Story Warren

Kindling Imagination for Kingdom Anticipation

Summer on the Mountain

by 1 Comment

There’s an iconic photograph of my grandmother holding the story spoon.

The story spoon was just a regular, long-handled, wooden spoon, but in her hand, it became a fairy’s tail, a magic wand, a hooked witch’s nose, a shovel, or a tiger’s claw. My brother and I spent summers with her in the mountains of North Carolina, and we were never bored. With just a simple wooden spoon, she would mesmerize us in the hangry time before supper.

“Let’s tell a story,” she would say. “We’ll all take turns. Whoever’s turn it is will hold the story spoon. When you hold this spoon and tell a story, it becomes anything you want it to be.”

And it did.

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Her stories were fantastic. The neighbors’ grandchildren often came to take a turn with the story spoon, but mostly, I think they came to hear Nan’s stories. My brother says he still has nightmares from some of her scarier plots. I learned more over those summers than I ever did in school, and as I think about how to spend the summer with my own children, I think about how she did it.

She paid attention to us.

When we woke in the morning, she would be at the breakfast table reading.

“Oh hello!” she would say, setting her reading glasses aside. “I have a good word for you this morning.” She would sit us at the table, talk to us about whatever verse she had been reading, and fix us something simple to eat. One time, it was honeycomb, and she made us taste it. (It was better than the prune juice she also insisted on). While we licked our fingers, she read, “Gracious words are like honeycomb, sweetness to the soul and health to the body.”

When we were older, her attention never waned. “Do you have a good word this morning?” she would ask. She would be juicing lemons for a “beauty treatment” she wanted to try that would lighten our (already blond) hair. Her fingers ran through hair so patiently, and she listened as if she had all the time in the world.

She exposed us to new experiences.

One day, we hiked down the mountain to a stream, and she tied raw chicken legs on a string. She flipped the string into the water and ordered us to watch it. A huge, blue crawfish emerged tentatively and took hold of it in his pincher. So slowly, she pulled him up out of the water and gave him a little shake over a bucket. Plop! In he went. When we had mastered the art of “crawdadding,” we had a bucketful that we carried proudly back up the mountain. She boiled some water and had us watch as the live crawfish turned red. It was horrible and good at the same time. It was work that seemed like play. It didn’t cost anything but the chicken legs.

She took us blueberry picking and made us speak politely to Mr. Romenger, who sold firewood.

Flea markets were the classroom for how to spend (or not spend) money and when to recognize that a vendor needed a little friendly conversation more than money. We went to street dances and outdoor bluegrass concerts. We crossed swinging bridges and watched the caber toss at the Scottish Highland games.

Though we had her attention, she also gave us plenty of quiet time for reflection. She supplied paper for writing stories, paints for all the scrap wood in the basement, books to read on rainy days, and the freedom to play with moss covered rocks and the black, slimy newts under them. In those memories, I don’t remember where she was. I remember only the sound of the wind, blowing idly through the beech trees, the sun filtering down through leaves, and the world of my imagination more real than what my eyes were seeing.

Summer is the perfect time to break out a story spoon. Anything might happen when we pay attention, experience life alongside our kids, and take time to reflect on all that God has done.

Sarah Dixon Young
Latest posts by Sarah Dixon Young (see all)

Comments

Leave a Reply