understand why these pictures make me smile.

In just a few days that old moon will look down again over the whole park as it becomes a little square of light. Only the moon and those of us who have caught the Homecoming spirit will realize how much life has been lived inside that little square. We really have to belong and have the spirit to understand. Years ago Doralee had the privilege of traveling with her students to Europe— Paris, London. As a new teacher she took a group of Bevier students to places people dream about seeing their whole lives. One evening those students were standing in Paris, France. The Eiffel Tower glittered above them, and people from all over the world surrounded. A hush was quietly developing within the group, and Doralee and her sister could not understand the sadness that seemed to issue from these young people. One of the kids looked at them and said something that stayed with all of us forever.— “You know we’re missing the Bevier Homecoming for this.”—  Imagine that? Standing in one of the world‘s greatest cities— and wishing you were back in that tiny park in Bevier, Missouri. I guess that makes perfect sense to those of us who know.

Every year babies make their very first trip to ride a merry-go-round, and little boys probably carry plastic swords they won at the carnival. Unlucky goldfish try to survive in their plastic bags until they can go home and swim in bowls of their own. Teenagers quietly become young adults and propose on the Ferris Wheel. Someday they’ll come back with children of their own.

Very soon Homecoming visitors will hear an old country song, catch the smell of a grilled hamburger, or see a banner stretched across the stage. Without warning they’ll be surrounded by people who really aren’t standing there anymore. That’s when they’ll understand Homecoming was never just something to attend. It quietly became part of who we are. Even if some of us don’t attend any more in person, we still go there with our spirit. We see old classmates, former students, friends, and family. We see people who are still there, and we see people we miss with all our hearts. Somehow they’re all there together, and that’s the miracle of Homecoming. It’s a place that somehow became a container for a lifetime. A place where one city block can hold generations, and yesterday walks comfortably beside today. All of it fits together under the same August sky and that old moon. And under that August moon, nothing else really matters. For one wonderful weekend, we all go home again.

Pull up a chair

Sometimes people talk about “getting over” grief, but I don’t think that’s really possible.

When someone we love dies, grief doesn’t knock politely. It simply moves in. It sits in every room of the house. It waits at every holiday, every birthday, every empty chair. For the rest of our lives, it can feel like an intruder determined to make itself known.

Grief usually isn't sadness. For me, grief is a wicked, sprawling monster. From the very start I believe I told a friend that I would never feel any worse, but I would never feel any better. I have had lots of sweet counsel, and one sweet mama who lost her daughter way too young told me that I would never be myself again. She said I would learn to be a different person.

Grief was an attack. In reality, grief is still an attack.

Grief doesn't come carrying a handkerchief. It comes carrying weapons. It feels as though it has me surrounded with pitchforks and spears, slashing at my heart, opening wounds that never have time to heal before they are torn open again. Every memory becomes another cut. Every sunrise reminds me of another day to fight through without my son. Every ordinary sound has the power to ambush me. There are mornings when simply waking up feels like losing him all over again. I usually feel less like a grieving mom than a hostage.

I sense that grief has me locked in a cage with no door I can find. It deprives me of peace, steals my appetite for living, and whispers that nothing beautiful will really ever exist again. It isn’t content merely to make me cry. It seems determined to wear me down until there is nothing left of me but the memory of the girl I used to be.

For a long time, I believed my only choices were to fight grief valiantly or be defeated and killed by it.

Lately, however, another revelation has been quietly growing.

I am learning that grief isn’t leaving the building. What if, instead of trying to throw it out of the house every morning, I simply acknowledge that it has become a permanent resident?

Not a welcome one.

But a resident nonetheless.

So instead of meeting grief at the door with another battle, I imagine saying, 

“Well… You’re here again. Pull up a chair.

“Let’s have a cup of coffee. Let’s sit on the porch together. Let’s watch the trees. You don’t have to torture me today. You don’t have to reopen every wound, but we can simply remember.

“We can remember my daddy’s insulators and the delight they brought him.

“We can remember my mom's celebrations and ordinary afternoons that never seemed extraordinary until they were gone.

“We can remember Gerred, not only in the moment I lost him, but in the thousands of moments I was blessed to have him.

“We can remember without being destroyed.”

As I have thought about this, I have realized something else. Grief didn’t move into my house alone. Love came with it. There is no grief without love. The deeper the love, the more brutal the grief. For a long time I only noticed the grief because it was the loud one. Grief demands attention. It fills every room with its dark sadness. Grief is loud and greedy… and ugly and thoughtless.

Love is quieter. Love is the beautiful inhabitant.

Love simply sits beside me. The truth is…  

I would never choose to love less just so I could hurt less.

Not for my parents. Not for my grandparents. Certainly not for my son. If the price of loving them deeply is carrying grief, then I would rather carry grief than erase a single memory.

Maybe that is what grief really is. Love with nowhere earthly left to go.

So maybe grief and I can learn to share the same porch. Some days we’ll sit in silence. Some days we will smile at an old memory. And some days we will cry. And perhaps, over time, grief will stop feeling like a stranger who invaded my home, and grief will become a quiet companion who reminds me, day after day, that I had people worth missing. Asking grief to pull up a chair is not a pleasant image. After the battle, it’s an act of quiet courage. To me, this is what survival is really about.

Sometimes people tell me that I am doing better. It’s OK my friends think that, but I don’t believe that can ever happen. I’m slowly learning to become a different person.

Although I have an uninvited heart guest, he is not alone.

A sweeter fact remains. Grief didn’t just waltz in and steal my happy life, and it can’t destroy a single memory. I am learning that Love never moved out. 

Pretty is as pretty does

​I am sitting here in my living room, dreaming about the 250th celebration for America’s birthday, and I realize my place is pretty quiet. However, celebrating America doesn’t have to include a big picnic, a huge firework overlay, or even the traditional things we associate with the Fourth of July. I think for me this year, it’s going to include something special to watch on TV, an afghan in my hands to crochet, and burnt hotdogs. Yes, I love the burnt ones. A novice at the grill, one not used to those of us who adore burnt hotdogs, will never cook one long enough. He sees a little hint of char on a hotdog, and “my goodness, here it is…” 

I became the owner of some new, very lightweight, cooktop pans for my birthday. Here you see them sitting on top of my stove, but you also will notice a little, old pan I have saved out just for the purpose of burning a couple of hotdogs.

Some families have recipes. You won’t need mine for hotdogs.

Some families have old photographs. 

Some families treasure special sayings. My family has all of the three. My son and his buddies had one saying that made them laugh every time: “It cannot be unseen.” And that saying didn’t even have to apply perfectly. Something odd, something funny, something a little ridiculous would happen, and one of them would say, “Well, it cannot be unseen.” They took turns seeing who could drag out the E the longest ………..(unseeeeeeeen)

I was thinking about that because I made an afghan called Adrienne’s Philly Rose. I have a habit of naming every granny afghan, and I try to match the colors to a thought to the person. Adrienne grew up in Philadelphia with the last name of Rose, but now she lives with her son in Boca Raton. When I asked her what color afghan, she immediately chose a pink one. So I saw pinks and greens and love. She had shown me the Atlantic ocean years ago, so I made her a card with Ai, a shot of my stitchery, and an imaginary palm tree on the beach. When my creation arrived in Boca, her son looked at it and said he didn’t know his mom had wanted a watermelon afghan.

And there it was. Pink centers, the image of seeds where the spaces are,  and cream and green rind. It could not be unseen.

Now I still know what I meant when I made it, and she loves it, which is what matters, but I will admit when somebody said watermelon, my eyes did start cooperating with them.

My mother used to say “pretty is as pretty does.“ I think she wanted me to remember that beauty is not just what people see first. It is what they discover after they know you a while. I made Iona's Ozark Dawn for my beautiful cousin’s special birthday. If ever there could have been an image of both "pretty and pretty does,"  these girls are it! My cousin placed it near a picture of our grandmother, that beautiful woman you see who is crocheting at the Lake of the Ozarks. Seeing it there felt just about right: A handmade creation under a photograph of a handcrafted life.

My Gramma Herrington always advised if we were happy…or maybe even sad, to go paint something red. Today I’m thinking about the time we went out and painted an old pump on her porch. I sure don't remember why I was angry, but I do recall how much that vivid, red country pump accented a heavy, wrought iron pot hanging from it. Gramma planted our therapy full of petunias, pink and red, with an occasional bachelor button thrown in for fun. Now..  the place my gramma lived belongs to a new couple, dear friends and neighbors. I made them a housewarming afghan called Marshall Road Morning. I wish them many happy Marshall Road mornings in their future.

This spring we welcomed a brand new, baby cousin into our family, and I created a little orange, cream, and tan afghan called Bodie's Dinosaur Dream.

A saying doesn’t have to belong to us first to become part of our story. Sometimes it just settles in. Sometimes it makes us laugh, but sometimes it brings comfort or advice. Some phrases become a little thread running through the whole blanket. And once you see that, I guess it cannot be unseen. If you have watermelon at your picnic on Saturday, think of my little pink afghan in Boca Raton. Have a Happy Fourth…. Paint something red, white, and blue! 

   (Not my photo) 

July as Memory Light

​I called them lightning bugs, not fireflies. Fireflies does sound prettier now, more fairy like, more like something that belongs in a poem or on the cover of a glorious July journal. However, when I was a little girl, they were simply called lightning bugs; there seems to be a little bit of a difference.

On summer nights I sometimes caught them and put them in a jar. My mother would watch me while I ran over the yard, trying my best to capture the little winged messengers. Sometimes we counted the lightning bugs when the night was through. Sometimes we even wrote the number down on the calendar, as if I had accomplished something official and grand. But at the end of the night, Mama always told me to open the jar and let them go. 

I did not really want to. I really wanted to keep the little lightning bugs. I wanted to put some grass or leaves or something down in the jar to make them a little home. However, my mother said no. They needed to go free.

So, if the fireflies did not hurry out, I would sometimes shake the jar a little too hard, trying to help them along. This letting go was not my favorite part of the process. Then Mama would say, “No, no don’t shake them. They’ll crawl out. The ones that stay must not be afraid. They may kind of like you, but they will still want to go free before morning.” Looking at that statement, I think she was talking about the bugs. Maybe she was talking about men.

I know now my mom probably just did not want dead bugs in the bottom of a jar. She was practical in that way. But she was also quiet about some tender things, and maybe that was one of them. Maybe she knew something I did not know yet: that loving a thing and keeping a thing are not always the same.

I had another way of seeing lightning bugs, too. My mom and grandmothers had soft, nylon scarves that women used to wear, and if a person put one over their eyes, every light in the world turned into a puff ball of diffused light. Car tail lights became red glowing moons. Porch lights bloomed. And lightning bugs became pure magic – little, floating lanterns in the dark.

I love seeing fireflies along roadsides and fields, woods, anywhere the night was dark enough for them to show themselves. One time, at a friend’s farm when our children were little, her whole place seem full of them. Her land must’ve been perfect for lightning bugs that night, and I remember it was one of those small miracles childhood gives us without announcing itself. Our children were ecstatic. 

However, there is one lightning bug memory I wish I did not have. One night when I was about eight or nine years old, at my grandparents’ house, some of my dad‘s distant relatives came by. In the group there were grown-ups laughing inside and outside, men sitting with my dad and both my grandfathers in the yard, women talking in the kitchen… The kind of evening that probably looked perfectly ordinary to everyone else. 

Children were everywhere that I really did not know. I guess we decided we could catch lightning bugs. My grandma had plenty of jars and old lids, so there was no shortage of anything… Except maybe kindness.

Toward the end of the night, those “awful” children showed me something I had never seen before. Suddenly they began to squish the lightning bugs so that the glowing part of that bug left a glowing smear on their skin. They made rings and bracelets and earrings on their skin with those squished, dead bugs. I think each of us had about ten fireflies apiece, so they had quite a bit to work with. They started to write their names on the sidewalk with that little,  stolen light.

But not me.

As a child I was not exactly quiet. I like to be quiet, but throughout my life things just didn’t always work out that way. So, as I watched this debacle, I heard myself scream over and over. I kicked these mysterious cousins.I threw their jars. Oddly, they just laughed at me. I remember my dad coming — stomping over, and so did the other fathers because to them I know I would have looked like the problem. I never thought my dad really understood what had happened or why it had mattered so much to his little girl. Maybe to him it was just bugs— and children being children. Maybe he wanted his daughter to look a little more civilized. All I remember is that after that, Daddy marched me up the stairs and took me quietly inside to my mother to deal with.

But to me it was a terrible thing. It still turns my stomach a little all these years later. Maybe some stories do not need a moral. Maybe some things just happened, and we carry them. But I think that night did teach me something about wonder. Some people see a little light and want to follow it. Some people see a light and want to keep it. And some “awful” people see a light and want to smear it on the sidewalk just to prove they can.

I still love lightning bugs, and I still don’t love that third kind of person. I still think the best thing to do with a firefly is to count it, admire its little light, and let it live openly… in a jar or not. Sometimes they like you, but they still will want to go free by morning. (Yes, I’m still talking about Lightning bugs!)