Virginia Avenue 1

Our house, built of timber cut from my great-grandfather’s farm, was planted on a wooded hill above the intersection of Virginia Avenue and South Main Street.  In a neighborhood of small homes we were perched on the crest of the hill and mostly invisible to our neighbors. Trees protected us on every side.

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An overnight snowfall turned the world outside the house silent. No traffic on the roads. The television played in the living room. The aroma of bacon frying in Mom’s cast iron skillet filled the house. I lay with my head at the foot of the bed and watched snowflakes sifting through the trees. A small hemlock at the edge of the woods sagged, its boughs heavily laden with snow. In an oak tree, a squirrel clung to a length of twine that dangled a cob of dried corn. The squirrel spilled more kernels into the snow than he raked into his mouth. The corncob slipped from the twine and dumped the squirrel into snow. He grabbed the whole cob in his mouth and headed up the tree to a main fork, perched there and resumed gnawing at the kernels. A blue jay swooped past, but the squirrel paid it no mind.

Ten minutes later, I stood in sock feet on the floor furnace grate and slipped into my blue jeans.

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From the windows in our small dining room, when the trees were bare, I could see the two gravestones on the hill in the woods behind the house, only a few yards from our window.  I studied their engravings carefully. They were old, neglected and weathered.  Only two names were decipherable – Thomas Davis, who died in 1864 and Jewel Davis in 1857.  Pieces of gravestones lay scattered around the two intact stones – a family graveyard fading into the shadows of neighborhood history. The graveyard fixed my understanding of time. Thomas Davis passed during the Civil War, a hundred years before my childhood. His wife never knew that war unless her ghost haunted his house. Where did his house stand in 1864? Perhaps down in the creek bottom, now lined with houses along South Main and the little textile mill across the creek.

My father owned half the woods on the crest of the hill separating our street from the row of houses behind us.  It was only a few acres, but trees and thickets shielded us from parental supervision. We thought. On the far slope of the hill, just beyond the gravestones, a thicket of mountain laurel spread under the understory of oaks. At six years old, the thicket was our hide-away.  Betty and I crept into the tangle of limbs and found an opening where we played doctor and nurse.  I examined her and she examined me. We confirmed the differences between boys and girls. 

A few years later, Bobby, Steve and I used a piece of plywood and a cinder block to build a table inside the laurel thicket.  In a tin can we kept marbles, matches, an old knife and a deck of playing cards. We played strip poker, but no one ever removed the final piece of cotton.  Without a girl player, what was the point?

We used a wagon and a wheelbarrow to tote loads of discarded oilcans from the service station at the corner into the woods.  It took weeks, but we accumulated enough cans to build a small shed using scavenged planks to keep the lines of cans straight and level.   An old blanket made the roof.  Within days a wind blew down the shed. The phone rang in our house with a grumpy complaint about scattered oilcans in the woods behind a neighbor’s house. Bobby and I spent the next Saturday afternoon hauling the cans out of the woods to the bed of Dad’s pickup. We did not get the pleasure of riding with him to the trash dump.

Bobby and I dug a foxhole at the edge of the yard.  Dad made me fill it in.  We moved deeper into the wood and dug a deeper hole.  We were going to build a tunnel until we discovered how much a little bit of dirt weighed.

Alan showed us how to climb samplings and swing them down to the ground.  When Dad discovered all the bent trees he told us to stop bending his trees. When I was in high school I learned from Robert Frost that it was a boy’s right to subdue is father’s trees.

Over the years we used an old hatchet and a hand saw to cut down trees – one from this acre, one from that acre. There were hundreds of trees.  Who would miss a few trees? Dad did.  Quit digging holes in the ground and cutting down my trees, he said. We quit for a month or so.  Eventually, we cut and trimmed enough trees to build a lean-to shelter. Boy Scouts had to practice lashing limbs together.  We built a three-sided shelter with a sloping back, a ramp to the roof of the shelter, our lookout for fathers.

The shelter was our engineering summit. Enough is enough, said Dad.  We played games, held scout patrol meetings and camped out in the shelter until my brother turned over an oil lamp and set it afire.  The Marion Fire Department, sirens and all,  put out the fire.