Looking out the window on the world

" Hours are golden links-God's token-
Reaching heaven but one by one;
Take them, lest the chain be broken
Ere thy pilgrimage be done."

From Seven Hundred Album Verses
J.S.Ogilvie
c 1884

Life sometimes seems short when we are so busy with everyday lives and tasks we need to accomplish.
This month makes me think back on those times in life when we were not so busy. Our childhood. Even though we are still in the heat of an Indian summer and no leaves yet turned, September always makes me think of the old song Autumn Leaves.

Going back to my childhood, we would be back in school by now and getting down to the reasons we were there. But all the while daydreaming of the summer just past.

My summers were filled with running freely in the woods across the main road from our home. I grew up mostly in the country but we moved into town when I was in 10th grade. Our own land on this side of the road was mostly pasture land with a scattering of trees.
I missed those places to roam, think and dream of the future when we moved into town.

My husband calls me a little Indian maid when I tell him about those wanderings from the time Mom released me from the daily tasks she had for me until time to come in for dinner. I did not even stop to come to the house for lunch, having packed myself a little lunch of peanut butter sandwich and kool aid in a jar. I would usually find berries to add as my dessert.
These days were so full and I could not tell you a single thing I did while out there lost in my forest. I remember I was not allowed to go further than a railroad track that cut through the forest near my home. This was the Waco Beaumont Timpson and Sabine Train which was a small local area railroad that had only one train that I know of. They would do large hauling between those small towns.

Later on the engine sat in the roundhouse for many years rusting away with no one able to raise the money needed to restore it until finally it was given to the Railroad Museum in Galveston.
It is now fully restored, or was prior to Hurricane Ike and I have not checked to see how it fared during the hurricane.

I have a picture of it from it's early days long prior to my birth and my memories of it. The picture shown here is small.

News of deaths or events came to us via this little train. They would stop and after blowing the whistle several times we would go out to the tracks and the conductor would tell us whatever it was we needed to know.

This was many many years earlier when we first moved to this house and while we were waiting for a phone line to free up so we could get a phone.
There were party lines and only 3 in our direction were installed so whenever one went off another could get that line. I believe we waited about 2 years for a phone. Since we lived in a mainly rural area progress moved more slowly here.
This train was nicknamed Wobbly Bobbly by all the kids in our area.

Today I still look out the window sometimes when it is slow here at the store and think back to those carefree days of roaming in the forests and eating wild berries and dreaming of what my life would be.
Now I look out and still dream. I don't think you should ever stop dreaming.

" We could count time by heart-throbs;
He most lives who thinks most, speaks
the noblest, acts the best. "

from Seven Hundred Album Verses
J.S.Ogilvie c 1884

I am pretty sure I was born in the wrong time, but what can you do but make this time a little of what it would have been had you lived in the time you think you belonged to. That is what I try to do with my antique store. Go back to a more gentle and civilized time before CNN and other networks spread the world before us to worry over every day.

My husband gave me a cup that said" Why pray when you can fret and worry." He wanted me to read it every time I was having tea in the morning and probably hoped it would influence me.
Which it has although I still admit to being a second generation worrier. My Mom invented it I think.

But for now, I look out the window and remember the time I would have fit into better. In this little old antique type town built around the courthouse square it is not hard to imagine yourself in the 1800's. But it is home.

" Some write for pleasure, some write for
fame,
But I write simply to sign my name."

Seven Hundred Album Verses
J.S.Ogilivie
c 1884

Have a good week!!!
Lois


This picture from the new book Images from America-Huntsville that I sell in my store. This was taken in the early 1900's here in town at the college.