Ethyl Remembers: Mississippi Honeysuckles

My niece who lives in Bartlett not too far from me made the comment this morning she had gotten her first whiff of honeysuckle yesterday and it made her miss her childhood in Mississippi.  And that took me back.  Back fifty years to the gravel roads and wild honeysuckles of rural Tishomingo County. 
In the late spring and early summer when you drove down the gravel roads with your windows rolled down, the scent would be so strong it would literally fill your car with the sweet fragrance.  And you would always have your windows rolled down for air conditioners in cars were a dream of the future.  Only the very well to do had such luxuries.  Even new cars were without this modern day necessity.  And it was unheard of to have such a fancy gadget in most of the pickup trucks so many of us owned in those days.  So it was two forty.  Two windows at forty miles an hour.
Sunday afternoons were almost always spent visiting the grandparents on my mother's side, and often the mode of transportation that took us there was Daddy's pickup truck.  We kids would climb in the pickup bed without any seat belts or restrains of any kind, for that matter, and take off down the highway to grandma's house.  He would run the thing just about as fast as it would go, and wide open I imagine it might do as much as fifty or sixty miles an hour.  Who needed a convertible!.  The wind would whip our hair in so many tangles it took the rest of the day to run a comb through it, but did we care!  No way!  The freedom of speed and wind and total lack of being buckled in was wonderful and exhilarating.  So much so we, or our parents for that matter, never gave any thought to the realization that if he hit an obstacle of any sort we might have gone flying out the back and into eternity.
My grandparents lived at the top of a hill and the little road leading up to the house was just about all the little pickup truck could do.  Daddy would turn into the drive way and goose the gas for the extra boost it took to get to the top.  We kids in the back had two choices.  Either find something to hold on tight to or go rolling to the back and hit the tailgate.  I remember it was great fun rolling around in the pickup bed.  Parents today would absolutely shutter at the thought of such reckless endangerment, but hey, that was the fifties.  Most families in those days had so many kids that if they lost one it might go unnoticed for at least a week.  And the prevailing thought was they could always make another one who would look very much like the one that was missing.
And dust!  Let us not even speak of the amount of dust!  The roads, for the most part, were all gravel.  The only paved roads were the Highways 25 and 72.  From our house we hit Coleman Park Road, which was gravel.  That took us to Highway 25, which in turn took us to Highway 72.  From Highway 72 we turned onto Mount Gilead Road, which took us to my grandparents house and which, for the duration of our trip, was gravel.  And by the time we arrived on a hot, dry Mississippi Sunday afternoon we had eaten enough dust to thoroughly coat our teeth and digestive systems for the remainder of the week to come.  But did we complain.  No way!  Freedom was sweet and so dear to us children.  To get to ride in the back of the pickup and feel the breeze was preferable to any time spent in the cab of the truck.
I am in no way opposed to seat belts and child seats and similar restrains.  I realize they have saved the lives of many children.  And looking back, I also realize we could have been injured because of  our mode of transport.  But it is nice now, fifty years later, to remember what the honeysuckles smelled like on a spring day or what the wind felt like in your hair at sixty miles an hour, or to recollect the smell of dust up your nostrils.  And the sheer joy and freedom of being a kid getting to ride in the back of Daddy's pickup on a hot Mississippi summer Sunday afternoon.  Such is the gift of memory.  How wonderful to possess such a gift.