FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: DAYS OF CONTENTMENT INCLUDED LOVE, PEACE, JOY

Jean Bell Mosley's new autobiography, "For Most of the Century," is only available in serialized form in the Southeast Missourian. Return each week for her continuing story.

In spite of the distant rumblings of discontent in the later part of the 1950s, my days were full of peace. I found great satisfaction in homemaking. The pleasant odors of Windex, Mr. Clean, Pledge and other cleaning supplies added to my joy of making windows sparkle, floors shine and furniture gleam. The so-called feminist movement which was smoldering, awaiting quick winds to fan it into flames, was outside the parameters of my thoughts. A home where there was love, peace, joy, good food, good rest and good friends coming were the embers I wanted to fan.

To knead the yeasty smelling bread dough, crack the lovely eggs on the rim of the blue crock, shape the fluted edge of a pie crust, create a warm spicy odor in the kitchen or that of sturdy soup simmering, were things I enjoyed.

To hang my beautiful handmade quilts on the clothesline for an airing on some brisk, blue-sky, spring day was a happy thread woven into the tapestry of my life. Once a tiger swallowtail butterfly lit in the center block of my Flower Garden quilt as it hung over the clothesline. Stayed there for a long time as if it wished me to see it. "I saw it, Lord. Thank you."

The idea of being a second class citizen as Simone de Beauvoir had deemed women to be in her book, The Second Sex, might as well have been written in Sanskrit or hieroglyphics for all the understanding I had of it.

Later, when it was declared by some of the leaders of this feminist movement that the image of happy female domesticity pleased advertisers and kept women readers caged in a docile mood, I laughed all the way to my hammock.

My hammock was not just any old hammock but one made of wooden barrel staves put together with strong wires, just like the one I had swung in, in other halcyon days when visiting Grandma Casey in Fredericktown.

My hammock was fastened between two apple trees that we had earlier planted in the chicken yard. The chickens were gone by this time and green grass grew all around, plus a myriad of daffodils, irises and peonies I had planted where the chicken scratch yard had been. Clumps of hollyhocks still stood at places where the fence had been.

The apple trees had grown tall and sturdy and just the right distance apart to fasten a hammock. Padded with old quilts, the hammock was a comfortable place to be when the trees were in bloom, all through the summer as the little apples swelled and into the Indian Summer days when the apples were ripe enough to fall in a slight breeze. Some of them even fell into the hammock where I lay, ~far away from the feminist movement, rumors of racial discontent and distant war.

Nearly every spring, summer and autumn afternoon, I would take a favorite book out to the hammock and read while the birds sang, crickets fiddled and grasshoppers hopped. What books were these? Not "The Second Sex" nor later, The "Feminine Mystique" rather Thoreau's "Walden," Grayson's "Adventures of David Grayson," Frost's and Riley's poems, Archibald Rutledge's "Peace in the Heart," Gladys Taber's Stillmeadow books and for probably the fiftieth time, "The Wind In The Willows" to study Grahame's felicity with words.

One of the cats in my long series of cats would come to curl up beside me and purr contentedly. Blue jays, peering down at us from the canopy of green leaves, somehow seemed to understand that their vocal opposition to our presence would not be appropriate here.

Sometimes I would close my eyes and ask God to let me "see" a message from Him when I opened them again, just like I had that long ago day of the carbide light.

I was never disappointed. Once a piece of white lint, drifting from a cottonwood tree landed in the exact center of an apple blossom, hung up on the pistil and stamens. I thought, I must pick that out so a bee can come and mix the pollen, but as I waited, a sparrow flew in, daintily picked out the lint and 'few off to resume the making of her nest. "Oh, God," I chuckled, "how you do arrange circumstance, what economy of nature you have ordained, and your perfect timing for me to see."

Cat would wake up, stretch, settle back down and soon would be purring again.

It would have been on such a hammock day that I wrote, "Foot of the Rainbow":

I once asked Aunt Marg, "What makes the dew?"

Aunt Marg lived in a magical world of her own, on the far side of some rainbow. Her answers to my questions were far more to my liking than any I found in a textbook.

"Why, honey," she explained, "at night the world washes its face and the dew is what's left over."

Her explanation is so believable, especially on a morning in June when the earth is so fresh and vibrant and, as Lowell said, "We see it (life) glisten."

To step outside at dawn, one finds that not only has the earth recently bathed, but perfume has been splashed on, too. The fragrance from the clover blends with honeysuckle and mock orange to make a perfume that hasn't been bottled, unless at the far side of some rainbow.

The early morning rabbits leave intricate, dew-shaken trails in the grass. Thinking the pattern to be some new musical score, written in the night, the mockingbird in the apple tree, looking down, tries to sing it, while a woodpecker down in the park offers his drum beat.

After inspecting the zinnia and marigold seedlings, I take an improvised seat under the arching branch of a tall-growing climbing rose to meditate a while on the seeds. Ah, the eternal mystery of a little brown scrap of apparently nothing, springing to green life in six days!

They alone contain all the visual proof we need for the shortcut to good living by faith and promise. I wonder what Aunt Marg would have said if I'd asked her what was in the seeds that made them sprout. "Little samples of God's power," seems a fitting answer.

The decibel of sound slowly rises in June. and the first stridulations of the crickets. The rattle of grasshopper wings will join the symphony~ of jarflies and tree frogs. The children, free of school, and their dogs, glad of it, make the hand of the sound register leap wildly.

Like some old King Cole in his counting house, I start to list my June riches. The nearby wren just turning himself inside out with song is so insistent I had to list him first and then make three mental ditto marks to include the one in the lilac bush, the one on the fence and the one on the weather vane. Next are the roses. Not just those in my yard, which are few, but my neighbors' and all those all over town, even the pretty pink sweetbriars blooming of~ on remote hillsides which I see in my mind's eye only. But, they are mine!

For a while my dew diamonds are exposed as the sun searches them out in the grass. There is one glinting red over by the bird bath. Another, blue-green, lies at the foot of the martin house. The martins must see it, too, for you never heard such chortling talk.

Underlying all these fanciful jewels and rare musical performances is the real wealth of June -- the persistence of the fundamentals. Grass grows. Seeds sprout. Rivers flow. Shadows are cast at the same angle as last year. Forces and rhythms are at work that transcend man's ideas and plans.

From my rosy bower I look across the street at my mailbox and am tempted to go pull off the numbers and write, "Foot of the Rainbow."

~Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.