Monday Mimisms ~ Katy Never Was A Jackass To Me

Do you see that window to the left?
Katy lived there.


I grew up on a large family tract of land divided between siblings, uncles and aunts, grandparents, tobacco fields, barns....and well...even jackasses. When I looked out the living room picture window of my childhood home, this is what I saw: My great-uncle and aunt's home across the road (it was a road, not a street, trust me) a myriad of barns and tool sheds, large oak trees, persimmons, weeping willows, pecans and pines. A pump house, a cellar door straight out of the Wizard of Oz, a pack house, a meat-hanging building for hams and an assortment of tractor sheds. They were farmers after all. Behind their modest brick house was a large cornfield, to the left across the dirt road more tobacco fields, several 2-story tobacco barns, an outhouse (yes, I said an outhouse complete with Red Devil lye) and fences. Next door lived my great-grandmother and great-aunt and uncle. Next door to them lived my dad's younger brother's family. Across the road from them lived his older brother, my aunt and two first cousins. Directly through the woods and across the field behind their house was the "old homeplace" of said great-grandmother, the fishing pond, more tobacco fields, a huge watermelon patch, a bean field, potato field (I so hated that part) and a long 2 mile long white-sanded driveway with pine trees on each side where I loved to ride my bike.

You might say I grew up in the country. I was literally surrounded by four generations of family.

And then there was Katy.
A splash of buttercup color on an otherwise dusty potato field life she was.

Katy and I had a love/hate relationship. I wanted to pet her all the time but doing so was NOT in my best interest. I never could figure out why my uncle had her in the first place. Yeah sure....he used her to plow the garden a few times but really.... most of the time she just stuck her head out the little window and grazed on corn.
That is, unless she was talking to me.
Don't tell. But I fed her flowers.

Time and again I would sneak behind the house, approach the little stable and try to coax her out, only to hear "MIMI! If I've told you once I've told you a hundred times NOT to touch that mule. Get awaaayyy from the fence!"
Uncle Henry had no patience with me (he would not be the last man to admit to such) especially after my too-big-for-my-pencil-britches-self put the tractor gear in reverse and ran over his foot once upon a terrible time. One sunny day, Katy and I had too close of a munchy smooch and I lunged into the electric fence.

Ouch.
Katy was not amused. Neither was I.
I screamed. She turned around and went back inside.
Of course, she knew I'd be back.

That was many years ago. So, today, when I visited my parents, I decided to have one last chat with Katy..... Oh I know she's not there. Is she?

You see, there was a strange wind blowing around the farm today. I didn't alter these photos. Do you see the swirling white wisp of a cloud in Katy's home? If I didn't know better, I'd think it was my favorite mule. And with good reason.

Yesterday, the firemen came and burned down my uncle and aunt's home in the middle of my 33 acre playground. They've long been gone and the property must sell. They call it progress. I call it hogwash.

And it made me terribly sad.
Nothing will ever really be the same.
The house is gone.

A house where I played endless hours of Sorry with my aunt and cousins, Pick Up Stix and Monopoly. Rook. Go Fish. Ate her wonderful cornbread and yummy cakes, drank iced tea and lemonade on the back porch each summer, got off the schoolbus in her driveway......played the antique organ when she'd let me. It was untouchable, like Katy, and although I knew she was peculiar, my aunt, I loved the order in her home, the smells, the sparkling cleanness, the flower bouquets.

Behind Aunt Evelyn's white picket fence was my favorite place to play. It was beautifully white and pristine. I imagined myself there today as I snapped this photo. Purple crocus popping up underneath it in the spring. Daffodils (I picked the remaining ones today) and amazingly tall gladiolas of every color that she carefully chose for church altar arrangements on Sunday mornings.And Uncle Henry smelling of tobacco cure in the crisp fall air. It was a wonderful smell. He even took me with him to market one year. But nothing was right in the backyard today. I couldn't make it so. Everywhere I turned there was spooky silent smoke. And the pecan trees were weeping..... See how sad they look?

But I had to show you.

To prove to you - and to myself - that they all still exist.

Peculiar Aunt Evelyn who made you take a bath before you got in her clean bathtub, overbearing Uncle Henry's off-limits-to-children tool shed door still stands open. I think I see him watching out the window making sure I'm not leaning on that.....that......ouch!

Katy.

She liked daffodils.

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