Chesnut Hill
The Early Years
by
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Mama was sitting at the kitchen table when my sister Hannah’s screams rang out! She ran out the kitchen door and across the lawn to the big pecan tree at the southeast side of the house. There Hannah lay writhing in pain. She had fallen from the tree and grated her entire backside from her neck to her knees, on the trunk, as she fell. She was a bloody mess! Mama gathered her up and rushed toward the house. I trailed behind with my eyes trained on the ground. The sight of blood wasn’t something that I handled well.
As we walked under the next pecan tree mama didn’t notice Ruth hanging on to an upper branch.
Hannah was gently laid on the bed and mama began to carefully remove her torn clothes so she could doctor her back. She didn’t let up in her crying, so at first we didn’t hear more frantic screams from outside. Suddenly, mama dropped the bloody towel and dashed out the door.
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About the Book
This book is a collection of short stories, poetry and recipes gleaned from the “Growing Up Years” of the nineteen-thirties, forties and fifties, on Chesnut Hill. I was born in the big old white clapboard house where we lived. It was a large, airy, cool house in summer…and in winter! When frigid temperatures came; and they did, even though it was Florida, and the wind whistled around the corners, we gathered around a cozy wood fire sipping hot chocolate and later slept warmly, bundled under ‘fourteen or so’ handmade quilts. It was altogether a perfectly lovely place to spend a childhood !
Daddy was a Rural Mail Carrier and mama stayed home to ‘cope’ with our frequent, wild adventures.
We children, presented a constant challenge. We weren’t exactly bad… just very creative…and we didn’t have TV to divert our attention. As a result, we came up with lots of ‘fun’ things to occupy our time. For instance, we went wading in a lime rock sink hole one summer and caught ourselves a baby alligator which we hauled home in a washtub full of water. We thought he’d make a cute “pet”! But, can you believe that our daddy didn’t agree? His reaction was something like, “ Where there’s a baby gator…there’s a mama gator!”
We were just country kids, in an environment where we were allowed to stretch our imaginations although we did have certain rules. We were not rich in material things and mostly had to “make do” with what we had but we were a pretty ingenuous bunch of kids.
Come and travel back in time, to the days of my sojourn as a very precocious inquisitive child. Experience the poignant nostalgia of the sad and happy times our family lived on Chesnut Hill!
About the Author
This author was born in the quiet little southern town of
Art and writing have always been special interests. She taught scores of children the art of creative writing. She has written copy for a local radio station; reported for an Alabama newspaper; has numerous short stories and poems; wrote a cake decorating manual; was published in the Best Poems and Poets of 2003; wrote and directed a children’s operetta, “It’s for the Birds!” in 2001.
She and her husband have one son and recently celebrated forty-eight years of marriage. She laughingly says, “I’m the only person I know who grew; got married; moved across the street and still lives there, forty-eight years later. I’ve traveled other places...but never had any desire to live anywhere else.”