Is the prompt today a hint at why it was posted a little later than usual? ;-)
Old stomping grounds The East Wallingford Gazette has been informed that the Sixticton Pensioners (2nd Heavy Division) has been asked to help out with the town's annual coffee festival. Nearly 100,000 people are expected to visit the town and the surrounding area over Valentine's weekend and all are keen on sampling the locally grown coffee beans. To help handle the business the pensioners will be treading down finely-ground coffee as hot water is pumped through in a vat the size of a piggery, much the way that their grandparents used to tread grapes for the wine harvest. This will be the third year that this has happened, and our experienced reporter tells us that never has the phrase 'Old stomping grounds' been more true.
[It's not easy to make clear in just four sentences, but treat 'stomping' as a verb in the present continuous and 'old' and 'grounds' and nouns and you'll see it :) ]
Nostalgia gripped me as we drove slowly through the old neighbourhood of my youth. It was early on a Sunday morning, no one was around. I guess they were sleeping in.
“There’s the old school yard I used to have nightmares about,” I told my driver. “I hated school back then. It took me years to actually grow to like it. I had to bend to its rules, see, and I couldn’t understand why, but that’s Life, eh,” I continued. “Let’s pull over for a minute, I want to get out and look around.” So we parked under the trees of the adjoining church where I’d buried my mother and father and continued on. Tears gripped me momentarily as I recalled my one friend who stayed with me right through to college. “She’s dead, now. Cancer - the great scourge. She was born on the thirteenth and I remember one Friday the thirteenth when she didn’t come out for lunch - she was put on detention for uttering a word during class. The nuns were terribly strict and gave no quarter, no, no clemency for the fact it was her birthday that day. That was a bad luck day for her. She died on another Friday the thirteenth, too, just shy of her fifty-fifth birthday. Crazy times. Let’s go!”
We cruised past the lake - a beautiful oasis inside suburbia where the bell birds would sing (you’d hear them during class, the lake was so close) and the mist would rise from cold waters during winter once the sun hit it in the early morning. I knew this because I was always up for early church on Sunday (no sleep-ins) so that I could go home and have the whole day slogging at my books just to gain a pass at college. It was the same lake where my partner proposed to me.
Finally, we got to the old house. It was okay to look at it, better than I thought. It hadn’t changed at all, outwardly, which is good, because that way all my memories of it remained intact, instead of being torn apart by my expectations. The letter box was the same and still just as rusty. The sun blind was still in place, an essential guard against the fierce western sun that blighted the lounge room each summer. The long, skinny driveway that was not really wide enough for a car had a few weeds growing down its middle but it still reached the old shed my father had erected with my brother who did a fair job of it although it leaked in every rainfall because the nails had been put into the valleys of the corrugated iron roof, instead of into their peaks. I looked at the front bedroom I’d shared with my sister who’d nearly lost her life in there from septicaemia, until the ambulance arrived to rush her to hospital. Then I looked at the adjacent front room where my father had the duty to inform my other sister she’d just become a widow. I’ll never forget the inhuman howl she emitted from hearing that news. I was sixteen, then, and she - not much older. Life can be bloody unfair sometimes.
There were good times, too. Guy Fawkes night had us all lighting tiny fire crackers and cooking jacket potatoes on the curb of our court every November back in the ‘Sixties. I learned to ride a bicycle in that court with my brother holding the back of the bike until I got my balance. I recall the many times I had to walk up the hill to meet my friend on the way to school and I’d already be soaked from the rain made worse by the fact that she was nearly always late. Sitting in a wet tunic made of scratchy wool and smelling like a wet dog all day has put me off that fabric for life! Oh well, it wasn’t the Princess Generation back then, was it? At least I had shoes and didn’t have to walk to school barefoot in the snow. You have to count your blessings, speaking of which - it was time to go. I snapped off a few photos of the old place and said ‘goodbye’ in my mind, never to see these old stomping grounds again, unless I ventured onto Google Earth.
Greg - nah, it was inspired by my covering for the clerk at Public Works that day. Hadn't been back there since my cleaning job ended.
It was late because I fell asleep :P
Ah, good to hear from the Gazette again :D And that's a clever take on the prompt, which needed no clarification (for me anyway). I hope they have proper footwear for that hot water being pumped through the beans...
Dragonfly - no worries :)
Love the descriptions of the memories. Can almost feel the pain and beauty of them. Feels like a needed return to old places, one that won't need to be repeated.
3 comments:
Is the prompt today a hint at why it was posted a little later than usual? ;-)
Old stomping grounds
The East Wallingford Gazette has been informed that the Sixticton Pensioners (2nd Heavy Division) has been asked to help out with the town's annual coffee festival. Nearly 100,000 people are expected to visit the town and the surrounding area over Valentine's weekend and all are keen on sampling the locally grown coffee beans. To help handle the business the pensioners will be treading down finely-ground coffee as hot water is pumped through in a vat the size of a piggery, much the way that their grandparents used to tread grapes for the wine harvest. This will be the third year that this has happened, and our experienced reporter tells us that never has the phrase 'Old stomping grounds' been more true.
[It's not easy to make clear in just four sentences, but treat 'stomping' as a verb in the present continuous and 'old' and 'grounds' and nouns and you'll see it :) ]
I couldn’t confine mine to the four line brief...
Old Stomping Grounds
Nostalgia gripped me as we drove slowly through the old neighbourhood of my youth. It was early on a Sunday morning, no one was around. I guess they were sleeping in.
“There’s the old school yard I used to have nightmares about,” I told my driver. “I hated school back then. It took me years to actually grow to like it. I had to bend to its rules, see, and I couldn’t understand why, but that’s Life, eh,” I continued. “Let’s pull over for a minute, I want to get out and look around.” So we parked under the trees of the adjoining church where I’d buried my mother and father and continued on.
Tears gripped me momentarily as I recalled my one friend who stayed with me right through to college. “She’s dead, now. Cancer - the great scourge. She was born on the thirteenth and I remember one Friday the thirteenth when she didn’t come out for lunch - she was put on detention for uttering a word during class. The nuns were terribly strict and gave no quarter, no, no clemency for the fact it was her birthday that day. That was a bad luck day for her. She died on another Friday the thirteenth, too, just shy of her fifty-fifth birthday. Crazy times. Let’s go!”
We cruised past the lake - a beautiful oasis inside suburbia where the bell birds would sing (you’d hear them during class, the lake was so close) and the mist would rise from cold waters during winter once the sun hit it in the early morning. I knew this because I was always up for early church on Sunday (no sleep-ins) so that I could go home and have the whole day slogging at my books just to gain a pass at college.
It was the same lake where my partner proposed to me.
Finally, we got to the old house. It was okay to look at it, better than I thought. It hadn’t changed at all, outwardly, which is good, because that way all my memories of it remained intact, instead of being torn apart by my expectations. The letter box was the same and still just as rusty. The sun blind was still in place, an essential guard against the fierce western sun that blighted the lounge room each summer. The long, skinny driveway that was not really wide enough for a car had a few weeds growing down its middle but it still reached the old shed my father had erected with my brother who did a fair job of it although it leaked in every rainfall because the nails had been put into the valleys of the corrugated iron roof, instead of into their peaks.
I looked at the front bedroom I’d shared with my sister who’d nearly lost her life in there from septicaemia, until the ambulance arrived to rush her to hospital. Then I looked at the adjacent front room where my father had the duty to inform my other sister she’d just become a widow. I’ll never forget the inhuman howl she emitted from hearing that news. I was sixteen, then, and she - not much older. Life can be bloody unfair sometimes.
There were good times, too. Guy Fawkes night had us all lighting tiny fire crackers and cooking jacket potatoes on the curb of our court every November back in the ‘Sixties. I learned to ride a bicycle in that court with my brother holding the back of the bike until I got my balance. I recall the many times I had to walk up the hill to meet my friend on the way to school and I’d already be soaked from the rain made worse by the fact that she was nearly always late. Sitting in a wet tunic made of scratchy wool and smelling like a wet dog all day has put me off that fabric for life! Oh well, it wasn’t the Princess Generation back then, was it? At least I had shoes and didn’t have to walk to school barefoot in the snow. You have to count your blessings, speaking of which - it was time to go. I snapped off a few photos of the old place and said ‘goodbye’ in my mind, never to see these old stomping grounds again, unless I ventured onto Google Earth.
Greg - nah, it was inspired by my covering for the clerk at Public Works that day. Hadn't been back there since my cleaning job ended.
It was late because I fell asleep :P
Ah, good to hear from the Gazette again :D And that's a clever take on the prompt, which needed no clarification (for me anyway). I hope they have proper footwear for that hot water being pumped through the beans...
Dragonfly - no worries :)
Love the descriptions of the memories. Can almost feel the pain and beauty of them. Feels like a needed return to old places, one that won't need to be repeated.
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