April Grist Rhodes
Bio
April Grist is a silversmith, music lover and cat connoisseur, returning to writing after a long hiatus. She lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia with her husband and three traveling felines.
Stories (3/0)
Satellite Savior
It was a week before what would have been my grandfather’s eightieth birthday, and he was finally up at the pulpit. A somber delegation of a few hundred people occupied the pews in front of him. His entire family sat in a special section off to the side with pages open to verse in our laps. The ceremony would have run its course seamlessly had we not created the spectacle of howling like a pack of irreverent dimwits before Pa was even in the ground. Bemused mourners looked from their hands to my grandfather’s corpse to the television screen behind the casket, indecisive as to where their gazes belonged. Certainly not on us. Tears collected in the creases of four generations of crow’s feet and dripped onto our fingers as we unsuccessfully tried to use them to mask our smiles. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 was lost in an indistinguishable chorus of sniffles, giggles and gasps. The time to weep and the time to laugh had collided in a post-mortem flux, characteristically commemorating the life of Cecil Burl Grist.
By April Grist Rhodes2 years ago in Families
Crossing Old Sandy
From the time we were old enough to catch crawdads in the nearby creek without getting pinched, my cousins and I were allowed to roam the farmlands nestled between the foothills of the Ozark mountains and the Arkansas River. We’d step out the door of Granny and Pa’s cozy rock-sided house accompanied by an eager pack of farm dogs, work our way through the barn, walk in one door and out the other at each of my aunts’ and uncles’ and great-grandparents homes who all lived “over yonder” or “down yonder” and then set off along the washboard dirt road that my family’s been settled along since the early 1800’s. Up the hill was Granny’s old schoolhouse, still furnished with broken pews and desks, a disheveled time capsule begging our imaginative spirits for dramatic recreations of academic life in the “olden days.”
By April Grist Rhodes3 years ago in Families
