"Older Than Dirt" and Fearless All The Way!
(a true, short story edited from one of my
old snail-mail newsletters)
I remember being a kid growing up in Tennessee, in the foothills of the Smoky mountains. It seemed like I was always surrounded by old people. Back then, I categorized them into varying degrees of "old". My brothers were old, my parents were older, and my grandparents were "older than dirt".
My favorite old person was my great aunt Liz, and she really was older than dirt. She was also fearless. Aunt Liz was my grandmother's sister, and she was born in the late 1800's. She always wore black, ankle length dresses, black lace-up shoes, white knit shawls, and her hair in a tight Sunday-Go-To Meetin' bun. Like my grandma, she wore no makeup, not even lipstick. God forbid! And she always cooked her meals on an old wood stove.
My great aunt Liz (on the left) and grandma Jeffries. As a kid, I always thought of them as being "older than dirt", and there was no doubt, - they were always fearless!
Growing up, I spent every other weekend and many summers at Aunt Liz's old country home in Kentucky, where most of my daddy's ancestors had lived their entire lives. After supper, it was tradition to gather around the black and white TV and watch Bonanza, and Gunsmoke. Watching westerns always felt like home to me. Shoot, half my kin looked just like those rough and tumble cowboys, and I'm sure we had an outlaw or two in the bunch. As a kid, I was in love with Little Joe, and even more so, his awesome paint horse. And Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke was the absolute "bomb" in my eyes. And not just because she wore makeup, had a real beauty mole, and rode horses. Nope, she was as tough as nails. She sassed back, stood up for what was right, and faced up to every one of those rowdy, outlaw cowboys that rode into town.
The Cartwrights from Bonanza. Little Joe (lower
right hand corner) always made my heart skip a
beat, but it was his awesome paint horse that
I was really smitten with!
As for Aunt Liz, she was a force to be reckoned with. Although she was a tiny woman, she seemed larger than life to an insecure, knock-knee'd kid like me. I remember one day stepping out onto the creaky, wooden front porch on a hot and muggy summer afternoon. Aunt Liz sat silently in her rocking chair snapping beans with a large black snake coiled at her feet. Running back inside, I peered out the screen door and demanded, "Somebody kill that snake!"
To my way of thinking, there was only one good kind of snake. A dead snake. But Aunt Liz didn't consult me, and suddenly she changed right before my eyes. No longer looking like a tiny, "older than dirt" woman, Aunt Liz suddenly became ten feet tall, and an animal activist! Rising from her rickety old rocker, she adamantly declared, "Now you listen here. Ain't nobody gonna kill this snake. He eats the rodents in my garden, and that makes him my friend!"
Another visit to Aunt Liz's house started out uneventful and innocent enough, but as the evening progressed, things quickly took a turn for the worse. I remember munching on home-made fried pigskins made fresh on the old wood stove, and drinking sugary grape Kool-Aid. The family was gathered around the black and white TV for another episode of unequaled gunslinger action on Gunsmoke.
Miss Kitty hanging tough with the boys. Good
thing she always had the law on her side!
Mesmerized, I watched as Miss Kitty in her purple ruffled dress and ruby red lipstick single-handedly kicked a no-good, drunk varmint of a cowboy right out of the saloon. I was completely star struck! However, my mom wasn't. Fearful that I'd somehow be brain-washed by this worldly woman, she tapped me on the shoulder and said the words I dreaded most,
"It's time for you to go to bed."
Now, being sent to bed at home wasn't so bad because I had my portable TV. Soon as mom would leave my room, I'd always tiptoe over to the little lime green box and turn on the knob. But, things were primitive at Aunt Liz's house. There was certainly no portable TV in the bedroom. Not even a pink princess phone. Poor Aunt Liz. She still had an ugly black phone with a rotary dial. If that wasn't bad enough, she was still on a party line! Finally, with nothing else to distract my thoughts, my eyes began to wander around the moonlit room.
There was no denying it. I was surrounded by old stuff. Old furniture, old lace doilies, old smells, and pictures of old people hanging on every wall of the old room. Finally, I got the courage to summon Aunt Liz to my bedside, and I asked her why the people in the pictures all had weird looking eyes. "Oh," she said matter of factly, as she turned to leave the room, "that's because the pictures were taken after they were already dead. We never could get them to pose for a picture while they were alive. So we had to pry their eyes open for the pictures!"
Right then and there fear gripped me. My eyes were instantly frozen wide-open, and I couldn't speak or move a muscle. With bedcovers clutched tightly up to my neck, I stared at the old people peering out at me from the old picture frames. It was my first major encounter with fear, and I knew it was going to be a long night.
By 2:00 a.m., I still hadn't slept a wink. Quite the contrary, I was as bug-eyed and petrified as the old, dead people staring back at me from the old wooden picture frames hanging on the old wall-papered walls. Worse yet, I knew that even if I could, I must not shut my eyes. The consequences could be fatal, and I was no dummy. I also knew from watching late night episodes of the Twilight Zone that one must never let their hands, arms, or legs drift off the bed. Not even for a nano-second. And so, I laid there mummified in old quilts and old bed covers, suspended in some kind of time warp that only Rod Serling could understand. Meanwhile, the hours ticked by, and my fears grew larger and larger. And then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw it. I was not alone.
At first, I thought it was my imagination. It was lying quietly, unassuming on the wooden floor in the corner of the bedroom. As the moonbeams streamed through the window, I could make out the glistening shape of something coiled up, and it appeared blacker than night. Alas, I recognized it. It was Aunt Liz's snake, - her friend!
Finally, at the end of my tethered, emotional rope, I could take it no more. I let out a high-pitched scream at the top of my lungs. "Daddyyyyyy, help me!" I hollered long and loud. I paused for a moment and listened, never taking my eyes off the snake. There was no response. My childish imagination moved quickly into overdrive, "Oh no, they got daddy!" Fighting back panic and tears, I knew I had no time to waste. I thought quickly and let out another scream, "Mommmmmm!" And then desperately, "Did they get you, too, mom?"
To my surprise, it wasn't my dad or mom that came to save me. In the dark, I could make out the image of my "older than dirt" Aunt Liz standing by the bedroom door. "Oh, hi Aunt Liz, am I glad to see you!" I lied as my voice cracked with fear. Inside my overactive brain, I was scared to death, and thinking I would probably die right there in the den of Satan's helpers.
And then, something quite unexpected happened. This tiny little lady came over to my bed and sat down. She gently stroked my hair, and asked what was troubling me. At once, all my fears bubbled uncontrollably to the surface and spilled out. Fear of the old house, fear of the old room, fear of the dead people in the old picture frames that were hanging on the old wallpapered walls. Oh yes, and fear of losing my arms and legs if they, by chance, happened to hang off the bed. And then, there was Aunt Liz's friend. That dreadful, awful snake.
"Come with me," Aunt Liz said. I grasped her small, weathered old hand and followed her into another room that had old wooden plank floors, and an old four-poster bed. It sat high off the floor, and I could see ropes tied beneath the bed frame where normally bed-slats would rest. Lying perfectly on the tightly woven ropes was an old feather mattress.
"You will sleep here with me tonight, and nothing will harm you." Aunt Liz spoke softly.
Crawling into the big feather bed with crisp, line-dried sheets and down-filled pillows, I felt like I was surrounded by a giant billowy cloud. Hours later and still wide awake, I laid there silently watching as the first rays of sunlight began to peer through the old lace curtains. Aunt Liz lay there gently sleeping on her side, softly bathed in the glow of morning light. Somehow, she no longer looked older than dirt. Instead, she looked like an angel to me.
And in that instant, I knew. I knew that I was loved, and I knew that I was safe. And I knew something more. I knew what I wanted to be.
Finally, closing my tired, little-girl eyes, I prayed, "Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Oh, and by the way, Lord, could you please make me "not so scared" anymore, just like you made Aunt Liz? Oh yeah, and I wanta' be just like her when I grow up, Lord. Old as dirt, and fearless all the way!"
WISHING YOU A BLESSED AND FEARLESS
FALL SEASON!
"He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust: His trust shall be thy shield and buckler.
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee."
(Psalm 91: 7)
