Sheila Hill Colston
A friend, who was apparently raised in a more moneyed fashion than I, recently surprised me when she stated “I wish I had been raised like you, like poor country people…you all have such good memories.”
While she might not know is that comment brought tears to my eyes.
I am touched that someone would actually be jealous of we who were raised out in the country, doing country things, learning country ways and probably living in much harder conditions than she lived in.
It made me think of a recent post on face book, a little film showing some of what we experienced in those times. I think we were more behind the times than we even knew, but I also think we turned out pretty dang fine.
I thought how nice it might be to contact a bunch of parents who now have teenagers, and ask them the following questions, just to make them ashamed of themselves……
Does your kid know what dodge ball is?
Has your kid even touched cotton? I don’t mean the cotton that comes from the store in the form of clothing…I mean real, true cotton, growing on a hip high plant, out in a 
dusty or muddy field.
Has your kid ever spent the whole afternoon in a tire swing, looking up at the tree limb he is swing from just to see the leaves shake?
Has your kid ever had to split a
Chic O Stick and a small Coke in a glass bottle with two other kids?
Has your kid ever had newspaper stuck in the bottom of his shoes because the soles had a hole in them and they had to last another month?
Has your kid ever worn plastic bags over his shoes to play in the snow?
Has your kid ever done his homework outside on the porch, with a dog on each side of him and a tin glass of green Kool Aid sitting on the porch beside him?
Has your kid ever played in a creek, found interesting rocks to keep forever, or throw at the snake floating down that same creek, while he waded in his oldest shoes?
Has your kid ever eaten a peach or an apple straight off the tree?
Has your kid ever got to spend the whole day fishing, stopping once in a while to get untangled and maybe have a baloney sandwich and a little bag of popcorn his mom put into a bag with a twist tie on it?
Does your kid know what a muscadine pulled off a vine in the woods tastes like?
Does your kid know that potatoes and peanuts grow underground?
The list of questions could go on for days and days and pages and pages.
It took a good friend to remind me of the wonderful childhood I had. We were loved in a different way than kids are today, and that sad difference shows in the disrespect I see in kids today.
We were loved with jelly sandwiches, tire swings, rusty bikes, outhouses, mason jars full of green beans and corn, cars whose doors didn’t shut all the way, gardens full of food to last the winter long, dads who toted lunch boxes with biscuits in them, moms who had to count pennies, trips to town on Saturdays only, and sometimes we were loved with a peach tree switch or a belt.
But, we were truly loved. We who are lucky enough to still have a parent or two in our lives…we show them respect because of that love.
Kids today, they are loved with electronics, money, cars, tablets, I Phones…everything to turn them into the little robots they seem to be becoming.
I didn’t even get to give MY children the right kind of raising, but I did see that they learned a lot of country ways. When they did get back to the country, they took to it like a fish to water, and today they don’t mind a little hard work, or having to do without something to get something else.
I guess I might be wearing a lot of you out with my memories of times gone by. Understand, these times are really and truly gone. They will never return….it’s way too late now.
My memories, and I am sure some of your memories too, almost seem in black and white. It’s like a film is running, a documentary, and it’s a grainy film starring us!!!
You who were raised in the fifties, sixties, seventies, out there in the boonies, with birds and squirrels and fox and dogs and horses and trees, party lines, black and white tee vee…how blessed you are!!!!
And, I would like to thank my friend who reminded me to keep on treasuring my young years. We didn’t have much money, but we must have had some things that she, to this day, desires.
