The ties that bind

Every Spring we took violets to Ellie in a cracked white creamer. She lived in an "old people's home" and was scarcely taller than my child stature. Her room had a radiator that billowed heat and Mother fanned and fanned. The purple flowers came from the edges of the wide open fields behind our house. But Ellie's world was small. And so that she didn't glimpse it all at once, she backed down the stairs, clutching the rail tightly. Good manners required only darting glances but we wanted to gape.

The floors gleamed with polish and sunlight. We quieted our steps and walked gently down the halls, hoping to see the lady with the chin stuck to her neck, and the one who was always needing to "fetch the cows" and the one who pushed a chair before her.

Our limbs were strong and whole. Our faces tanned. Our hearts curious. We were violets that heralded spring; they were the cracked pitcher. We needed each other.

Beaches

I love beaches.

From my early days, that word meant the coarse sand of Red Point, a beachside community on the northern rim of the Cheasapeake. That beach was cluttered with shells, sticks, seaweed - crude to anyone else except those of us who grew up with it and considered it the holy of holies.

Next came the Jersey Shore with the soft white-sugar sand of Ocean City, clean, vast, edged by an old-fashioned boardwalk with the smell of popcorn, pizza and french fries floating on the sea air.

Then came the  pristine Outer Banks with its dunes, birds and dophins cavorting through the surf.

I loved them all.

Now a Glick reunion took us to the Pacific Northwest, to an Oregon beach near Lincoln City. The craggy rocks and shrubs stretched down to the wide sand and a box of pastel crayons spilled into the vast stillness of sky and sea.

Alleluia.

Enclosed

A brief July respite from Northern Virginia's deadly humity and heat opened our evening windows to the sound of cicadas singing,  bedtime bird lullabys, summer trees stirring, and boisterous calls of that last game of hide and seek.

Air-conditioning, I praise you in my later years.

But I see too that you insulate me from the heady perfume of summer.

By heart

This morning's crossword puzzle had the clue "afternoon social time" and as I wrote "tea" my mother's voice came singing across the years '

"We're going out to tea today
So mind your manners well,
Let all accounts I hear of you
Be pleasant ones to tell..." 

And the poem ended with -
"And Fannie do be careful
That you do not tear your frock!"

Was it the name "Fannie" or was it the word "frock" that so intrigued me as a child? Or was it the concept of this mother instructing her children about a custom I only read about in books? Or was it the sparkle in my mother's eye as she recited from memory the poems from her battered brown readers that rested on our hall closet shelf? Was she remembering the days of her tiny schoolroom, lunch pails, clambering over fields and streams of Frogtown farms and the joy of learning?

Whatever the reason, she planted poem after poem in my heart, and they grew green and flourished.