Putting the right accent on the day

Editor's note: This column originally was published Feb. 24, 1991.

A person should declare for himself, every once in a while, an Aunt Polly Day. Such a day isn't noted on a calendar nor does it appear in any book describing holidays or any other special kind of day.Only a few people scattered up and down the river valley community knew, first hand, what such a day would be like. They were Aunt Polly's contemporaries.

Sometime, somewhere, someone, tiring of the weary routine of living, declared he or she was going to have an Aunt Polly Day. The term caught on.

There was no need for explanation of the kind of day it would be, although Jim Stacy described it pretty well when he said, "You skim the cream off the day for your own use and feed the blue john to the hogs." Thus no minute of a day was wasted since even the blue john had a thrifty purpose. You did what you had to routinely do, (the blue john) but didn't place the accent there. Boiling clothes in a kettle over an outside fire was routine. Roasting wieners or marshmallows over that fire was the cream skimmed off the routine.

Until our rural mail route was changed, I had almost daily contact with Aunt Polly in the summer time since our mail box, about two miles from home, was near Aunt Polly's home. Quite often, when I went for our mail, I arrived at our mail box before the mailman, on horseback and with fat saddlebags, arrived. Aunt Polly, from her porch, garden, barnyard, wherever she might be, would wave and call for me to come on up. Her house was on a little, leveled-out place on the side of a steep hill.

When I arrived in her presence she would say, "I want you to listen to this," or "I want you to see this," or "Touch that," or "Taste this."

Once she was watching a measuring worm inch its way up a stalk of some sort. I sat down beside her in the tall grass and watched. The little worm moved along by hunching his middle section way up, back feet touching front feet, then pushing with his hind legs to move the humped-up portion forward. I had seen such a worm before and wondered at Aunt Polly's fascination. When the worm got to the top of the stalk it went down the other side in the same "measured" way.

Without total recall, our conversation went something like this: "Dumb, ain't it?" Aunt Polly said.

"Why?"

"Well, didn't you see? When it finally got to the top after such hunching work why didn't it stop and look around, enjoy the scenery, smell the air?" Then, as if about to miss this herself, she got up, breathed deeply and waved a hand, wordlessly, at the river valley below where black and white cows grazed peacefully in green pastures and rows of tasseling corn sent their perfume all the way up the hill.

I didn't know whether measuring worms had eyes or nose, or for that matter knew up from down, and said so.

"Makes no never mind. Anything that works that hard to get up somewhere oughten to go back down as if nothing had happened," Aunt Polly declared. "Ought to stay a while and soak up the pleasure."

Taking time to notice and soaking up the pleasure are the underlying principles of an Aunt Polly Day.

When I recall that "day of the measuring worm," sitting in the tall, warm grass with Aunt Polly. I can still see that little green worm going right over his "mountain peak experience" without missing a hump of his body and I pause, wondering querulously, if I've missed a precious moment to stop and soak up the pleasure, if I've recognized mountain-top experiences only in hind sight.

REJOICE!

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