Thanks to Tina, Bobby's daughter, for this photo.  OK Tina.  When was it taken?  Where were they? Tell us about the Dukes.

Thanks to Tina, Bobby's daughter, for this photo.  OK Tina.  When was it taken?  Where were they?  Was Bobby on leave?  Anything you can tell us about the circumstances.

There's the house on the left (note how close it is to the road), the corn crib in the middle and the barn on the right.  The fields that surrounded the farm always contained corn in my memory but I think they had a few crops of cotton during my mother's youth.  This is not Hiram's place.  It was his daughter (Lola's) place but he could look down on it pretty much as the camera does in this photo and he died in that house in the bedroom on this end.

As a very young lad I was never bored cause I could climb the horse apple tree (that was just this side of the driveway and the house) or the chinaberry tree just about 15 feet behind the well house.  I have since learned that Chinaberry trees have VERY weak wood and I was lucky that the limbs didn't break.  Sometimes I spend some time playing with the bench-and-pedestal grinding wheel that Gordon and Howell used to keep their plow's, axes, hoes and knives sharp.

The grinding wheel was just outside the corn crib on the right of the crib in this photo.  The crib had a shelter to it's right for a buggy.  The outhouse though humble was essential and stood about 40-50 feet beyond the crib from this angle.   When I was very young, preschooler maybe, my uncle tried to scare me by dragging a stick over the boards of the outhouse and poking at me through the holes to convince me that the Devil was gonna git me.  Yeah we were country hicks... but we didn't know what it was to hate anybody or to want to steal what they had.

The barn was a great place to play cause it had a "hay loft" where you could day dream laying on a pile of hay or act like an idiot jumping out of the loft.  It never occured to us that we could hurt ourselves ... and we didn't.  The animals must have gotten bored in their stalls though cause sometime they would gnaw (that's country for chew) on the exposed wood when they ran out of feed.

Livestock had to be cared for so once a day they had to be let out of the barn and then rounded up for the night.  It wasn't too hard to convince them to go back to the barn cause they knew they'd be fed and watered... and the feed had molasses in it.  One year when I was somewhere around 12 to 14 a sawmill did some cutting on the land to the right which was where Gordon and Grandma's pasture was - right behind the barn, and they paid me to take care of their Percheron (HUGE SAWMILL HORSE) making sure he was fed and watered every day.  

Ah.. precious memories like hog killing day with the smell of a wood fire under the scalding pot, and practicing shooting with my new 410 shotgun right behind the house with Daddy, Howell and Gordon.  (The hog pen was between the house and the outhouse.)

It's all been torn down now and the road is paved but in my mind I can still see the iron filings hanging from my magnet when I lift it from the sand in the ditch beside the road.