Summertime

I love the summer smells and sounds here in northeast Nebraska.
I love the little country roads. I love the evenings - warm summer
darkness filled with the twinkling lights of fireflies.
There is something nostalgic about it, and memories come flooding back - like
memories have a way of doing when the setting is right.
These are the hills of my childhood. This is the summer heat; the scents; the pastures.
These are the people. Many others who are gone on to their eternal home live again in memory. The ones we visit now were younger then. Many were not even born.
In those years so long ago I never imagined being here as I am these four summer weeks, helping my granddaughter with Gospel Meetings.
What a privilege! As Jana and I travel, I can't help but tell her about people that once lived here, about the way things were then.
One day as we traveled west on 275, I found the Ridge Road, and we turned north on it.
I've wanted to go over that road again for a long time.
Yes...there is the Bega School, the building still there.
Memories of my country school getting together with that district a few times; memories of
Gospel Meetings there long ago, and a remembered voice ringing out the words from the hymn, "Was it for me sweet angel strains came floating o'er Judea's plains....?".
That was the road my parents and I traveled toward home in torrents of rain the night of the Madison tornados. We reached the south end of our road in the middle of the night and with the storms over, walked the muddy 3/4 mile over the hill to home by moonlight.
There was no one to see, and my Dad, to save his suit pants, took them off and walked in his
"long john's" Mom and I, behind, couldn't help but snicker a little.
It was fun to walk around Winside, where I went to grade school three years.
So many memories there! The kids I sometimes played with; the grocery store where I brought in my bicycle basket our little bottles of cream to sell. Once I took out a dime from the pay and
bought candy, and still remember my parents disappointment that I had done that without asking.
Enough reminiscing! It is another era now, and in most ways a better one.
Mostly, I'm glad to see that seed sown many years ago is still producing here. I know the courageous sowers of those bygone years would rejoice and give thanks to see it.