Once Upon A Neighborhood

L-R Steve (holding Rip), me (holding Tiger), and Freddy
1962




"There are "friends" who destroy each other, but a real friend sticks closer than a brother." (Prov. 18:24)

Five small houses under a thicket of trees made up our neighborhood, which stretched down a gravel road along the lower brow of Lookout Mountain. Earlier that summer, the Public Works Department had covered the dry-dust potholes and rainy-day mud with crushed Fort Payne chert, a light-olive-gray limestone blasted from the mountainside at the hometown quarry. The hard, sharp rocks leveled the road for cars, alright, but made for many a bloody knee in bicycle wrecks.

We followed a trail into the woods to a pine-bough teepee. Fresh cut evergreens perfumed the warm June air. 

Yesterday, Mark (who would turn ten before school started back in the fall) had chopped down pine saplings with his new hatchet and stripped the limbs. Freddy, Steve, and I helped him lean the bare trunks against a tall hickory. We covered the wood frame with thick-needled branches, leaving a gap in the front for the doorway.

At the hut, Steve set a rusty bucket on the ground. Buttercup bulbs “borrowed” from Grandmother Eberhart’s flowerbed filled it to the brim. 

~

Grandmother Eberhart’s flowerbed sat beside house number one in the neighborhood where Freddy and Steve’s grandparents, Aunt Evelyn, and Uncle Norman lived. It had two kitchens—a small one for everyday cooking and a spacious one for canning vegetables in the summertime and making the best popcorn balls and candied apples in the state of Alabama at Halloween.

Ten-year-old Freddy and nine-year-old Steve Eberhart lived in house number two with their parents, two dogs, Snowball and Willie Bo Jokin’, and Wilbur Sifter—a little stuffed monkey that held a place of prominence on Steve’s bookshelf.

The Fred Raymond family lived in house number three with one teenage daughter and two mean collies, Prissy and Teakie, that barked, growled, and showed their vicious teeth when anybody passed by. Oftentimes, the kids in the neighborhood cut through the woods to avoid their grumpy dogs. 

Mark and I lived in house number four with our parents, Winfred and Verna Watson, and our older brother, Rocky. Rocky was almost fourteen and liked to spend his summer days playing baseball with friends at an empty corner lot on Forest Avenue near our grandparents’ house down in the valley between Lookout Mountain and Sand Mountain. But the second week of summer vacation, his life changed big-time. Daddy woke him up at the crack of dawn one morning and announced that Rocky had a new job, working for him as an abstractor (somebody who sits at the courthouse all day checking title history on real estate property). Daddy said, “Boy, you’ll never go hungry if you know how to abstract.”

Two hunting dogs, Sue (the best pointer in DeKalb County) and Rip, also lived at our house along with Mama Cat, a black and orange stray that showed up one rainy Halloween night. After that night, a bunch of kittens showed up at house number four a couple times each year. (Last summer, Mama Cat “married” a wild lynx from the woods. One kitten from the litter, Blue Boy, had a bobbed tail.)

Past the first four houses, the road crooked and twisted for about a mile along the rocky bluff until it dead-ended at house number five where the Winters family lived with five teenagers and no telephone. (My family shared a party-line with the Eberharts and the Raymonds.)

Because city water had yet to make it up the mountain, each house in the neighborhood had its own well. Daddy was really good at building stuff and fixing things, so he rigged a red light on our well house to signal low-water levels. Nobody dared turn on a faucet or flush the one toilet or take a “navy” shower when the light was on, which happened practically every day. Rocky had spent every birthday wish since he was two years old hoping for ample water.

Once Upon A Neighborhood, 

A Fort  Payne, Alabama Story

Coming spring, 2020

Deep Sea Publishers, LLC in Bradenton, Florida