The power has to go out for you to see the stars at night as brightly as we did during the Great Depression. We have a yard light now, two of them really, and we can see the glow of the night lights of Knoxville on the Southeast horizon. There might be a shooting star but we don't bother looking for one. There are too many other things to do. After all, the best television programs are on at night. No, we don't linger outside like we used to do.

I was afraid of the dark as a child. It seemed like the thick blackness was closing in on me. I didn't know what horrors were lurking in those deep shadows. There wasn't much light inside our house, either. A kerosene lamp on the kitchen table if Mother was still in the kitchen and another one in the parlor where Dad would be trying to tune in the radio he had sent away for and put together. We couldn't afford a store-bought one. This was in the early days of radio. If it was a still windless night, Dad couldn't get the radio to work. Since we didn't have electricity, he had hooked a wind charger to the windmill that stood over our well in the back yard. No breeze to turn the blades of the windmill, no electricity and no radio. In the best of evenings, it was hard to listen to anyway, what with all the static. We didn't take a newspaper, so Dad got his news of the world from that homemade radio. Today we cuss KUB when the power goes out. We can't watch our favorite shows. We have come a long way entertainment-wise, but we need electricity even more.

Another thing different back then in the nighttime was the nature calls. That two-seater stood a ways off from the house at the end of a well worn path. Only extreme necessity and the unavailability of the chamber pot would drive any of us out there. Kerosene lantern in hand, we would trudge the scary distance to the facility. As I said, I was afraid of the dark. My brothers, who weren't afraid of the dark, liked to hide along the path and jump out to scare me. In our childhood it was about the only way they could get back for the mean tricks I pulled on them in the daylight hours. That outhouse is another story.

We didn't have homework when I went to the country one room school. We didn't have to sit at the table and try to see by lamplight how to do our sums. But I learned my multiplication table by rote, sitting there as Mother checked my progress or lack of it. We didn't have any magazines or newspapers in the house so we dind't try to read by lamplight. Dad did. He would buy a pulp Western the few times he got to town. After all, he worked seven days a weeks for Mr. Carter milking cows and doing field work. Dad would read those magazines over and over. Once, I tried to read one, but there were too many big words I didn't understand to make sense of the story.

We went to bed early back in the day. Dad had to rise long before dawn to walk up the road to the milking barn to begin his day. I had a mile walk to school. Mother's day was full almost beyond belief. Kerosene was expensive so those lamps didn't light the way very long after dark. It was a different way of living back then.