Did you ever wish you could just slip back in time and catch up on the days-of-old with your family elders? This writer, for one, would sign up in a quick jiffy for a one-more-time opportunity to be a part of that old family fold.
Well, back in the late summer of ’85 (that’s 1985 for those trying to do the math in their head), three of my elder cousins from my parents’ generation—unmarried siblings Mertie (b.1899) and Cecil (b.1913) McAllister, and Virginia Baptist “Bap” Sandridge Hicks (b.1911)—arranged the next best thing: an afternoon of visiting on the front porch of the old McAllister homeplace overlooking the Moorman’s River in Sugar Hollow. Their stories of the days-of-old flowed with little pause until the sun began to slip behind the ridge of Buck’s Elbow Mountain.
Our four-way chatter covered a hundred or so years of family relations, farming, fruit orchards and youthful shenanigans, sitting-up-with-the-dead, and stories galore, many punctuated with laughter all around and others with only a solemn nod of acknowledgement.
“Somebody had died and there was a whole crowd here,” recalled cousin Bap, “and they went to eat. They left Momma with the girls. The corpse was laid out here. The wind blew the door shut and Momma was there by herself, watching—like to have scared Momma to death. I can’t recall who it was. Used to lay everybody out at home.”…