Daddy and Mama moved us from our home on 3rd Ave in Atmore to our new home here at Barnett Crossroads Alabama on Thanksgiving weekend 1945.
What a memorable time that was for me. I was heading towards my 5th birthday and growing like kudzu.
My memories of my early life seem to come from dramatic events......moving day was dramatic.
Mama scrambled us some eggs and fried flapjacks in a cast iron skillet in the hot coals of the fireplace. The reason was because the woodburning stove had been disassembled and loaded onto the trucks for hauling out to our new house.
The day was early and rushed in my memory.
Our new home was still under construction and a wonderful play ground. No walls, just 2x4 studs outlined what would eventually become bedrooms and closets and a kitchen and nooks and crannies. Way too much for my young mind, just fun to run around and see everything from wherever I stood.
My baby brother Buddy was just a lump to be jumped over if he happened to be there. My two older brothers and older sister were there if I wanted them to be.
My most indelible memory of that day was watching my brothers push and shove to draw a bucket of water up from the bored well. Having no electricity in our community until 1946 didn't allow for having electric lights and running water in our new home that day. Kerosene lamps, fireplaces, woodburning cook stove and windless water well was our new normal.
Looking back Mama and Daddy must have surely thought they had moved down instead of up with the decision to leave town and all the conveniences to settle here in the Barnett Crossroads Community.
A house with walls, floors and a roof without any defination of spaces except 2x4's.
Poor Mama, Poor Daddy.
Didn't matter to me. It surely must have mattered to Mama.
So after the water was drawn and both brothers proved their meddle, my next clearest memory is of us heading out to play in the long ignored area between our house and the "Old Field". The Old Field was the place where Daddy and his family had been born and raised.
Grandpa Joe and Grandma Minnie had homesteaded 160 acres of red clay, iron rocks, gully cuts, and sand land filled with sagebrush, gallberry, sawbrier, honeysuckle, yupon, along with trees of every kind growing in this part of Escambia County to birth and raise eight children.
Daddy decided he needed to raise us here, so he bought his siblings shares and our farm living commenced.
Two ponds were on this land, one at the backside of the Old Field that held no interest to us and another, "The Pond" was placed by God himself just waiting for us to make it here to live and enjoy.
Oh how we did.
The Pond was an important place in my childhood.
Move in day let Mama and Daddy get things sorted and set inside the house while me and my older siblings headed out to explore our very own paradise.
The only warning we got was, " Be careful".
How easy was that?
The memory I see is my brothers wearing brown leather Bomber jackets while me and my sister rode their shoulders as we went towards the Old Field.
The area between our house and the Old Field was covered in sage brush and groves of tall saplings of yellow longleaf pine, persimmon and scrub oaks.
We found some big stump holes covered in soft sage grasses and pinestraw. Those holes were huge and allowed all of us to lay in them as the winds of that cold November day blew across. I remember the sky being a perfect blue with fluffy white clouds drifting across overhead.
We heard trainer planes from Whiting Field flying past and decided we should shoot them down in our game of pretend.
We stood up to watch them coming and just before they got close enough to see us we jumped into those wonderful stump holes to shoot with our pretend guns and watch them crash somewhere over there in The Pond.
" That dirty Jap Kamikaze tried to kill us".
" Nuh, uh, I shot a German".
The trainer planes dipped and rolled over our new home doing what we had seen on the newsreels at The Strand in Atmore.
Dogfights were heart stopping to watch on 8mm film, but to see them in our own made up games of war was beyond wonderful.
We stopped to eat shriveled, frost sweetened wild persimmons right off the trees.
We explored the area around The Pond. On the east side of The Pond a delapadated old split rail fence. We tried walking those rails but the rot had left them too unstable for good balance. That old rail fencing ran out to the edge of the woods that was thick with hugh yellow longleaf pine trees. Some of those trees had cat faces from the long ago days of turpintine production. A few had tin cups still attached to the scar. We tried chewing some of the old sticky resin clumps, but it tasted icky and stuck in my teeth.
Lots of that gummy mess stayed on our hands and britches.
Mama knew pretty soon what we had been up to.
The cold days in our new house and all the surrounding woods and fallow old pasture and fields held such wonder for us. I didn't understand what a hard challenge lay ahead for our parents with the job of getting a garden plot ready to plant a place for food, a barn, a smokehouse, a chicken house, a twoholer outhouse and fencing for a cow and pens for hogs. All that was daytime work while time after supper they spent nailing up walls so as to make our house a home.
That weekend was the new start of a wonderful childhood. We were poor as far as money, but oh so rich in spirit.
Unless the ravages of age take away my memory, I'll always have something wonderful to revisit.
Thanksgiving 1945 was my earliest memory of this holiday and the most memorable.
How blessed am I................
