I reached 70 yesterday (December 20, 2018) on a very wet day that kept me from being outside much.  Unusual because I spend most of my time outside.  I am a better truer version of myself out from under a roof.

Whitey’s Place in Bellwood

I remember a yard that was part of my temporary home in Bellwood, Pennsylvania, not far from Altoona and on the way to Horseshoe Curve.  Coming to the dirt road that led to it meant beginning a steep ascent on a paved road and turning suddenly on the beginning of a curve into steep descent.  (I revisited the somewhat changed location a few years ago.)

About forty yards down the first turn was left and into the yard of Whitey and Pearl.  She was Pearl Irvin White, my mother’s mother now married to Whitey who looked like an aged Charles Bronson to me.  My mother plucked us down there during one of her departures from my dad Harold in Saluda, South Carolina, my main home.

The driveway was one-lane wide and split in two about twenty yards away from the blue mobile home with an awning and two doors.  To the left was Whitey’s hut or workshop and home away from home.  He spent lots of time there because he was old and sick and did not care for the visit of a runaway daughter and her brood of three.

On the left was an improbably colored blue and darker blue DeSoto, a massive chrome masterpiece.  Going near it was verboten.

The thing to know about the whole place and in particular the yard adjacent to the driveway is that is was low, tree covered, but next door to a swamp.  Walk down the driveway and turn left–which my brothers and I often did to stay out of the way–and the dirt road that brought me to my Grandmother White’s house gave out at a pond that was some sort of recreational fishing club with one or more buildings.  During events we were not to go down there but most of the time it was part of my ten-year-old stomping ground.

I remember walking to the nearest store via the main road.  It had no shoulder and we had to be careful to avoid cars and falling down the slope.  An alternative was to cut directly up hill behind Whitey’s hut and weave through a neighbor’s yard, which was frowned upon.

The store was less than a mile away and directly adjacent to the road the way stores were not in Saluda.  It perched on the side of a hill and hid a residence underneath.  Like all country stores of my youth, it was dark with a dirty concrete floor and a variety of tempting treats.  Hands down, my favorite was birch beer pop.  In a returnable bottle of course, it was clear.  I marveled at being able to see straight through the bottled liquid that was heavy with a kind of root beer taste and so, so fizzy.

The eight-foot wide trailer was blue, white, and chrome with a sweeping modernist flourish that seemed to make one end rise up.  My slot in that rectangular space was an upper bunk bed just past the kitchen on the way to the bathroom.

I remember the cozy wooded quarters that I entered every night but not as much as the swampy yard and its surroundings.

 

513 West Church Street, Saluda, SC

My guess is that the primary yard of my youth was 75 by 150 feet.  The driveway was left front near the Padgetts.  How many thousands of times did I chase a ball down its slight slope?  I had to fix in my mind the prohibition to keep running directly into the McCormick Highway to avoid being run over.  I did stop a car at least once.

Say three car lengths up the drive, the house started on the right as did my mother’s rose garden on the left.  That ten-foot side yard sloped a bit back towards the Padgett’s and was hedged with ligustrum, which I was regularly sent to pick switches from for routine whippings.  The histrionics and red whelps associated with those is another subject.

Sometime when I was several grades advanced in elementary school, some fill was brought in to park a second car on the spot of the disused former coal pile dump; before that we had just one vehicle that is clear in my memory, a black 1953 Chevrolet BelAire, that was squeezed each night into the narrow garage just beyond the house on the Padgett side.  Beside it was our fig tree and behind was a rocky garden that ran the 75 feet width of our lot.

At one time I believe our house lot was a repository for highway department gravel hence the rocks.  I spend so much time in the garden, weeding, playing, peering beyond to the Padgett’s dog pen or the trees that obscured the view of the Cockrell’s home behind ours.

The backyard had a crabapple tree that always yielded an abundant crop that my mother Leona turned into jelly with a twang.  The only tree in the back was the location of a sandbox that I spent as many hours as a modern kid does playing video games.  I loved building roads to push my trucks along but my favorite pastime there was hauling a sand bucket of water to sprinkle on the sand for frog houses.  I was a master of frog house sand construction.  I can still see the outline of my imprinted fingers in the golden brown sand.

The Hipps lived front right and had a working farm on their place which was twice our acreage as it extended to road behind Church Street.  They raised pigs, chickens, and cows on a lot covered with small barns and had hardwood trees along their property in the front that complimented our two big pin oaks adjacent to their driveway.  I used to spend hot afternoons under our trees watching the dozen or so cars that might pass per half hour, getting up to pump my arm to receive a honk from a passing truck bound for Georgia via McCormick.

If I heard  a jet in the air–a rarity and always military–I darted out to the middle of our small front yard to trace its contrail with my head tilted up until I could no longer hear or see its wake.  Jets and my front yard and riveted in my mind.  On a good summer day I could see a jet and stomp the black, pink, green and yellow hard husk grass hoppers that appeared along the front side walk. The mashed guts of the stomped creatures rose between my toes.

The shade of those twin oaks reached nearly to the angora juniper that brought me back toward the Padgett’s and the edge of my driveway.  I remember my fascination with staring over across the front field of the Mathews’ place across the street into bushy growth that surrounded Old Luke’s tenant house, a tar paper covered shack.

He and his wife were leftover sharecroppers and servants and the only black people in my white boy’s world.  I could, and have in another composition, go on and on about Old Luke and his daily walk up West Church to the liquor store but that takes me away from my yard.

My small yard went away as such by the time I started walking about a mile to elementary school and from that point on I owned every yard in my Mayberry-like world of Saluda of the 1950s.

Altoona Trailer Court

I believe I was in the fourth grade when my mother seemed to leave Harold for good.  The yellow and white two-tone 1958 Chevrolet Nomad station wagon was strangely backed into the drive.  We were stopped and a discussion ensued about Cally’s place within the green interior versus mine.  Butch, of course, was up front with Leona.  The interior was crowded, the afternoon was passing, and we were about to become Yankee residents of Altoona, Pennsylvania.  I took a slot among the luggage in the back and on we went to a new life via a straight-through all night drive.

We moved into a trailer court about a half mile from my maternal grandmother’s home on LeHigh Lane.  We were at the edge of the neighborhood where the homes gave way as they climbed up the low mountain.  Our trailer was the third or fourth on the right side of the one way u-shaped gravel drive through the court.  A college basketball player could have lain down and stretched to join our silver Airstream-type trailer to the next up or down.  (I have written about that home in a composition entitled Houses I Have Lived In.)

What I remember most about that slit of a yard was the empty tree-covered land that gave way in the direction of LeHigh Lane before the field and the dirt road that led up the mountain.  I spent my time in the trees behind my new silver home.  They were superb for climbing and exploring.  To this day a hike in Appalachia always yields a bit of what I internalized in that dark place.  I reckon I felt comforted.  I know I was happy.

So there was no real yard there but I could climb trees and walk the bent road to see all the other shiny metal trailer houses.  Other than the cement block steps, which I replicated within ten years when I brought my own trailer home, my most vivid memory is walking out of the yard on a snowy day through drifts that wet my new Lee jeans up to the knees turning my skin blue toward the bus stop for school about half a block back toward LeHigh Lane.

How cold and wonderful it was to be outside making a path through the snow squinting to see who was already at the bus stop.

 

Park Avenue Yards

Just after high school graduation at age 18 I gave up Smith Holmes, my designated Wofford College roommate, for my new pregnant bride.  I have never regretted the roommate swap and was swelled with pride in my new life with my son Chris on the way.

Nita and I got out of her upstairs bedroom on Hazel Street by buying a 47 foot 12 wide blue and white Park Avenue trailer with front Jack and Jill bedrooms.  It is still my favorite house. We moved in November of 1967.

Its first yard was under a stand of pine trees adjacent to the Newberry Airport.  I treasured the little time I had outside from my work at the local Red and White Supermarket and studies at Newberry College.  We admired the the surrounding trailers and wondered about their interior layouts.

Our yard was pine straw-covered dirt and narrow and particularly pressed on on one side by a neighbor’s fence.  Directly in front where the hitch jutted out I built a wooden enclosure to secure our two metal trash cans.

I parked our beloved 1965 Mustang just a few yards from the door.  Rambling around my space, my rented yard, was my third best outdoor activity there.  Second was to roam around the empty space out back and in between the near perfect circle of parked homes.

Best of all was to walk along side the paved road by the airport to study the small planes. It was a fine place to walk with my bride.

That summer of 1968 I borrowed Mike Steven’s mint green F-150 to haul my trash can holder and pile of blocks that formed our front and back steps for a move to 2006 Dew Avenue, West Columbia.  It rode so high up going down I-26 that I had trouble holding the road and seeing the way to my new spot for the next four years.

I was waiting for the Park Avenue when it arrived in J.W. Hendrix’s mobile home park, a more compact location in the white sand that said beach more than it did Piedmont.  There I had a king of yard covered with Saint Augustine grass.

We planted canna lilies out front and I bought a sprinkler to water new grass that I sowed out front where I parked parallel to my castle.  All was well and got better.

We had a cement patio out front and I built a sandbox outback for Chris who was too young to master frog houses.  He rode his plastic motorcycle around and around the trailer, stopping occasionally to turn the handle behind the handle bars to make an engine sound that delighted him and me.

From that yard I walked a few hundred yards to catch a green and cream-colored SCE&G bus to USC three days a week.  When I came home, I jumped on my bicycle to ride to work a full schedule at Piggly Wiggly #60 on the Augusta Highway three or four miles back toward Columbia.

I suppose my youth ended there but not my love of yards and being outside.