Old barns often remind me of a different time...when we had more time for each other. With all our time saving appliances and devices, time still seems to slip away.

The song below is one of my favorites. It just seems to fit the mood I am in. I often think about how the best songs tell a lifetime story in just a few verses. I hope you will listen and enjoy as much as I do. Below the video I will put the lyrics...

Better Days (Tim Grimm)

Farmer Jim had the bailer
I had the hands and had the time
He was up into his seventies
I was in the middle of may prime
I was bringing back my childhood
He'd been doing this all his life
Driving that old John Deere tractor
Eating lunch brought by his wife

And they'd rest under our maples
And they'd tell me of their past
Lost a son and lost a grandson
One went slow, one went fast
Ruth would tell me of the old times
Men would go off to the fields
And all the children and the women would
Hitch the team and drive them down to the woods

(chorus)
Me, I'm trying to learn the old ways
Of the heart and of the land
People growing old together
Families working hand in hand
So I will watch and I will listen
To voices cracked and faces worn with age
And when they're gone, Lord knows I'll miss them
They give me hope for better days

Amos Chesnut is my neighbor
All his life an honest man
I stepped up to his door a stranger
Walked away a new found friend
When he works out by the roadside
People slow and wave a hand
He watches life pass by his Oak Bend farm
But I don't know a richer man
He knows every creek and hollow
Every fencepost dug by hand
Where the paw-paws grow
Where the coyotes roam
Where the dirt turns into sand

(chorus)
with repeat last 2 lines

The first lines of the last verse reminds me so much of Lily, that used to be my neighbor. We moved here in 1980, and after spending the first night, Roger got up to go to work and our car would not start. The phone had not been put in, that was before cell phones...doesn't that in itself seem like another century?

Anyway, our way of meeting was for me to go over and ask if I could use her phone. I did walk away with a lifetime friend.