HIDDEN FROM THE PAST

Tarrytown, Georgia is a small and quiet town. It has a small population, a little sheriff's office, and a mayor that has multiple positions in the town hall The town also has a small clinic with a doctor, that should have retired long ago, and two nurses.                                                                        

The Faith Christian Middle School serves as the community church for the small town.  It's bell could be heard throughout the town when it rings at the end of school days, and Sunday mornings.                                                       

Today started a beautiful day; a special day for Rosetta Jackson. It was the first day of spring, and also Rosetta's thirteenth birthday.  She and her two friends, Mia and Sarah plan to go peach and apple picking once school lets out.  During school lunch hour, Mia and a few other classmates walked behind their school, through a wooded path, to a dirt road where she plans to take Rosetta and Sarah to pick fruit that hung over crooked fences. When Mia went back to class, she managed to convince the girls to go with her that way home today, so they could fill their bags with the fruits that she spotted earlier.                                                

The three girls live on the same street. Their houses not far from one another.  They usually go home the same way everyday, by way of Soperton highway; the way most of the middle school kids walk home, if they are not being picked up by their parents, or getting on the big yellow school bus.                                                                                                                             

After the bell sounded, The three girls walked around the schoolyard, cutting through the wooded path that led to the dirt road that Mia told them about. Rosetta told Sarah and Mia that she didn't mind going with them as long as she get home before father come from work and her begins to worry about her; which is something she told her friends that her mother seems to always do.  The three girls came out of the wooded path, to a long dirt road. Old Kibbie Road. The road runs two and a half miles through the south side of Tarrytown; revealing unfinished fences,and paint peeling off most of the backs of the the old Victorian homes and ceder shacks. Most of the homeowners showed little interest in caring for the backs of their homes. They only kept the front of their houses painted, and their front yards trimmed.                                                                                     

Majority of the yards along that road has wild gardens, honeysuckle bushes, weeds and old wooden fences. The fruit trees have been in those yards for so long, that the roots to those trees caused most of the homes foundations to crack, leaving them slightly slanted.                                               

The girls started picking fruit, going from fence to fence, tree to tree, stuffing their bags.  The sun beamed high and bright. The girls continued stuffing, and joking about how some of the yards have old rusty pick-up trucks in them, looking like part of the landscape; the way the flowers and wild weeds grew around the tires and windowless windows of the vehicles.