They'll All Come to Meet Me

The Green Green Grass of Home

         I was born in 1952.   It seems to me that I have lived with one foot in the 19th century and one in the 21st.   My earliest memories are of my great-grandparents -- Dad and Granny -- who are the fulcrum of this story.   Dad was born in 1872; Granny in 1882.  My mother and I lived with them while my father was stationed in the Phillipines in 1953 and 54. This was in Roby, the small west Texas farm town where both my parents were born and raised. 

Dad and Granny

    Dad and Granny were not still living on the farm, then.   They lived in town. They had moved into a two-bedroom red brick house a block off main street the year before I was born.   Granny was tired of how hard it was on the farm, and so they left the Victorian farmhouse on the homeplace west of town. It stood empty all of my life -- never to be occupied by family and children again -- but it was full of memories for my mother who grew up in the house like her mother before her, and they were passed on to me.   In my childhood we visited the empty, slowly decaying house, so many times --while my mother or my grandmother or one of my aunts described to me where the table was, where the lilac bush was, the tree with the swing, the rockers on the porch, the chiffarobe, the rug, Dad's cot on the sleeping porch – that it feels as though lived there too.    

Melton Homeplace 1946 

(painted by my grandmother, Ora Melton Bennett) 

        Though Dad and Granny were living in town in 1953, their dog Keno -- the dog that had belonged to my mother and her siblings when they were growing up -- still spent  time out at the farm.   He roamed the county freely, showing up at the back porch of Dad and Granny's house in town to be fed a couple of times a day, trotting the mile out to the farm, regularly, visiting Uncle Dick and Aunt Ethel on the way, stopping at Aunt Fi's when he got back to town. 
    

    The paths that Keno travelled lead to all those farms that had been the scene of my parents’ childhood.  My father's mother was still living on their family farm in the house where my father had been born.  On her back porch stood the cistern that had been the family's only water supply for decades.   She had running water by the time I came along, but we still drew water from the cistern and drank from the dipper when we were out on the porch.   Force of habit I suppose.  Or the spirit of conservation which was still alive and well, then.  My Aunt Vela lived on another farm a few miles away.   Aunt Vela didn't have running water yet. Her children took baths in a metal tub in the kitchen, and their toilet was an outhouse. 
       

    The road to the homeplace

    On top of being surrounded by those physical remnants of an earlier time, I had parents who were very young.  My  mother was 19 when I was born; my father was 21.  My maternal grandmother was only 39.  I was so much closer to the generations before me and their experience than my son who was born when I was 33.  

     None of this is particularly relevant to the story of what happened to the Melton family in 1885 except that it situates me as the story teller.  Though my parents moved away from West Texas when I was still a child, no place has ever seemed more like home to me than Roby.  In my earliest memories I knew in my bones that I would always feel that way. Though I have lived most of my life in other places and have travelled far, the truth is, I'm not sure there's anything more important about me than the fact that I come from Roby, Texas.