photo credits
Judy Meeker
From ''Whisper on the Wind''

As I write, I can almost hear summer wind whispering in the meadows and through the tall old pines of my childhood.

I can hear the whippoorwills calling out to one another from across the ridge and through the dark hollow like lonesome echoes. They seem to be calling out to me too, saying, 'Come back little mortal in your rags of light, come back to the hills where you rightly belong.'

Visions of days gone by fill my head, and I see the little green tarpaper shack and smell the odor of good clean charcoal from the old man's smithy on a knoll below the barn. I hear the sad song of Jimmy Brown the little newspaper boy playing across my heart until it becomes injected into my very soul like wistful poetry.

I hear the far away tinkle of a cowbell, a bob white in the meadow, and once again I detect the odor of good strong burley from the old woman's pipe mingled with wild baby roses. Oh how I am haunted by her brown weathered face, kind smile, and soft warm arms that were always open wide to embrace me whenever she happen to see me hurrying toward the cabin on little bare feet. Most of the time she was glad to see me. I was always glad to see her.

I can see my pa's frail white hands so like a woman's and much to pretty to belong on a man. Papa had the most beautiful hands in the whole wide world. I can see my Ma's young beautiful face framed in ebony locks, her yellow-green eyes just a sparkle with love, anger, hate, and all the other emotions that young women with hateful hearted children go through.

I want to go back- I have gone back many times only to find that my childhood home is just another place and the mystery nothing more than a state of mind. The time of childhood can never be relived again. the most cunning poet cannot go back with common pen and paper. These dreamy eyes self ordained philosophers with their pretty words and nasty little opinionated critics have no power to turn back the clock.

Perhaps the little ghost child of my childhood has found new playmates? If so I envy these children for their childish faith and pity them for having to grow up to believe in the foolish reasoning of humankind as it stands today. As they grow older they will loose what can never be regained as long as they shall live. It has been said, 'When I was a child I spoke as a child but when I became a man, I put away these childish things.'

Oh what a mistake that writer made. Child like faith is one of the greatest losses ever lost and perhaps- just perhaps it is the one power that has power over time. Just ponder on the words that a friend of mine once said- 'You must become as a little child to entwer into The Kingdom of Heaven.'