About With Glenn

Glenn at
the gap























woodpile
fort

by the cowpond



















cornfield

Dickson Farm

Lilac in May. Behind that is the potato house. The potatoes were in bushel baskets on a platform off the dirt floor, and Mamaw's canning was on rough plank shelves along the wall by the door. It smelled like clean dirt and creek banks and shade.

Smokehouse. After the cold had settled in, more than just a frost or two, they'd slaughter some hogs. For days the house smelled of it. My grandmother made sausage and they salted hams and slabs of bacon. While the meat was fresh there were pork chops and, my favorite still, tenderloin, and my grandmother grumbled and worried at us all not to make ourselves sick eating all that fresh meat. When the smoking started, it was small, slow fires of hickory, banked to burn long and smoky. The cracks were stopped up in the building and all that smoke permeated the wood as much as the meat, so that long afterward the scent stayed. Before I saw this picture, I had been wondering where apples came from: that's an apple tree there in front of the garden. That's Daddy with the Camel in his hand and Glenn with the lapful of puppies.













Corn crib and the barn pond. The corn crib was built like a log cabin, notched logs. It was set up off the ground and there was metal flashing around to keep rats out of the corn that was supposed to go to feed the chickens and hogs. There was a sort of lean to on either side of the main section. One side sheltered some tools like the plow and cultivator, and the other side held the wagon. We decorated the walls of the shed with pages torn from magazines and catalogues borrowed from the outhouse, stuck them onto nailheads and splinters. The wagon itself could be anything or nothing more than a place to climb or to sit and be dusty away from grownups.














This is from Uncle Will's room, which was part of our play ground. Not very strong on private property. That's Larry Joe with the BB gun. Chicken house, some old saw I never saw in use, potato house. The BB gun reminds me: The steps to the upstairs were just framed, not finished, and between the studs people hung spare overalls and jackets and there was always a 410 and a 22 leaning there with shells and bullets on a ledge above them. All the kids there were running around and not one of us bothered the guns. The closest we ever came to that was when we found some shotgun shells in Uncle Will's foot locker and proceeded to drop them one by one into the well [which was shallow and rock-lined] in the hope that one would go off like a cap pistol. The shells didn't go off, but our mothers did.

Dickson County City Girl

Here are a few I didn't take myself, the only ones with me in them:











Me with Papaw Yates. The well is in the background. The oak tree beside us was the most important thing in the yard. My cousins and I played cowboys and Indians around it (I wanted to be an Indian when I grew up). My Uncle Will's funeral was held in its shade. Nothing much grew around it, but then it wasn't a very fertile farm. Two mules, four or five cows for milk and butter and heifers to sell, hogs to butcher when it was cold enough.












Uncle Will, Wilburn, was a batchelor, which was a shame because he was better with kids than any of his brothers (and among them they had plenty). He took care of the farm for my grandparents. He had hound dogs: fox hounds and coon hounds, and he and his neighbors went out on clear fall nights and listened to the dogs run. They'd have a fire and tell lies and (I have reason to suspect) pass around a Mason jar. The only thing I knew him to bring back from one of those evenings was a fox kit in a burlap sack. He brought it into the living room and tipped it out onto the floor. It was small and scared and I wanted to make a pet of it. Uncle Will used his pen knife to cut a chew of tobacco off a plug and with the same knife whittled bits of twig to fit in spools for me to use as twirling tops or dolls. He died after he got caught in the rain riding my mare Gypsy to McEwen to be bred, and my grandmother blamed the horse, not being the sort to blame the child. During his wake the men sat out all night in folding chairs in the front yard and the women in the front room. It was all a quiet buzz. Upstairs, I couldn't sleep. I'd look out the front window and watch the cigarettes flare and burn, go out, and start up again.




Me. Coming and going.