Nostalgia

As I type this, the katydids are singing a symphony outside my window.

It's relaxing.

It's going back in time and sitting on my granny's screened in porch at midnight. Breathing in, I can almost smell her coffee or the buttermilk and cornbread that was always her midnight snack. My grandmother rarely acknowledged the accepted "norm." Bedtime came when you were sleepy. You woke up naturally instead of being jolted by a blaring alarm. You wore what was comfortable and you refused to conform to anything. She would pay her bills a day late on principle alone because she hated deadlines or being told that she had to do something on a specific day. Self-sufficient, she worked for herself, selling her fruits, vegetables, and livestock when she needed something. I was ten before I realized what grocery stores were and that everyone didn't grow their own food the way we did. I shopped in mom and pop places for clothing and shoes, but I plucked my own tomatoes off the vine and ate them there with the juice dripping down my chin like water.

Life was simpler then.

I make it sound as if I'm far older than my thirty some odd years, but who's counting? Living out in the country the way I did, where night fell on you like a warm blanket and you could count every star in the sky, you learned to rely on the earth for entertainment. You realized that staring at the darkened sky and holding your breath anytime a star fell was just as entertaining as sitting in front of the television to watch 'Hee Haw'. You knew that lying in a patch of clover and looking for the elusive four-leafed variation could steal hours at a time and you never felt that they were wasted. You understood that the sound of tree frogs, crickets, and katydids could lull you to sleep much easier than the insistent beats from the radio. And the smell of honeysuckle, the kind that grew up the side of the house and attracted bees, smelled fresher than anything you had ever smelled before.

Yes, life was simpler then.

Life was running to the creek and diving in without worrying about pollution. Life was rusty bicycles with chains that never worked right, but you liked walking anyway. It was roller skates, mud cakes, catching lightning bugs in a jar, and running barefoot on the grass when the dew was still there to wet your feet. It was a lazy, sweet, innocent time, and I would give just about anything in the world to go back to that place.

To sit next to Granny and listen to her spoon hit the side of her glass, because the only way to eat cornbread and milk is in a glass, and hear her swing creak as she rocked to and fro.

I don't have a swing, but I feel as if I've been dangling from chains the same way her swing did.

I don't have a darkened sky to look at because the streetlights are too bright here.

And I don't have a creek or a honeysuckle vine or even a clover patch to lie in.

But I do have katydids. And tree frogs. And crickets.

Tonight . . . they've sung me back home.