Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Lilacs the sentry of past memories, success and failures......... someone's gooder days.

My friend Belle was telling me several years ago that the forests back where she came from were different than the ones we have here in Montana.  Her husband, Groom, is a USFS law enforcement officer, I meant him when I was a dispatcher, I meant Belle years later buying a goat, but I digress.  She told me that when the Government decided to make the national forest the Appalachians and Great Smokies were mostly all settled, there wasn't a great expanse of untamed forests like here in the Rockies.  She said in many cases the US government had to buy the property and remove the buildings, they didn't bother with the plants that had sustained the settlers or pioneers that had lived there for life times.  Now in those National forest you come across raspberry plants in the oddest places, in the middle of a piney forest, beside a bayou, or in a marsh land area.  I thought that was so bazaar when she had said it. 

Our conversation had reminded me of my mom, we moved a lot when I was a child, so I have said, and no, we were not military or anything like that.  My dad was a saw filer and we went where the work lead him, all the way through living in 6 different states, all of them had the Rockie Mountians in them, from the northern border with Canada to the southern border with Mexico. We would travel along and as we would pass a broken down shanty, cabin, adobe or old once stately mansion, my momma would say, "there is someone's gooder years".  I learned over the years, as I aged, what she meant.  She saw the abandoned weather worn place with all the love it once had in it.  I soon began to see them all as places of lost love, God's haven of days gone past.  I still do to this day.  I never see them as someone's failure, but from a realistic point of view if they fell into ruin and became the remnants we see, lost and alone, maybe the people that lived in them left them in despair.  I think that only the old building themselves really truly still know the truth of it, them and God.  I, being a half full sort of person, still see their love of days gone by and hear the happiness of a little pig tailed girl running from a freckled barefooted boy chasing her with a snake or frog.  Memories of love stir my heart to see them.....

I recently have begun to notice the Lilacs of the Rockie Mountains.  Have you ever seen one standing alone in a pine woods forest?  Did you ever see one standing along side an apple tree along the river confluence?  Did you see the one by the mountain lake atop a mountain?  God didn't put them there among the tamarack and the spruce, no, some woman brought them cross country on a wagon train, or in an old model T, hoping to add a ray of sunshine to her new home so far away from her people hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles away, back east, from whence she had come.  She brought that climbing rose that now embraces a blackened lone standing beam that stands as a sentry alone among the pines in the woods.  No one around, no buildings, no towns just the impression of a once trailing road where she last saw her beloved rose burned down, she never knew it grew anew in the spring to honor her passing through this valley so long ago. I know you can see them here in the rockies if you but look.  My friend was wrong, sort of, the lilacs, the roses, the raspberries, apples and pear tears are here, just like back east in those forest, the only difference was that the pioneers continued on and never really tamed the land they had here, but their foot prints are on the ground they once trod if you but look.  God sent them on, let them succeed or fail only the tattered and torn long greyed wooden sentinels, where they once called home, could tell you the tale, if they could but talk...... I hope God has given you "gooder years" a place where some day some one will wonder about the abode you leave behind.... and think of you fondly as someone from the gooder years.

Matthew 6:25-29

King James Version (KJV)
25 Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?
27 Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?
28 And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
29 And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

I don't think Solomon was arrayed as beautifully as a Lilac either just look are there beauty today in the Rockies of Montana along the beautiful place that some one once lived......

 
The lilac almost has no bloom left in front of this "good years"

 
Alas all is almost gone but the memories of the wood and God.

 
The road the goes nowhere now, but took them somewhere then. 


 
The lone sentry.

The sentinels the Lilacs and the Apple.


 
I once held all the food of a winter, but alas no more.

 
A new road goes by me now not know that I once shaded the porch of a cabin in the woods, and my scented petals were once given lovingly to a momma from her child on a lovely spring day.  My gift made her remember the places she had left behind, now I am the left behind.....
 

1 comment:

Please leave a comment, I value your comments and appreciate your time to read my blog....