Swinging on Grapevines

I was talking to some folks about swinging on grapevines back in the good old days when we made our own fun instead of depending on a Game Boy to keep us occupied. For some reason I didn’t get into grapevine swinging too much. Think I was too little when we lived in that big log house at the edge of the woods where the vines grew. Brother Robert had a really good one but wouldn’t let us little ones use it because he could swing out over a real deep ‘ditch’. He made the mistake of talking about it at the one room school we went to and some of the big boys followed us home to see it. When Robert insisted on taking his turn swinging on it they pushed him off and he fell so hard he lost his breath. When he got able to come home he told Mom and Dad about it…..Did Daddy ever get mad! He took the chopping axe over there and cut it off so high up they couldn’t reach it any more….He tore up ‘the playhouse’, so to speak, but may have saved a life….

I CAN remember shinnying up young hickory trees and bending them over …When that got ‘old’ we rode them down off a steep bank into the road….on Red Hill….For some reason there was a very  teep hill near the end of our driveway that was just as red as could be.  Mama said it sure was hard to get that red clay out of our clothes……On the scrub board with lye soap, of course. We moved from there when I was 8 or 9 so I didn’t get into that scrub board routine too much…just washed out baby diapers as needed after Betty was born….Sis and I set the pan we used on a chair.

We were sitting around talking about the old days one time after we had grown up and Mother let slip that she used to climb the big pecan tree in their front yard {It’s still there but Mama died in 1984 }, climb off on the roof of their big log house and into the upstairs window! I was shocked of course, and asked her why she fussed at us kids for doing stuff like that if SHE had done it! She got a loving look on her face and said ” I was afraid you would get hurt.” Awwww…..

Ma’s  ‘Mr Buntin” as she called him bought that farm in 1900 and built the finest log house I ever saw for his first wife…Susie Boaz. He dug a well, but it had minerals in it, so he dug a big cistern. He nailed planks into a vee and made gutters to catch water off the huge shingled roof. I never knew of it going dry, and the farmer that bought the land after the family left said he thought he never would get that cistern filled in! I have SO many fond memories of that cistern, and how Ma kept a syrup bucket down in there on a thin rope that held sweet milk and a pat of butter in the hot summer time….
 
Not long ago I read a history of the county, and back in the old days there were some famous spa’s build  there because of the mineral water. That’s my Grandpa alright….fillin’ in the mineral well instead of building a spa, and selling the herd of fainting goats he traded for just because his kids were about to give them a nervous breakdown! NOW folks want those weird old goats.