Pearlie
I remember the long summer days at Grandma Pearlie’s house when I was a little girl. My dad would wake me up at some ungodly hour, help me get dressed and climb into his Ford truck. If he was working with his friend Bill that day, I would have to ride in the middle, my scrawny legs making room for the gear shift, skin already sticking to the shiny red seat. Luckily, it was about a two-minute ride down the road.
Once at Pearlie’s, I would hoist myself into her four-poster bed and go back to sleep for a few hours. Her sheets and pillow smelled like baby powder and the deodorant she used. When I woke up, I’d find her on her screened-in porch in a rocking chair. When I was really small, I’d climb in her lap and perhaps doze a little more—grandma’s make great pillows. Then she’d make me a little snack, my favorite was ritz crackers and deli cheese in a little pink bowl (My mom still has this bowl and Kemper used to eat goldfish out of it). She’d tell me stories about my mom growing up or teach me little nursery rhymes before sending me out to play or off to read the library books we had picked up that week.
Sometimes, we’d go out onto the front porch of her little gray craftsman and watch the cars go by. I’d take my building bricks or coloring books out there to entertain myself. She knew every car that drove by--and if by chance she didn’t recognize them, I’d hear about it. Every year there would be a bird’s nest in the bushes that lined the porch, and we’d listen for the babies chirping. We always looked for Cardinals in the yard because she loved them. And if it was a clear day, she would inevitably muse, “God must have loved green and blue because he made so much of it.”
I have never made a connection before, but perhaps that is why I love sitting out on the porch so much. There is something about the warm concrete underneath my bare feet and the soft breeze that drifts by that relaxes me. Listening to the birds singing, waiting for the hummingbirds to buzz to the feeder, and observing our little corner of the world transports me to a simpler time. She would have loved it out here. Indeed, there is a lot of green and blue to be seen all around us. And maybe it isn’t just that God loves those colors, but that he loves us so much he decided to share them with us too.