Halcyon Days

I was born in the age of dinosaurs—1953—the last of seven children raised and loved by Tom and Agnes Workman. Yep, I was the spoiled baby of the family.

My siblings and I grew up on a 180 acre farm/ranch way out in the country. We lived in an old house where the only sources of heat was a fireplace in the living room and a wood cook stove in the kitchen. All the bedrooms were unheated. You wanted warmth when the snow was ass-deep, you stayed in the kitchen or pret ‘near inside the fireplace. And the bathroom . . . well, it was a rickety outhouse way down past the garden spot. I remember running barefoot to it in the dead of winter. I was tougher back then.

But we managed to stay snug in our beds beneath a couple of layers of quilts my mama had made. And we had plenty to eat: homemade biscuits and cornbread, fruits and vegetables Mama had canned the summer before, eggs from the chickens, and milk from the cow. My daddy hunted, bagging squirrels, rabbits, and an occasional deer. I think we even had ‘coon a few times. Oh, and turtle soup–once.

I don’t recall the winters being particularly miserable, even though six or more inches of snow sometimes blanketed the ground for weeks on end, usually around Christmas. Oh, the snowball fights we kids had then. It was a free-for-all, snowballs whizzing through the air from every direction.

My brother Mike–he picked on us girls–didn’t always play fair. Unbeknownst to me, one time that ornery boy packed a rock inside a snowball and threw it at me. If I hadn’t barreled full speed into the house and slammed the door shut, it would have hit me. Instead, his white bomb smacked the door with such force it cracked the old wood. Whew . . . a narrow escape there.

The Dog Days of summer down here in the South can be miserable things—at least when I was a kid. Back then, when you lived in the country instead of town, (or close to one) it was as if you’d stepped back in time a couple of decades. We didn’t have the luxury of air conditioning, or even a fan to cool us while we slept.

When the nights were so hot and humid I couldn’t sleep, I’d sit in the bedroom window. With my back braced on one side of its frame, my feet its other, I’d take ice cubes and rub them on my face and throat, and pray for a little breeze. I shared a bed with my sister, Linda, but I don’t remember if I shared the window. Probably not. I could be a selfish little brat at times.

The summer days were another matter. Lord, they were magnificent and seemed to last forever. My brother Mike, sister Linda, and I played cowboys and Indians. We caught crawdads out of the branch, roamed the woods and hills and fields looking for possum grapes, sheep showers, (wood sorrel to you city folks) wild apricots, blackberries, wild onions, and anything else edible or catchable. We caught some frogs once. I think it was Mike who fried the legs in a cast iron skillet—and they do hop around when cooked.

Looking back, it seems as if we spent about all the daylight hours outdoors. Mealtime was the only thing that lured us back into the house.

We ate watermelon sitting out on the old gray boards of the front porch, biting out chunks, juice running down our chins. We plucked red, ripe tomatoes from the vines in our humongous garden, brushed off some of the dirt, (no pesticides used then) and ate them whole. We ran barefoot on the dusty, dirt roads. We played in the rain. We swung from grapevines that dangled from the bluff at the top of the hill behind our house. We didn’t have a care in the world.

We were little savages.

And we were happy.

If I could go back in time, I’d return to those magic years between about five and ten years old and relive them—over and over again. Those were the best days of my life,  the “halcyon days” of endless summer.

I was innocent. I was wild. I was free.

But nothing lasts forever. You grow up, you get hurt, you lose your innocence, life weighs you down with responsibilities—and not necessarily in that order.

But until I draw my final breath, I will always be grateful to have lived those glorious, carefree times . . . grateful for the precious memories. And I will always be grateful to my wonderful mama and daddy for making them possible.