My first memories existed in a two-story clapboard farmhouse with a tin roof.
We didn't have cows. I think we had chickens. No pigs except for the hog farm run by my uncle who had something to do with the Piggly Wiggly. I knew about the hog farm because I went there years later. This is after we had left the two-story clapboard farmhouse with a the tin roof.
My uncle (not the one who owned the hog farm, but another one who must have agreed to feed them for him) would pull up in this smelly old truck with rotting tomatoes in the back. We were told we could pick the good tomatoes out and the rest were headed to the hog farm. We ran inside and grabbed our garbage bags. Free tomatoes! Then, we climbed into the back of the open pick-up being very careful not to get the squishy tomatoes on our clothes.
You think the truck was smelly? The hog farm was much worse but it was interesting to see one for the first time. We had to be very careful not to fall into the styes but how cute it was to see them run over to the troughs and slurp up those smelly tomatoes. Now I know why I hate flies so much.
Our two-story clapboard house was actually owned by my great-grandmother and great-grandfather who was no longer with us. My grandmother stayed there and that's where after I was born lived there until I was seven.
It's miraculous but even at that young age, memories are clear and vivid.
I remember sitting at what must have been a bar...don't remember it being a table and the train would blow in rattling everything on the walls. The kids next door who would visit their grandmother would come by and we'd put pennies on the tracks hoping the train would flatten them. They became our lucky pennies.
Were they the good ol' days? If not, then why are designers designing homes with the farmhouse theme? Because it was a simple life - hard yet simple. No computers. No cell phones. No color TV. Some had black and white if you were rich enough.
Would I want to go back? Hell yeah.
