FOR MOST OF THE CENTURY: HOME IMPROVEMENTS (PART 49)

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.

During the years of Edward's sickness, things around our premises began to look shabby. A sort of gray pall seemed to descend and cling to everything. It was not our first priority to remove it.

A few months after Edward's death, I knew that if I didn't do some needful things, I might not have the nerve later. So, from time to time, there came a new stove, a new refrigerator, washer and dryer, new kitchen linoleum, new green carpet all over the downstairs rooms, a new car, a new trellised privacy fence at the rear of our lot and many other little things.

One spring thereafter I went to visit some friends, the Harold Aldrich family. They occupied, at that time, the old Stacy farm, the farm that adjoined ours way back in the early part of the century. The visit was unplanned. My sisters and I were just driving by, crossing and re-crossing old familiar roads. When we came to the Aldrich home, it was like stepping into a fairyland. There was the same old house, the same old bell mounted on a pole that called countless workers in from the fields, but now the place, unknown to us, had become a show spot of the National Iris Society. At the time of this visit there were great beds and rows of the most beautiful blooming irises and overhead soared a myriad of purple martins, making their most happy chuckling sounds. I could hardly wait to get home to establish my own "fairyland of irises and purple martins."

Two seasons later I had a great curving bed of colorful irises, all secured and planted by myself. At the end of the row was a bird bath and overhead soared purple martins.

When the martin house was put up I wondered if any of the lovable birds would come. The first spring after its erection I walked out the back walk one day and there on the lower porch of the house were two little dark colored birds huddled together. It was still cold, last of March. I knew that if I could just see their forked tails, I'd know they were martins but I didn't want to scare them away for fear they wouldn't come back. I stood there for a long time in the cold. When they did fly away, I saw their forked tails. I've had flocks of the cheerful martins ever since.

Thereafter I took a consuming interest in my backyard. Forsythia, mock orange, calacanthus, bush honeysuckle, old-fashioned roses, tiger lilies, phlox, daylilies, peonies, clematis, rudbeckia, sundrops, columbine, daisies, hollyhocks took their places. With annuals sown here and there, the premises became a mecca for honey bees, bumblebees, butterflies, hummingbirds and all manner of beetles and bugs that liked flowers too. I could spend hours sitting way back, almost hidden in the blooming mock orange, inhaling the fragrance and listening to the bumblebees, and some whose wings would brush my cheeks. I never feared them, not they me. Many times a cardinal would be nesting in the same bush and we were all just co-existing like, shall I say, "a peaceable kingdom?"

I encouraged the rabbits and squirrels, the tortoises, any manner of wildlife to take up residence. Didn't even mind a little garter snake and her offspring, in spite of my early acquaintance with snakes. Once in a while a 'possum or 'coon would waddle through the back yard.

The birds came, all of them native to our region and a few which were not. The big swallowtails -- tiger, zebra, etc., came. It was all almost enough to make me withdraw from society and live in my own little world, but not quite.

Days that saw a rabbit sitting on my porch, a butterfly alighting on a sleeping kitten, a squirrel looping downward from a high wire yet holding on to let another squirrel pass made for big bold entries in my journals.

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