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| Story ID: | 2003 |
| Written by: | Bobby O'neill Mitchum (bio, contact, other stories) |
| Story type: | Family History |
| Writers Conference: | $500 2007 Family Memories Writing Project |
| Location: | Phenix City Alabama U.S.A. |
| Year: | 2007 |
| Person: | My Dad |
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My Dad was born and grew up in Mellow Vally,a rather small community near Ashland,Alabama and located in Clay County.I vividly remember a lot of the stories he told of his exploits as a young man growing up "in the country" He told of "possum" hunting on cold Fall nights,how to use smoke to rob a wild bee tree and how to search for and find somthing he called heart plants and parch the leaves,sweeten them and eat them,and eating some thing he called pawpaw's and picking black berries for his mother to bake a black berry pie,churning butter milk to make butter and all the wonderful things that we today either consider archaic or old fashioned. Those were indeed different times,more simpler times, times that we mostly kid each other about and yet remember with a fond nostalgia in our more private moments.Those days are perhaps,gone forever,except for fleeting moments when we watch old re runs of "little house on the prarie"and see "half pint" playing jump rope during recess outside Reverand Aldens quaint little church in walnut grove, which served as both school and church for the community. Or perhaps you have beendriving down a super highway and caught a glimps of a crowd of youngsters playing in a creek at an old swimming hole and thought how briefly our youth and innocence is gone,and maybe thought how wonderful it would be to be able to go jump in the water and shout with the sheer joy of just being young and alive! My Dad could tell the best Ghost stories in the world,rivaling such masters of that genre as Stephen King or Clive Barker,he could hold me enthraled for hours on end with tales of the exploits of his childhood,he had the knack of a great teller of tales,the gift of gab, if you will, of the old irish bards,he was truly an accomplished recounteur.Indeed,in the light of his talent i am but a mere flicker of a candle in a dark and dreary tunnel. The art of story telling,i fear,has all but disappeared with the advent of the electronic age. The story "The Dumb Supper" is just one example of his stories,of course they were more effective when you were "there" more so than my mere attempt at recounting them in print could ever be. |
