Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Once Upon a Time...Morning Time

Day 31~



25 years ago, about last Friday, my oldest son was 4 almost 5.  I was pregnant with my 4th child. I was nauseated. I remember it well. I sat on the couch with my three little boys and we read nursery rhymes and practiced for Awana. Sometimes I fell asleep. Once, as the little boys played on the couch and I slept, an electric candle tipped over and burned a hole in the couch. Thankfully, God gave me a good sense of smell which our whole family learned to trust over the years. 

 I didn't like that dark house we were living in but we were soon going to move to a little blue house on a pond where many happy memories would bud and bloom, but I didn't know that yet. I just woke up each morning, felt nauseated, and read to the boys. Then we acted out nursery rhymes and took long walks which usually ended with me carrying two and sometimes three people home. So much for strollers.

25 years in the future was unfathomable. My life was pregnancy, nurse, repeat. Read-aloud. Read the Bible. Pray. Sing. Say poems. Learn speeches. Talk. Play. Draw. Read-aloud.  Morning Time. Day after day after day after year after year after decade after decade. Little tiny moments captured in such a way that they would never be forgotten. Not by me, not by them. 

Not all family memories are happy ones. Eleven sinners in one house can make a mess of trouble. Not all memories are happy ones but some are.

Someday, not long from now, you may visit me in my old age as I sit and rock and perhaps you will catch a hint of the voices in my head. I put them there one grain at a time. Perhaps if you could live long enough you would see other old men (and one lovely woman) in other rocking chairs and you would hear those same voices echo in their heads too. "Old men forget but all is not forgotten."  

Once upon a time we had Morning Time.

The voices in my head:


"Little boy kneels at the foot of the bed
droops on little hands, little gold head.
Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!..."

"Wynken, Blynken and Nod one night sailed off in wooden shoe..."

"James, James, Morrison, Morrison, Weatherby, George Dupree...."

"The sun did not shine it was too wet to play...:

"Once upon a time their were four little rabbits Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and..."

"Christopher Robin has wheezles and sneezles they bundled him into his bed..."

"In the great green room..."

"Clam chowder for lunch!!!!"

"In all of France there was no mouse more beloved than Anatole..."

"It was very early Christmas morning, and in the stillness of the dawn, with the soft snow falling on the housetops, a
little child was..."

"Little Black you are the best pony in the whole world...."

"Listen my children and you shall here of the midnight ride of Paul Revere..."

"I never really knew Father very well until we moved to the ranch..."

"For God so loved the world..."

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents..."

"They tell us, Sir, that we are weak unable to cope with so formiable an adversary..."

"Marley was dead; dead as a doornail..."

"The Lord is my shepherd..."

"Where is he that wishes so? My cousin Westmorland?.... If we are marked to die we are enow...."

“When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"
"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods,…
She was glad that the cozy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.”


Thank-you for joining me on these 31 Days of Morning Time.

Psalm 126:6

"He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him."<

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