Recently, I had the privilege of revisiting several of the places where my childhood memories have taken me in the stories from the Cotton Patch. It was a rewarding visit, complete with the nostalgia that we experience when we realize that those times of the past are only memories. The joy of the experience was made greater by the presence of two of my sisters, who have shared in my memories, and my husband who has encouraged me to write about them.
The Piney Chapel community was the place where we moved in with the bedbugs and waged an all-out war to get them out of the crevices of our beaded ceiling walls and where our mother persistently treated us for scabies every time we scratched. It was there that my anger got the best of me and I hit a first grade classmate in the head with a piece of coal for following me and singing, “She’s My Curly Headed Baby”. Of all the events that I have recounted that had nothing to do with cotton, most of them occurred in this little corner of Limestone County, Alabama.
As we drove around looking for familiar sights, we were dismayed by the changes in and the loss of many buildings, but we were equally amazed at the unchanged condition of others. Sixty-four years ago, I was running around playing on the swing sets and climbing on the monkey bars of the school that still exists. A small area of the schoolyard was familiar, but the addition of many buildings has displaced the teacherage in which we lived. The house had been about halfway between the school and the church building, and, although we missed it the first time we drove by, the church building is still there. It is not so magnificent a place as I remembered it, but it gave me a thrill to see it. Best of all, diagonally across the street stood the house where the Broadways lived.
We could not believe how little this neighbor’s house had changed. The cellar, with its sloping tin door, was there, validating my memories of sliding down the cellar door and singing, “Come Out My Playmates, come out and play with me…and bring your dollies, three…climb up my apple tree..shout down my rain barrel….slide down my cellar door, and we’ll be jolly friends forevermore….”! Windows that opened out over the roof of the front porch reminded me of times Rebecca and I had played “dress-up” in that upstairs room.
We left Piney Chapel and went west of Athens to the very rural community of Oxford Elementary School and Pleasant Valley Church. On the way, we tried to find an old favorite spot for swimming and fishing. We almost despaired of finding it, but eventually, we got our thrill of knowing that we had located it. The “end” of the backwaters from the river and two streams through which we had driven before they put culverts across the road were foolproof evidences that it was “our” spot.
A few miles from the river we located the old homeplace of one of my dad’s aunts. Some of her children and grandchildren established homes on nearby farms, and we were able to recognize a few. One that I was most interested in was Ross Holland’s home that had sat among some big shade trees and had a porch that went around two or three sides of the house. The porch always intrigued me and I thought the house was handsome. Well, it has changed a great deal and if houses could shrink, I would say it has shrunk to about half of its original size!
I saw fields where I had picked cotton and the barn looked the same as I remembered it. There were cows in a pasture and the country store building across the street is still useful. Except for the house itself and the paved street, the place looks as if life has continued in the same way for sixty years.
Oxford school no longer exists, but the concrete bell tower that I watched being built is still standing, and the teachers’ home where we lived looks very much the same. It was here I had the great Halloween scare and in turn frightened my parents by hiding so successfully. It was here my father taught me in fifth and sixth grades. It was here we lived between an aunt and a great aunt whose houses appear so wonderfully unchanged.
Time is forever moving forward, never backward, and so our experiences come and are gone. We will never relive a moment of time, but our memories enable us to vicariously play pleasant scenes and emotions over again and again.