Flashback of a

ITNESS,

The world is becoming very crowded...they said on my tv news today that 1 in 1,000 people will die of covid.  Is this natures way of getting balance back?  Sure makes you wonder.  It is so very painful for the ones who are losing loved ones.  Trust me I know first hand what loss feels like.  So now the remaining 999 that survive must bear witness to this event and acknowledge the passing of those ones who don't survive, for like a tree that falls in the forest if there is no witness did it ever live?

I know I am weird; no one has to tell me.  Lately I am shrinking even more from society I am finally becoming Ms Hopkins.  She was a widow that lived near me when I was a kid just moved to SC from my Grandmother's farm in TN.  I was very unhappy to have my wings clipped.  It took me a while to grow new ones and explore my new childhood space.  Observing Ms Hopkins gave me great joy, she was much like my grandma, in that she kept the old way of life going.  She hoed her garden, she canned, she tended her flock of chickens, and she dressed the same way with a dress of flour sacking, an apron and a sun hat.  My Grandma never wore the sunhat but she wore these woolen stocking  she kept rolled just above the knee. 

I witnessed all this about her.  Ms Hopkins had two daughters.  They did not help her and when they went off to school they never came back...course that is my observation they probably did but how was I to know so in my mind they just left.  Probably got married and lived nearby and had a ton of grand kids for the old lady to babysit.  

I had this one friend who was a little bit older than me...she lived down the road.  I was so naïve as a child and even a teen., it was her father, her mother, a brother and suddenly a BABY in the house.  The funny thing was the baby appeared after my friend had gone off to live with her grandmother in another town...the family never explained the baby but her mother was way to old to have a child so soon the truth got out...my friend who  was older by 3 yrs had given birth to a child she was 14.  A baby had a baby.  Never found out who the father was. 

I know she dropped out of high school later on and I don't know what ever became of her...or the baby.  She stopped being a child that year.  There was three sisters who lived nearby that I spent time with but they were so different from me.  All they cared about was boys.  I had no interest.  I wanted to talk horses, they wanted to talk boys so I went over and watched them roll their hair and paint their nails and it seemed so trivial to me.  It still does. 
Then I found a friend who had a horse and so I started hanging out with her.

She would come get me on the horse and I'd ride behind her...sometimes she'd take me to her house which was a few miles away, and then her dad would drive me home.  Each time he'd tell me don't come back here anymore I don't have to time to be driving you home....I didn't like him, or her older brother who threw pinecones at the horse when we were on it's back and made it jump. He was mean.   

Lately I have been reliving my entire childhood.  I had some kind of flashback happen to me, I was not hit by lightening but I had a severely emotional day on Christmas, I think I've been time wrapped back...cause this all started long before Christmas.  I have memories of my childhood that go back to age four or five living on the farm in TN.  They are not complete but like little sketches of my life there...like grinding corn for the chickens, watching Grandpa Jess shear his sheep and crying when they had blood on them...then my uncle JC lifting  me up on the back of the one of the big plow horses on the way to the barn after a day of work in the fields...sitting by Ma's fireplace at night with her cats huddled around the rocking chairs.  

They say before you die your life flashes before you, am I dying?  If so its taking a long time.  I asked my sister to relay events and fill in some gaps...See when I was about sixteen I befriended a twenty-four year old lady.  She was married and had one son.  We hit it off cause I was giving her riding lessons, by this time I was quite an accomplished rider and had taken up at the boarding stable doing odd chores and teaching kids how to ride fat ponies, this lady boarded her horse there so we became friends....She asked me to go to Cincinnati with her to visit her parents. Her son was 2 yrs old I would help with the driving and taking care of the baby in exchange for a trip to Cincinnati. To me it was an adventure. 

I will tell you about Bramblewood later, but we lived there at this time...my Mom, and my sisters and we had horses! It was an old run down plantation...then defunked but under lease, well like I said another time...but we all loved living there it became the home we never had we rented and the rent was lowered since the deal was my sister and I had to take care of the horses that lived there who belonged to a very wealthy lady who lived in town...

Well when I was in Cincinnati, it was this same week the one between Christmas and New Years...1968/  The Leaser of the farm told my Mom we had to move out..like I said I will get back to that cause it's a story of it's own.  But we had no telephone so when the lady returned me home, they were gone.  My family!...the dog was there but no family and nothing in the house----> all gone.  I guess the shock of it all made me forget how I found them but eventually, but I don't recall how.   I asked my sister, did y'all leave me a note or anything like that?  She told me she also cant recall but I showed up with the family dog...and that was when my childhood ended. 

I was a witness to it all...a silent witness. 

Me age 8 

Mom and "Silky" at Bramblewood