Ethyl's Rainy Day Thoughts

It's a slightly cool rainy November Saturday in Memphis,  the place that has been my home for the last thirty plus years.  The kind of day that elicits memories and daydreams.  There are projects that have long been put on hold, but it just does not seem the day for doing them.  I am listening to the Seekers sing 'Cast my Fate to the Wind' and dreaming of other rainy days long past.  Days when my restless soul needed to constantly  be going and doing and moving.  How times have changed.  Now it is so nice to sit upstairs and look out my window at the peach tree that's losing it's leaves and from which hang the random drops of misty rain, and think and remember and to subsequently write about the thoughts I am thinking.
When I was young we had neighbors who were old.  For as long as I could remember they had been there and they had always been old.  And they spent a great deal of time in the summertime sitting under the massive oak trees in their front yard on old wooden yard furniture and watching the road in front of them.  They seldom moved, other than just ever now and then to gently rock back and forth.  They just sit and watched the road.  Most of the cars that went past were neighbors they knew far too much about.  As the cars went down the road there would be the exchange of waves,  sometime accompanied be a nod of the head.  Never much movement on the part of either party, but just a kind acknowledgment from both.   What would really elicit the stares and excitement would be when the occasional car speed by in which the occupants were not known.  There would always be much conjecture as to who they were, the fact they were not part of us, they were from 'off'  and just what on earth could they be doing in our country.  As if they owned it and foreign people needed permission to drive down our gravel road.   And by foreign people, I mean anyone who was not from Tishomingo County.  They knew them all.  They had known their parents and sometimes even their grandparents.  And then there would be talk of who they had married, how many kids they had, both the legitimate and otherwise, and whether or not he drank too much, stayed out late, beat his wife, or whose wife he might have intimate knowledge of in addition to his own.  As far as the wife was concerned, was she a good housekeeper, were her children heathers or otherwise, did she gossip too much and stick her nose into other people's affairs.  Such was the enlightening conversation of a summer afternoon.  My little brother and I went almost ever day to their house.  We could always come and go, most of the time never even knocking if they happened to be inside.  Sometimes in the summer we joined them under the large old oak trees and listened to their chatter about who ever happened to be in the few cars that went down our road.  Funny what you learn about people from just listening.  How much of it happened to be factual never crossed my mind.   What I used to wonder about is how they could sit still for hours on end.  Now I think I understand.  There is a quite reflectiveness that comes with sitting still.   Sitting and just thinking and watching the drops of misty rain as it touches the leaves on my peach tree.