My Dear Friend Gladys

Several years ago, my father sent me a stack of books from his collection by Gladys Taber.

“Read these,” he urged. “You’ll see yourself in these pages.”

So I did. And he was right.

Gladys Taber lived on a farm named Stillmeadow in the Connecticut hills, where she wrote for Family Circle, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, and other popular magazines. She published over 50 books.

I live on the Johnson Funny Farm in middle Georgia, where I make a feeble attempt to add to my blog every day.

Gladys was a lover of animals. She raised her precious, spoiled rotten Cocker Spaniels and treated them like her children. She even made friends with 2 skunks.

I’m smitten with our three Schnoodles. We call them our four-legged sons and share our meals with them at every sitting. I watch birds and serve them specialty seed.

Gladys and her friend Barbara Webster exchanged letters for years, even publishing one full year of correspondence between their farms in Stillmeadow and Sugarbridge, sharing details of farm life in the 1950s.

I’m fond of mailing postcards to family and friends.

Gladys’s love of the countryside is evident in every carefully crafted sentence, rich in her descriptions of the simple pleasures of farm life.

We, too, are so fond of our corner of this planet that we audibly say, “Ah, back in God’s Country,” when we come back home from anywhere else. We’re “those folks” who take Sunday evening drives just to admire the landscape and praise the Creator for the rolling hills and the cows in the meadows. We catch our breath with every rustic charm – split-rail fences, old barns, rocking chairs on porches, sweet tea in mason jars, sheets blowing in the wind on a clothesline, clumps of wildflowers at the base of a mailbox.

I turn to the July pages of Stillmeadow Calendar and begin.

“July comes to Stillmeadow clad in silk-blue dawns, blazing gold noons, and violet dusks. Heat glazes the air, leaves droop, and the pond level begins to drop. But night is lovely as a dream, and we can go outdoors without a sweater. Sitting in the garden is inadvisable because the mosquitoes and gnats are busy, but a brief walk is possible.”

I connect with Gladys. These could be my own words now, 80 years later.

I glance out at the drooping leaves, heavy with the heat of the day here in middle Georgia and look to the western horizon, the copper tangerine sun hanging low in the branches and think, “What did I ever do to deserve this slice of heaven on earth?”

And for a moment, I feel the knowing spirit of Gladys here with me, nodding enthusiastically, urging me to love it while I can. She’s smiling from a better place, assuring me that for now, this’ll do.