Bedtime Stories

My grandmother was a spinner of tales, all of which were based in truth, at least to some extent. The vivid pictures she could paint with words were magical. Our family often sat around a fire late at night and listened to her, enraptured. We all focused on her wizened face and watched the flames reflected in her eyes as she wove her magic.

The tales that my grandmother told varied from the humorous to the thrilling. There were ghost stories, horror stories, and other stories of every flavor. The one that I remember most vividly is one about a spring and a lion. It involved fear, bravery, misunderstandings, and vindication.

The story opened on my grandmother and her sister as children. They had been sent to the nearby spring to fetch two buckets of water. It was deep in the woods. The buckets they carried were almost as big as they were. They weren’t afraid. After all, it was a familiar chore for them, and the path to the spring was well worn.

It was a beautiful day, so the two girls romped and played as they went. They chased butterflies and caught frogs. They looked for pretty pebbles. It was fun and glorious.

As the two girls walked along the sunlight-dappled path, the sound of burbling water came to them on the wind. When they arrived at the spring, they began filling their buckets by hanging them on hooks. The water was diverted to the buckets by a couple of narrow troughs.

The two girls were so intent on their task that they hadn't bothered to look around the nearby wooded area. When they looked up, they saw a lion concealed in the brush.

My grandmother grabbed her bucket from the hook and dipped it in the nearby horse trough to fill it, and then she ran. Her sister left her bucket hanging and followed close on her heels.

At this point in the story, my grandmother met each listeners' eyes and said, “He didn’t chase us. He must not have been hungry, don’t you think?” All of us nodded, completely caught up in the story.

It continued with the two girls running all the way home. When they arrived, they were both babbling madly about what they had seen.

My great-grandfather told them to hush, and then he asked my grandmother what had happened. Speaking, breathless, she told my great-grandfather all about the lion they had seen. Of course, being in Alabama, my great-grandfather didn’t believe her. He then asked her sister, who related the same story. Furious, he punished them both for lying. Both girls were devastated that he didn’t believe them, but what could they do?

Later that day, some men came by the farm where my grandmother lived. One of them spoke to her father and told him that he represented a circus that was in town.

Their lion had escaped!

Naturally, my great-grandfather felt like a heel. He abjectly apologized to both girls, who were ecstatic to have been proven right.

When the story wound down, my grandmother met each of our eyes once again and said, “And that’s just the way it happened.”

I remember those words like it was yesterday. Listening to that story and others made me feel close to my grandmother like nothing else ever could.

Now, as a mother, I want to capture my grandmother's tales. I want to preserve them for the generations to come after me. I hope that my children and their children's children will read them and be as enamored of them as I was on those dark nights sitting around the fire.