Beside the store was an old unpainted, flat-roofed house where we lived. I don’t think it had ever been painted. It had tarpaper tacked to the sides. It really wasn't much of a house, but Mom, always proving you could do a lot with a little, kept it so neat and clean, it really was delightful. The house had a small kitchen with a wood burning stove, a small dining room, a small living room that also had a bed in it, and, two small bedrooms. Everything in the little house was small - - but, we loved it. I actually remember more about living there than at the farm.
There was no water in the house. No cistern. No well. No pump. No water. No Nothing! Our water came from a “spring” at our next-door neighbor’s house. It was the mine and Wayne’s job to take a couple of buckets each day, walk the nearly half mile to our neighbor’s house, dip those buckets into the big hole of water made by the spring and carry them back to our house. There, Mom would preserve the water for drinking, cooking and baths. When it got low, off we would go to our neighbor’s place and their spring for more water. I’ll never forget that spring. It was fascinating.
The spring was about 100 yards from our neighbor’s house in a valley-like low spot in a field next to their house. There was a little small 15 feet by 15 feet building and in that building was the spring. There were lots of rock around the spring. There were big one-foot and two-foot boulders, and in the middle of those boulders was a spring or water about four feet by four feet wide and about one foot deep.
The water was the clearest, cleanest, coldest, best-tasting water anywhere. It was kept in stainless steel buckets on the counter in the kitchen with a dipper close by. A dipper is a metal coffee-cup-lookin’’ thing with a long handle on it. We’d take that dipper, reach down in that old bucket and get our drinking water. We all drank out of the same dipper. It was there at the spring of our neighbors that Wayne and I would fill our buckets and tote them back to our house. On occasions, Mom would stash our milk there in that cold spring water to keep it cold.
A spring of water flows all of the time. Water seeps up out of the ground from an underground source of water resulting in an endless supply of water lasting decades or, for what I know, centuries. The water usually forms a puddle or little pond of water on the top of the ground. The water then flows off into a creek-like stream of water. Since the water is always flowing, fresh water is constantly being added and the stale water is being displaced down the stream so the water is always fresh and clean and good tasting.
One of the bedrooms of the house was very, very small. It was the one in the very back of the house. It was just large enough for a small twin bed and, as I have heard Carroll say on many occasions, you could lay in bed and stretch yours arms out and touch the walls on both sides.
And, again, as was the case at the farm, there was no indoor plumbing. The outhouse here was about a hundred feet from the back door. It was not near as nice as the one up at the farm that had two holes. This one was one-holer. On the other hand, we had two! There was one that sat beside the store. It, too, was about 100 feet from the house. If you had to go, you could always find one of them empty. I suppose us having two outhouses made us pretty classy in those days. Most folks only had one!
I have great memories of this home. It wasn't very pretty but it was “clean as a whistle”, as they would say, and it was a fun house. There were always people coming and going at the store so there was always some activity around. You always had someone to talk to and as a kid that was a pretty big deal. It was fun to sit around the store and listen to adults talk adult-type stuff like politics, religion, farming, etc. I learned a lot from them.
It's funny how little things or little incidents serve to remind you of events, places and things that, otherwise, you probably would have forgotten. Things that really don’t have anything specific to do with the place or thing you are talking about.
One of the memories of this house was when Dad gave me my last spanking. It was really a whipping but I hesitate to use that word because today (1994) that seems to imply "child abuse". I, quite frankly, and very simply, got whipped on this occasion and I deserved it and, make no mistake, Dad whipped me for only one reason - he loved me!
It was a Sunday and I had asked to go to the Sunday evening church services. The Clear Springs Methodist Church was about 2 miles from our house and the store, an easy walk for a 14-year old. On the way there I had to pass the house of a young girl that did not have a good reputation in the community. She was what they called in those days - loose! On the way to church I stopped to "chat" with this young lady and went off to romp in the hay (so to speak!). While we were chatting and romping in the hay (so to speak!), the first thing I knew, church services were over and I hadn't made it to church.
In a small rural community, everyone knows everyone, and lo and behold, one of the other churchgoers informed Dad that I never made it to church! Oh, was Dad mad! When he got to me, the belt was already off and I got exactly what I deserved - a good whipping! After that, you better believe, when I told Dad I was going to church, I went to church. As I recall, that was the last whipping Dad gave me. There were many, many more that I deserved, but Dad thought I was too old for whippings. While that was my last whipping, we had many, many "talks" when I didn't live up to Dad's standards. Sometimes the talks were worse than the whippings.
Lest I be misunderstood, Dad's whippings were never that bad. Yes, they hurt. Yes, they left some red marks. Yes, they helped me know right from wrong. Yes, I deserved them. And, no, no, no, he never, never abused me.
While we lived there, in that tiny, little, flat-roofed, tar-papered house, there was another incident I recall that, for some reason, I associate with this house, although the house itself had absolutely nothing to do with it. A couple of us kids (we were around 12 years old) had gone off into the fields to play. There were literally hundreds of acres of land to wander around on. This was farming country and most of the fields were pretty well cleared of trees so we could wander as we please without fear of getting lost. On one of these trips we came upon a nest ofd baby skunks.
I had read where someone had "de-skunked" skunks and made house pets out of them. The article made it sound fairly simple. You cut a one-inch long incision on each side of its butt, locate a little sac there, surgically remove that sac and you had an odor free skunk.
We caught the little fellows, used a razor blade to perform the surgery, located and removed the little sacs (they were exactly where the article said they would be!). As I recall, we "worked" on three of them. One died within a couple of days and the other two escaped before we could find out how our experiment worked. It was not a proud time in my life. It was cruel and harsh to the little baby skunks. I've often regretted that little incident in my life. On the other hand, what we had done bothered me so much, that I developed a very deep sensitivity towards wild animals. I really hate to see any animal killed.
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