Childhood Memories
My childhood memories begin with our home, which was a stone’s throw from a small country road in the outskirts of a small town USA, Ware Shoals South Carolina.
Old Home Place
The drive way was a half moon and covered in sand. It was a very large driveway. Down to one side of the drive and to the side of the house ran a big grassy field which ran all the way to the back and bordered a different road than the one in front of the house. At the other end the drive connected with the driveway of a huge brick Baptist church that sat on top of a big hill.
Our old house had several trees scattered around the yard, each with a story of their own. The house was put together poorly and you could feel the wind blowing through the cracks in the walls. It was an old wooden country home covered in shingled sheeting that was coated with a design to look like bricks. Through the cracks in the walls in some places you might even see a rag or blanket carelessly hanging out from the inside.
We used an old iron potbellied stove fueled by coal for heating and cooking. There were burn marks on the ceiling where the pipe that let the smoke out through the ceiling had charred the surround. During one of those cold winter days someone had put too much coal inside and caused the pipe to get red-hot all the way up to the top, accidentally catching the ceiling on fire. I was still too little to remember when this happened. My mom told me it was my older half-brother Wayne’s fault. I remember vividly digging out pieces of coal from the pile in the snow and ice in the winter-time with my brother Tim. The house was put together poorly and you could feel the wind blowing through the cracks in the walls. We would put the coal in old buckets which were very heavy for our cold chilled little hands and dump it in the house near the stove.
We had one water source in the house that was located in the kitchen. If you had to go to the toilet there was always a bucket in the bedrooms. The official bathroom was called an outhouse and it was a half mile walk from the house. One of my daily chores was to take the bedroom buckets and empty them into the outhouse. To get to the out-house you had to go down a trail into what I thought was a haunted forest. I do not remember ever sitting in the outhouse because the thing was leaning to one side and the hole you sat on would not let me sit down on it without falling in. To do so I would have had to climb up onto it and hang onto both sides to keep from falling into the mess of crap and maggots crawling down below. This was challenging in itself but what terrified me most was the snakes and spiders that I knew were hiding in there just waiting to bite my shiny little soft bottom end. Mostly we just went into the edge of the woods with a roll of paper and squatted down somewhere. I remember my mom laughing when one time my grandmother had went to the woods to use the bathroom. A week later my grandma could not stop scratching her bottom end because she had sat down in the middle of a patch of Poison Oak and she scratched her bottom for a long time.
When my brother and I took a bath we used this huge metal tub filled with water outside. This was usually sat up beside my dad’s barn that was covered with wire in the front for all of his chickens and pigeons. It was on top of this barn that I would pretend to fly my plane when mom was not watching. If she found me she would ground my plane with a belt to the backside.
The big trees scattered in the clearing around the house always offered some kind of adventure. I remember several of these in particular. There was the huge black walnut tree that my dad had hung an old tire in to make a swing for my brothers and me. Right underneath this same tree on the other side from the swing sat an old rusty T-model automobile sitting up on some blocks. I learned to climb to new heights in the huge maple tree in the front near to the road. I also learned a valuable lesson; the higher you climb the further you fall. It was a rather quick way to rid myself of all my front baby teeth at once, but far from painless. My special tree was an old cedar tree about 20 feet high. I could climb up inside of it and nobody could find me; ask my mom.
A little further away from the house in the back was the trail that led into the haunted pine forest. The pine forest was always so dark and I never went there at night. You could follow the trail through the forest past the outhouse and it would pass by a trash pile and a small hand dug pond then enter a clearing where my dad planted a garden every year.
My dad’s family comes from a long line of farmers whom worked hard for a living. My dad never learned to read or write. He only completed the third grade of school. He worked for 20 years in the cotton mill doing hard labor intensive jobs. Later he went to work for the state of South Carolina cutting grass on the sides of the roads until he hurt his back from falling off the tractor. He never had enough money to send my two brothers and me to college. I used to go hunting and fishing with my dad. This was his best way of providing so we would have extra food in the house. He kept two huge deep freezers which remained at least half full year round. My dad kept it stocked with deer, squirrels, raccoon, fish and a few other things. My dad always had numerous hunting dogs. These were my pets until my dad would decide it was time to sell one of them or trade it for one better. We also had a garden every year of about 1 acre. My dad would plant corn, tomatoes, and beans mostly. The vegetables we harvested my mom would later put into canning jars for the wintertime.