Everything’s Just Been Different!

My Daddy had the house on Simmons street built when I was very young. I’m pretty sure we moved there before I was five years old, because I can remember being there when my brother was born in 1955.

I remember that Momma was in the Trion hospital in labor, and Daddy was pacing out and back in the living room in front of that big picture window that Momma insisted on having built.

He was smoking Salems one after another. He finally got to head out for the hospital when my cousin Mary Mount came to look after me. I dutifully went off to bed and to sleep, and in a few days Daddy brought baby brother Mike, Mom, and himself home from the Trion hospital in his 1953 Pontiac.

The world was different back then. It was a world of very few television shows, and a lot of outside play. During the summer months, we lived outside from daylight til dark. In the first few years we lived there, my Uncle and cousins lived right next door. Johnny, Patsy and little Jeff. After a while, Uncle Curly moved, and Coach Jones and his wife moved in. They had a son, Jerry with whom we played….and his wife had a baby girl while we lived next to them. Can’t recall her name right off hand.

The cemetery was just across the road, and we kids used it and the wooded field next to it, as our playground. It never occurred to us to be scared, even as daylight turned to dark, and the lightning bugs and moths came out in force. I guess that’s the reason I used to still go up to that dark, quiet place in the middle of the night as an adult to watch the meteor swarms. Just another place to be, and safer than most…because the people resting there certainly weren’t going to bother you.

I used to lay out in the cold, sweet clover sometimes in our backyard in the waning days of summer, into the early fall, and watch the big puffy clouds go by, and try to figure out what they looked like. I thought about the future, and the things I had in mind to do. Now that the future is here, I find myself sometimes wanting to go back and lay there awhile again, and rethink some things. I wonder if it’d do any good, or if things would just work out the same way?

Ain’t been too bad really, not at all. Just different than what I figured.