The Recollections of a Child

My father was bigger than life and no time during my childhood did I feel afraid.   I always operated with ease and comfort during my young life not really feeling threatened about anything.  Until 1957. 
My father as a very young child had a terrible accident with a knife trying to cut a shoe lace.  He had sight in only one of his eyes as long as I remembered, always.   But in 1957, he was cutting bushes on the farm and yes, he stuck a thorn in his good eye.  The eye that contained his only sight.  Years later, He told me to hold my hand over one eye, and over the other eye make a fist like a cylinder, and peek through the hole and that was his vision.  Wow!  I remember he was taken to Vanderbilt Hospital and was there for 6 weeks.  There was no interstate in 1957  and by the time he arrived at Vanderbilt, cataracts had grown over his sighted eye.   To say things changed on that day is putting it mildly but I had no idea how much it would impact me until this week.  The week of the flood.  
You see a farm doesn't care if there is a flood.   It doesn't care if there is a drought and everything burns up.  Farmers are some of the hardest workers I know but they do live life in a wonderful setting.  They don't punch a clock nor do they have a boss standing over them demanding more and more output.  
But they don't have family medical leave, unemployment benefits or company health insurance .  The farm didn't care that my father was in the hospital for 6 weeks adjusting to the fact that his life would never be the same.  He had to adjust physically to having limited vision.  But he was on an emotional journey also.  I can just imagine how he laid in that bed day after day worrying about the farm.   What would he do? How would he carry on?  Work on the farm didn't wait.

But that is not the point to the story.   You see, when the 6 weeks were up, we went to Nashville to get my daddy.  When we returned that day, turned the curve, and caught the view of our house, there were so many cars parked on both sides of the road you could hardly get through.  My Dad had come home.  His and my mother's families and all the community came to see him but more than that, the men had come to get my daddy's crops in the barn. They were farmers.  They knew someone needed help and did not hesitate to show up and do what was good, what was right.   My father cried that day and I as a young girl captured that feeling of awe at all those people who loved my father and mother and made sure all was as well as it could be in a time of great crisis.  

 I had that same feeling this week in the time of the flood as I watched people rush in to assist in any way they could.  Neighbors helping neighbors.  People raising money.   Churches cooking food and feeding thousands.    And others had that feeling too.  Someone sent me an email about the blog entitled "We are Nashville".   I think he captures the essence of how I have felt this week and those weeks so long ago in 1957.

http://www.section303.com/we-are-nashville-4366