fgazette.com Community news site for Union Parish Louisiana
(This is a chapter from the new book, “Fathers, Sons and Old Guns” by Glynn Harris. The book is now available from Amazon.com.)
It’s been a long time since I last visited the home place where I grew up. I remember what it was like soon after my mom passed away; it was like the cord that had bound our family together had snapped after she was no longer there.
My sister, Linda, lived next door to our house and I remember one Christmas when I visited Linda soon after mother had died, I was not prepared for the feeling of loneliness that swept over me when I looked across her yard to the simple frame house where we grew up. On other Christmases, this would have been the scene of laughter, of sweet and tangy aromas wafting from mother’s kitchen. This day however, it seemed cold and dark.
The years have soothed the pain of that first Christmas without my mother but my memories of the old home place linger like the spicy aroma of her applesauce cake. The old house is gone now, somebody bought it and moved it and there was nothing there but the cedar tree in the front yard, the crepe myrtles that formed a ring around the yard and the pecan tree growing just out of the yard.
Until the house was purchased and moved, a young family rented it for awhile and I remember feeling sad and resentful that somebody else was living in what had been our family’s home where we all grew up.
As I paused to reflect on the spot where our house had been, I remembered things like drawing water from the well in the back yard. The water bucket, a slender cylinder that went “gulp…gulp” when it filled and when you pulled the bucket from the well hand over fist by the rope to which it was attached, you pulled a trigger at the top to release water into the water bucket.
I remembered things like calling our old milk cow from the pasture late in the afternoon, dumping cans of Acorn cow feed into the trough and pulling up the stool to sit and milk the cow, hoping she hadn’t gotten into bitter weeds that day.
I remembered things like watching dogs with names like Boots, Rusty and Tippy waiting outside the back door for scraps from the kitchen.
I remembered how the cool green grass felt to tender feet the first time shoes were shucked in spring.
I remembered hoping it was my turn to lick the bowl after mother made a cake, and sitting on the front porch on a summer afternoon making the churn dasher slap up and down in the sour milk as it separated from the globs of butter and watching mother work the golden mound until all the buttermilk was gone and pure, sweet butter remained.
I remembered things like listening to my uncle Sam cuss his mule over on the hill across the way as he plowed his field.
I remembered making sling shots out of slices of inner tubes and old shoe tongues attached to just the right fork of a branch you had cut for the handle.
I remembered things like digging earthworms from beneath the cow patties at the cow barn and my brother Tom and me heading for Molido Creek with bamboo poles, hook, line and sinker to fish for goggle-eyes and sun perch.
I remembered fingering the etched wooden stock on my old double barrel shotgun as I sat with my back against a beech down on Molido, listening for the scritch-scratch of a squirrel’s claws on oak bark, getting out of a warm bed early fall mornings, grabbing my shotgun and heading for the Sand Flats along Saline Creek hoping for a shot at a squealer duck that flew from their roost to wing their way up the creek to feed.
Somebody else now owned our house and I knew I could never go back home again. That’s how it should be, I suppose, and that’s okay. I have my memories and I can take them down from time to time, dust them off and for a moment, become the little barefoot boy again.
