Memories of my summers in Appalachia are full of good memories. They include hiking, swimming holes, peeling cherry trees, picking green beans and hauling hay. Country stores, biking, church, and cousins coming to visit also highlighted the best times of the year. Jumping on sugar cane stalks at a molasses stir off, whiz ball in the pasture field, hot dogs from the Tastee Freeze and camping was included. I have always loved summer.
Around the age of seven, I was up at the break of dawn one morning. Barefooted, I ran most of the way to the back section of our farm. There in a small pup tent my closest brother in age was asleep with his friends. Although I wasn’t invited and considered too young to camp, I did the next best thing and showed up at dawn. A few years later I would find my own camping place about a hundred yards away and invite my friends to camp. Camping was a big deal. We would plan for a couple of weeks even down to the food we would eat. It always went well but not without accidents. My cousin got burned real badly one time. Neighborhood friends would visit during the night and raid us for fun. The group kept getting bigger and some failed to bring anything to add to the meals. Camping was the only vacation I ever knew.
Raising sheep was such a big part of our life. I have shared about the sheep shearing in other writings. I usually had a pet lamb that would quickly grow into an adult sheep. One of the biggest events was going to the sheep market in Tazewell. I would invite my cousins and we all loaded up in the back of the pick up truck and headed out. My dad would drive. The market was beside a big outdoor drive-in theatre. We watched the movie without sound from the balcony of the sheep market. It is funny how the simple things meant so much.
There was always the fun of making a rock dam across the creek and playing in the water. My aunt always told us we were going to get a disease but we didn’t. Sometimes my brother would load all his friends up on a wagon and drive down to the bigger creek. Since they were all about ten years older than me, I was always the tag along. Not many people had swimming shorts back then so they all swam in the buff. They would lay their clothes on the bank of the creek. I remember running off with their clothes for fun. It was even more fun to do when an older neighbor lady was out walking in the field. They would stay in the water longer.
On summer nights we would often go to a molasses making. Dozens of people were there and us kids would jump for hours in the sugar cane stalks. While the molasses was cooking a steam would come off of the big trough. I made the comment that it looked like fog. The molasses farmer tagged me with one of my many nicknames, “Foggy.” When the molasses was emptied into containers, we had wooden sticks ready to scrape the remaining molasses out of the trough.
In my later teen years we decided to build a cabin on our mountain property. It was high in the mountain. We cut trees and built a twenty by twenty cabin. There were about eight of us guys that worked on this project. All of us had unusual nick-names that we gave each other. By this time I had settled with “Harm.” Some of the names of my friends included “Mooney,” “Bird Brain,” “Fox” and other meaningful names. Most names came from an event in the person’s life. It took an entire summer to build the cabin.
At the end of the summer we were ready for our first camp out. In the valley below a revival was going on at the Methodist Church. I attended the meetings and returned back to the cabin for the nights. About mid-week I rededicated my life back to God. When I returned that night, I told the guys what had happened. I told them I would like to have devotions before we went to sleep. Someone grabbed a cassette player to record it. I wish I had that recording. It was a memorable night. Afterwards, I took a blanket and went out into the mountains and reflected on God and what the rest of my life would be.
Summers still mean so much to me here in the mountains. I still go back and camp on the farm. I still hike, garden, play in the creek, and just lie in the fields and reflect on the God of creation. There is so much restoration taking place as creation groans for the release of the sons and daughters of God. May each of us take time to do the simple things that make mountain kids marvel. May simplicity be restored in our lives as we worship the creator of the mountains.
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