I’ve climbed up into the loft of my grandfather’s barn on a hundred and sixteen acre farm in Shingle Hollow and no one knows where I am. In time, and before summer’s end, my mother will figure out my hiding spot, but today I am alone and undetected with a parcel of books to read I’ve shelved along the wall. Shingle Hollow in the sixties is a patch of farms growing corn on one side of the Piney Knob road and woods growing parallel the West Branch on the other. There are white clapboard houses, small churches, and country ice-box stores in each community. Men are in the fields. Women alternate between the fields and houses. Children play outside, ride bikes and horses, and rob watermelons from fields. A trip to town is a monthly Saturday event, and one where a mother buys Sealtest Ice Cream, bulk flour, 8 O’Clock coffee, Crisco, and washing powders. Molasses, sweet milk, buttermilk, sugar cane, goat soaps, and honey are bought or bartered from a neighbor’s yield. My German grandmother, a midwife and root doctor, roams the woods for organics and trilliums for teeth brushing, stomach pains, antiseptics, and more. She gleams the sides of banks and thickets for elderberries, blackberries, scuppernongs and muscadines, and takes my hand on hunts for wild strawberries creeping across the ground. The root cellars are full of sweet potatoes, “arsh” potatoes, rutabagas, gourds, peanuts, cabbages, and other tuber harvests. The outbuildings hold the coal piles, the wood pile, the chicken coops, the corn cobs, the hanging garlics, the smokehouse meats, and the drying timbers. A bucket on a rope drops low into the well and Grover’s spring provides water; an outhouse on a lower ridge, relief. I decide early that I will spend my summer reading in the barn, racing bikes down the hill to jump across the branch, riding the white horse bareback across the Knob, and singing in the choir on Sundays. I want to visit relatives weekly with my mother, and see the “come back again” signs scattered across each separate territory. I want to fall asleep at night tucked in a featherbed atop the upper stairwell, and to listen to an orchestra of croaking bullfrogs and singing katydids in each day’s closing hour. I want to wake to the crowning of the roosters and the streaming light of a rising morning, like the biscuits in the stove below me, where a grandmother works for hours beforehand in her floral blue-printed, flour-dusted apron, humming old Tennesseean mountain songs. My grandfather will be at the table slurping black coffee and dipping a ham-biscuit into red-eyed gravy, while tuning in the moderator of our daily show, “Swap N Shop, This is Pappy” whose voice bids me, “come, put my feet to the floor.”
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 00:41:05 +0000
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