E-Book, Englisch, 214 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-5439-9145-1
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Moving to a Farm Dear Chloe, In early 1944, my family lived in Belle Meade, Tennessee, a short distance from Nashville. We rented a very small house with one bedroom for the five of us - my parents, my brother, Chuck, and my sister, Gay. My sister slept in an alcove and my brother and I had a space in the attic. When I had just turned five, my family was informed that we had to move because the landlord wanted to live there himself. Chloe, this was during World War II and housing was in short supply. My dad could only find a place in the country near Franklin, Tennessee, about fifteen miles away. Up until then, we had hardly lived in luxury housing, as you see, but at least we were used to indoor toilets and central heating. Without them, life was going to be a challenge. On a nice fall day, I found myself saying goodbye to my only friend in the neighborhood, a kid named “Pud” (which rhymes with “should”). Pud was short for the name his mom called him, which was Puddin’ Pie. Don’t ask me where the name came from, as I don’t have a clue. Well, Pud lived across the street in a very small wooden house that was always dark. There was an old abandoned truck in the backyard which was overgrown with weeds. I guess that looked ornamental to Pud’s family. His father and two brothers never seemed disturbed by this sculpture cluttering up their property. Pud’s mother sat all day in an ancient overstuffed chair and listened to the radio. Periodically, she yelled to Pud. “Pud, ya’ll git me a glass of water!” or “Pud, ya’ll’s gotta hep me up and git me to the bathroom!” This went on all day. You see, Chloe, she was enormously fat, maybe three hundred pounds. Not having known too many fat people as a five-year-old, I really couldn’t have hazarded a guess. When neither of my friend’s brothers was home - and on school days they would be gone most of the day - we had to stay within earshot. Playing on that ole icon of a truck got to be a little boring after a while. But Pud and I always played together and had become inseparable. I was going to miss him. When the day came, I was put into the back of a moving van, and, without much fanfare, waved goodbye to Pud. We began the drive to our new home in the country, not realizing what it meant to live “in the country”. We thought it would be like where we lived now, just cows and pigs around and with the houses further apart. Chloe, a kid that collects snakes and baby birds from his yard doesn’t exactly live in the Bronx, but he also does not live in the wild. After a while, we turned off the highway and began driving down a gravel road. There were only simple farmhouses and barns. There were low hills all around and cornfields, pastures, and vegetable gardens along the way. It was pretty much as we had expected. This was what we Southerners called a “holler,” but Northerners would pronounce it “hollow,” not knowing the language of the South. Finally, we came upon a river with a set of railroad tracks running along it. The tracks had long been abandoned, but the slow-moving, muddy river looked awesome compared to the little creek next to our home in Belle Meade. My dad said the river was a branch of the Harpeth. I immediately saw it as a place to play and have endless fun. (The same river comes up in another one of my later stories about frog-gigging.) Crossing the bridge, we saw fencing and the entrance to a farm. When dad stopped the truck, I realized that we were going to be living on an actual farm! This would be great! I couldn’t wait to do farm things, like feed chickens or milk cows. It appeared so easy to do when you saw it at the movies, but it was not as easy as one thinks. Farming was a whole lot of work, and soon even a kid could see that. The farmhouse had another, simpler house just east of it that had been hidden from the road. That house was somewhat smaller than our previous home, but it seemed okay. I didn’t care, except it didn’t have a barn. I had had visions of playing in a hayloft, diving into the newly mowed hay, or milking the cows. I was beginning to understand that my idea of farm life was not very accurate, and maybe my mother hadn’t prepared us for what was to come. Reality was setting in, and life in the country was going to be more rustic, uncomfortable, and lacking things that we had taken for granted. We all tried to make the best of the situation until we realized that we had a log burning stove and that the toilets were outside the house! No, Chloe, it didn’t have one of those quarter moons cut out of the door to air out the smelly inside, but it should have. We had never used an outhouse before. This was a bad omen. It turns out that our new home was a large cabin built for hunters and fishermen who would stay for only a few days and couldn’t care less about these niceties. We did, but we had to make do with what we had. Much to our surprise, we got used to things rather quickly. We loved the fresh vegetables and smoked meats we got from our neighbors. The neighbors were incredibly friendly and would bake pies for us or bring us fresh shucked corn. They would occasionally bring us things from the nearby town of Franklin if we asked. We learned from them how to enjoy swimming in our little portion of the river, although I couldn’t swim yet, so I just paddled around. We started to like living in the country, but we never got used to the outhouse. The worst for me was that there wasn’t another boy to play with like I had with my friend Pud. I was bored a lot after my brother and sister went off to school each day. The local one-room schoolhouse was less than a mile away, so Chuck and Gay enrolled the next Monday morning. It was a single room with a stove in the front heated with logs split by the older boys. A long blackboard lined the front of the room, and was washed by the girls. Younger girls beat the erasers, creating clouds of dust and making them cough. There was a well with a cup and a bucket used for drinking and washing. There were other chores for us kids too. All this was overseen by the lone teacher who was also the principal of the school. The teacher couldn’t teach all the students at different grade levels at the same time, so she had the older students to teach the younger. She also liberally used study time for each student to read and use workbooks while she taught the others. It didn’t work for everybody, as my sister was put back a year when she transferred to city schools later. Because Gay and Chuck were away at school all day, I often had little to do. As a result, usually around noon, my mother would tell me to go get the mail, even though we rarely had anything in the box. When I would complain that the old sow from the farm next door often chased me to the mailbox, my mother scoffed and called me various names such as “fraidy cat” and challenged me to just outrun the ole pig. Honestly, I was really scared. That ole sow probably weighed close to three hundred pounds and seemed to want to swallow this five-year-old whole. I would go to the door, check out where she was and then start my mad dash for the mailbox. It seemed like I always just made it. To return, I had to wait until the sow got bored waiting for me and wandered off. Then I ran the return lap and again just made it. Boy, I hated that daily mail run! A little girl lived in the farmhouse next to our house and we sort of became friends. Since our brothers and sisters were away at school, we only had each other to play with. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to like playing with make-believe trucks, and she didn’t want to go to the river to capture minnows. Her interest in dolls and other girlish things held no interest for me either. Besides, both of us were kept busy with chores dreamt up by our mothers, such as taking out the garbage or washing dishes. On Christmas Eve, Betty Jo came to our house and timidly knocked on the door. My mother answered and called me to come. Betty Jo stood there for a moment and then stuck out her hand that held three ears of popping corn. They were tied together with a simple red ribbon. She said “Merry Christmas” as I reached out and took her gift. I muttered, “Thanks” and “that’s nice” but, before I could say anything more, she turned and left, walking the short distance home. Wow! I had been given my first Christmas present from a member of the opposite sex! It was somehow very special. I couldn’t think of anything to give to her, so Mother convinced me just to show what a good friend I could be in the future and let it go at that. And that’s what I did. Christmas was fun except for one thing - my sister and brother made me stay up and find out about Santa Claus. I mean I’m only five, and I really believed in Santa, the reindeer, his gifts, his arrival down the chimney, and all the other stuff. But they said they were going to stay up and prove to me there was no Santa and that our parents brought the gifts. This just couldn’t be true! Well, I stayed awake with them until about ten o’clock and then fell sound asleep. Maybe an hour later, my mean brother and sister, Chuck and Gay, woke me up and clapped a hand over my mouth. Then they made me peer through a crack in the door where I saw Mom and Dad bringing in the presents and placing them under the tree. At first, I couldn’t believe it. I was so depressed. It changed Christmas for me forever, and its magical quality was lost. That winter, we came to hog slaughtering time. The farmers worked together on this as it needed...
