THE SUNDAY DRIVE IN THE COUNTRY

Vincent-Van-Gogh painting of "Cornfields". I love these colors.

Perhaps it is the child in me that doesn't want to let go of a childhood too soon gone. Whatever the reason, I still remember as if it was yesterday, those long Sunday drives in the country. I long to go back to those good times when cares were far behind us. After a dinner (noon time in the South) of fried chicken and potato salad, we would all pile into the car and head out on the highway..well make that, into the country. We would ride around and see what the rural country side looked like. Most of the time we drove down the same old dirt roads and saw the same things week after week.

But once in a while we would take a new road. Now that was exciting. As city kids, just seeing animals in the fields and seeing the country kids riding their horses was fun for us. I loved looking at the corn in the fields and stopping to visit with some of the farmers and their children. We would drink ice cold water from their well. They didn't have a pump, they let the bucket down on a rope that was wound around the top and had a handle on the side. Sometimes they would have to pull up the bucket and take out the jar of milk in it. They kept their milk in the well to keep it cool for supper. Then they let it back down for their visitors who were dying of thirst. Sometimes the farmer's wife would take a stroll around her yard and garden with Mama and they would come back with fresh vegetables and some new cutting of a flower Mama wanted. This always pleased Mama so much. She would thank her with a big smile on her face.

Mama would always stop on the side of the road and gather wildflowers and put them in a pail of water, she brought along, just for that purpose. If it was blackberry time, we would pick a few berries in the tin syrup buckets, Mama brought with us. Or if we were lucky, we would end up with pears or plums from wild trees. Back then, no one shot at you if you were on their property looking for wild fruit or a Christmas tree for that matter. You can't do that now, you would at the very least get arrested. But back then, farmers didn't care. At least we never ran into any trouble.

After a few hours of just total saturation in the country smells and sounds, we would head back to town. We always ended the trip with ice cream at the local ice cream shop. I remember the taste of that lemon ice cream to this day. It was fun, free and probably very good for us to take that Sunday drive. We learned about farm animals and crops in a way that the city kids who didn't have this wonderful trip each Sunday, would miss but the most important thing was the good memories.