November 6, 2008 - Last evening driving home from Monticello my nostrils were filled with remembered smells. We have had a late harvest this year but only a few fields of corn are awaiting the combines. A few tractors were pulling chisel plows across the stubble and there was the sweet odor of the good earth blended with the dust of harvest. Looking out across the prairie was a treat of Autumn colors; brown and tan; black earth mixed with russets forming the background to white farm houses and groves of yellow and red groves and fence rows. I remembered the peaty smell of coal fired furnace smoke mixed with the tart essence of leaves burning at the street side. I heard again the rustle of leaves on the sidewalk six inches deep kicked up by my feet as I trudged down Green Street delivering the Champaign-Urbana Courier to my customers.

I remembered Mrs. Lowery who each Saturday when I came to trade the weekly coupon for her 15 cent subscription fee. I could smell again the wonderful flavor of the two pieces of fresh made burnt sugar fudge she handed me with her coins - two dimes to pay the fee and she always waved away the nickel I handed her in change. I remember it as a better time, a simpler time, the good old days. Champaign-Urbana was a beautiful place then, a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover capturing the domestic tranquility of a nation recovering from a good war and the bad times.

Even though the picture painted over the ugliness of a divided society and pockets of poverty and deprivation hidden away I remember it as a good time. I remember Lottie Howard who cared for us while my parents went away each week day to my father's accounting office. Between the wars she had come north from the Mississippi Delta seeking a better life for her family. Though she was older than my mother by a decade she was our "hired girl". Each morning she arose early, god her own children ready to go off to school, climbed on the bus and came to our house on Prairie Street arriving before 8 in the morning. She fed us, washed us, rocked John to sleep, put bandaids on our cuts, and wiped away our tears. Then, each evening at six, she would collect her $2.00 from my father, plunk her wide brimmed hat on her head and catch the bus for her long ride home.

Lottie would cook our lunch, set the table for the five older children, then repair to the kitchen table to take her own meal. One day I asked her why she did not eat in the dining room with us. She looked shocked at the question. I still hear her voice as she answered, "It wouldn't be fittin' " and return to her kitchen to eat. My sister and I looked at each other, picked up our own plates and followed her to the long kitchen table and sat down along side of her. Anna Mary, just 6 years old, looked at her and said, " I think that this is fitting." We ate with her in the kitchen after that and she told us stories of her child hood in the cotton fields.

Yes, Champaign-Urbana was a beautiful place then, a gentle place in my memories. But it, and all of American is the more beautiful this morning. The sun came up and lit the pallet of fall in reddish gold light. My dear Lottie wasn't here to see it but memories of her were. These aren't the good old days but they are the good new days and it is morning in America once more and it is fitting.