I had the greatest little grandmother. My mother’s mother. When she became a woman, they started calling her Miz Lena. She was born, raised, lived and passed away in her beloved Tennessee. Her family lived way out in the country. The same women who delivered Miz Lena into the world were her neighbors and longtime friends of Grand Mom’s parents, Papa and Mama Sue Harvey. Miz Lena was the first of 10 or 11 kids. More boys than girls.
Families living outside of town were in the farming business. There were a few big spreads, like Papa and Mama Sue’s, but mostly little farms with some cows and pigs and chickens and a mule or two. Always a big barn and sometimes a silo. Pastures and crop fields. Usually a clear-water, tree-lined creek sliding down one side of their properties.
They built small block buildings up on the gravel-and-dirt roads that passed by their homes and ran across the flat land. A fellow in a Sealtest truck would come by in the mornings and pick up metal canisters of fresh milk the farmers had set out that same morning, just after the sun popped up.
Mailboxes, nailed to a white-washed fence post, out front. Another beat-down, dirt road that led up to their homes, built back behind small groves of cedar, maple, elm and oak trees. Just enough cover for privacy, some shade in the summer and a pinch of protection from the winds that blew down off the bluffs. Looking at them head-on, most of the houses, deceivingly, appeared to be much smaller than they were.
When the stork arrived with a brand new little one, they’d build another room onto the back of their houses. Different roof lines. If you stood back a ways from the side of the house, you got a chronological picture of their growing families. Each back-of-the-house addition, just like the rings inside a tree, marked a time and a place and told a story.