Hilda Osborne A personal journal

January 2005: Moving   Leaving There are two elements connected to moving.  There is the leaving of one place and the arriving at another place.  The arriving is filled with a sense of adventure and new discovery.  But the leaving of dear friends and familiar places brings on a sense of sadness, a knowledge that something precious has been lost.  Memories packed into a suitcase are cherished with promises of "we'll keep in touch" even though you know the "keeping" will not be the same as "being."  I knew I would be moving long before I made the announcement to friends.  For months, I made mental notes of faces, places, and events I knew I would soon be leaving behind, becoming keenly aware of what I would soon be giving up.  I had grown comfortable in that place.  I knew my way around, and knew the places I could go to find acceptance.  I knew who needed me, and whom I needed.   But we are called upon to grow our experiences in this life.  To become complacent with our lives and ourselves is to stop reaching for something more, a little more knowledge, more friends, deeper experiences.  We are required to experience changes, either through birth, death, marriage, divorce, leaving, or being left.  There is more to us than just living our own quiet lives in this humble world.  I believe that the things we experience in our own quiet ways will somehow effect the whole, the all of us.  We are not just one; we are a whole.  What happens to the one, whatever the one feels, will in someway touch the whole. Although the friends I have left behind will never seem quit the same, I look forward to combining the memories of old friends with new acquaintances, and perhaps by drawing them together, maybe become the instrument that brings together the elements that are destined for unity.      Arriving    I have moved back into the town of my childhood, Kingston Springs, TN.  I find it odd that I associate this town with my childhood.  Afterall, I only lived here about four years, the years between fourth grade and eighth grade.  Yet a few years ago when my husband and I were passing through this area on our way to a weekend get-away and I spotted the sign for the exit to Kingston Springs, my first reaction was, wow, it's still here.  And when it became apparent that our life's road was going to bring us back to the Nashville area, I said I want to live in Kingston Springs. When I lived here oh, so many years ago, we took the exit from the interstate and soon ran out of paved road.  We knew we were nearing home when we had to roll up the windows in Daddy's car to keep the dust from getting in.  For about the first two years we lived here, we lived in the middle of cow pasture.  Daddy would stop the car in front of a large swinging gate.  One of us would get out of the car, open the gate, wait for the car to drive through, then close the gate and climb back into the waiting car.  We then rode the half mile or so up to the house that stood alone in the field, marked by an old walnut tree and a swing set.  My brother had won the swing set several years before in a coloring contest sponsored by some TV station.  It certainly would never have been purchased by my daddy because there was never enough money for such extravagance.   Mama would gather the walnuts that fell from the walnut tree every fall.  She covered the little drive in front of the house with them so that Daddy's car would run over them and break the hulls off.  The nuts were then left to dry for a while.  She would take the dried walnuts one at a time, and placing them on a well-chosen rock, one with a little dip or cradle just the right size for keeping a walnut from rolling off, she would crack them by hitting them with a hammer.  The broken nuts were collected in a pan, a bowl, a bucket - whatever she had that would hold them.  Then we would all help "pick" them.  We'd pick the nuts out of the shells, eating some along the way.  But no matter how many we ate, there was always plenty for making walnut fudge at Christmas time.  Walnut fudge and Mama's homemade coconut cake were our Christmas staples.  Mama's homemade coconut cake was made with a fresh coconut that she would break open herself.   She punched holes in the "eyes" of the coconut and turned it upside down on a glass so that the coconut juice would drain out.  The juice was a treat that she saved for herself, one of the very few treats she allowed herself during those hard years.  She would grate the chunks of coconut on a grater she made herself by driving nails threw the bottom for a tin jar lid making sharp little ridges that served perfectly well as a grater and easily grated the coconut into fine pieces that she sprinkled over the top of her homemade white frosting.  But I digress .... We lived in that house in the middle of the cow pasture for about two years.  The house was old, and so Mama and Daddy found another house for us.  The rent would be twice as much, going from $5 a month to $10 a month, and Mama worried about how she would be able to pay that much money.  But evidently we got out of the old house just in time because about a month after we moved, the roof fell in. Our "new" house had four rooms: a living room, a kitchen, a bedroom for Mama and Daddy, and a bedroom for the five of us.  There was still no running water and no heat other than the coal burning heater.  Life was hard, but since I never had anything to compare it to, I never knew how hard it really was.  Or how unnecessary if was for us to have had such a hard life.  We simply didn't have money.  Period.  It wasn't until many years later that as a young working adult myself I began to look back at the salary my daddy made and wonder what he did with his money.  But I digress again... There is something comforting about being back in the town of my childhood.  Life here was hard, and we did not have a lot of friends.  We were just too isolated for socializing.  Yet I have a since of expectation.  I drive around the town that is so strange yet so familiar with the feeling that just around the next bend I am going to discover something new, or something old, and it is going to be meaningful, if not wonderful.   .          Click here to see photos      Back to HOsborne Home Page