We are putting together this year’s “A Mississippi Carol” Christmas show for WJTV.
We are putting together this year’s “A Mississippi Carol” Christmas show for WJTV. It’s an hour of singing, stories, and maybe a recipe or two. I want to try to work one of mama’s tales into this year’s show. Her story could fit Halloween as well as Christmas. She often told it at our family reunions about this time every year. I think about the reunions when the leaves start turning.
Back when mama was a child, traveling was an adventure. There were very few paved roads. The dirt roads turned to mud after a good rain. Throw in cold weather and an open-air Model-T, and the adventure grew exponentially.
Now, my memory of this is fuzzy, and sadly, there is no one still living to clarify things. So, my version of this story is the most accurate there is. One year around Thanksgiving or Christmas, mama, granddaddy, and grandmother took a day trip to visit a relative. Now today, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge. Just hop on a stretch of 4-lane and zip there in about 20 minutes. This was in the days of no lanes, so, a 20-mile drive was not for the faint of heart.
It was on the way home when the situations started popping up. Granddaddy wanted to get back before dark, so they left midafternoon. Had he not had to repair two flat tires along the way and constantly coax the car out of the mud, they would have made it easily. Soon it got dark, and granddaddy didn’t want to chance going the rest of the way after nightfall.
So, they stopped at a country church for shelter. Churches rarely locked their doors back then. The family hauled in the quilts they had along for warmth, and each picked a pew and settled in. Mama said after a while she began to hear singing, a choir way off in the distance. She figured it was the wind. But the singing grew louder. Granddaddy and grandmother heard it too.
Turns out, driving that last 10 miles in the dark didn’t seem so bad after all.
What was it? My theory is our brains strive to make sense of the abstract. We see pictures in clouds. We form constellations out of random stars. I figure it probably was the wind in the trees, with the mind making patterns of the noise.
At our house we usually sleep with a fan or noisemaker at night. Before our daughter left for college, often I would hear music from what I thought was Keri’s alarm clock radio. I thought she had overslept. But when I checked, there was nothing. Just silence.
As recently as last month Miz Jo woke me up in the night asking if I had left a radio on downstairs. She heard music. I told her to roll over and go back to sleep. It’s just a family thing.
