Memories

I just read Shauna Kelley?s blog. Shauna is also a Lucky Press author. Her new novel (soon to be released in November) ?Max and Menna? sounds really good to me. I will, no doubt connect with Max and Menna, for I too grew up in an alcoholic home!

Shauna shared her feelings about her mother?s losing battle to cancer. It brought back so many memories. I lost my mama two years ago this month. She battled C.O.P.D., heart problems, and all the other stuff that comes from one too many packs of cigarettes. She spent the last thirty odd days of her life on a ventilator.

Every day since, I have said a prayer for all who are on ventilators and their families. There are no words to describe the horror of watching your loved one hooked up to that machine, the steady sound of air being pushed into their lungs and then sucked back out. I wrote a poem during mamas last days titled ?Alive in Hell.?? I might share it with you one day.

Memories? when I was a little girl my mama and daddy took us to a place called ?Tweetsie Railroad?, a small model of a western town, located near Boone, North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Tweetsie is a working coal/steam locomotive, which now hauls wide-eyed children and adults around a mountain. When I was a kid I watched in horror as Cowboys and Indians fought each other, jumping on the train shooting guns and bow and arrows, to me as a small child it was so real, maybe that?s why I always dreamed there were Indians behind our couch.

My husband and I took our daughter there some 25 odd years ago, and watched the same fighting routine. Now with the coming of a new generation I re-visited Tweetsie on Friday with my granddaughter. Things looked pretty much the same. The life size replica of Fred Kirby?s horse still stands out front of the mercantile. Mr. Kirby, once upon a time visited Tweetsie. He would have his picture taken with kids sitting upon that horse. It was a big deal, because, for all who don?t know; Fred Kirby was a famous Western Movie Star!

The Cowboy and Indian fights are the biggest change at Tweetsie. Now the Indians are called, ?The Tweetsie Tribe.? No more jumping on the train hooping and hollering. Tweetsie Railroad has now become, politically correct. How sad, but probably for the best, remember all those bad dreams I had?

But Tweetsie is still in the memory making business. Three generations of good memories to be exact. There are many things my mama and I disagreed on, some memories not so perfect, but with Shauna?s mom passing it has stirred up my own thoughts of Mama? doctoring my skinned knees, our many trips to the beach, especially the one when we visited all the lighthouses on the North Carolina coast, and then the trip to Niagara Falls, right before her health really began to fail.

The shortness of one?s life tends to way heavy on my heart some days. Did you know that the average life expectancy is 75 years? That is only 3900 weeks!

Something else that weighs heavy on my heart is how we hang onto the bad things in our lives. I choose to be different. I have gleaned out the bad memories and left them by the wayside. I harvest only the good recollections, they?re the only ones worth saving.

Shauna, may the God of peace and comfort be with you and your family.

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