Mary Lee sat on her favorite white rocker watching the day turn to dusk. Her grey curls has begun to hung down low on her forehead. The summer air was still warm. The temperature earlier in the day had been hot and steamy.
Beside sat Frank her husband of fifty years. He had starting to doze in his rocker. Mary Lee loved to listen to the crickets chipping and Frank’s light snore fill the air around her.
She loved this time of day when things slowed down and she could just remember.
Mary Lee had such wonderful things to remember.
She and Frank had met in college. He was football player and she was the math tutor that helped him pass the required math classes for his major. Frank was actually a very good student. He just needed someone to go over things with him a few times. Frank loved to say that had met over the pluses and minuses.
After college they had gotten married and moved to Simpsonville, South Carolina. It was a small factory town. Frank had gotten a job in the business office of one of the factories and Mary Lee had worked as a bookkeeper for the local elementary school.
They had lived in a small house and saved money for several years to move to this big old Victorian on main street. On Sunday nights they had walked by this house and dreamed it would one day be theirs.
Mary Lee had fretted about the train tracks that lay only 100 yards away. Would it be a dangerous place to raises the children they would have? Frank had assured her that the picket fence around the house would be a deterrent and the backyard is where their children would want to be to play ball and chase butterflies.
Chiildren came quickly once they had moved into their dream house. First Sarah arrived and then Martha. They had hope for a boy too, but God closed that door and they had just the two girls.
Sarah and Martha had become their world. Mary Lee stayed home to raise them. She loved taking care of them.
On laundry day she enjoyed hanging their little dresses up on the clothes line in the backyard. The girls loved to grab onto the drying clothes and spin the circular clothes line around and around.
There had been many hours of creating special cookies and pies for dinner along with tiny cookie bites or fruit tarts made with the leftover dough.
The girls had loved to ride their bikes and trikes all over the yard. One would have thought the hard Carolina dirt and lumpy grass would have been hard for them to ride on, but it hadn’t held them back.
Mary Lee slowed her rocking and shock her head sadly remembering how quickly time has passed.
It seemed to her one fall that the girls had been in elementary school and by spring they were all grown up and beginning families of their own. How that had happened? Mary Lee couldn’t recall. It seemed like they went from little girls to ladies in mere minutes.
Each of the girls had stayed in town. They lived with their husbands and children not faraway. Mary Lee and Frank saw them often.
Mary Lee loved being a grandmother. She loved getting to see her girls as moms. They were wonderful moms.
Rocked slowly back and forth again. Mary Lee glanced across the yard at a tricycle covered in green by the tree near the front gate. One of the girls and forgotten to put it away one night and there is had stayed.
Frank had offered to take it out of the green tangle that surrounded it and Mary Lee had insisted that it stay. When he had asked her about it ,she had replied that it was a lesson. Frank had wanted to know about the lesson the tricycle had taught her. He loved to listen to her share her thoughts.
“The lesson,” she replied, “is that time is fleeting. You need to enjoy each moment and cherish each memory. That tricycle reminds me of our girls when they were little and loved to ride. It makes try to guess what must have caught their attention and drew them away from it and on to something else. It reminds me that for a time the white picket fence contained their whole world and they couldn’t bike beyond it.
Frank had a tear drop slowly from his eye after she shared the tricycles importance and agree that it needed to stay right where it was.
Mary Lee now wiped at tear from her eye. What a wonderful memories she had to think back on! What a wonderful lessons she had learned from them
End Note:
We walked a house on the 4th of July and I snapped a picture of this tricycle tangled near the tree. I had know ideas what story I would be able to weave based on it. I just knew there was one. It took most of this month to find Mary Lee and glean what reason there might have been for tricycle to be there.
I have no idea who lives in this house or why the tricycle is there. I am thankful that it was. I have loved getting to know Mary Lee and her story this month.
This post is linked to Mrs. Matlock’s Alphabe Thursday!
