We'd walk down that hill to school -- it was cobblestone then. Trees bent across and met in the middle and you'd walk through the tunnel. There, just after that dip in the road, there on the right, was a poplar tree we'd climbe, us kids. And on the bank on the left, the biggest wild strawberries scented the air in late May.
When I think of me and my Grandma walking together, this is the first sight I see. My Grandma, standing just about where I stood to take this picture, one day looked down into that dip in the road and said, "a four-leaf clover" -- and walked down and reached into the greenery to the left and picked the 4-leaf. She'd put them in her Bible, even though that was frowned upon by preachers (superstition).
Funny about "superstition". It was silly to believe in the luck of 4-leaf clovers or to read signs such as a broom falling, but was perfectly logical to believe in a place called hell, where people -- good people -- were sent for not believing in an invisible being in the same way the preacher believed in it.
Well some of us here in these hills believe our invisible people are still with us. Sometimes we feel them nearby or sometimes we visit with them in dreams. It's also easy to believe in house wights and land devas. Tell anyone around here about the old home place we're cleaning up and they'll tell you there's ghosts up there. Maybe so. And maybe these ghosts see a bit more of the big picture than we do. If your house ghost senses someone is coming, it stands to reason s/he'd try to let you in on that secret. And if s/he's an ancestor, s/he'd remember that notation someone once set up that meant someone is coming, and maybe would knock over the broom to let you know what they know.
Or it could be that you know it yourself in that 90 percent of your brain you don't use and the Bigger you set that broom down in just such a way that it would fall over to let the Little you know what was coming.
But I like the invisible people theory, so that's the one I'll make note of. I wouldn't be at all surprised to have Grandma Hall walking beside me someday down that very road, only her on one side of the veil and me on the other and to suddenly know there's a 4-leaf clover there finenth the berry stems.
Why not? She once told me, in a dream, that yarrow was good for a toothache.
4 comments:
Can't you tell us more about your walks on those cobblestones. I felt so much more not said.
Blessings - B
Oh yes. I'll have to write about those walks through the Divide -- that's where that is, that dip in the road. At the top of that rise, you move toward town, a few more steps and you see the whole town spread out across the other hillside (Just like in Hears the Wind).
Also, the picture behind the blog title is going into the Divide from the other side. If you walk that road and go to the top of the next rise and look back, that's the picture I've posted here.
I've walked on roads like that in Iowa. We didn't have cobblestones tho. lol We would have had a dirt road . . . perfect for bare feet.
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