They are no good to eat but sure are fun to catch. 

That is what I thought growing up though I have since heard people say they are quite good eating if you clean them right. Their flesh is jelly-like and I was told very bony but supposedly you can cook them up as fish patties, fry them, throw them in a stew or smoke them. But for me it was always about catching them.

The mudfish (Amia Calva) is also known as the bowfin or dogfish. They are fresh water and range throughout the Mississippi, the Gulf Coast and along the Atlantic Coast rivers and streams as far north as New York.

They look like a throwback to an earlier era and they should, they have been around for 180 million years. They breathe air via their swim bladder and when oxygen content in the water is low they just gulp oxygen directly from the air.

They are easy to recognize, they don’t look like any other fish. They are broad across the head like a catfish but the rest of them is unique. They have a long wavy dorsal fin and a paddle-style tail. Their lower fins are much smaller than the dorsal and their heads are smooth. They range from 2 to 5 pounds on average but often go up to 6 or 8 pounds. Anything larger than that is unusual and described as a “lunker.” The state record is a whopping 19.0 pounds according to Florida Fish and Wildlife.

And while most people don’t fish for them, there is even a Bowfin Anglers Group on line today with fishing tips and recipes.

Mudfish bite lures or baitfish and I have even caught them on worms. Guess they were really hungry that day. One thing for sure, everybody agrees they put up a helluva fight and can be mistaken for big bass before they are landed.

When I was a kid and visiting my grandparents in Gulf Hammock I spent a lot of time fishing. Nobody thought anything about letting a young girl go off on her own in the woods with a pole, some bait and probably a peanut butter and jelly sandwich to stave off starvation before supper.

Most of what I caught were sunfish — bream, bluegills, warmouths, shellcrackers and stumpknockers. Hard to say if it was more fun catching them or calling their names. And if I was lucky I might find a small trout or more often a bass. The big gars that floated like half sunk logs in the crystal clear creeks headed for the Waccasassa River almost never bit anything, but the mudfish, sometimes they did and when they did it was fun.

I remember the first big one I caught. I had walked over across US 19 toward the old then-abandoned hotel back in the woods. A creek wandered by the dirt road leading to the hotel and sometimes the water stretched out into the low lying area into shallow black ponds with deep muck bottoms and cypress knees dotting the edges.

I had caught a pretty good mess of bream and saw something big working the water in one of those ponds. I crept over near the edge (didn’t want to lose my shoes to that sucking mud) and started tossing my worm over near where the water was being worked. I’d drag it slowly back toward me (this is a cane pole not a fancy rod and reel) and it requires a delicate touch to entice a fish in a tight area with overhanging limbs and Spanish moss.

On about my third pass something took hold of the worm. It didn’t run, it didn’t do anything. It was just holding it in its mouth. I knew If I tried to set the hook I would probably just pull it out of the mouth and that fish would be gone so I waited. In just a few seconds the fish turned and started to move away with the bait and I hit it hard as it turned, setting the hook in corner of the mouth.

That mudfish pitched a fit. It swam hard and changed direction and bent my pole nearly in half. I thought the line or pole would break and tried to follow it around the edge of the swampy area to tire it out. It flipped around and ran toward me an away and I started to back up every time it headed toward me. Finally it was close to the edge and I picked the tip of my pole up and prayed the line would hold. It did.

That was a big mudfish, though probably not as big as it seemed to me then. After a good long look I took my old slime covered fish rag out and held it down while I worked the hook out.

Some people kill mudfish, they think they eat too many of the fish we like to catch and eat but I just pushed him back toward the water with my toe until he gave a big flap of his tail and got back in. I saw his dorsal fin cutting the shallow water for a few feet and then he was gone, back into the black water and me gone back toward the sunlit creek with a still-pounding heart for a few more bream.

This piece first appeared on April 24, 2015 in Levy Living, the ezine of the Nature Coast. 

On some lucky days my grandmother would bring me a taste of what she was cooking on the cast iron stove that radiated heat like a mini-sun in the kitchen every day of year including the hot Florida summer.

She could work that stove like a fine instrument. There were no controls to speak of, just a damper and a firebox. So all the heat under the burners and in the oven was regulated by adjusting the damper and building the fire or letting it die down.

While she was cooking greens and frying chicken on top she was cooking the fluffiest biscuits imaginable in the oven. If I had been good and gone out looking for blackberries and come back with a batch there might even be a blackberry cobbler in that oven. She would shove pans around on top to cooler or hotter areas and in between would find time to set the table and make the iced tea.

She was first up in the morning and building a fire before the sun peeked over the horizon. Poppa left for work early, sometimes by 5, and got home early, giving him time take care of the garden and the chickens. That meant she had to be up and making the breakfast — bacon, eggs, grits and biscuits — and packing him a lunch.

During the week he ate lunch out in the woods on the job so she was free to do the laundry, weed the garden and clean the house before starting supper. You might say dinner but in those days lunch was called dinner and the evening meal was called supper. For supper there would be meat of some kind, chicken and pork mostly and sometimes venison if hunting had been good. And there were two or three vegetables, most of them from their garden and either rice or potatoes. Dessert was hit or miss, you couldn’t count on a regular dessert but you could always take a biscuit and crumble it up and pour cane syrup on top of it with butter beat into it.

My grandfather liked buttermilk and he’d have a bowl of buttermilk with cornbread broken up into it. I never could get warmed up to that but he surely loved it.

Sometimes now I wonder what Granny liked best. She rarely said and never kept the best of anything for herself, and she always made sure something each of us liked was on the table.

So that stove got busy early and stayed hot most of the day. It was even the way we heated water for baths or to wash the dishes in a big enamel pan in the sink for a long time.

One of my jobs when I was visiting was to cut kindling. That meant going through the woodpile to find pieces filled with rising sap, resin. That wood, sometimes called “lighterd” wood, was nearly orange from the highly flammable sap and sometimes sticky to the touch. It split easily. Just put a piece standing on end on the stump used for cutting wood, tap the axe into the edge, lift and let the weight of the axe just split it right down. You did need to get the pieces pretty small and when you stuck a couple of those in the fire box of the stove with a bit of crumpled paper and a couple of pieces of firewood you would have a nice fire in just a few minutes.

I now see “country” catalogs selling memories or at least a sweet reminder of the past. They offer small stacks of this “fat wood” for sale wrapped in gingham and tucked into handsome little copper buckets to sit by the fireplace. It may start the fire and may have that wonderful smell but I’m pretty sure it is not being cut by scrawny, curly-haired girls like me out behind the weather-beaten house and brought in by the scratchy armload to stack by the stove.

I love Christmas. I like getting and giving presents in equal measure and remember how I would save pennies from my allowance in the ‘50s for months so I could go shopping for Christmas presents.

My mom always gave me a few bucks, maybe as much as five, so I was pretty well set those days. The dime store was always the first choice since it had so many inexpensive things to pick from. Granny got a scarf and she would wear it to church or prayer meeting. Poppa got a pipe, some snuff or some tobacco in a can. Momma got classy rhinestone jewelry and poor Daddy got stuck with socks or on very good years, a new shirt.

There was the occasional bottle of Evening in Paris or Jergens Lotion for the gals and Old Spice or Aqua Velva for the guys stuck under the tree and little delicate figurines that took their place on shelves on Christmas morning. 

As I got older I got better about shopping in odd places for gifts. I would go to the Tackle Box and look for fishing things for Daddy and Poppa and would venture into those nice jewelry stores downtown where one could still get something small but special just a few bucks. Those clerks were very nice to me, a young skinny girl clutching a couple of dollars and looking for the perfect present and they never failed to treat me nicely and let me look at all kinds of things I could not afford.

As a teen I discovered the stationary store and gifts expanded into little notebooks, boxes of writing paper and thank you cards and fancy pens that no one really had any use for or wanted except maybe me.

And one year when I was very young I took one of Poppa’s snuff cans, washed it out and painted it Chinese Red. I can still remember going over to the Commissary in Gulf Hammock and into the far corner where paint and hardware were stocked and picking out that tiny can of Chinese Red enamel paint. I slaved over the can so there was not one brush stroke on it. On Christmas morning you would have thought I’d given him a new car the way he fussed over that red can.

I don’t know what he finally did with it but it was around for years.

Under the tree for me were guns and holsters and sets of plastic cowboys and Indians. One year, the year I had polio and still managed to pass the second grade, I got a real bicycle. And amazingly Santa found us no matter where we went, once even tracking us down in a little trailer in the desert as we trekked from Florida to California for a brief try at life on the other coast.

But the most important thing I got from all that giving and receiving was the lesson about how good it is to show appreciation for what people do for you not because of the thing they give you or its value but because they cared enough to try to make you happy. 

That’s what we all did as a family, over and over, year after year, try to make each other happy. And mostly, we did. 

The creek, where I shot the moccasin and fished on long hot afternoons, had a few surprises. One was finding tiny flounders. They were anywhere from half an inch to an inch and a half long and really hard to catch. They changed color from pale yellow like the sand seen through the tannin-shaded water to dark brown over by the leaves in the edge. Or, they burrowed under the sand and just disappeared.

Recently I was doing some research trying to find out if being in freshwater is a phase of the saltwater flounder’s life cycle like salmon going up the rivers to spawn but it doesn’t seem to be. They are Trinectes maculates but commonly called hogchokers in the online chat rooms about freshwater fish and no one seems to know much about them. Apparently they are not really flounder but are in the sole family and live their lives in brackish water as far north as the Hudson River in New York. They can also be found many miles up the Mississippi and in most of the Florida rivers leading to the sea.

Back then I didn’t think too much about it, I just liked to catch all kinds of little fish with a dipper or a small scoop net. Sometimes I caught them with my hands. I caught minnows and I caught baby fish that would grow up to be catfish, trout or bass. And naturally I caught the little flounders too.

My grandmother let me take her big blue enameled turkey pan and make an aquarium that I kept on the back porch. I got creek sand and washed it until it was clean and then got a couple of water plants and some rocks from the railroad bed so the little fish would have places to hide. I hauled water from the creek and set it up. Then I caught the fish and put them in.

Now of course I did not have a fancy aerator so I had to add fresh water every day or they would have nothing to breathe. And the water went bad and got to growing algae and stinky things in a couple of days so twice a week I had to catch the fish and put them in a glass while I took everything out and washed it. That meant washing the sand, the rocks, the pan and even the plants. Then it all had to be put back in and the fish carefully added back.

They did hide in the little cave I made for them out of rocks and I could watch them for hours swimming around and coming to the surface where they made little gulping moves.

I don’t remember for sure what I fed them. Maybe crumbs or maybe I actually got some fish food at the store.

At any rate they lived and when summer vacation was over I took them back to the creek and turned them loose. Years later I may have caught them as grown fish and even eaten them, who knows.

Riding the Woods with Poppa

One of my special treats when I would visit my grandparents in Gulf Hammock back in the ‘50s is that my grandfather would take me to work with him once in the while. He worked for Pat & Mac (Patterson McInnis Lumber Company) out in the woods. He had a company jeep, probably a WWII surplus vehicle with a canvas top and hard seats.

Some days he would drive the firebreaks and make sure they didn’t need to get plowed again. Other days he’d drive through the piney woods and mark trees to be slashed for turpentine. He was always watching out for fire and keeping an eye on men who were camping so they could hunt or fish in the woods.

He took lunch in one of those domed-top metal lunchboxes with a thermos in the top and a sandwich and a sweet in the bottom. He always kept a fishing rod and tackle box in the back of the jeep because you just never know when the perfect little fishing hole will appear.

The woods were honeycombed with little creeks, all trying to find their way to the Waccasassa River or the Gulf of Mexico like hungry dogs scrambling to get scraps thrown out the back door. Mostly they were shallow and clear as glass, fed by springs out in the swamp. But there were places where they deepened up into tannic-brown pools with plenty of lily pads where a fish could hide on a hot day.

Mostly he drove and looked and paid attention to everything he saw in nature. He could track and recognize all kinds of signs that most people would never see.

So, a day in the woods with him was special. It meant getting up well before dawn. Granny was up before either of us, getting the woodstove hot, making coffee and cooking grits and eggs for our breakfast. She would have packed our lunch too, usually sandwiches or maybe a piece of fried chicken left over from supper the night before.

By the time we got in the jeep there were tinges of red in the sky lining the bottom of clouds or on cloudless mornings, just making a smudge across the horizon.

We started out with headlights on and bumped our way out of town and eased onto a sand road you could have missed if you didn’t know it was there. By the time the sun was up good we were deep in the woods.

Sometimes he’d sing a bit, usually church hymns or old time favorites. He liked to tell old-fashioned jokes that were usually plays on words. They were the kind you told when you were a kid and then hit the other kid in the ribs with your elbow and asked, “Get it? Did you get it?”

One of my favorite jokes was old wood eye. There was this boy and he had lost an eye down at the mill. Someone carved him a nice wooden eye and he wore it all the time but he was very sensitive and hated when anyone made notice of it. There was a gal in town who had lost most of her hair through some unfortunate way that no one was very clear about. She had a wig that she wore but it was not very good and tended to slide to one side if she bounced around much. Everyone knew about her wig. They both turned up at the Friday dance and he watched her a long time before he got up the nerve to ask her to dance. He took a deep breath, crossed the floor and asked, “Would you like to dance?” She enthusiastically replied, “Would I?” Shocked, he immediately replied, “Baldy, baldy, baldy!” and never went to another dance again.

Poppa seemed simple in his ways and yet he knew so many things. He could plant anything and get it to grow. He built two houses that I know of from scratch and there may have been others. He could get home from work and walk down to the creek with his fishing rod and be home in less than an hour with enough fish to feed everybody. He could hunt with precision. He probably enjoyed it but I don’t believe he ever hunted just for the fun of killing something alone, he hunted to put meat on the table.

I remember you always had to be careful when eating squirrel. He hunted those with buckshot and no matter how well you cleaned them there was likely to be a couple of shot in there somewhere waiting to surprise you when you bit down hard.

He gave his work its full due and at the end of his workday he gave his family and his home all his attention. He was never too tired to take a walk with you and he did not miss church on Sunday. 

This morning the rain is falling hard and reminds me of weekends when I was a kid and the skies would seemingly open and stay that way. In Florida the raindrops are big and when they hit you hear them. They sound like a drum when they pelt the thick green leaves of the plants and when I was young, the sound of rain on the metal roof was an unremitting din. In fact you could judge, moment-to-moment, what the skies were doing even from deep inside the house by the rising and falling level of sound. There was an element of speed too as hundreds of falling drops turned into thousands and then tens of thousands pounding down in a few seconds.

And though Florida is a big sand pile on top of porous limestone sometimes the water falls too fast to soak up and instantly every low spot in roads, in ditches, in yards becomes pools, ponds, mini lakes, creeks. If there is somewhere lower to go, the water rushes away in its new streambed. If not, it sits, making an unlikely pond with grass showing through on the bottom.

If the water stands for a few days there are suddenly minnows and tadpoles in every roadside ditch though none are connected to streams or lakes where these little fish could have been before the rains.

If you run outside right after the rain the puddles are cold in stark contrast to the brooding heat of the day. But the ground is so constantly heated by the sun that in minutes the water is warm.

On days with quick thunderstorms popping up, which is exactly what they do — pop up out of clouds that suddenly come building from the horizon, turn black, dump rain and sweep by like a car speeding to an important destination somewhere else, you might wait the rain out. Standing on the porch one foot tucked up behind the other knee, you might look out gauging when it would pass and when it did be okay to run down the stairs into the yard splashing water all the way to the street as you headed for a friends house, or just a romp in the woods.

If the rain settled down, like that speeding car had got a flat and was stuck waiting for the guy at the gas station to get around to showing up, it would be time to hunker down and find some inside worlds to live in.

I liked to take the rocking chairs on the porch at my grandparent's house in Gulf Hammock and lay them on their sides to make a three-sided box and then cover them with sheets that granny let me use for my “fort.” I could play there for hours while the rain droned on outside. Or I might turn the porch into a boat and be making my way slowly down the Amazon. Then, when the rain would stop I’d put on my flippers and mask and walk down the dive ramp (front porch steps) into the river where I would look for treasure while trying to avoid the piranha that were everywhere.

Swimming was a little tricky since the real water was only about two inches deep. But, if I was careful I could walk across the yard wearing the flippers without falling. I’d bend at the waist parallel with the ground and appear to pull myself along with long strokes of my arms while I turned my head side to side looking for the hidden treasure.

I could make a sound exactly like a scuba expelling air and I did. I can still make that sound and sometimes do just for fun.

Of course I had a knife to defend myself with and sometimes a spear gun made from a sharpened palmetto frond. And if I didn’t feel like diving I’d just fish from the deck of the “boat,” casting lures into the yard in hopes of snagging anything that I could pretend was a fish.

I fought some pretty big fish from that porch and in retrospect am surprised my grandfather never minded that I used his rod and nice lures to hook limbs and pieces of wood to drag across the yard.

I guess he believed I might catch a dream and of course, he was right. 

Behind Granny and Poppa’s house in Gulf Hammock was a path that ran between the garden and the edge of the swamp. At its end was a little creek, crystal clear with a sand bottom in the middle and deep muck by the edge. You might step in and feel fine white sand ease up between your toes or you might step in and sink slowly down up to your knees. It was hard to get out of and there was known to be quicksand around so there was always that scary part of wondering if you would stop sinking.

I remember reading comic books about people getting stuck in quicksand and slowly being pulled down until finally all that was left was one hand waving feebly over the surface. I read once that if you acted quickly you could throw yourself prone and very slowly “swim” across the quicksand to firmer ground. Probably not but I was prepared to try it.

Anyway, back to the creek.  Another one of my chores was to take one or two big enamel buckets down to the creek to get washing water. I had to walk to the end of the two-plank boardwalk out to mid creek and dip in the buckets to fill them then totter back to the house. They were heavy.

That was a good place to fish too.  Dig up some worms and rig up a cane pole with a bobber and a little hook. Stand on the end of the boardwalk and lightly swing the line upstream. Let it drift down and around the boardwalk. Try to maneuver it up close to some lily pads. Things waited under the lily pads. Hopefully a fish but could be a snake or even a gator.

One day I was getting water and when I got to the creek there was a huge cottonmouth moccasin. I put the buckets down and backed up a ways and then turned and tore ass for the house. I slammed open the back screen door coming in and started yelling, where’s the shotgun, where’s the shotgun? Granny said in the bedroom and asked why. I ran in there and she followed me wiping her hands on her apron. I grabbed the 410 and ran back out the door.

“There is a big cottonmouth,” I yelled over my shoulder.

When I got back to the creek I started to creep toe to heel just like the Indians did so as not to make a sound. I edged out to the boardwalk and he was still there, fat and dull black in the light dancing off the water. As I came closer he felt something and started to slither off. By then Granny had caught up with me and took the gun. Before he could swim away she threw the gun up to her shoulder and fired, cutting him nearly in half.

The current caught him and took him on down into the darkness of the swamp. Granny lowered the gun. I filled the buckets and we walked back to the house together.

For all of my life the way I have remembered this story is that I shot the moccasin before my grandmother caught up with me. I swear I have a clear physical memory of throwing the gun up to my shoulder and shooting before it was seated properly which caused it to give me quite a big recoil that hurt for days.

My mother said no, it was my grandmother who pulled the trigger but I thought she was wrong. Several months ago I was visiting with a younger cousin who out of the blue said, “Remember when we were visiting Granny and Poppa and you found that moccasin and Granny shot it?”

Just like that, a vivid lifetime memory declared untrue. It sure makes me wonder about the veracity of other things I remember but it does not make me question the emotional truth they have in my heart.

Dorothy Allison who wrote Bastard Out of Carolina once said in an interview with Ellise Fuchs for PopMatters, “People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you’re telling them is true. The thing I’m telling you is true but it did not always happen to me. It is absolutely true to my experience.”

 

I do believe in soundtracks and often when I am remembering the past it’s country music that I hear. A little Hank Williams goes a long ways toward setting a mood. “If you loved me half as much as I love you…”

It’s odd because I really didn’t like country music. Me, I was too hip for that old stuff. I used to fight with my father about the radio station. I’d press some rock station button, maybe the Big Ape out of Jacksonville and he’d push another button and get a country station. I always lost but not because I didn’t try.

Now if I think of those long ago days I always hear a little twang and heartbreak in the background.

Sometimes I hear my grandfather playing the harmonica. I don’t think he knew many songs but he loved “Little Redwing,” a sad story about love cut short.

“Now, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing
The breeze is sighing, the night bird's crying,
For afar 'neath his star her brave is sleeping,
While Red Wing's weeping her heart away.”

It breaks my heart that I didn’t think to make a cassette tape of Poppa in his work clothes standing in the yard and singing “Little Redwing” in his unexpectedly high and scratchy voice.

Once when friends who had a band visited they actually knew the song and pulled out a fiddle and did an impromptu version for him. Could be the best gift I ever gave him. Certainly better than the pipe I gave him for Christmas after he quit smoking but not much better than the styling pork pie hat from New York that I bought for him in a West Village shop. He wore it for years in the dusty rural south.

In September of 1950 when I was three and a half years old a hurricane blew in from the Gulf of Mexico and slammed into the Florida coast around Cedar Key. With the unlikely name Hurricane Easy the storm broke national records for most rainfall (38.7 inches in 24 hours at Yankeetown) that stood for years and is still the Florida record. 

My family was right in the middle of things.

The year of the storm my mom and dad had opened a café in Chiefland, Fla. they called the City Grill. It was on US 19 where it came through the center of town. There were sidewalks in front of the block-long strip of stores that nestled up tight to either side of US 19. On the opposite side of the street my father’s father ran a hardware store.

The City Grill was open three meals a day. Breakfast and lunch found a lot of locals sitting at the counter or hunched over tables but for dinner most locals were at home and it was folks traveling north and south on US 19 that stopped to eat. The jukebox stood ready to take your nickels, and coffee was a dime.

Things were going pretty well as summer slipped out of August and into September. In those days there was not the complicated early warning system we now have for big storms and Easy crept up the coast with little initial warning.

It dumped torrents of rain on Yankeetown south of Gulf Hammock and on the way up caused the tide in Tampa Bay to rise by 6.5 feet flooding north Tampa with two feet of water.

When the warnings were sounded in Cedar Key (situated 29 miles southwest of Chiefland) some people left and others decided to stick it out. The storm swept into Cedar Key with 125 mph winds and then made a big counter-clockwise loop out into the Gulf, all the while gathering moisture, dumping rain and putting Cedar Key in a siege-like state of enduring sustained winds of over 100mph for nine and a half endless hours.

Those who remained in town huddled in the high school. Out of 200 buildings in Cedar Key, 150 lost their roofs and a full 90% were damaged. All 100 of the boats in the town’s fishing fleet were destroyed.

My father was in Gainesville when it all started and my mother was in Chiefland running the café. I was in Gulf Hammock in a house my grandfather built down a sand road back in the woods. We didn’t know what was coming.

My mother says that as the storm really kicked in people swarmed from Cedar Key and the many homesteads out in the swamps and woods and along the Suwannee River into Chiefland, the nearest town looking for shelter and food. My father drove down from Gainesville and they kept the café open and fed everyone who pushed through the door and out of the rain and wind. After a while they stopped giving people checks for their meals and just kept cooking and putting out hot food and hotter coffee while the winds howled outside.

I don’t know what everyone knew or when. I was just a small child but I do remember being in that house and the sound of the wind thrashing the trees and scratching at the house looking for a way in. I was scared but I was also curious. I later heard someone say that the wind was so strong that it took a pine needle and buried it four inches deep in a tree. It was such a vivid statement that to this day I believe I saw that very thing though it’s likely I did not.

What I do know is that at the height of the storm, when it had made its loop and hit Cedar Key for the second time and started inland that my father came for us.

He drove down US 19, dodging tree limbs on the road, the rain almost horizontal and the night so black that everything wet shone like silver. When he got to Otter Creek, midway between Chiefland and Gulf Hammcok, the State Police had closed the road because of flooding and the danger of downed trees and power lines that followed the road. (Three people died in Easy, all from electrocution from downed lines.)

“Sorry,” the State Policeman in his slicker said, “you can’t go through.”

My father told him. “My little girl and my wife’s parents are down there. I’m going to get them.”

The police must have pulled the barricade aside because he did come and get us. We bundled into his car and he drove us back to Chiefland through the furious night.

They kept the café open until no more people came in looking for help.

The next day, like most days after hurricanes, was sunny and despite the damage all around us it was almost like it never happened.

The only thing I know for sure is that for the rest of my life I always remembered that my father pushed past the police and drove through the crazy black night and storm to save me. That’s what fathers do.

Gulf Hammock is barely more than a wide spot in the road these days but it used to be a busy place as my mother tells it. It was strung out all over the woods when she was growing up and had more people and a mill that was owned by the Paterson-McInnis lumber company that ran the town. She remembers boardwalks snaking through the woods following one lane roads to houses tucked back from US 19, the hard road that ran north to south full of truckers and people in a hurry to get somewhere else.

Like any good company town there was a commissary that offered almost anything you might need including the post office that took up one corner of the big square building ringed with a porch on three sides. There were two other stores, Peek’s and Gavin’s, both small side-of-the-road mom and pop places with basic groceries, hard candy, ice cold drinks in a big square cooler filled with water so icy it would hurt your hand when you dug around for the coldest soda down in the bottom somewhere. On the side of the cooler box was the opener where you popped your soda’s metal top off. There was a satisfying snap of a sound and the metal cap fell down among the other tops. I don’t know what happened to them when they were cleaned out but I have seen bottle caps used like washers when nailing things together.

There was even ice cream and Popsicles. Well, what a choice. To have the small Dixie Cup of vanilla with its own little wooden spoon or the double barreled banana Popsicle. Whichever one you picked was bound to melt before you finished it in that heat. And even though you might want to linger and savor the cold and the flavors, a prudent person wouldn’t. 

Gavin’s sold flour in 20-pound bags and also in smaller amounts from flour kept in a big barrel. They kept all the flour sacks, cotton with some sort of decorative print on it, and sold them to women who made clothes out of it. I had some flour sack outfits myself, mostly little shirts or shorts.

It was always a few degrees cooler in the store because of the refrigerated cases and the fact that they were smart enough to keep the windows and doors shut down against the heat of the day.

One of my favorite things was the knives for sale. There were pocket knives and every man had a good one that he took care of really well. They were cleaned and oiled and sharpened and considered essential. I really wanted one and as a tomboy was eventually given one.

It was easy to be a tomboy in those days, cute even, but I imagine it would not have been easy to be a little boy who wanted to do girl things. Years later as a teenager I lived next to a boy who played with dolls. His name was Jerry and I made fun of him like everybody else did. With years behind me of seeing how people are different and yet wonderfully valuable all over the spectrum of human experience I can only say one thing to him and nothing in my own defense. I’m so sorry, Jerry.