Soft Hay Will Catch You Poems by Young People

Introduction My parents were part of that remarkable generation who went from the horse and buggy to the walk on the moon, embracing more change than any generation in history. They knew a life of farms and small towns, which gave them a love of simple things -- friendships, family gatherings, jokes, stories, needed rains, plentiful crops and summer vegetables, a big porch (I could go on and on), and, of course, the beauties of the natural world (pastures, fields, woods, lakes, rivers, and ponds). It was a love that they passed on to me -- a love not for things, but for experiences. They were not the kind of parents who sit a child down and drive home a pointed lesson, but their personal integrity, generosity, fairness, and kindness, and their deep and consistent pleasure with the shared human experience -- more often than not conveyed only with the warmth of their eyes, their smiles -- added the first quiet brushstrokes of depth to my own learning and understanding.My mother believed it was important to read to me -- until I could read for myself. She noticed my interests (they were fortunately inexpensive interests, such as drawing) and happily bought me things I needed to pursue them (drawing tablets, pencils, charcoal, and drawing pens and ink). Not an artist herself, she left entirely up to me what I drew and how I used my imagination. I think she saw her role as the guardian and supplier of my means and opportunities.Not only the guardian of my interests and opportunities, my mother was also a classroom teacher; she taught eighth-grade math and ninth-grade Latin at one of our local schools, and she was my teacher for both (and I learned to finish my homework just at bedtime, so she would not -- in her enthusiasm for those subjects -- give me more to do!). Even in this setting, at school, my mother's most profound instruction almost always came indirectly, often without her knowing. I remember a particular Monday when I was in the eighth grade. Over the weekend a man had been arrested in our town for trying to rob a grocery store. The story was in the Sunday paper, and everyone seemed to know about it. The man's son went to my school, and during the day he had been taunted unmercifully. Students said things to that boy in the halls like "Your daddy's a dirty, no-good robber" and "Your daddy's a jailbird." At the end of the day I went to my mother's classroom to meet her for the ride home. The door, almost always open, was closed. I opened it slowly and quietly. At the front of the room I saw my mother at her desk with her head in her hands. She was crying, not loud, but I could hear her sobs."What's wrong?" I asked. Lifting her head and wiping her eyes with a tissue, she told me that she knew the man who robbed the grocery store. He had a wife and three children. She told me that he had very little education, that he was a good person and hardworking. She said she knew he had been out of work for months, unable to find a job, only finding a little yard work here and there. She said she thought he must have been desperate to feed his family, or he wouldn't have done such a thing. She felt sad for the man, and for his family, and for his son who had been the brunt of cruel remarks that day.I stood there in silence, taking in what my mother was saying. With those heartfelt tears and a few words, she was teaching me a lifetime lesson -- to suspend judgment and to look below the surface of things, to wonder at the whole story of each person in the world before making up one's mind about them. The poet Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "Every smile and every tear deserves a history."My mother's death in 1992 took my sister and me back to Kentucky. It was my first trip back to see my relatives in almost twenty years. Almost all of them are farmers in Logan County, and they told my sister and me how much they loved my mother, and talked about her quiet sense of humor, anLyne, Sandford is the author of 'Soft Hay Will Catch You Poems by Young People', published 2004 under ISBN 9780689834608 and ISBN 0689834608.