July 17, 2021
I’m back in Corryton taking a short break from the writing while my step mom is here visiting from Raleigh, NC with her husband James.
I left Winchester Thursday and stayed over in Jasper with cousins. On my way out on Friday I stopped at the house of my mom’s oldest living cousin, Patsy. She is 89 and lives on the hill, which is what we always called the homestead in Jasper where Aunt Bernice and Uncle Hoyle, her parents, lived during the era of big family gatherings.
Aunt Bernice, the oldest of grandma’s ten siblings, was the main yardstick for my growth as a youth. She was short, my same height for many years and whenever I arrived at her door she would give me a big hug which was very much like hugging a big feather pillow. She smelled of the earth and the pillow, the old house and everything that grew there.
“My goodness you are shooting up like a pole bean,” she’d say. She knew a lot about pole beans because she always grew them in the garden with tomatoes and okra, corn and whatever else you can think of. In back was a sunken, cool, house for keeping row upon row of quart mason jars of canned vegetables.
I remember my stages of growth based on Aunt Bernice: looking up to her, being eye to eye (my favorite because I could really see the love) and then towering over her. Uncle Hoyle was 6’2’’. Next to her 4’8” they were an interesting looking couple.
When I arrived at their house on the hill I would sometimes see Uncle Hoyle in the field plowing with two mules that he walked behind in his blue overalls. Uncle Hoyle smelled of and chewed Red Ox tobacco which he cut from a coil. I had a hard time understanding anything he said except “Come over here boy,” which sounded like “Cumor hur boa.” His lips barely moved when he spoke. The words were a mule-talking mystery to me. I was afraid of him. I remember he once put me on his tall knee after I “came over there” and I immediately squirmed and slid down.
Mom gave him blanket permission to whip my butt if I started being a bad boy and so I always gave him a wide berth. He never did give me a whippin’ but he did once get up from the slider on the front porch, walk down under the big, shade tree and say, “Cumor hur boa”.
I’m not sure what kind of nonsense I’d been involved in, but it must have been annoying to a man who moved with the slow deliberation of early shudder photographs meant to show human motion.
He pointed to a limb high above my head and said, “See that limb?”.
I was aided in understanding him by the fact that it was a short sentence and he was pointing directly at the object. I nodded yes.
“Grab a hold of it,” he said.
He lifted my little body above his head. I grabbed the limb. Then he let go and walked away. The ground was very far below.
Correction: The favorite tree I showed in my post two days ago is a redbud not a rosebud. Specifically, it is called a Rising Sun Redbud.
Spotty West Goes East 