More Than Just A Dove …

There’s something about the soft gentle cooing of a mourning dove that calms me and brings back a flood of wonderful memories from my childhood.

I was so very fortunate to have grown up in the same little village that both of my grandparents lived in as well.  Once in a great while, I would get to spend the night with my mom’s mom, who lived alone since my grandpa had died when my mom was only 13.   I loved staying at Grandma’s. I remember sitting at her big round lace-covered oak table to do my homework or to draw my little ‘masterpieces’.  When I wasn’t at the table I could likely be found over in her easy chair by the front door. This spot was by a window and always cooler than the rest of the room. I loved to curl up in that chair and look at the National Geographic magazines and marvel at all the fascinating images of exotic places …and naked bodies.

Grandma’s bathroom had no heat except for a small gas heater that she was always fussing over for some reason.  Her bathroom sink had 2 faucets – one for cold water and one for hot …strange to think back on that now …no such thing as “warm” water at that sink!  And you would only find a green bar of Palmolive soap there as well.  To this day, if I run across a rare bar of that, it immediately transports me back in time.

Grandma didn’t have much income so she saved anything and everything.  Pantyhose were not much on the scene yet for her age group and she wore “stockings” that came in a flat cellophane package with a piece of white stiff paper supporting them.  She saved each and every one of those for my sister and I to draw and color on.  She had an old tin box of vintage Crayola crayons … ones with names like “maize” and “cornflower blue”. And so began my love affair with “art” and all its’ accoutrements .

On the north wall of her living room, Grandma had an old, old upright piano that had survived something like 10 moves over the course of being in her family.  It was so old and worn out that it had a very ‘twangy’, old-timey-TV western-saloon-type sound to it.  But it was still loved and played daily.  During the course of the 5 years I took piano lessons just down the street from her house, I fondly recall Grandma helping me practice my lessons and then sometimes we would sit side by side on the bench and play duets together…ultimately ending up in giggles over our boo boos……..just like when my mom and I played duets. Such sweet sweet memories.

The highlight, though, of staying overnight at Grandma’s was getting to sleep in my mother’s old bed.  If I close my eyes I can see the whole room just as it was all those many years ago.  A simple dresser on one wall with an old antique hairbrush and mirror set and a little matching glass container that held my mother’s hairpins.

The cotton sheets were always cool and smelled like a sunny summer day, as Grandma always hung her sheets outside on the clothesline to dry.  In the summer, the window next to the bed would be open and I would always wake to the sound of mourning doves cooing ….always.  What a sweet sound that I grew to cherish.

Amazing isn’t it how something so simple can trigger a waterfall of precious old memories.

“I slid between the sheets so cool

where Mother once laid too,

And dreamed the dreams that come with youth

and woke to your soft coo.”