GOOD VIEW FROM MOUNTAIN OF SWEET MEMORIES

Every autumn when the trees began to put on their gypsy clothes, Grandpa and I made a special trip to the Farm Bureau Store. The way was up hills and down, through woods, over rivers and creeks, alongside fields. To my nine-year-old sense of distance, it was a long trip. I looked forward to it almost as much as I did Christmas.

On Friday evening at the supper table, Grandpa would look at me and say, "Tomorrow all right, lass?" I knew what he meant and so did the rest of the three generation family seated around the table.

It had become a custom for Grandpa to take me on this autumnal journey to get winter supplies for the livestock such as rock salt, black salve and other such things we couldn't raise or make. He took my other sisters for special days too, but I've often wondered if they enjoyed it as much. Being older, perhaps they felt they must make conversation. Grandpa and I could ride for miles, high up on the spring seat of the big farm wagon, without saying a word, conversing in comfortable silence, motioning at a big hornet's nest we might see, or a deer in the road up ahead.

He had already taught me how the sassafras leaves were shaped like mittens. So when we passed the sassafras patch, and the leaves had turned from green to red, I knew exactly what he meant when he looked at them and said, "They're warmer now."

At one familiar place he would stop the horses and we'd look through a notch in the forest to see two red gum trees standing like exclamation marks at the far end of a field green with winter wheat. The horses would puff and paw and look backward, wondering why we had stopped. We'd look at each other, wordless, but smug with satisfaction that the scarlet sour gums were still there and we knew just where to look for this bright living picture.

When we dipped down toward the river, without mentioning it to each other, we knew we were coming upon the grove of sweet gums and that each would be expected to give a new description of what the grove appeared to be this autumn.

"Grandma's Flower Garden quilt," I once said. He nodded as if in agreement and then described, "A fallen-down rainbow." I thought that the best ever, but never said so. We depended on subtle expressions the clasp or clap of our hands, a fist pounded on the arm of the wagon seat, a broad satisfied grin.

From Grandpa I learned why the sun was warm on our shoulders at this time of the year but not overhead as it had been when in the meadows at hay cutting time, that hatching quail made little zigzag cuts around the center of the shell whereas chickens didn't. That horse hairs, in the water for some time, looked exactly like small snakes, but weren't.

Each year I knew that some special, little, new thing was going to happen before the day was over. Such knowledge kept me bouncing happily on the high wooden seat.

One blue-gold day, after we left the Farm Bureau Store to make our homeward way, Grandpa stopped at another store and came out with a wrapped package which he slipped under the seat. I would never have asked what it was.

As we passed some fields where Virginia Creeper looped in big crimson scallops along the rail fence, Grandpa pulled the horses over to the side of the road. "Rest," he said. He took the package from beneath the seat and motioned toward a fence corner where we sat down under the canopy of a flaming sumac. He unwrapped the package and there was a whole mincemeat pie. Little sugary humps had come up through the fern-cut decoration and spread out in little brown rivulets over the flaky surface.

"You cut," Grandpa said, handing me his pocket knife he had cleaned on his mole skin trousers.

I cut it in half and then fourths. We sat there silently eating that pie while yellow leaves from an overhanging shagbarks fell on our heads and shoulders. We could hear acorns falling off in the near distance and, far away, cowbells indicated that various homestead cows were winding their way home for milking time.

We ate the whole pie, looked at each other and grinned with immense satisfaction. It was one more secret to pile atop all the others until, eventually, they became a mountain to stand on from which one can view the world as good, no matter what goes on above, below or all around.

REJOICE!