Memories

I just finished watching a show about Loretta Lynn on American Masters and now I'm filled to over flowing with memories of my fifteenth summer, the year I first heard her sing.

We moved back to my mother's home town just before my senior year. It was only thirty miles from the town I called home, but that is a million miles if you can't drive.

Too young to do much else I helped out in the kitchen of my grandma's nursing home and met Millie, a woman born in a log cabin who married a mountain man from Tennessee. Millie cooked and carried me back in time where I learned to cook without cookbooks and save the leftovers for her pigs.

Her son would come pick her up at the end of each day and I would beg to go home with her. Her home was a tiny ranch house on a farm she and Ira, her husband, had bought when they got married. A fire had burned down their home and the insurance only covered enough to build a shadow of the old house. It had a bathroom, but no plumbing. The bathroom was just for show. We used the outhouse way out back.

Millie's house was where I ate my first fried green tomatoes and home butchered venison. It was where I sat under an old oak tree late on hot summer afternoons and scrubbed spark plugs with a wire brush. Her son had heavy full leg braces on both legs and he used those spark plugs in his pick up truck where he'd built his own hand controls for the gas and brake pedals. I learned to drive a pick up that summer -- with those hand pedals.

I also helped pick the corn that year. Larry, her son, drove the old McCormick tractor across those bumpy fields. I balanced behind him, holding onto the seat and weighing down the picker so it would work. Then we drove it to the elevators before going home for supper and an evening of music.

Larry played his guitar (pronounced gee-tar). His dad told stories and danced in his denim overalls and high topped shoes, stomping till the windows rattled around us. Those nights were echoes of mountain evenings going back for ages.

When we ran out of stories and steam, Larry put a record  on his player so I could hear this country singer, Loretta Lynn and I fell in love with that voice. The first song I ever heard was "Two mules  pull this wagon."

Then it would be time for him to drive me home. It was my last real summer at "home." The next year I went off to college, but on July 20, 1969 I was back for a visit and driving that truck with the hand pedals across a bridge in a thunderstorm while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The bridge washed out and we were stuck at a friend's farm house in the middle of nowhere watching that marvel on an old stat-icky television. 

Somehow that time is all woven in together when I hear Loretta Lynn sing, or see a space shuttle take off.  They marked the end of my childhood and the beginning of my adult adventures.