Days from a different time

There are days here so quiet you can hear sand hit the bottom of an hourglass, or a clock tick away the seconds.

Time moves that way, quietly.

Everybody knows time goes fast, but it tends to sneak by so quiet sometimes you forget til you’re left to wonder where it’s all gone.

Days like this tend to take me back to a time when I thought I knew a lot more than I knew, before I realized I know a lot less than I thought.

Maybe it’s this can of Sam’s Choice Cola.

Sometimes, no matter where I am in reality, when I take a swig from one of those cans my mind sits me on a tailgate outside of the chicken house office.

The office is wood and tin.

There’s a one-eared fake donkey anchored to the roof for some reason.

Its most important features, at least to me, were two chairs and a refrigerator.

The refrigerator stayed stocked with Sam’s Choice, and I’d get one after I picked up dead chickens for the day.

I raided the refrigerator for the cool elixir, which is a rung below the sweet nectar of Dr. Pepper on the ladder of cokes.

Sam’s Choice does wonders for a parched throat.

Sometimes, Pawpaw and Daddy sat with me on the tailgate and drank one down while we talked about the weather, the Braves or what Nana cooked for dinner.

Those were the days.

There were other days, too, like the one when I shot cans with my cousin and my .22 rifle.

My cousin is much better with a gun than me, and he’d shot all of our cans just about full of holes when he decided he’d kneel.

He rested the rifle barrel on the back deck rail and fired.

It was a rare miss.

The bullet ricocheted into the woods, and it took a noticeable chunk of the deck rail with it.

We knew we were in a heap of trouble when my parents came home so we did what all teenagers who’d shot off a piece of someone else’s deck did.

We prayed, and then we superglued a leaf onto the bullet-scarred rail.

We were geniuses.

Then there was the day when we got sick from the concoction we made from a kit meant to produce homemade sarsaparilla.

There was the day we tried to cook squirrel meat while we camped.

We charred it so bad the dog turned his nose up at it, and then he walked away with his tail tucked between his legs.

I told you we were geniuses.

When the days here are so quiet you can hear sand hit the bottom of an hourglass or the clock tick the seconds away, I think about those days from a different time.

There were plenty of others like them, with plenty of other people, I was blessed to have.

I think it’s important to look back on those days because one day time will sneak by, the top of the hourglass will empty and a clock will tick away the last second.

This post is my response to Sue’s prompt, which is “time.”