***
Returning to awareness of the park bench, I blinked as if trying to sort out where I was. Jones was standing before me.
"Good Sir, tomorrow we can continue our wanderings...or what should we call our adventures? How does...?" He stopped, looking lost. "Oh, well, it doesn't need a title, a label, does it? It's just a journey isn't it...an exploration of ideas and discernment evoked by memories and applied to the facts that can be discovered?"
Obviously pleased with his analysis he smiled, then said, "Tomorrow, then dear sir, let us be about our travels. I'll find you." With that Mr. Jones walked north into the night to the rhythm of his ebony cane tapping the pavement.
***
Sister was just taking her cornbread-she makes best ever created-out of the oven when I arrived at her house and entered her kitchen. She had prepared the entire supper, including my pork shoulder. We talked about Grand and Miss Adelaide, our grandparents, Mother's parents, while we ate. Grand's blue-ribbon-winning dried apples and lye soap were remembered. He'd had a long run in first place at the annual Lincoln County Fair with those entries. My memories of Miss Adelaide were of the Child Craft and World Book encyclopedias she had in her bookcase. I spent many hours hunched up against the wall on the floor by that bookcase, loving those books. They were my windows on the world when I was eight. Perhaps my urges for pilgrimage began there.
Sister, Mother, and I shared stories of Paw Jimmy and Maw Annie, Aunt Marvin, the boom times, the depression, Grand's fine riding horse, and the World War II rationing, We talked of Mother at Oak Ridge, and how Daddy, after coming back from World War II, got Mother to call off her engagement to someone else.
Memories of Granddaddy Mansfield and 'Mamo'-my name for daddy's mother-were rehashed. Not a favorite topic for Mother. The stereotypes of in-laws proved more true than false in her case. I remember their treatment of Mother. Mother had a soft spot for my daddy's grandmother Miss Emily and she confirmed that she, the widow of great-grandfather John Longstreet Mansfield, had held me and tended me when I was a little one.
We retold the story of Mother shooting the head off a snake that Sister had thought was a toy. I'd gone to tell Mother about Sister's danger. I was maybe four and my little sister a year old. The snake had raised up its head, and she was crawling to play with the new strange "play pretty." Mother, on the porch, seventy-five feet away had quickly retrieved her gun. She stopped, raised and aimed her sweet little 410 shotgun and "Bang"! The variety of snake is an open question. It does seem to become a more venomous kind in each retelling of the story. Her shot snapped the snake's head off with the precision of Annie Oakley! Remarkable!