There were no lawns at the Little House. Grass was not allowed in the yards. The yards were keep clean with a “brush-broom”. A brush-broom was made of bushes that grew down in the branch head. They were cut off at the ground, the bottoms were bound together in a bundle, and the bushy tops used as a broom to sweep the yard.
There were trees in the yard. One was near enough the front porch so that you could climb right up on tin roof of the house, and, of course, we did. The house had a tin roof and we had a radio. Daddy figured out that if he hooked the radio antenna to the tin roof, reception was improved. But somehow electricity was involved. So, sometimes when we climbed the tree to get on the roof, we got a little shock!
If you went out the back door of the Little House, and turned to the right, you were looking at the “bus body.” Daddy had been the school bus driver, and owned the bus. When he quit driving, he took the body off the chassis, to use at the Little House. He had built a brick furnace in it to build a fire to keep baby chickens warm. There was also a brooder and a run pen, and I don’t remember exactly how all that worked, or if there were different operations at different times. But the bus body was a fine place to play, and behind the bus body, well, that was “out of doors.”
The most interesting story about the bus body concerns a rat. Daddy had some fine half grown chickens in the bus body. Then at night, something started getting in there and killing them. Daddy got some kind of wire trap, determined to catch the varmint. He did, and it was a big ole rat. Daddy was furious. At that time, before I was born, he had some kind of vehicle. Mamma’s sister, Aunt Maggie was there visiting, and got to see and tell about it all. Daddy decided that the rat clearly deserved not only execution, but punishment. So, Daddy devised a scheme to hook the wire trap, rat and all, up to the spark plug wire on the vehicle. Only problem was that he couldn’t see the rat dancing! He suggested that Mama hold the contraption up with the rat in it! Fortunately, Mama had better sense, but Aunt Maggie really got a charge (of a different kind than what Mama would have gotten) out of the suggestion!
The bus body was used for chickens before we had a chicken house. The chicken house was built, at least in part from old material salvaged from Aunt Pinini’s house. But I haven’t told about Aunt Pinini yet.
If you went out on the front porch, and looked to the right, you would see the Orchard. There were lots of peach trees, a few apply trees, and a couple of pear trees. One of the pear trees lived for many years, long after we departed the little house. Switches off the peach trees were a convenient alternative to the dog belt. But Mama never collected an arsenal of peach switches and leaned them in a corner for convenient access, the way Aunt Runnie did for Montez, Zenoma and Franklin!
To get to the garden, you had to walk out in front of the house, veer to the west, around the top of the branch head valley west of the house. The garden was on the other side of that draw. That’s where butterbeans, tomatoes, peas, Irish potatoes, radishes, peppers and lots of other great vegetables found their origin.
One year, Daddy cleared new ground for a watermelon patch down at the bottom of the hill below the garden on the other side of the draw. He broke it up, plowed a deep furrow, filled the furrow with manure from the cow pen, and covered it over. He planted Black Diamond watermelons and cantaloupes. The hills (the place where you planted the seeds) were six or eight feet apart, and after the seeds were planted, were covered with newspaper with a rock on top to keep rats from digging up the seeds! Watermelons were an important part of social life, as I will explain later.
Uncle Earl’s house was across the branch, about a quarter mile east of our house. But there was a well-worn footpath that went straight to it. You left the side yard of the Little House, went down the hill just south of the orchard, crossed the pasture fence, and went through the pine thicket to the branch. There was a board that spanned the branch, so you could walk right over, pass just north of the cow pen, go up the hill, cross the pasture fence again, into Uncle Earl’s yard, just south of his smokehouse.
There was also a road that went to Uncle Earl’s and from there turned left and went almost straight to big road, about a half mile away. The road from the Little House to Uncle Earl’s followed an arc out onto Mr. Frank Pierce’s place around the top side of the valley that contained the branch. A spring the gave rise to the branch. It was down below the road to to Uncle Earls, to the south. The road followed the contour of the land, and was about level, all the way to Uncle Earl’s. It had two ruts, worm by wagon, and the occasional automobile or truck and the school bus, that was driven by Mr. Maudie Pierce, the first grade teacher’s husband.
Right in front of the Little House, across the small front yard, was the sweet gum tree. Its rosin was a decent substitute for chewing gum. Mama made homemade tooth brushes from the twigs. She worked the fibers around, so that the end of the twig was a little like a brush. We couldn’t afford real tooth brushes, and didn’t like them anyway. I remember defiantly breaking one that Mama got for me. Dog belt time!
The sweet gum tree, and a small tree—oak I think—just beyond it hosted a wisteria vine. In the spring, the blue blossoms of the wisteria, hanging a little like grapes on a grape vine, were absolutely gorgeous.
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