MAPLE CREEK MEMORIES V
HUNTIN' POSSUM
Sittin' on the front porch in the evening watchin' Gracie come down the road with her flashlight shining everywhere but the road in front of her.
Some memories are just as sharp and clear as the full moon on a frosty night. I can remember sitting on the front porch in the evening and talking with other family members and friends who liked to drop by about dark and chat. I guess some of them liked to sit on our porch better than a lot of others because our house sat up on a hill overlooking the road, the only house in the hollow which did so. This meant we could see down the road about a quarter-mile and up the road about a half-mile.
We would sit and talk for hours about all kinds of things, baseball, other people, ourselves, animals, weather--it didn't matter. What mattered was that we were enjoying each others' company.
Along the side of the road down towards the hard road, the trees lined both sides. On the north where our house sat, the hill jutted out to the side of the road and was covered with oaks and pines , except for the patch around our house. On the south side of the road, however, there was nothing but a crop field and there were a number of locust trees that had grown up next to the road. These locusts were young trees but had reached probably twenty-five to forty feet in height--fair sized trees.
Just in front of our house, across the road, there were no trees except for one large apple tree. The apples from this tree were probably the sourest things you could imagine. They never got to much more than an inch and a half in diameter, sometimes wormy and always as sour as swill.
And there was always a bumper crop of them.
The woman who lived in the shack across the field from us and on the other branch had some friends who lived up the hollow past us. Every day or two she would go up the hollow about four- thirty or five (just in time for supper) and would not come back until nine-thirty or ten.
She always carried a flashlight with her for after dark. The road was not such a rough one, having been built by the WPA in the 1930's from a sandrock base and scraped every month or so during good weather. But still, a flashlight was a good idea as you could never tell when a snake or something else just as bad would come out and try to gather some of the warmth left by the summer sun on the exposed sandrock.
One evening in late August we had a large group of kids over to a party--my brother's birthday, I think. Anyway we are all sitting around on the porch talking and carrying on. The moon was super bright, midsummer and not a cloud anywhere. You could have read a book if you wanted to at ten o'clock at night just by the light of the moon. And here she comes, flashlight and all, walking back home with a full belly from her friends' house.
As she approached our house, the beam of the light suddenly swung right onto the front porch. Probably inadvertent, try walking at speed with a flashlight at the end of your arm which wants to swing with your gait--see how it weaves and bobs--inadvertent, right? So how does it come off the road and hit our porch which is about thirty feet higher than the road? Who knows, who cares?
Our friend Neil did. The beam hit him squarely in the face and he yells, "Whatch doin'? Huntin' possum?"
The beam dropped immediately She increased speed dramatically and made it home in record time. But evermore while we lived there, whenever we saw her on the road with her flashlight, there was always a question...
Sittin' on the front porch in the evening watchin' Gracie come down the road with her flashlight shining everywhere but the road in front of her.
Some memories are just as sharp and clear as the full moon on a frosty night. I can remember sitting on the front porch in the evening and talking with other family members and friends who liked to drop by about dark and chat. I guess some of them liked to sit on our porch better than a lot of others because our house sat up on a hill overlooking the road, the only house in the hollow which did so. This meant we could see down the road about a quarter-mile and up the road about a half-mile.
We would sit and talk for hours about all kinds of things, baseball, other people, ourselves, animals, weather--it didn't matter. What mattered was that we were enjoying each others' company.
Along the side of the road down towards the hard road, the trees lined both sides. On the north where our house sat, the hill jutted out to the side of the road and was covered with oaks and pines , except for the patch around our house. On the south side of the road, however, there was nothing but a crop field and there were a number of locust trees that had grown up next to the road. These locusts were young trees but had reached probably twenty-five to forty feet in height--fair sized trees.
Just in front of our house, across the road, there were no trees except for one large apple tree. The apples from this tree were probably the sourest things you could imagine. They never got to much more than an inch and a half in diameter, sometimes wormy and always as sour as swill.
And there was always a bumper crop of them.
The woman who lived in the shack across the field from us and on the other branch had some friends who lived up the hollow past us. Every day or two she would go up the hollow about four- thirty or five (just in time for supper) and would not come back until nine-thirty or ten.
She always carried a flashlight with her for after dark. The road was not such a rough one, having been built by the WPA in the 1930's from a sandrock base and scraped every month or so during good weather. But still, a flashlight was a good idea as you could never tell when a snake or something else just as bad would come out and try to gather some of the warmth left by the summer sun on the exposed sandrock.
One evening in late August we had a large group of kids over to a party--my brother's birthday, I think. Anyway we are all sitting around on the porch talking and carrying on. The moon was super bright, midsummer and not a cloud anywhere. You could have read a book if you wanted to at ten o'clock at night just by the light of the moon. And here she comes, flashlight and all, walking back home with a full belly from her friends' house.
As she approached our house, the beam of the light suddenly swung right onto the front porch. Probably inadvertent, try walking at speed with a flashlight at the end of your arm which wants to swing with your gait--see how it weaves and bobs--inadvertent, right? So how does it come off the road and hit our porch which is about thirty feet higher than the road? Who knows, who cares?
Our friend Neil did. The beam hit him squarely in the face and he yells, "Whatch doin'? Huntin' possum?"
The beam dropped immediately She increased speed dramatically and made it home in record time. But evermore while we lived there, whenever we saw her on the road with her flashlight, there was always a question...
posted by tanstaafl | 6:54 AM
3 Comments:
Oh, poor lady. She was probably just being nosy, lol...funny, the huntin' possum crack, though. This one reminded me of a story my great aunt told me, about walking home one night, a barn her brothers warned her to be careful around, and a mule. I couldn't imagine, out there in the boonies, having to walk those roads home as dark as it gets sometimes...but I have to admit, some of the stories they tell about it are really, really beyond funny.
Moving up to the next entry--but question first: have you ever thought about putting these in a book? The reason I ask is, my great aunt and grandmother have been picking up some interesting books, mostly self-published, but anyway, the last one they got was about East Lynn, some of the families out there back in the day, and I never thought I'd enjoy reading things like that, but I have to admit, I'm finding these kind of oral histories put down on paper absolutely fascinating to read, as well as enjoyable. There isn't much out there anymore quite like it, except for the storytelling competitions state parks sometimes have.
The closest thing I've found on my own recently, interestingly enough, was a book about hauntings in Appalachia. I was expecting the usual brief stories about different haunted places, but it ended up being verbatim stories, and I just loved it for that reason. The hauntings weren't all that interesting, but the way different people told the stories, and the characters and landscapes they'd describe were great, and it seems like each one had a lot of humor in it.
I think, if you have enough stories, they'd make a great book. As it is, if it is okay with you I think I'll print these out for my great aunt and grandmother to read. They're pretty wary of computers, lol.
I beat you to it. The book is unpublished as yet. The purpose of placing them on the blog is to get comments, and to see how it looks in print. My old printer was a beast of a thing. My new one makes it look so much better.
Go ahead and run copies off, it won't bother me.
And I'm disappointed with you as an editor--the last one was titled "Jennie" and had Sarah in it. And you didn't say anything about the incongruity. Actually her name was something completely different. I had used Jennie in one rewrite, then after typing it the other day, I decided to change it to Sarah, but forgot to change the title. Can't be perfect all the time!
LOL...we'll have to get Mr. Ross over here to edit. :)
And okay! When you get ready, put me down for three copies. How exciting! Books are my favorite gift to give, and this will just be fantastic!
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