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.