We lived on four acres. Not large by country standards but a whole universe to a child and her dog.
My Brother Making a Fort
My father worked in the city but wanted his children to have the country experience that he had growing up in a small town in east Texas. So, braving the commute, he moved us out into the “boonies” where we would have the opportunity to build forts, create mud pools, maintain an aviary, and know what it feels like to run bare foot through the field that you, a child by others standards, mowed with your John Deere tractor that morning.
My siblings and I loved tramping through the woods claiming forts and tree houses that the other gender was not allowed to cross. The girls made homes with rolls of toilet paper and transplanted cacti. The boys made watch towers with tire swings and snake skins. A paradise of wood and mud – and we loved it. Read the rest of this entry »
I was raised in rural North Carolina in a town called Altamahaw-Ossipee. Yes – hard to pronounce and hard to find.
My parents and another couple, Jim and Susan Walton, met at a Quaker retreat and made a plan to live communally in a log house built with their own hands.
My cousin, Kevin, and I were (once upon a time) quite young; perhaps four years old at the time this tale took place.
We loved to loiter on our granny’s boat dock down on Lake LBJ. It may still have been called Lake Granite Shoals back then, but I was too young to know or care. Just as I was too young to know what it was we pulled out of the minnow net that day. Read the rest of this entry »
