By scqueen
Date: 25 January 2001

Shaping My Soul

     In a black and white photo of the two, circa 1940, his arm is casually slung around her shoulders.  A coy grin dances on her lips, depicting the look of young lovers who are meant to grow old together.  I came into their world twenty one years later.  Deemed the 'first and favorite', I remained their only grandchild for six years.  In those first impressionistic years and the ones to follow, I watched them love.

     I saw him count out his money at night from the day's soft drink route.  He often exchanged his own pocket change for an occasional wheat leaf penny or solid silver piece.  He would tuck them away in a jacket pocket or hide them under the mattress.  He was saving them for her.

     He preferred to go hunting and fishing alone.  She worried that he would fall in a pond and drown or the gun would go off accidentally and shoot him.  I felt her panic once when he didn't return home before dark.  I clung to the skirt of her dress and hid in it's folds of deep blue and purple while she called the police.  Her concern turned to anger when he finally arrived, a string of fish in one hand, his pole in the other.  She was afraid she had lost him.  Then he would smile and eventually she fried the fish for dinner.

     On Sunday afternoons, we took drives in the country to visit his mother.  I sat between them in the front seat of the pick-up truck, often holding a bowl of muscadines in my lap.  We would share the sweet fruit and take turns spitting out hulls into a plastic bag.  I never saw him feed her one, though I noticed how intimately their hands brushed as they reached for the bowl at the same time.  Sometimes, she would fall asleep on the trip home. Head back, mouth open. Just as she would start to snore lightly, he would poke a needle of pine straw at her mouth until the tickling woke her. I thought then that he did it to make me laugh.  Now, I know he did it for her smile.

     He lived until the year of their forty-ninth wedding anniversary.  For years after, she found the coins he had hidden here and there. She even found bills stashed under bedroom carpet and hallway runners.  He never did believe in banks. She eventually gave his guns and fishing gear to grandsons.  She probably has not eaten fish or muscadines since.  But she will always love him with the same good, old-fashioned love that molded me.

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