Saturday, January 8, 2011

A Little Present

Late one summer afternoon I was standing in the front yard of the house where we were living with Grandmother and Granddaddy Jones, on a place near Chipley. I was standing off to one side of the house. The sun had started to sink behind the tall pine trees, and their long shadows fell across the yard.

A pedlar driving an old truck loaded with home-made chairs turned into the yard and honked his horn. Stepping down from the cab, he began to loosen the ropes that held the chairs in place. By that time Grandmother had come out of the house, and the man explained the purpose of his visit. Grandmother walked on over to the truck, and spent a few minutes inspecting the chairs and asking questions.

Eventually the pedlar set a small red rocking chair down upon the ground. Grandmother gave him some money, and he left. As he drove off down the road she brought the little rocking chair over to me and said, "Set in this and see how you like it."

That incident took place in the summer of 1938, when I was about four years old.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Where I Was Born

One morning in the summer of 1956 Granddaddy Jones and I were motoring westward along State Route 2, in Holmes County, Florida, some twenty-five or thirty miles west of the town of Graceville. In that region the road roughly parallels the Florida - Alabama line, and is some seven or eight miles to the south of it.

I knew that Granddaddy had once lived in the area through which we were then passing, and I asked him some question or other about it. After addressing my question he pointed northward, in a direction generally toward the little town of Geneva, Alabama, and said, "The house where you were born was a mile or two that way, over across those woods."

From where we were at the time I concluded that the place of my birth is located about five or six miles southeast of Geneva, which would place it in Holmes County and about two miles below the Alabama line.

     Granddaddy Jones was Mama’s daddy. He and I were great buddies.