SHARING

Do you send your friends postcards when you travel?

A text on your phone with a photo attached is almost as good, but the joy of receiving something handwritten still pleases me. Postcards in the Air seemed a perfect name for this blog. The art pieces or short narratives that readers send me in response to a Postcards posting remind me of postcards from friends.

Some of my collection of postcards from friends from long ago.

Here are two stories that came my way in response to two different blog posts.


From my posting titled What Touches You? came this memory from Jan. H.:

Sunday Dinners at Ma and Pa's Farm in Oklahoma

My maternal great grandparents, Ma and Pa, lived on Route 4 about a twenty-minute drive from the town of Shawnee where my grandparents lived and where we stayed when we visited them from California. My sister and I would crouch down in the car so that we could surprise Ma when we rolled on to the dirt road up to their house (as if she didn't know we were coming). She always obliged with a surprised whoop! After the family hugging and kissing, the men gathered on the covered back porch to smoke, talk politics, and drink a beer.

The women were seated on stuffed chairs in the living room shelling beans and talking. My sister, Jonnie Kay and I visited both groups but stayed with the women who allowed us to shell beans as well. We loved shelling beans. The air was warm with laughter and love. Ma took the beans into the kitchen and in a short time called everyone to be seated at the big round oak table that had been set with her Sunday dishes, silver, iced tea goblets, and home sewn napkins.

Everyone gave thanks to God and then Ma brought out the friend chicken, mashed potatoes, beans and salad. My grandmother poured the iced tea from a pitcher and we all dug into an incredible feast of fine cooking. Seconds were offered as well as warnings to save room for dessert. Then came the fresh homemade pies and coffee. That Ma sure knew how to cook.

I wish I could go back in time and enjoy those days again.

In my post, Three Sides of Green, I asked the question:

"What plants did you play with when you were a child?"

Here's Joan S.'s reply:

In the summer we lived in a cottage on a lake in Upstate New York. Our home abutted an Iroquois Reservation, the first place oil was found in the country. No one lived there any longer so we were free to roam. Queen Anne's Lace lived in stately wonder in a field of wild raspberries. One of my many aunts suggested that we dye them and sell bouquets by the side of the road. My brother and I thought that was a great idea and pooled our limited resources to purchase bottles of ink in various colors (remember those?). We diluted the ink in water and placed the stems in the 'dye' vats hoping the color would rise through the stem. This experiment had limited success so we dunked the flower heads in the colors and let them dry. The sale of our bouquets was not robust, but the aunties came to our rescue and bought all the stock we had left over. Still never pass a cluster of Queen Anne's Lace without a smile.

Thank you, Joan and Jan, for sharing your stories with us.

Since it is almost summer, keep your eye out for postcards wherever you may be and send some to people you know. A great way to brighten someone's day!