The Time Machine

Wouldn't it be something if you had a handheld "time machine" that you could point at certain rooms, or certain places? Then ghostly images from the past would play like a movie in front of your eyes..showing exactly what happened years ago. What an invention that would be!!

I would point it in the direction of the living room of my childhood home. First, I wouldn't even see the room that stands there today but a big open field with high, green corn growing on one side, and an older brick home on the other. Then, my two brothers and I are running across the grass as our dad explains that we would soon have a home built here. All three of us have on cowboy hats and play clothes as we run over grass that doesn't have our footpaths worn in it yet....but soon will.

Then the scene fades and a house is now standing there. A nice, big living room with orange carpet (yes, it was the 70s). My mom and dad are sitting on their green furniture smiling and watching their three children run across the long room, doing sommersaults and rolls across the new, fresh, shag carpet. We are rolling and turning until we can hardly catch our breath.

Now it is Christmas....a real tree all decorated with old ornaments and big colored lights and lots of tinsil is blinking in the room. I see myself looking out that window to the sky, trying to catch a glimpse of Santa Claus and his reindeer. Then, quickly, I see three bright-eyed children sneaking down the stairs and waking their parents to come in and start opening presents. I see snap guns, dolls and racetracks across the room and parents enjoying the laughing and activity. Then, everyone is dressing up and grandma Irvin is sitting on the couch and we are waiting for family to come celebrate the holiday. Aunt, uncles and cousins are sitting in a circle as they guess who drew their name so they can open their gifts....but they fade away.....

I see myself having a birthday sleepover, with my friends in their sleeping bags laying across the floor. The game of Truth or Consequences is being played and then a scary movie on the TV and girls screaming and ducking underneath covers. What fun they are having! They don't know that time is ticking.....Then I am sitting at my black piano, practicing my lessons...I spent hours there...but I only see a little glimpse....

Now, it changes to summertime, the heat bearing in, windows opened and fans running. We have come home from a picnic, where my brother had gotten lost from wandering away. Now he is standing in the corner, the flush of fear still on my parents faces. Now it is winter, so cold...the blizzard of '78, the worst winter storm in Ohio history. Banks of snow all around the house, the furnace out, all the other rooms but the living room, blocked off to keep the small heat from the fireplace on us. I am coughing with bronchitis and have to go and stay with friends who have a coal furnace......

Now the room blends from white to color and a woodstove, that would be the main staple of the room for years to come is now in place. It's dark green color and it's beautiful window with black trim intriguing to young eyes. From now on, the room will be filled with firewood and newspaper to keep out the cold.

All of the sudden, the scene changes and we are older. I see many events going by in a blurr....myself, sitting and doing an all nighter for science, my brother lying on the couch crying from a fall down the stairs and a broken collar bone, my dad bringing in a big oak stair railing that would define the room forever, family devotions in the morning before school, church family over for a cookout, missionaries that we took in during a conference, my brothers wrestling on the floor. I see dad taking a nap on the couch, mom sitting and reading her bible under the lamp, old boyfriends of mine and old girlfriends of my brothers joining our family for an evening. I see myself and my cat playing Hide and Seek together, one of my favorite memories and Bobo running across the room, excited to be in the house. The scenes are going by so quickly, I want them to slow down so I can savor each one.....but they keep on going....as life seems to do...one chance to see the moment and then it is gone forever.

I can tell the machine is fading...the spirit-like images becoming even more transparent...but I can still make out my brothers holding their trophies up for a picture in front of the fireplace. I see me in my high school cap and gown smiling for the camera with my parents. I see me looking around the room one last time before I leave for college.....and I see coming home and finding things a little different but still familiar. I see my last night at home....the living room can be a quiet room...the TV was in the "TV room" and brothers in their room or outside....the lights are turned down, just the green glow from the lower half of the lamps shining. I sit quietly in the chair, hearing the chimes of the clock as they sing goodbye...for I soon will have a new home.

The last few scenes show me returning home with husband and daughters. Now they are the ones sleeping on the floor with cousins and hanging out around the room talking. The living room that once seemed so large for the five of us, now is bursting at the seams with the 18 of us. Mom and Dad loving on their grandkids.....but wait, dad isn't here in this picture after all...he didn't meet all of his grandchildren...he is gone and we look sad. But we go on...summer visits still passing by, Christmases celebrated, family gathering. It seems it will go on like this forever.....

But then, everything is changed. Mom is gone, too. One by one, things start to disappear from the room...soon it is empty. The house is just a shell of what it once was....it is handed over to someone new....it isn't ours anymore.....new decor, new faces, new memories will fill the four walls.

The scenes are ended and there are no more pictures to see. I shake my head and try not to cry....at first I am sad but then I realize that I don't need a "time machine" to see those images. They are in my mind. They are available at any time. Yes, it is true that they are more like shadows and I can't touch, taste or feel those moments anymore. But I can close my eyes and remember...so I lean back, sigh....and I choose which moment to open up to my mind's eye...the old times right there to see...and I enjoy the pictures...of any room I desire.

The Wagon Wheel

If you look from my living room into my backyard, you will see an old iron-metal wagon wheel leaning against a tree. Sometimes I sit and look at that wheel and imagine the stories I could learn from it. You see, it didn’t come from around here… Virginia, which is full of its own history and stories. No, this wheel’s story comes from another place…another time.

Last month, I was visiting my brother in Kentucky. He asked me if I would want to ride along to Jacksboro, Tennessee, the next morning, stay a few hours and be back to his house by lunch. This involved leaving at 3 am. I was so tempted to say no, because I do love my morning sleeping hours. But I had not been back to Jacksboro since my mom and I went for the Richardson Reunion five years ago.

Jacksboro is an important place to me. It is right near all the action that took place so many years ago with the Tennessee Valley Association, For you see, my relatives lived right where Norris lake is now. My ancestors had to leave their homes for higher ground for the government wanted to put a manmade lake in their valley. So they just moved…up. Up to Jacksboro. Jacksboro is a little tiny town…the kind that you would miss if you blinked. But from the town, you start going up the mountain and many folks lived up there. Most of my dad’s family did. My history is there…and when I am there, I feel that history all the way down to my bones.

My great-grandparents, Hattie Gaylor and Lee Richardon, did well for themselves. They owned about 300 acres and they farmed the land. From the time I was born, my father would take me there every summer to visit his grandparents. We called them Grandpa and Grandma Richardson. As I grew, I used to roam the rolling hills that my family owned, with the barb wire fences separating the fields, the crops growing, and the cows (and that bull we ran from) chewing their cud. It was a world that didn’t exist back home in Ohio, the Midwest flat lands! Even as a child, I could close my eyes and see great grandparents working in the fields, their 9 children helping them. I heard the stories Grandma Richardson used to tell us of days that she remembered with such clarity. She lived to be 104…but she died in 1990….so long ago, it seems to me. Now her home is rundown and empty….a terrible sight to see. But one of her grandchildren still raise hogs and cattle on that farmland.

So that day, when I agreed to get up when it was still dark and take that 4 hour trip with my brother, I was thinking that I had the chance to see it all again. So much had changed and that made me sad. We went through her ransacked house and I tried not to cry. The very same couch she would sit on and tell us her stories still sat there in ruins. The bed she would sleep in, still there but destroyed! I found a pair of her shoes, one of her purses and some cards she wrapped in red ribbon.

But as we were leaving, we drove by the house in their side yard. The one with the cellar….the one where grandma would take us as she got her preserves or her canned green beans that she had put away and needed to cook for us on her wood stove. I asked my brother to stop…could we look in it? Could I take one whiff of that cellar smell that was so familiar to me. We could hardly open the door….my brother stepped in, hoping to avoid any creatures hanging around. But he saw something! Leaning against one of the walls were two old wagon wheels! He wanted one to take home….it was soooo big. But he wanted to use it as a decoration in his yard. Did I want one?, he asked me…….I thought, oh, that’s big and we are far from home…what will Steve think? But I said….YES! I did!! So we loaded the second one….took it back to Kentucky and then into our van and back to Virginia.

Now that old wheel, that sat so many years in an old cellar, of a home where no one lived anymore, where there was nothing left but memories, was sitting at my home. We leaned it against our back tree in the back yard. It looks good there! And it makes me think. I can now imagine about the Richardson land from my own yard in Virginia. I look at the wheel and wonder if my great grandfather had it on his hay wagon…for that is what it looks like…a hay wagon wheel. I imagine him in the hot, Tennessee sun, with his boys, working hard in the fields…the wheels slowly turning as they make their way up and down the rows of crops they planted themselves.

Then I remember that my dad spent his summers there. His father died when he was 5. His mom wanted him to spend time with men. So he would go to Cincinnati to stay with an uncle or he would go to Tennessee to spend time with his grandfather. Dad told me how he would work out in the fields sometimes and help. He told of riding the hay, drinking cool water and working hard. So now, I look at that wheel and wonder if it could possibly be one of the wheels of the hay wagon carrying a teenage boy, who had lost his father, but kept touch with him through his family? Did my dad hoist himself over that same wheel that now leans against the tree in my yard! What a thought! I wonder what he would have thought if it were true? Could he imagine being married someday with a daughter who would miss him when he was gone and miss the family that he introduced her to when she was born? Could he have realized that he could put love of family and love of land in that little girl? Would he had ever thought as he noticed the wheel of the wagon he was riding in that hot day, would 50 years later be in Kentucky at a son’s home and in Virginia at a daughter’s home? I wonder and I wonder!! These are the thoughts that tumble around in my mind as I look out my living room windows at the old wagon wheel in my back yard…..oh how I wish that wheel could answer my questions!!

My Childhood Bedroom

I was the only girl, so I got my own bedroom. It was upstairs in our home but had one slanting ceiling. I loved it. Mom painted the room light blue when we had the house built and it was a Holly Hobby theme. Later, I had it painted pink and white. I loved all the angles and corners in the room, although I did bump my head a few times. My room was my sanctuary. I spent hours there (just ask my brothers). I had my own world going on. I was always a dreamer, making up stories...sometimes writing them down but many times, living them out through my Barbies, Dawn Dolls and paper dolls...my imagination ran wild.

Each doll had a name that it still has today. Each one had a personality, certain friends, liked certain clothes. My neighbor, and best friend growing up, would come and add her Barbies and we had a real Soap Opera Serial going on!! We would spend hours playing...an old Ed Ames record played music as our dolls danced, various parts of the room would be homes, I could go on and on. What a world we lived in!! I loved it.

I spent hours in my room reading as well. I doubt you could count the books I read in there! It was where I could get away from what I percieved as my "trials" in life! Growing up, at times, was difficult for me , because of so many things that I didn't understand...such as why I had to dress or be a certain way. I felt like I never made my own decisions and I was very dramatic! I rarely rebelled on the outside but I sure did on the inside. I guess most kids go through these kind of things as they grow up. I took mine very hard. My walls could tell many stories of things I said outloud that never left my room.

I have had trouble falling asleep my whole life. While laying there trying so hard to sleep, I could hear everything going on in the house downstairs. Years later, my mom slept in there and was amazed at how I ever went to sleep with all the sounds. I spent many hours feeding my imagination as I tried to sleep. However, in the mornings, it was hard to get up!! My mom would yell up the stairs to get out of bed, and I would lean over and hit the floor with my hands so she would think I gotten up. Then I would lay there a little longer. She told me later that she knew that was what I was doing. It seems silly now but I remember as a child, the nights my mom would be out late at a women's church event. I would worry what would happen to us if she was in an accident and didn't come home. I would lay in bed worrying until I heard her pull in the driveway. I never, ever went to sleep before she got home...and I never told about it....I don't know why.

The furniture in my room was a dark, beautiful wood that had been my grandparents first bedroom set after they married. It was old but I liked it. I like the big round mirror that sat atop the dresser and the tall bedposts at the end and top of the bed. When I was a teenager, my grandmother found purple bedsprings that we put under my bed (purple was my new color) and though they were kind of noisey, I loved them. My mom got rid of them as soon as I moved out! :) I also loved the bubble light that hung next to my bed that I would read by and the crocheted plant holder my great-grandmother gave me. I always had a plant in it, near the window.

At night, my brothers, would knock on the wall and I would answer back. Sometimes I would start, and they always answered. It was the old knock that everyone knows....the five raps, ending with the two raps....the most famous knock in the world! It makes me smile to remember.

My favorite part of my room was the view out of the window. We lived in the country and there was a corn field across the road from us. On the other side of the cornfield, was a pond and beyond the pond was Route 104. I could see all these things from my window. The sun set over that pond every evening. Out that window, I saw sunsets, growing corn in the summer and white snow in the winter. One of the last things I did when I left the house for the last time, was gaze out that window at my view that was my own for 17 years before moving out to be married.

The most important thing that ever happened to me was in that room. One Sunday, on the way home from church, I told my parents that I wanted to accept Christ as my Savior. My dad took me to my room, we read some passages from the Bible and I knelt at my bed and asked Christ to save me. Right there in my pink and white room! :)

I had sleepovers with so many friends there, cried my heart out when my boyfriend in tenth grade broke up with me, railed against what I perceived as unfair rules, was woken up on birthdays by mom "trying" to play Happy Birthday on the piano and I enjoyed the rare nights my dad would come up and rub my feet when they were cramping and tell me stories of when he was little. I lay in bed many nights on Christmas Eve listening for Santa's reindeer to land on the roof and was SURE I heard the rustling of him wrapping our presents! I spent countless hours dreaming of my future, what I would be like, how many kids I would have and who Mr. Right would be.

And there was the Ohio State Basketball poster that I taped to the back of my door that I Ioved so much. It had my favorite players on it, Steve Winters, Larry Bolden and Craig Taylor. It was on the door for so long, that when I got married, it wouldn't come off so I could take it with me. When we sold the house, Steve took a razor and got it off for me. I loved that poster! There were the years of Abandon, my cat, sleeping on my feet at night. Such a familiar feeling. Then there was the spot on the rug where our dog, Bobo got sick and mom tried her best to get all of the stain out but never could!. And the little rocking chair that belonged to my grandmother and my mom and then to me. I would put my dolls in it. It sat in the same spot year after year, reminding me of my past and giving me hope for my future.

So many memories of my bedroom. I could never list them all. Last time I left there, most signs of my being there were gone, packed up and put in boxes or brought to my home in Virginia. Yet, it will always remain my room. Some memories are so ingrained, that even external changes cannot hid the fact of what was. No matter whose room it is now, if they listen hard enough, they will hear the sounds of a little girl's imagination.......

Remembering our Family Kitchen

I am going to posting my memories of my childhood home. My parents built the house when I was 6 years old and I lived there until I was 22 and married Steve. Every room has numerous memories. Today, I am going to think about the kitchen....

It wasn't a big kitchen. But a lot happened there. Our family dinner table sat in front of the sliding doors. We always sat in the same chairs. My dad at the end. We had family dinners every night. My dad got home at 5:30 and we usually sat down to eat as soon as he came home. My dad didn't like any other ethnic foods...we never had pizza, tacos, rice or anything like that. We always had a meat, potatoes cooked in some form, a vegetable and bread. We either had milk or tea to drink. Sometimes, my mom would put the bread in the crock pot and it would get warm and soft.

If dad came home in a good mood, we had a noisy, laughing dinner and if he wasn't in a good mood, it was a quiet one. Years later, I understood that he had colitis and was very ill many evenings, which had a lot to do with his demeaner. But as a child, I never understood that...I just thought he was grumpy those evenings. I wish he had told us.

The kitchen memories: once when dad was in one of his moods, he asked me to pass the bread. I don't know what possessed me, but I picked it up and "passed it"...a football throw from one end of the table to the other. He was an athlete...and he caught with a surprised look on his face. There was a moment of silence as everyone took in what I had just done. Then, a slow grin came across his face and he started laughing...so we all did, too. The rest of dinner was happy!

We had many a birthday celebration around the table...all of us at one time or another. One time, we even had party hats and cake for our dog Bobo. That was a good memory...his birthday was Jan. 19, btw. Dad also ate his cornbread in milk...we kids used to hate it..you could see the cornbread touching the sides of the glass and he would stir it and we would moan of how gross it was. He loved it!

For many years, Christmas was at my grandmothers but then it switched to our house. So on Christmas Day, our midday meal with my grandmother, her boyfriend, Paul, and my aunt and uncle and cousins were in our kitchen...although we ended up eating in several places though the years as we all grew up....the basement, the living room and even the garage so that we could all fit around one table.

After dinner, it was usually the job of the three kids to clean up. One of us would wash, one dry and one put away. Because it would make my brother, Steve upset, I won't tell you what really happened while we cleaned up. :)

We also colored eggs, played board games and did homework at the kitchen table. My dad would fix fudge...or TRY to fix fudge in the kitchen. He would get out the cocoa and start mixing it up, although most of the time, it was too runny and we ate it with spoons! He also would warm up milk on the stove and add cocoa to make us hot chocolate. We popped popcorn on the stove....not microwave then, but real kernels and shaking the pot as it popped.

Later, after I was engaged to Steve, he came and laid the new floor for us. I sat in the kitchen rocking in a chair as I watched him and the grooves are still on the floor! Oops!!

The kitchen is the first place we brought Abandon, the cat that Tom and I brought home...he was abandoned from a car driving in front of us and we brought him home. First he was in the garage and finally mom let us bring him in the kitchen...then he graduated to my room!!

We also left our winter coats, gloves, mittens and boots on the kitchen floor in front of the garage door...I guess eventually, mom picked them up for us.

I remember the dishes, the servings spoons, the serving bowls, the glasses, the revolving pantry doors and what foods we kept in them. I remember which drawers we kept the silverware in, the phone book, the paper and pencils, the bill box and the napkins. I remember where we kept the pots and pans, the kitchen towels and washcloths and the hanging tin cup we would drink out of. I remember mom leaving her jewelry on the kitchen window seal and how we had to tie a rubber band around the doorknobs of the shelves under the sink because they wouldn't stay closed.

We had an old, ugly green refrigerater forever!! Mom hung a picture of Tom Sellek on the fridge to tease dad. She kept the phone numbers of our friends and family on the inside door of the cabinet by the fridge and the keys on top of the fridge! We all would throw our keys up there!! The cat dish was in the kitchen. We never had a dishwasher...there wasn't really room and mom always said she had three dishwashers...haha...not funny! :)

When family came to visit or friends came over to spend time with us, most would come through the kitchen. Only strangers came to the front door!

Yes, our kitchen. It was small but it was mighty in memories. The last time I was in the house, I went out through the kitchen and into the garage. The kitchen ws the last room I said goodbye to. If I close my eyes, I can still see the five of us sitting around the table eating dinner.....

Hawaii Trip