I was an only child.
There were no other playmates for me.
We were too poor to own a cat or a dog, or anything for that matter, that required feeding and would not one day dress our table with its brown and crispy carcass.
On those long, languid summer days when mama tired of me hovering under her apron, she would push me out the door to play outside. The cemetery beside our home became my playground.
I found those old stone monuments comforting, somehow.
Perhaps, those old head stones spoke of a permanence that we, as mere mortals, do not possess.
The church, abandoned long ago, was like any structure that is unloved.
It fell to ruin with a quickness that could only be described as astonishing.
A building, such as a church, gets Life's blood from the folks who walk across its threshold.
Its heart is warmed with the wide-bottomed women who fill its pews. Its lungs are filled with the oxygen from the deep baritone voices that stand along its back walls, in their Sunday best over-hauls with battered felt hats in their hands.
Its brain is quickened from the sound of children's laughter, and it draws new energy from the little dynamos that worm and squirm and positively cannot sit still through the preacher's sermon.
It breathes a sigh of tired relief as its doors are closed, content in the knowledge that in another few days, the ritual will repeat itself, and once again folks will bring Life blood back to its doorstep.
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Love Songs: The Wrong Note - A Collection of Short Stories
General FictionA second volume of short stories in the Love Songs collection. Many of the stories in this collection focus on the theme of love and how it sometimes goes wrong. A large collection of stories that run the gamut from humorous to tragic. 1. Love Songs...
