The Best Things in Life are Free

When I allow my mind to sift back to a time I felt the pure, unrestrained bliss of a child, there are two events that easily stand apart from all the others. It was a time when life was uncomplicated and safe, with the ugly of the world still unapparent. We lived in a little red, two-story sandpaper-like sided house beside the kindest people I’ve ever known. I’m sure they were middle-aged, but Maggie’s sagging folds of wrinkles and Claude’s slow deliberate gait made them seem ancient. They had little in the way of material things and had no children of their own. We spent warm days and cooler evenings on their porch, from spring through fall. They felt like family.

In the early spring, my mother would load my sister, me, and Maggie into our old two-toned green sedan and head for nearby railroad tracks to search for poke greens. Maggie instructed us in the ways of the poisonous plant in her deep, raspy smoker’s voice.

“Stay away from them ones with the berries. They’re pison. And don’t pull ’em up, cause the roots are pison, too. They’ll kill ya just to touch ’em. We hafta cook the greens, first. “

We each carried our own knife and paper bag, searching for tender young pokeweed plants on the sides of the rail bed. We only picked the youngest plants. Maggie showed us where to cut the plant stem, reiterating how the roots and berries could kill us if we ate them. I became adept at finding the plants and cutting them, and it was like a game to compete against the adults for my quota. Although I wouldn’t eat the greens myself, called poke sallet once they were cooked, I loved to hunt them in the cool shade of trees hanging over the tracks. I’m not sure how much constituted just the right amount, but Maggie’s worn old eyes could always spy when we had enough for a “mess,” and we would pile back into the car and head home. Maggie would cook up the mess of poke sallet with pork backstrap and fried potatoes and we would all eat supper in their sagging kitchen with cold water pulled from the well and toted into their dilapidated little house. I picked the bits of porkstrap out of the greens and piled my plate high with the pork and potatoes.

During this same time, when Daddy was out of work, Mother, Daddy, my sister Geri, and I would load up into his rusty old truck and go outside of town to collect sandstone rocks. Daddy was resourceful. Between jobs, he would make agreements with little old ladies that he would make them sandstone flowers beds to keep their multitudes of colors and species from being mowed down into the rest of the yard.

There was a creek below a sandstone bluff we would drive out to. The road took us up and over exposed outcrops of rock, through smaller creeks, around trees, and through mud. The truck scraped across the slabs of sandstone and would bottom-out or get a tire stuck in the mud. Daddy could always get us up and running again, but in the process, that truck threw us all over the inside of it. We’d hang onto door handles, the dashboard, and each other, laughing on our very own carnival ride.

But the best part was reaching our pot of gold: the cold creek running over perfectly weathered sandstone rocks about the size of loaves of bread. We would wade into the creek and lose our breath at the water’s temperature and become enthralled with the colors emanating from the wet rocks. They were nature’s kaleidoscope. For a while, my sister and I would argue about who was finding the prettiest rocks. Even though the day would be hot, we would feign thirst over and over again as we dipped our hands into the water and drank. Geri and I would eventually begin to help find and load rocks that would be ideal to ring a flowerbed. They had to be flat enough to stack. It was like the creek knew exactly what it was doing, weathering and smoothing the sandstone into just the right sizes. Then we’d become distracted again by a backward swimming crawdad or salamander.

Daddy knew when we’d loaded enough sandstone by how far the truck bed was off the ground. He knew exactly how much we could take and still make it back over the rough terrain. I never remember having to unload any rocks out of the truck, but those trips out of the place were somehow scarier when we were only a foot off the uneven ground.

A few days later, Daddy would drive us by a house where he had placed the perfectly round-edged rocks around beautifully tended flowers. We were all proud of the contribution we’d made, and as kids, we never understood those expeditions were really the difference between the lights staying on in our house or not. We were rich, and those trips to the creek fill my heart as the most beautiful and valuable times ever spent with my family.