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Maybe, I’m just simple minded.

That thought came bubbling up to me as I was getting the dishwater ready. ­­

I squirted Joy into the dishwater and a hundred bubbles, not much bigger than a pinhead, came floating up and simply filled my heart with — ‘joy.’

I stood mesmerized as the tiny bubbles of rainbow colors popped, one by one, until there were none.

My son came in the kitchen and caught me smiling to myself.

When you get to be my age, you have to be very careful of the things you do. If you appear a little odd and repeat yourself too many times, well, they have places for folks like that.

“I was just smiling at these soap bubbles,” I said realizing as soon as the words came out of my mouth that they had not come out the “right” way.

My son glanced at the dishpan, nodded very accommodatingly and made his way out the door.

I could have told him about blowing soap bubbles through the lid of a Mason jar and the joy of Mama buying me a bottle of soap bubbles with a magic wand at the dime store. But, then, he would have thought that odd, too.

A friend gave me a wooden carved plaque with a little girl hanging by her heels from a tree limb. It reads, “Remember how simple life used to be.”

I think of that often when I have the urge to lie on my back in the middle of the pasture and watch the clouds float by or the stars twinkling at night.

Or, when I want to take off my shoes and walk barefoot along a sandy road or catch tadpoles in the shallow water of the fishpond.

It’s been a long time since I made a mud pie or a frog house or took a ride on a young saplin’ tree. Even longer since I sipped the nectar from the honeysuckle vine or dusted my nose with a buttercup or wrote my name in the dirt.

As I stood there washing dishes, those memories stirred familiar in my mind. Then, the bubbles began to pop, one by one, until there were none, I realized that life as I knew it, as my generation and those before knew it, will be no more.

The lessons of 2020 have been harsh but hopefully lessons well learned and not easily forgotten.

Today, I’m reminded of, and holding close, a poem the late Kathryn Tucker Windham, Alabama’s Legendary Storyteller, shared:

Life is like a journey on a train

With people sitting

at each window pane

We may sit far apart

The whole journey through

You may never know me

And, I may never know you

But if by chance we should sit

Side by side

Let’s be pleasant companions

On such a short ride.