My Old True Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

carrying with him her very breath.

3
    C AROLINA WAS BORN ON the first day of December that year and time for me after that melts and runs smearing all together. Having three under three is
not
the way I’d say to have them. Now, you talk about being tired, but I was slap wore out.
    I wouldn’t have thought I’d remember much about them times but it’s always an amazement what I can reach back and drag up out of this tired old head. I can recall something that happened fifty, sixty years ago better than what happened just last week. Why, I remember words to love songs I learned when I was just four or five year old. Or stuff that ain’t got to do with nothing, except maybe my heart, like how the sky colored up so pretty of a summer morning with that pale red and orange right before that big sun ball peeped its hot face up over the mountain. Or in the wintertime taking that first breath of air so cold that it caused my nose hair to brickle, and how the deep lavender light of dawn would be laying about in every crease and crevice there in the cove and the mountains off toward Tennessee would be wearing their misty shrouds. Or how I asked Granny one time if she thought green might be God’s favorite color since he’d made so many different shades of it. I remember sweetthings, too. The way Zeke’s eyes changed color with his moods, the wonderment on John Wesley’s baby face when he found his hand, the sweet milk breath of all my children, the time little Ingabo pulled all the green ’maters and when I fussed at her she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I’ll just have to take them and hang them back.”
    Maybe it has something to do with what’s important to us, and what happens when you get old ain’t too important. Granny said it was because them early memories was stored in the uncluttered mind of a child. I reckon that’s one of the prettiest ways to explain it that I’ve ever heard.
    C AROLINA WAS ALREADY A month old when the first deep snow of the season fell. It had stayed warm right up till then. Then it was as though winter had just been biding her time, saving it up. It snowed just about every day till way up in March. Most folks just hunkered down, waiting for it to be over. But weather never slowed Hackley and Larkin down even a little bit. They was always together and always out going and doing just like boys probably always have and always will. Some mornings just at daylight I’d look out and there they’d be heading down the main trace. I’d know they was heading for Big Laurel Creek. They had traps sunk in the deepest pools and went to check them at least every other day.
    Oh, how I envied them two boys their carefree ways. It had only been four years since I’d gone traipsing along with them. It was
me
that learned them how to set their traps deep so only the biggest muskrats would go for the bait,
me
that Larkin come crying to wondering if the trap hurt when it closed on them,
me
that learned them to swim in the deep water of the Seward Hole,
me
that used to go with them to the creek in the still of a winter’s snow. And it was
me
that was standing there with a great yearning in that cold little cabin my husband had built with loving hands,
me
that was now held back by the strong yet flimsy chain of flesh that was my own creation.
    T HEY WAS NO EASY way to get to the creek where it twisted and snaked its way around the foot of the mountain and was bordered on one side by a sheer rock cliff called Jumped-Up. It got named that ’cause it really did look like it had jumped up out of the water right on to the side of that mountain and it kept a stubborn grip for a hundred feet or more before it finally give way to the laurel hell that went the rest of the way to the top.
    In the wintertime the clouds seemed living things that would lower their big faces right to the top of the mountain like they aimed to kiss it. As you went down the path to the only ford, they’d boil all about you, coiling