Introduction: Memory Hours

Copyright © 2007¹

Introduction to the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid

This article is also available in the complete paperback version.

There are days when the tides of life seem turned back, and we obey the divine injunction, “Remember the days of old.”² It is not that we have willed to do so, or had so planned it. These days just come. They have their own times and seasons. We know not their day and hour. We cannot produce them at will. They drift in on us as a “sweet refrain,” setting aside the present or so molding it and suffusing it with a softened, mellowed light that life is ever afterward different, owing to the new meaning brought in. We pay little attention to these memories. We may not even cherish the occasion or give the suggested thought any special attention.

Perhaps these seasons belong more to middle and post-meridian life than to youth, and yet I remember they began with me early. After the win­ter school closed and the long vacation followed, and I saw not the happy faces any more, I remember how fondly, and yet with a cherished sadness, the hours of remembrance would come on me and make me almost live over the lost hours. Later, when school life, as usually understood, was over, how these memory hours increased in preciousness when the battles and trials of manhood life came on! Then later still, when Mother had gone home to God, and Father lingered, lonely and, though having a home, yet had none in the old sense, these memory days grew richer and more fully surcharged with life interests and values.

Sometimes it is the memory of Father, or Mother, or brother, or the old home, the barn, the spring, the sugar-camp, or the old schoolhouse, or the green hills, with redbud and dogwood blooms shining in beauty in the leafing forest, that, coming into the present-day life, checks its over-pressure and holds the attention away from what is going on, till afterward we find ourselves returning to our work carrying something of the strength of other days to help us bear the heavier burdens. It is like having a fresh drink from the old spring, or breathing the balmy air of the old apple-blossom time in the orchard. These memories are not idle thoughts, or without a mission.

I was thinking of this on this April day, as again and again old boyhood memories thrust themselves repeatedly into my thinking. Sometimes our memories are of friends only, or perhaps of one. There are days when per­sons, living persons, seem to come and stay with me in spirit all day. They are more manifest in presence than they are by speech or any act. While I write they stay, while I am busy here and there, though perhaps un­thought of, they remain. Like the rose or sweet fragrance floating in at your window, or the presence of the May Day apple orchard, not every mo­ment thought of or noticed, yet always present, so these visiting presences stay about you as a sweet benediction and a real inspiration. They actually tone up your spirit, and sweeten life’s bitter cups and soothe the brow of care.

But today the memories belong to the school days. It may have been the returned robin’s song or the love-call of the yellowhammer in the leafless trees, or the newly starting grass beginning to respond to the April suns, or it may have been through some unseen gateway into my thought-world the memories came, but come they did. I had not invited them nor did I know of their approach. They seemed to say, “There is the old log schoolhouse. Don’t you see it?” Yes, I remember. The picture is bright, though the schoolhouse is long since burned down.³ Out back of it was our large “playground,” with the forest trees on all but one side of it. Down the hill was the spring. Over the fence was the big pasture, with cattle and colts feeding. Around the field fence ran our way home, with the fence on one side and the great forest trees on the other. The memory is fresh. It never comes without its old lesson being repeated. It is good for my spirit that it sweeps in on me. Hushed and quieted, life’s pulses seem to drink the waters from youth’s fountain, and sobered, chastened, I return to my task as if I had been off on a visit.

One memory brings up another. Why do they come and of what use are they? It is hard to tell in few words.

Memory links up to our self-consciousness. Did it not come in with its pos­itive certainties, we might soon doubt and deny our past. Memory in eter­nity will forever link us up to the life we lived on earth. Saved or lost, we will “remember.” Dives⁴ remembers how in this life he received his good things. The saints remember about being saved and washed in Jesus’ own precious blood. Memory keeps me from forgetting Mother. Memory carries my old school life over with me. The old Catechism is still in the mental library. Grand­mother’s room has the fire still burning of a winter evening in the old fireplace. The cows come from the pasture around the corner of the fence by the woods. The robin sings in the apple tree. I have the preciousness of the past without carrying all its useless lumber.

Memory makes past life still a part of the present. The old schoolhouse is a real picture of what was life then. The old house has fallen, but the life it shel­tered and fostered still abides. There was the honeysuckle with the mock­ing­bird’s nest in it. How I longed to see the eggs! Father taught me not to touch them. He wanted the birds around. The vision is bright. The lesson remains. And those old Sunday afternoons in the fresh springtime! They touch me yet as I remember them just as if Mother’s hands were still on my brow. The peach tree blooms, and the early wild violets, blue and yel­low; and the service berry blooms white on the brow of a leafless hill as yet. Really, after all, they seem a part of the present life that had been sleeping for a number of years. One memory brings up another until the list would make a book.

Rev. Isaiah Reid
Sunnyside Place
Dallas Center, Iowa
April 1904⁵

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