The Gang
Watercolor by Tatiana Suvorova Murray from a photo, circa 1956, of the gang on the farm; all rights reserved.
I grew up on the old Whorley place in Spring Hill, Texas in a rambling and falling down old house built in the 1860s surrounded by a hard scrabble farm of some 200 acres. It was magical. My father ran a small herd of cows, grew cotton, wheat, maize, and corn in the black gumbo, and harvested the native meadow for hay. A huge portion of our food was grown in an enormous garden steps from the back door. Chickens and guinea hens ran in the yard, and butter came from a churn. I can remember details that tell me now how hard my parents worked, and how precarious their lives were financially, but as a child I had no idea I was poor and my days were filled with love, freedom to roam, and pure joy in the natural world around me. There were fields, woods, creeks, stock ponds, wild plum and dewberry patches, persimmons to fight over with the cows, wild rose thickets, wildlife galore, and lots of grandmas, grandpas, aunts and uncles who were actually indulgent and watchful neighbors. We children were practically feral, and I cannot image a better way to grow up.
Though somewhat isolated, I was not alone. I had cousins who loved the farm as much as I did and who visited often. In the summer we ran in packs, typically either at my grandparents’ farm in Grayson county or on our farm in Spring Hill. There came to be six in our gang. In the above photo, Neil is on the left, followed by Darlene, Yvonne, Charlie, and me. My brother, Jesse, who was an infant at the time the photograph was taken would eventually become part of the gang. We were generally beneath the notice of our two older cousins, Walter and Glenn, and the baby of the family, Vernon, came along too late to join in. To this day, the bonds formed during those years on the farm are unbreakable, and Darlene and Yvonne are the sisters I never had. I can’t imagine that I could be any closer to actual sisters.
I wax nostalgic for those innocent bygone times. Our grandparents are long gone. Our parents generation now consists of only my aging mother, and recent weeks have cut deeply into our generation. Since mid-Dec, Charlie and Neil have lost their wives, their lifelong partners, and my brother, Jesse, has passed. In just three months, we’ve been given a hard lesson in life and loss and the passing of time. I suppose it is natural that I turn, in grief, to memories of mud pies, of hide-and-seek played in the tall green wheat (which we paid for with one of my Daddy’s withering scolds), to carrying my Daddy a cold drink across freshly plowed earth, to collecting wildflowers and bringing them home to be placed on the kitchen table in a mason jar of water, of going as far as my legs would carry me and turning homeward only at the sound of three long beats on the horn of the truck.
The old house is gone, as are most of the old “home places” of my youth. A major, divided highway has long cut the farm in half, and she suffered another indignity when the supply line from the new Bois d’Arc Lake cut across the land on its way from lake intake to water treatment plant to the people of the metroplex. Moreover, the small, family farm has all but disappeared. There are no old, beat-up pickups with homemade sideboards rolling up to the mill with a couple of youngsters riding on top of the load, only 18-wheelers. There are no local grocery stores running tabs to be paid up when the crops come in. Thriving small towns, scattered at roughly 5 mile intervals and full of small, local businesses are hollowed out economically. And by and large, children these days live very structured and protected lives, often indoor lives, never knowing the freedom and wild joy the gang took for granted every day. An entire way of life has slipped away while I was busy being an adult. I’d give my right arm to be able to step back in time and experience it once again.
Text by Wanda Oliver, all rights reserved.
