Notes from the Spring Creek Arts Guild

Perhaps it is my recent Big Decade Birthday, but I have been doing a good bit of looking back and realizing just how much water has passed under the bridge and disappeared over the horizon, and been struck by just how fast that water flows. My grandfather, Papa to me, died in 1973 in Readyville, Tennessee, when I was 12 years old. I do not remember how long he was sick before he died, but I am thinking it was maybe a year. For the 11 years before that, he and I had a very special relationship. Papa had a bunch of grandchildren as he had 15 children, and most of them had at least two or three kids. But I always felt like I was special to him. It seemed all the other grandchildren thought he was a mean old man, but I never saw him that way.

Papa was not what you would call jovial or light-hearted. I do not remember him smiling or laughing much, but he did get a twinkle in his bright blue eyes that stood in for smiles and laughs. He projected the persona of a grump, but somehow I never fell for that. To this day I can remember how his house smelled, how he smelled, and I can remember his gnarled old hands holding his Bible open on his lap every evening when he would have “chapel.” I can remember going out with him every morning in the summer to tend to his garden, feed his hogs, and gather eggs from his hens. That mean old man would do things like stop to run his cane across the tops of the hay grazer to show me all the grasshoppers, or tell me some crazy story like how he was going to rig up a lift so if he ever felt chest pains while he was feeding his hogs he could yank himself up by the neck and not fall dead and get eaten by the hogs like what happened to this other old man he had heard about (this was a joke, by the way).

Besides growing vegetables, Papa planted flowers—Hollyhocks by the fence and four-o-clocks around the house. He planted a mimosa tree in his yard because he thought it was pretty. He grew “dish rag gourds” (loofahs), egg gourds that looked just like chicken eggs, and dipper gourds with yard-long handles (he almost always won the Longest Dipper Gourd category at the county fair). Papa always told me his name was William James Francis Jones Junior the Third and I believed him. Later I found out that he was a Junior but not a Third. He had a big buffet cabinet in his kitchen that he pronounced like Jimmy Buffet, not buffay. On top of that was a cut glass cake stand with a domed top. All of the leftover biscuits, sausage, and/or ham from breakfast went in the cake stand and made for convenient snacking. Papa would sprinkle a little sugar across the top of his biscuits and gravy so of course I did the same, and it was surprisingly delicious.

I could go on for pages about Papa, but I had better stop before these tears actually start rolling down my face. I wish so much that we could have visits or at least Zoom calls with those who have gone on before us. I would love for my family to meet Papa, but I suppose they will someday. SpringCreekArtsGuild@gmail.com