My Birthplace

It was June 21, 1943 when my mother took to bed in the front bedroom right off the porch and gave birth to me. A neighbor, Mrs. Ailene Prescott, came to assist mother along with Dr. Charles Hayes. Dr. Hayes picked me up after the birth and guessed I weighed 7 pounds, and we've claimed that weight ever since. Hoyt and Herschel were sent off from home that day to be with neighbors to play or visit.

The little house pictured above is not the actual house that I was born in, but it is a neighboring house with the side porch added on. It is just like the little government house I was born in, without the side porch. My actual house is now brick and spreading out due to nice additions, and right down the road a piece.

Imagine me in a few years, say four, standing at the front door or window looking out and seeing Daddy walking across the front yard coming to the house with a red tricycle in his left hand and you will be visualizing the first memory I can remember. The blog before this shows me a little later on that tricycle, after we moved to the Holland Place on Route 4, Elba, AL.

I have heard through the years that it was in the backyard of this homeplace that my brothers took me up into a tree with them to sit on a limb. Mother didn't like that a bit.

It wasn't too long ago that I took mother and we rode down to see the old homeplace, and stopped and visited with the lady who lives in the modernized actual home. Her home is surrounded by large pecan trees and I couldn't help but wonder as I looked at them if perhaps my daddy might have planted them years ago. She was gracious to let me come in and look at the kitchen, the corner of the living room where my birthroom used to be, and stand and look out the window as I once again visualized my daddy coming across the yard with my tricycle, some sixty years later. The lady had one more thing to show me, that pulled at my heart strings. She brought out the actual deeds where Daddy and Mother had bought the place, and then the one where they sold it to she and her husband. I made pictures so I could forever remember their signatures.

Looking back and from this side of the life we had there, I wonder how things would have been had we not sold the house and moved on......