I was born at Athens General Hospital a few months after daddy graduated from UGA and got a job teaching agriculture at Dearing High School. He also bought the small farm where I grew up, starting a business that would grow into 11,000 laying hens and selling eggs to most stores in the area.

    The old farmhouse had an oil burning heater in front of the closed-up fireplace.  That was the only heat in the house so winter evenings meant everyone gathering in that room to talk and stay somewhat warm.  Bedtime meant burrowing down under thick homemade quilts.

    Its tin room made summer showers a symphony of lulling sounds.  No air conditioning meant open screen windows, flies in the house all summer and fans in every room.

    The house sat on rock pilings that were picked up on the farm and stacked without mortar.  If you looked closely you could see the ax marks on the hand hewn floor beams.  One end of the house sat about four feet off the sloping ground but the other end was only a few inches off the ground.

    The crawl space was a favorite place to play in the summer during the day since it was the coolest place available.  Under there doodle bug traps dotted the dry dusty soil.  Spiders were everywhere. And it was not unusual to confront the king snake that lived under there keeping us safe from poisonous snakes.

    One of the best features was the wide porch that ran the entire length of the front of the house. Almost all summer evenings had us sitting out there shelling butterbeans and black-eyed peas. 

    The porch was also a gathering place on weekends when friends or family dropped by.  It was not unusual for someone driving by to stop for a glass of sweet tea and discussions about weather, crops, children and other important issues.

    There were not many other kids my age in the area. I started 1^st grade at Dearing Elementary – one end of the same school building as Dearing High – with 25 in my class. That included every child my age in that half of McDuffie County.  But on weekends it was not unusual to have cousins near my age visiting.

    We spent the evenings playing while the adults sat on the porch.  I had a big sandbox and we built castles and tunnels in it.  The sand was dug by hand and transported by pickup from the aptly named Sand Hill Road. Catching toad frogs was an every night occurrence and we played with them like pets.

    We designed our sandcastles and tunnels for them and put quart glass jars on tunnel ends for windows to see them. We also caught fireflies and either put them in a jar or fed them to the toads, watching the light blink inside the toads stomach for some time.

    Rolling a roll-up bug in front of a toad usually resulted in a quick tongue flick and a missing bug.  They would eat anything moving in front of them so the Mark Twain story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” made sense to me when I read it.

    I remember one night getting furious when an older cousin took one of my frogs and chased a vising neighbor girl up the road with it. We could hear her screams for what seemed like miles.  But they were both interestingly quiet walking back! Turns out he was old enough to be much more interested in girls than frogs!

    We had a big wooden platform near the porch where we often cut a cold watermelon.  Mama had a big kitchen butcher knife and it was used to split the delicious cooling treat.

    The adults used knives to slice mouth size chunks of wet, red, juice-dripping joy but we kids picked up our slice and buried our face in it. We were messy but happy!

    When I was about 12 I talked mama into letting me use the big butcher knife to slice and eat my watermelon. And we both learned, I was too young to use it. For some reason after I finished I thought it would be a good idea to stab the rind with the knife.

    When I did, the knife stopped when it hit the wood under the rind. But my hand did not. Slick from juice, is slide down the handle and on down the blade.

    I can still see my hand as I opened it and saw the red gap running across my palm filling with blood.  It was quickly wrapped and I was taken to the hospital emergency room eight miles away for my first experience with stitches.

    Although growing up wild in Georgia was rough and resulted in many injuries, I survived!

    I was born at Athens General Hospital a few months after daddy graduated from UGA and got a job teaching agriculture at Dearing High School. He also bought the small farm where I grew up, starting a business that would grow into 11,000 laying hens and selling eggs to most stores in the area.

    The old farmhouse had an oil burning heater in front of the closed-up fireplace.  That was the only heat in the house so winter evenings meant everyone gathering in that room to talk and stay somewhat warm.  Bedtime meant burrowing down under thick homemade quilts.

    Its tin room made summer showers a symphony of lulling sounds.  No air conditioning meant open screen windows, flies in the house all summer and fans in every room.

    The house sat on rock pilings that were picked up on the farm and stacked without mortar.  If you looked closely you could see the ax marks on the hand hewn floor beams.  One end of the house sat about four feet off the sloping ground but the other end was only a few inches off the ground.

    The crawl space was a favorite place to play in the summer during the day since it was the coolest place available.  Under there doodle bug traps dotted the dry dusty soil.  Spiders were everywhere. And it was not unusual to confront the king snake that lived under there keeping us safe from poisonous snakes.

    One of the best features was the wide porch that ran the entire length of the front of the house. Almost all summer evenings had us sitting out there shelling butterbeans and black-eyed peas. 

    The porch was also a gathering place on weekends when friends or family dropped by.  It was not unusual for someone driving by to stop for a glass of sweet tea and discussions about weather, crops, children and other important issues.

    There were not many other kids my age in the area. I started 1^st grade at Dearing Elementary – one end of the same school building as Dearing High – with 25 in my class. That included every child my age in that half of McDuffie County.  But on weekends it was not unusual to have cousins near my age visiting.

    We spent the evenings playing while the adults sat on the porch.  I had a big sandbox and we built castles and tunnels in it.  The sand was dug by hand and transported by pickup from the aptly named Sand Hill Road. Catching toad frogs was an every night occurrence and we played with them like pets.

    We designed our sandcastles and tunnels for them and put quart glass jars on tunnel ends for windows to see them. We also caught fireflies and either put them in a jar or fed them to the toads, watching the light blink inside the toads stomach for some time.

    Rolling a roll-up bug in front of a toad usually resulted in a quick tongue flick and a missing bug.  They would eat anything moving in front of them so the Mark Twain story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” made sense to me when I read it.

    I remember one night getting furious when an older cousin took one of my frogs and chased a vising neighbor girl up the road with it. We could hear her screams for what seemed like miles.  But they were both interestingly quiet walking back! Turns out he was old enough to be much more interested in girls than frogs!

    We had a big wooden platform near the porch where we often cut a cold watermelon.  Mama had a big kitchen butcher knife and it was used to split the delicious cooling treat.

    The adults used knives to slice mouth size chunks of wet, red, juice-dripping joy but we kids picked up our slice and buried our face in it. We were messy but happy!

    When I was about 12 I talked mama into letting me use the big butcher knife to slice and eat my watermelon. And we both learned, I was too young to use it. For some reason after I finished I thought it would be a good idea to stab the rind with the knife.

    When I did, the knife stopped when it hit the wood under the rind. But my hand did not. Slick from juice, is slide down the handle and on down the blade.

    I can still see my hand as I opened it and saw the red gap running across my palm filling with blood.  It was quickly wrapped and I was taken to the hospital emergency room eight miles away for my first experience with stitches.

    Although growing up wild in Georgia was rough and resulted in many injuries, I survived!

    Growing up wild in Georgia for me meant living on a small 15-acre farm. We had 11,000 laying hens and that was our main business, selling eggs to local stores. We delivered to small mom and pop country stores that sold a few dozen each week up to the local A&P and Winn Dixie where we delivered about 30 cases of 30 dozen each, twice a week.

    We also raised hogs for the market, with a farrowing house for a dozen sows to the shelter where the pigs were fattened up for market, usually about 60 at a time. 

    For years we had two or three milk cows and I grew up drinking “raw” milk and eating “clabber,” which I found out was homemade yogurt when I went to college.    We had two ponies for my brother and I to ride and we cut hay from the field for the horses and cows. And we had a huge garden every year and mom spent hours so we could eat canned and frozen vegetables all winter.

    Although there was some kind of work to do on the farm every day during the summer, I spent many hours building tree houses and huts in the woods with my friends Harold and Hal.  They ranged from simple platforms with two or three boards nailed to branches somewhat parallel to the ground to elaborate sleeping structures in the trees.

    We often labored for hours dragging boards, hammers and nails to the selected tree. Many of my tree houses were built with old barn boards from one we tore down when I was about six years old. And many of my nails were straightened after being pulled from those boards.

    My friend Harold’s parents owned a planer where trees were cut into rough planks then planed down to smooth building wood. When Harold was involved, we had access to good wood, sometimes rough cut but often planed boards that were culled for some reason, usually a bend in them. But they worked great for treehouse and huts.

    We built a huge – to us – platform in a big pine in the woods behind Harold’s house.  It was about 200 yards from the back of his barn where the road access ended.   It was about 12 feet square and so high we put side boards around it to make sure we didn’t fall out. That was the only one we ever did that, all the others were low enough they didn’t scare us.

    We spend a lot of hard work pulling boards up with a rope then nailing them in place.  One time we carried our sleeping bags to the tree planning on sleeping way up there but chickened out and slept on the ground under the tree.

    That made us decide we needed a structure on the ground.  Someone had the bright idea to build a prefab hut and carry the walls and roof down in sections rather than make multiple trips with individual boards.

    That was not a great idea. The three room walls were about five feet square and the top a little bigger to overhand the front.  They were heavy!  It probably took us longer dragging each one a few feet and stopping to catch our breaths than it would have taken to haul individual boards to the site.

    Harold, Hal and I spent a few nights sleeping in that hut.  But we ended up with so much stuff like dry firewood, emergency canned food, matches in a jar and other essentials for wilderness living inside we eventually had to put up our pup tents to camp and just use the hut for storage.

    My favorite tree house was in a pecan tree in front of our house on Iron Hill Road.  It was beside the ditch so only a few feet from the road. And it was very simple, three or four short boards nailed between limbs of a fork that ran out toward the road. 

    Short boards nailed to the tree trunk made my ladder to get to it.  That platform was just big enough for me to sit with my back against the tree or lie on my stomach and read.  I usually had a cool breeze and was well hidden from the people in the cars that I watched as they rode by. 

    Many deer stands now are more complex and detailed than our tree houses back then. But they served our purpose of a place in nature to get away from everything.  My parents were far from “helicopter” parents. As long as I got my chores done I was free to roam until supper time, and I did almost every day.

    I am afraid those kinds of days are mostly gone for most kids.

    My youth was a perfect mixture of strict discipline and growing up wild in Georgia.  It prepared me for having a balanced life where I worked hard and did the best I could at my job, but my free time was mine.  I could concentrate fully on my job during the workday but forget it and do what I wanted the rest of the time. It has served me well in retirement, too.

    From about six years old I had responsibilities on the farm that went along with my age. I helped gather eggs from our 11,000 laying hens, cleaned out watering troughs that ran the length of the chicken houses by running a broom down them from one end to the other, and putting graded eggs in cartons.

    Those jobs increased in complexity and effort as I got older.  But not all were hard work.  I loved taking my semiautomatic rifle with the high-capacity magazine that I got for Christmas when I was eight years old that was loaded with .22 rat shot to the chicken houses each morning.  Four of the houses had big open feed bins and during the night wharf rats would get trapped in them.  I would climb up to the top, shoot any rats inside, then grab them by the tail and take them to the dead chicken dump hole.

    That same .22 rifle or my trusty .410 single shot shotgun accompanied me on my morning and afternoon pre and post school and weekend trips to the woods during the fall and winter.  Most anything was fair game, squirrels and rabbits during season and birds the rest of the time.

    It was not unusual for me to leave the house on Saturday morning at daylight and return home at dark, exhausted, dirty, hungry and happy.  I took some snacks like potted meat, Vienna sausage or sardines with some Saltines or Ritz crackers but that was never enough, although I supplemented it with roasted birds and a pocket full of pecans when they were falling.

    Spring and summer were fishing times.  Rather than my .22, I would carry my Zebco 33 rod and reel or later my Mitchell 300 outfit and small tackle box with me and walk or ride my bicycle to local farm ponds and fish all day.  Or I would go down to Dearing branch with some fishing line and a small fly in my pocket. 

I made the flies with chicken feathers and some of mama’s sewing thread, and they looked awful.  I would dangle them from the end of my rod, a stick that I had cut in the woods.  And the tiny bream and horny heads in the branch thought they were food often enough to make fishing for them productive.

Summer also brought the wondrous time of having many full days to spend wild.  My friends and I would camp out, starting near the house in the back yard at eight years old them moving deeper into the woods each summer.  Cooking food over a campfire was always an experience, and it never was cooked right, but there was never a crumb left!

We built tree houses, forts, “cabins” in the woods that kept out neither rain nor wind, and traps for non-existent animals.  We dammed Dearing Branch, sometime making a pool deep enough to come up waist high on a 13-year-old skinny dipper.

We chased toad frogs and fireflies at night until bedtime.  The adults often sat around on the porch after dinner and we kids, not tired enough from a full day of activities, would run around in the dark, chasing toads, fireflies and each other.

I hate that those days seem to be gone. I can not imagine someone 100 years from now sitting at a computer writing about a video game they played as a kid!