My Sunday column

Another time

My maternal grandparents lived in a two-story, Civil War-era plantation house in western Chattooga County, on the highway just a few miles short of the Alabama line.
I wish I could tell you it was a beautiful home, an echo of “Gone With the Wind’s” splendid Tara. But Granny Ola and Grandpa Jim’s house was a lot more Truman Capote than Margaret Mitchell.
Most of the house was in bad shape, worn out by years of baking sun and punishing cold, as well as a chronic shortage of cash for needed repairs.
In fact, some parts of that house were off limits to us kids, for fear that a wall or floor might give way.
My mama’s folks were respectable and decent people, but there is slim justice in this world and so their good works were seldom rewarded financially.
In true Scots-Irish “make do” fashion, more modern parts of the house had been added over the years and my family mostly lived there. The upstairs was almost completely out of use, lending to a belief among us grandchildren that vampires resided there.
It was that kind of place.
There was also a barn, a chicken coop and a tool shed where my grandfather worked on this and that while listening to Henry Aaron and the Braves on the radio.
The old house was a grand place to visit.
Nearby there were woods, a cotton field, hills and a stream to catch crawdads in. We roamed that land like high-and-mighty buccaneers, held back only by the limitations of our imaginations and the occasional thrashing for playing too close to the highway.
We re-fought all America’s wars on the grounds of that old farm, blasting away with our tree limb machine guns and corncob “potato masher” hand grenades.
We were soldiers and astronauts and pirates and cowboys.
Mostly I remember just bits and pieces of those days. But I vividly recall my favorite cousin Jeff and I stealing eggs from the henhouse and throwing them at Japanese soldiers hiding in the barn. That earned us a whupping Hirohito would have approved of, despite my grandfather’s plea to our mothers for leniency.
Central heat and air, which we take for granted, was unheard of in that time and place. Many a chilly morning family members huddled in the kitchen near a big iron stove where hot coals provided the only heat and my grandmother made culinary magic.
Granny Ola was a master chef. She could make a delicious meal for a houseful of people out of corn silks and a bag of dirt — not that things got quite that bad.
No one ever trod this earth who was her equal at making biscuits, which she did from scratch, punching out the dough with a sawed-off Campbell soup can.
When we stayed over at the big house, we usually slept in my Uncle Rick’s bedroom. There were model cars on a wall shelf and a pretty picture of my Aunt Sandra up there, too.
All us boys were very proud of Uncle Rick because he was in the Army in Vietnam. (I hope kids today look at their warrior kin the same way. If they don’t, something has gone askew.)
Uncle Rick’s room had a tin roof. Anyone who has slept under a tin roof in a steady rain knows that I speak the truth when I say it as about as close to heaven as you can get without your toes being permanently turned up.
Just thinking of lying on that bed with rain coming down and a window fan buzzing makes me want to lie down in the floor for a snooze right now.
As kids we made fun of the older folks for nodding off at what we thought were inappropriate times. “Just resting my eyes” my grandmother always claimed.
Little did we know that our wiser elders had come to understand that whenever the perfect conditions for napping presented themselves, you better jump on that train.
It was a different time and place and I miss it very much. My heart breaks for those who have left us. I never really knew my Granddaddy Jim. He died too soon. Granny lived a lot longer and she was my hero to that black day she departed. I miss my uncles and aunts who have moved on and most of all my mama, who lived for years in a nice brick house in town, but whose soul never really left the countryside.
They tore down that big old house many years ago. But ever so often — on trips to the lake in Alabama — we drive past where it stood — in all its decaying, foreboding majesty.
It calls to me. It haunts me.
I smile and slow down a fraction to look at where it stood ... and where a great family once lived.

Jimmy Espy is executive editor of The Daily Citizen