Those of you who know me well know how much I cry. I cry for little to no reason most of the time. Maybe I’m laughing so hard I cry. Maybe a song hits me just right. Maybe I’m mourning the Reese Cup I accidentally dropped on the floor. I suppose instead of Chester’s Chronicle I could do something called Amelia’s Emotions.

Today, this brought me to tears.

I couldn’t ask for better neighbors. They’re friendly, they’re respectful, they’re quiet. They wave at me if I’m sitting on the porch, they constantly consider me when it comes to the roaming of their chickens, they give me a heads up when they’re planning a get together so I’ll be prepared to party with them or leave the premises. They are entering their second harvest season and evidently their garden took on a life of its own this year. They had put a couple of containers out by the road when the squash started coming in. Today, it was a whole table.

Now, it isn’t just their generous hearts that made me a little mushy. Scott & Chasity live in my great-grandparents house. My Papaw built that house, starting with just a few rooms, and built on as his family grew. It was a bit of a mish-mash of a house, as you would expect. When Scott got down to remodeling it, he got way more than he’d anticipated. The wiring was a t-total nightmare, and the plumbing….well, it was a complete overhaul to say the least. But he persevered and he and his family have been living next door for about a year now. I’m tickled pink with them. And I’m off track.

So this piece of property that I live on was at one time much bigger. I would call it a gentleman’s farm, where my Papaw raised Charolais & Polled Herefords, pigs, chickens, hay, tobacco, and some rank ponies. He also put out an enormous garden. Those of you who are familiar where I live–that whole front field where I used to work my horses was a garden prior to my horseback riding years. So anyway, during the hottest parts of summer, that’s where you could find him, early morning and late evening, hoeing and picking produce in his straw hat and soft cotton, cornflower blue, button up shirt. I remember following him up and down the rows for ages, watching for packsaddles (it’s a stinging caterpillar that likes corn), picking beans and tomatoes by the five gallon buckets, and reaching for cucumbers that he’d point to with his hoe, simultaneously drawing back the scratchy leaves. I was closer to the ground, you see. I thought I made a fine helper, but the truth was I probably slowed him down immensely.

Anyway, most of the time there was an excess of what Mamaw and Grandmother and everybody could can, plus all we could eat and give away. So he’d set him up a little table out by the road. It was nothing special, and back in those days you could drive a mile and find three or four more. 1980’s Seymour would be hard for most people to recognize today. He had a set of scales, index cards held on with a clothes pin to the front of the baskets, some bags, and a jar for money. Shopping was on the honor system. This is also how I sold my 4-H bunny rabbits. You could mostly trust people back then, and we didn’t have the luxury of sitting under a tree fanning ourselves waiting on somebody to stop and give us a quarter for two heads of cabbage. We were busy with other things, like bush hogging, or putting up hay, or canning, or working at the factory, or taking little Amy to clogging or baton or modeling lessons……or maybe fishin’.

So today, I pull up my same ol’ gravel driveway that’s been here way longer than me, and there sits a little rickety table with cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes across the surface. And a great big sign that says “FREE”.

Because my neighbors are busy with other things, like taking their kids to practice, and working, and gathering eggs from their free range chickens. The honor system might still work, but this was close enough to my 1985 home as anything that’s happened in the last twenty years. And so I had to cry. ❤️