Weekly Scribblings #26. and we're asked
to consider the word "pavement".
Submitted to Poets & Storytellers United
July 1, 2020
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My thoughts go back to the soil-rich middle Illinois
farmland of my youth. I remember when the first paved
road came through our isolated part of the prairie. The
locals called it the "hard road". If you asked for directions
you might be told to "Go north past Miller's farm to the
mile tree and turn right. That'll take you to the hard road".
I knew only that the hard road would take us to Chicago,
that distant and mystical city about which I knew absolutely
nothing. My mother was suspicious of city folk. She thought
cities were filled with dens of iniquity like pool halls, bowling
alleys, and (God forbid) bars. What a quantum leap from that
simple time to today's six-lane highways and complicated
interchanges! Hard road. Path to tomorrow.
A blog for the midnight epiphanies and idle thoughts of a hopeless wordaholic.
Yes, indeed life also nwo is much more complicated than the simple past life!
ReplyDeleteThe dirt roads of my youth ... I remember them with a mix of nostalgia, yearning for the past and resignation of living with what was to come.
ReplyDeleteTwo key words, Helen …. yearning and resignation. Both come with age, don't they?? lol
DeleteWonderfully evocative. I think I'll start using the phrase "the mile tree" when giving directions to my house.
ReplyDeleteThis is absolutely beautiful, Beverly!💘 I enjoyed visualizing "the first paved road came through our isolated part of the prairie," and marveled at "today's six-lane highways and complicated interchanges!" Time passes and changes so quickly! Thank you so much for writing to the prompt!💘
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed your memories of a simpler gentler time.
ReplyDeleteThe best analogy I can think of for this that happened to me was the rise of the internet. I remember when it was a lazy way to talk so someone on a different floor in my college dorm (and how much this one friend of mine made fun of it). Today it's a pathway to learn and do a billion different things. LOL and I ended up getting married to that friend, who ended up working in IT. :D
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your story, Rommy!
DeleteAt about a minute and a half from Vermont's Canadian border, well "outside the village", I've been living on the dirt road for about 3 decades now. Tales I could tell...
ReplyDeleteNever heard of the "mile Tree" thing, but up here they'll often say, "It's 3 miles. No. Wait. It's a good 3 miles."
Thanks for the trigger.
It so happened the old tree was exactly a mile out of the little town, and so it was dubbed "the mile tree".
DeleteI enjoyed this. :)
ReplyDeleteLove this. I share your mum's misgivings..and I live in a city! A simple life with soft and hard roads suits me just fine :)
ReplyDeleteSadly we tend to love places as they were when we were young, sadly things change and so we have but memories of our childhood and youth and we are filled with regret...well I am. This is a beautiful poem.
ReplyDelete‘The hard road’ is an interesting and enlightened phrase, Bev. Life must have become harder as it became more modernised, as the city got closer. A different kind of hard.
ReplyDeleteThey have more "hard roads" now and some citification, but it is still a rural part of the state.
DeleteWow! this is so beautifully penned.
ReplyDeleteA fascinating glimpse into the past. Thank you for this reminiscing.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Rosemary. Seems I'm forever reminiscing. I need to concentrate on being a bit more current!
DeleteI grew up on a gravel road and I remember how wonderful it was when we would turn onto pavement...Now, I long for dirt roads.
ReplyDeleteBeverly, this is great for me. I grew up on dirt and gravel roads up in the hills five miles west from the pavement, fifteen miles west of the Missouri River, and seven miles from our closest town.
ReplyDeleteMy summer job after graduation, I was seventeen, was working on the paving gang making a new road from Tekamah, Nebraska, to Oakland, Nebraska. I was put on the form gang with two American Indians, Walter (young man) and Mr. Henry (an older gentleman). We followed the paver and picked up the forms from the previous day, loaded them onto Hot Rod, an older Ford flatbed truck with no muffler. For some reason, I was nominated to drive the truck around hook or crook to the front of the mixer machine riding those rails like a train does its track, where we would unload them for using the next day. I enjoyed this work, my first full time work although I left for college in August, and learned a lot about our early American indigenous folk.
We paved half the road, to Craig that summer and so I had a job again the next summer back with the Indians on the form gang. For several weeks our truck drivers hauling the dry cement mix out were on strike so I drove one of those dump trucks as a scab worker.
An aside, partially related: In my junior year second semester of high school I took typing, one other boy, a senior, was in my class along with a high teen number of girls. I sat next to a senior girl who embarrassed me a little by her announcement that when she had a child, she would advise her to stay single as my friend was planning. Okay, the next I heard of her she was pregnant, and the next was that she was marrying a fellow from the cement crew that I had worked for. (Small town of about 1800 for my last two years of public school-I wasn't privy to the gossip but I'm thinking it was real juicy)
I was glad to see that road being paved, I had been sideswiped driving home from school by a drunk driver, I couldn't take the ditch because of a graded up row a gravel by where the new curb would be.
TMI?? I'm betting yes.
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Never TMI, Jim. I love to hear the stories. For a time I belonged to a group called OWL (Older Women's Legacy), and we wrote of our memories. The stories were always fascinating. It's especially interesting you worked with two native Americans. I'm sure their stories were fascinating as well!
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