memories

I've had this quote or line from a Waltons episode floating in and out of my mind over the past year.  I hadn't thought about it for years until last summer.

The memory was triggered when I was out working in our garden.  Giggles, shouts, and then crying :) drifted into our yard.  We have new neighbors with small children and they were out playing.   It had been years since those sounds were heard in our yard.  Those sweet voices actually seemed to originate from the air around me... and they floated around my head.  I stopped and listened.  My boys' voices have long since past that stage of high-pitched giggling and shouting!  There are very few sounds that are as sweet as children's voices in the summer evening air.  And those voices triggered memories of my own boys' sweet laughter... sweet chanting...

The line..."the ghosts of the children we were".  That's what I remembered.   It was a line from an ending scene of a Waltons episode.   Those words struck me as a youth when I heard them for the first time and then they were embedded in my memory when I heard them again as an adult.   But it has been many years since I've thought about those words.  There was something about the summertime air and those sweet voices that triggered them.

And now those words surface again. So I googled the line that I remember and found a Waltons website with summaries of episodes.  The website also includes the beginning and ending narratives from each episode (which I will be reading--all of them!).   I found the episode... season 2 episode 8 "The Braggart"....


"It's late now in Virginia, that ball field which once echoed to the sounds of our games is quiet except for the call of crickets and the ghosts of the children we were. For my brothers and sisters and I are all grown now, and our children play other games in places far from Waltons Mountain. Still, there's something about the fall of night that turns our thoughts homeward".