My People's Place

I get a lot of questions about the place I call The Farm. I thought I'd tell you a little bit of it's (and my) history.

I hope you enjoy it.

I talk a lot about The Farm (OK, so it’s actually a ranch, but still). The Farm is my People’s Place. I've been visiting here since before I was born. My Daddy was born just about a mile up the road and so were his 12 brothers and sisters. The house where they lived is still there though ramshackle and practically gone. I've always called it Mama’s house. Mama and Papa, my paternal grandparents, raised their large family here in the tiny community called Lost Prairie just east of Groesbeck in Limestone County, Texas.

As I understand it at some point in their marriage Papa got up, walked down the road about a mile from the family home onto some of his Daddy’s land, built himself a little shack and simply stayed there. Evidently it seems, he would occasionally venture a visit to Mama up the road as some of the 13 children were born after his move. I know. In his defense, I’m guessing that tiny wooden house with the two bedrooms and no bathrooms got to feeling pretty tight with all those kids in and around it. In comparison, his little lean-to, though crude, probably fit his somewhat reclusive personality a bit better. I'm sure it's hard to be a proper recluse with 13 kids. I’ve always tried to reserve judgment about Papa’s decision to relocate and I like to think it was his way of saving his marriage (Fair Warning: this method likely won’t work for everyone).

Mama died the same year I was born so I have little to no personal memories of her. But there are some pretty good stories about her that I particularly enjoy. It appears she was quite a character, and may or may not have been somewhat opinionated. Sometimes, it seems, she was a member in good standing of The Lost Prairie Baptist Church, and sometimes she wasn’t. I have the original church record book to prove it. And although my memories of Mama are few, I clearly remember visiting Papa at his tiny little shack where there was no running water and only electricity to a single bulb hanging from the ceiling in the front room. There was no bathroom and no real bedroom to speak of. The bed was in the front room where the light bulb and the fireplace were located, along with a couple of wooden chairs (one placed extra close to one of the two windows so Papa could at the same time warm himself by the fire and spit snuff out into the yard). Papa was quite the character too and had his own way of doing things. One time, when we arrived to visit, he had placed one end of a very long log ( practically a tree) at an angle into the fireplace and had the other end of the monster log sticking out the front door. As it burned he would simply push it a little bit farther into the fire, expertly eliminating the need to continue bringing in logs from the cold outdoors, and at the same time completely ignoring the fact that his method also allowed the cold of all the outdoors right in through the half-open front door.

Papa died when I was six.
I vividly remember the morning that we got the call. That’s the first time I remember seeing my Daddy cry. But not the last.  And even though I certainly understood that Papa was my grandfather, it was on that very day that I realized that Papa was also my Daddy’s daddy.

(More to come...)