The Boy Who Loved School
Up on Silver Creek, the blackberry bushes grew taller on the east side of the hill. The dew came off them sooner and the berries enjoyed the sunlight for a longer time. The remains of an old orchard, planted by the first white settlers, shielded the fruit from the bluebirds. “My mother would help my sister Kathryn and I pick a vessel full of berries, then she would start home to start a batch of jelly on the wood stove.”...
Quick Remembrances from Fountain Creek
Yesterday I was driving my 95 year-old daddy Brother Jack White to Sonny Willis’s kennel in Lewisburg. Sonny has a training ground on his place and I was taking my dad for the sole purpose of showing off my German Shorthaired Pointer, Zula the Dog. It was an hour round trip so I had plenty of opportunity to hear my dad’s old stories about Maury County in the 20s and 30s. Most all of them I’d heard before about 127...
Miss Hattie
In 1958, when my grandmother Hattie Mitchell White became a widow, she “broke up housekeeping” and moved to Lewisburg to live with her daughter Kathryn and son-in-law Edwin Scott. In fact, Edwin built accommodations, a bedroom and bathroom, on the back of his house for her. “Granny” cooked all the meals and did all the laundry for the household. She paid her way and was proud of it. She read the Bible every day and worked on crochet,...
The Drunkard
note: The names in this story — except for my own family — have been changed to protect descendants of the others who I grew up with. One night my dad Jack White and his father Bob were walking home from a tobacco sale. It was dark and cold and as they rambled over the tall, rocky hills toward their home in Scribner’s Mill, Bob was most aware of the wad of bills he carried in his coat pocket. Jack was about ten and...
Decoration Day
Decoration Day at my family cemetery, Haynes, has taken place on Mother’s Day weekend for as long as anyone can remember – which includes the recollection of my 94 year-old dad. As a boy, he chopped brush and pushed a reel mower to prepare the grounds. Haynes is located in the Scribner Mill community of Maury County, Tennessee. My dad grew up on a farm across from Haynes which, by the 1930s, was a resting place for several of his kin...