Mama

We called her “Mama” because calling her “Grandmama” made her feel old.   As a small child my grandmother, my father’s mother, was the oldest person I knew.  She always seemed really old.  She limped along, one leg shorter than the other, as a result of childhood polio.  She always complained of aches and pains…her face and hands were wrinkled with age and she wore a worrisome countenance that was in need of a smile.

But she baked the best homemade rolls…rolls that we ate hot from the oven…covered in real butter and washed down with real milk from the cow behind the barn.  There were chickens in the yard and an old trash barrel…all black and burned.  I loved to run and play on the big covered porch that wrapped completely around the large antebellum house.   The porch was home to an old wringer washer that fascinated my mechanical interests. The tin roof carried rainwater to a covered cistern that playing in was not allowed.  We spent hours exploring the old barn that housed her Plymouth sedan with suicide doors that opened like a side-by-side refrigerator/freezer.  What great memories.

Lately, I’ve thought of my grandmother, Mama, a lot…each day as I struggle with all my little aches and pains and look at my wrinkles hands…I am beginning to understand what it means to be old. 

So with my bum knee

I began to see

What Mama meant to me

As I get closer to my goal

Life’s reality may be told

The understanding of getting old

Dear Jesus help me thru

The things that I must do

That draw me closer to you

I’ll bite my lip and not complain

For this is nothing like the pain

That You suffered for my shame

Amen