As a child coming from New York, "The big Apple" and away from all the bright lights and traveling to the south,we were going to visit my grandparents. This place was very similiar to the different parts of living up in the mountains of Jamaica.....and people who live in Jamaica that have never been to the U.S. perhaps don't realize that in the south, apart from the nearest city, we called this place where my grandparents lived at The Country too.

My grandparents lived on a beautiful 2 acres of land that they and their siblings including my mom picked cotton from sun up to sun down to buy. This 2 acres of land is where my grandparents raised a garden that went for miles and miles and as a child my mom would take me in the garden to point out the various crops that were being grown.

The house that my mom grew up was a wooden house that had a tin roof and newspaper for wall paper, and outside stood the Out House where you go to do your business with all the saw dust laying beneath you, and if you had to pee she had a pot in the house and when you got done you thow it out the back door!

When we took baths it would be in a tin tub where grandma would heat the water up on the stove. Now, on the other side of the field was the well and I would lower the bucket down in the well to get water and that was the best water in the world and very cold.

Whenever grandma cooked her breakfast and dinner she would put wood in the stove to get it hot and would you believe Grandma would cook sometimes hoe cakes and chicken foot soup too! and grandma was crazy for oxtails. When night fell it got pretty dark in the country so it was nothing else to do but to sit on the porch and listen to the frogs croaking and the crickets chirping.

Then when it was time to go to bed you would sleep under the patchwork bedspread that grandma made by hand with the feather pillows. She was good at stitching because she would stitch my mother and the rest of the sibbling up when they got cut.....they also believed in roots and herbs being from an african ancestry.

I miss my grandma and grandpa with my grandma passing at the age of 86yrs and my grandpa at age 97yrs old. All the sibblings have passed away except two of my moms sister's who are both in their ninetys. It was 10 children in all with a set of twins.

Those were the good old days much like in the country of Jamaica and that is why when I am in Jamaica my husband always says that I love Jamaica more then I love him but it's only because parts of Jamaica I go to remind me of grandma and grandpa place--It reminds me of home....Dear God thank you for these lasting memories and for sending me to Jamaica to keep those memories alive.

Jamaica Soon Come! I love you!