Country Connections
By James and Ellen Perry
The song of Eddy Arnold’s “Christmas Can’t Be Far Away” reminds me that spring can’t be far away. We’ve had a rough winter with the biggest snow (which started January 14) since the blizzard of 1993.
The snowstorm of this past January left ten inches on our deck. The temps went down below zero for two nights, but we made it through, and now let’s hope we have a long spring this year.
Time to turn the garden soil, plant some lettuce, radishes, potatoes and some spring greens. The robins have come through on their way to nesting areas north, with some staying here as permanent residents. The bluebirds have already started families and hummingbirds will be returning from their overwintering grounds in Latin America. I am glad to welcome all these back.
Dogwoods are busting at the seams to bloom as well as the Azaleas with many colors. Irises are growing with their promise of many different colors and roses are swelling and getting ready to bloom. Spring can’t be far away.
Spring brings many good things, like, for instance, church reunions. Back in the day, Rose Hill Primitive Baptist, or Hardshell as it was known, had their reunion with dinner on the grounds and at least two circuit preachers or more in attendance and doing a lot of hellfire and brimstone during the reunion.
It was held at Rose Hill near the Easter week. There was lots of fried chicken, chicken and dumplings, potato salad, pies, cakes and Kool Aid or tea on hand. Being 12 years old I remember all the 12-year-old and up girls wore their new Easter dresses and borrowed some of their mother’s perfume for the occasion. The girls sure looked pretty and smelled so good. Some of the young girls would borrow a pair of their mother’s high-heeled dress shoes.
For the younger girls this was their first time wearing high heels and them trying to navigate through the rocky and sloping church yard. The girls resembled a young fawn deer trying to learn to walk. It wasn’t a pretty sight at first but boy it looked good to us boys.
The next week after the reunion at Rose Hill public school the girls acted uppity and would not play or associate with us boys. This would change in about two weeks as the girls would revert back to their playful ways, and the playground would be peaceful again. We would start playing softball and actually play other community schools in Union County.
And talking about girl’s rights, every girl had a chance to play on the school’s traveling softball team if they could qualify, and some did. The Miller girls took precedence over many boys. One of the Miller girls destroyed more softballs than any boy. When she hit the ball it looked like a frisbee as it sailed over trees on the way to the darkest woods.
Fishing in Norris Lake back in the late ’50s was great. I remember one Sunday morning sitting there by an open window in Rose Hill Church on a warm spring morning with birds singing, the Tumbling Run Creek meandering by the church, and me just knowing that the fish at the end as it deposited its water in Norris Lake were just waiting for me and my rod and reel to introduce them to dry land.
What a waste of a beautiful Sunday I thought. My mother elbowed me to wake me from my daydreams of catching those crappie, bass, sauger and walleyes just a few hundred yards down Tumbling Run Creek. Back in 1958, you could catch fish in Norris Lake anytime of the year. Tumbling Run at this time ran all year bolstered by Spout Spring about halfway down the creek towards Norris Lake. Many people got their drinking water from that spring and all the locals used the spring for tobacco planting in late spring. There were water lizards, minnows, periwinkles, tadpoles, frogs, crawfish, watercress, and horny-head fish in abundance until the county straightened out the road and moved the creek in the ’60s. Now Tumbling Run Creek as it was is only a memory.
Now back to the dinner on the grounds. There would be fried barnyard chicken, chicken and dumplings (the best I ever ate), potato salad, mashed potatoes, green beans, soup beans, banana pudding, blackberry cobbler, pumpkin pie, fried apple tarts, cornbread, tea and Kool-Aid. Boy, it makes me hungry just thinking about all that good food. Completely forgot about those boiled eggs filled with all kinds of good stuff.
All of the boys my age in 1958 who were 12 years old would look at the pretty girls dressed in their Sunday clothes with mama’s perfume and hope to get either a smile or google eyes from the young lasses. Some would stick out their tongues at us boys. You can’t win ’em all.
If the weather was good enough to have food on the ground (actually served on makeshift tables) then there would be an afternoon ball game between Rose Hill community baseball team and an opposing team from another community team starting around 2 p.m. that Sunday afternoon. The game would be held behind Charlie Seymour’s General Store in a relativity level field there. If Jawbone Thomas would be on the opposing team, people from all over Union County would be there. Cars and pickups would be lined up beside Hwy 33 for at least a mile. Charlie Seymour had the biggest sale day of the month on Sundays when there was a baseball game there. He would sell out of smokes, chewing tobacco, Moon Pies, RC Colas and Pepsi drinks, Tom’s Peanuts, sardines, potato chips and Country Club Malt.
After the game it was back to Rose Hill Church for evening services and the closing of the reunion which included singing hymns and more hellfire and brimstone sermons.
In my case, fishing would have to wait until next week and dreading school for the next two weeks until all the 12- to 15-year-old girls lost some of their recently acquired religion from the reunion and things returned to normal. Next gotta get our softball team up and running.
See you next month.