Friday, June 24, 2011

lightning bugs and supper

The houses were smaller then and in the late afternoon they smelled like supper. Walter Cronkite’s voice would be part of the background noise along with the banging screen door and the quick staccato ring of the telephone. The carport held only a single spot for the family car, fireflies were called lightning bugs,  and the dining room table is where supper happened. The windows had curtains on them, either homemade or ordered from Sears and Roebuck’s and there was only one TV and it was in the living room and it signed off at midnight. I’m not describing my house, I’m describing everyone’s house in my childhood, just taking my senses back a few decades to that illusive and real “simple life”  - not the commercialized , prostituted version the media is trying to “sell” us now – the mockery that exists here really is stomach-turning and is, for me, consumerism at it’s worse – selling simplicity? Hmmmm. Oxymoron perhaps – better yet, Martha Stewart telling me how to “simplify” - I think the catch phrase here would be, “yeah, right”. No, simplicity can’t be bought and it can’t be organized in Rubbermaids and no one on TV can show you how, simplicity starts from within you and manifest itself in your physical, emotional, and spiritual life and it’s free and freeing…it’s about the choices we make, choices that allow things in our lives, both physical and mental “things”, the more we allow in, the more complicated it gets – it’s just that simple!

b u
p s

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