Simple Things

I’m not a smoker but every now and then out on the back porch I’ll smoke my pipe. Mainly because the smell of the tobacco and the wooden matches take me back to when I was a child and my grandfather Weaver McEwin would sit in the porch swing on his front porch and smoke his pipe and watch me play. Either his pipe or a Roi-tan cigar. Smell is the greatest memory enhancer that I know, for me anyway. I can be carried back to a hot Texas summer evening playing in grandmother’s flower beds or around the big oak tree in Chicota, Texas just a mile or two from The Bone Yard Slash. Not hardly any traffic and I knew everyone that passed by. Granddad would rock and puff, looking content as if all was right with the world. Sometimes he would let me blow out his match after lighting up. The only sounds were birds singing, cows lowing in the pastures and an occasional air plane to high to see. As I get older I have come to appreciate the simple things like watching children play.