By Wilson Love
Up until age fifteen, my family lived in a tiny four room rented house in the southern piedmont of North Carolina. When asked, we described the location as “out on 74 about halfway between the Patrol Station and the drive-in.”
Calling our home a house is generous because it really was a shack. My folks and little sister slept in one bedroom and my older brother and I shared the other. The glory in this situation is that we kids grew up country. Yes, we were country long before anybody considered it cool.
The setting and circumstances of this childhood were a throwback to the eighteen hundreds. As low paying renters (sharecroppers essentially) on a large property south of the Mason-Dixon, we were expected to assist the landlord (plantation owner) in his farming operations. I’m pretty sure there was nothing to this effect in writing; so with no lease and no place else to go, a way of life settled in on us. As a young teenager, I became all too familiar with an enormous mule named Samson and the low tech cultivating of watermelons and tobacco.
The house lacked any sort of insulation. Two coal burning, cast iron heaters kept us from freezing. Daddy stapled sheets of plastic over the windows. That helped a little. In summer, an antique GE reciprocating fan sat on the kitchen table to keep the blistering air moving.
Lest this begins to sound like all toil and hardship, we also hunted and fished, rode bikes and flew kites. In short, we learned to love the outdoors. Daddy kept beagle hounds and we ate rabbit every way except raw, but his children caught more fish than he did. We also learned to do a lot of things for ourselves; practical things that don’t require a keyboard or touchscreen.
The little town nearby where we went to school was a hub for the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad. Your daddy either worked for the railroad or he didn’t. Ours didn’t, but we carried on more or less as equals with our contemporaries, choosing not to acknowledge social lines drawn in the sand.
Country living didn’t keep us out of trouble. The truth is all three of us siblings had a drug problem. It all started at a small building way out in the sticks, which served as a Methodist church meeting house. My mother loved that place.
In fact, she regarded it as her home away from home. So, she drug us kids there at every opportunity. She was going – and we were going.
No discussion.
When Christmas time rolled around, with only a dozen or so youngsters there, our little church always produced a special service for all who would attend. We sang, acted, read scripture and recited verse. We played it up as big and as good as a company that size could. And there were always treats at the end for young and old.
At home, Christmas meant a red cedar tree cut from nearby woods, decorated with odd ornaments and shiny foil tinsel. Our “stockings” were plain white, waxed cardboard tubs (the kind fried chicken comes in). We eagerly dove into our treasure chests to find cookies, chocolates, soft peppermints, and exotic fruits like seedless grapes and tangerines. Even as sheltered children we surely knew that the doll, the Zebco rod and reel, and the BB gun did not come down the chimney. Our folks worked extra so they could provide extra for us.
Every time I see a “Happy Holiday” or “X-mas” I laugh and think, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Like one of those old magazine cartoons where things are out of place or not quite right, the “X-mas” people are trying to leave the main character out of the story.
It is possible for a person to ignore Jesus at Christmas time and for all the rest of this lifetime for that matter. But then, the Main Character will ignore that person for all the rest of the forever story (Matthew 25: 31-46). Is it just me or does that seem like a really bad trade?
To everyone who helps produce The Angler Magazine, and all reading this, have a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!
Wilson Love is Owner/Operator of The Practical Outdoorsman.