Nene s House

This last week my grandma's house burned. My sister called me to tell me that it was on fire from a lightening strike that evidently hit it directly or the tree near it. The electric power was off to the house and I think the big bolt must have run in and through the old wiring and super heated the wiring and caught on fire. I hate that it is gone and despite pictures of the house on fire I still cannot picture the location without the house there. There were a lot of memories in the house and yard where we spent a lot of time. My first memory of the house was spending the night there when my parents were still young enough to go out to the movies on weekends and leave me with my grandma. I always enjoyed it. And I was young enough to be sound asleep when they returned. I often heard the story of my grandpa rocking me in a chair on the porch of the house and he rocked so vigorously that the rocker moved off the edge of the porch and we fell off the 4 foot high porch into a puddle. It orginally had a open back porch and for years I played in the water from a facet that wet the boards until they rotten out and had to be replaced. I remember sleeping there with no air in the summer and with the doors wide open to let in a breeze. We sometimes took a blanket and sat on the porch waiting for it to cool off at night. In the summer my sister and I made playhouses in the back yard and our grandpa made us pop guns that we shot china berries out of. My friend Clemois, my sister and I have enjoyed many breakfast of Nene's homemade white gravy, biscuits and salt pork in the kitchen. At the time that the house burned it still had some of my grandmothers furniture and other items in it. As my niece said it was almost like losing my grandma again. But then she was a tough character who would have mourned the loss of the house and moved on. She enjoyed it when she was there but now she has moved on too. And as with everything in life there are changes. And these we have to accept and move on. All of us have our memories of the house and what it meant to us. But some things remain even after the fire that took an old house made of pine. A friend found a metal toy car that was mine when I was small and that I rode in. It was burned and rusted, but my brother in law is going to clean the car and paint it. My grandma always told me that it was under the house if I wanted it. Now I do. And I want a picture of us all with that car and one of my great nephew Jon sitting in it. Some things change and some thing remain to be passed on to new family members and for them to make new memories.