Vintage Family Photos:

For the first 16 years of my life, I spent 2 to 3 weeks every summer staying in this ol' house. Forever burnt in my memory is the feather bed I always slept in next to the pump organ in the front bedroom , that there were no screens on the windows and holes in the floor where you could actually see the ground, an old wood burning stove in the kitchen with a warming cabinet on top from which both young and old would sneak left over breakfast biscuits, that ominous well just off the back porch that required expertise and labor just to get a metal dipper full of incredibly cold water to drink, the long picnic style dining table (for company) that was in a back room just off the back porch, the outhouse that I refused to use - prefering the cotton fields out back, that noisy, dusty red clay and gravel road that ran all the way from the 72 highway on past the house and on down to Snake Road, near the Lucy Fill on the Tennessee River, the mysterious old barn out back that held all the rusty wonders of an even then by-gone era. The worst part is -- I was a spoiled middle-class kid from Central Florida and I hated every minute of it. Yet now, in the autumn of my life, I would give just about anything that is mine to give, if I could spend just one day reliving the sights, sounds, smells and tastes of that old wooden frame house that my granddaddy built down near the forks of the Tennessee and Elk rivers, in Coxey, Alabama.