Tennessee hills

The hills of Tennessee in all their splendor. :)  All of these pictures were taken in the area where Rose and I grew up. Since it's right on the border of TN,KY,VA some pictures show parts of all three states.

Old home place

These pictures, except for the one with the barn, are all from my old home place. The only thing left is the chimney. The kitchen and the living room were on opposite sides of the chimney so it had openings on both sides. One was for the Warm Morning coal/wood heater and the other was for a cooking stove. The side with for the Warm Morning also had a fireplace. If I recall correctly the house was 24 feet by 28 feet and had a kitchen, living room, and 2 bedrooms. For a short time there were 7 of us kids along with mom and dad living in the house. My oldest sister left home shortly so that only left 6 of us at home. We got electricity when I was 5 or six. Sometime later we got a refrigerator and since we didn't have much room in the kitchen a hole was cut in the wall between the kitchen and one of the bedrooms and the refrigerator was set back in the hole so only the face of the refrigerator was showing in the kitchen. Obviously most of the refrigerator was in one of the small bedrooms. The holler where we lived always had a lot of rattlesnakes. We killed one or two about every year...sometimes in the yard. The bottom pictures kind of shows how isolated we were. The little square picture in it is where our house was located. The barn belonged to a neighbor about 1/4 mile down the road. Those daffodils are probably from the ones that my mom had more than 60 years ago.

Childhood memory

When I was a kid we had a one horse wagon like this wagon. We used it to haul all sorts of things on it. It was an absolute necessity to us. Once in a while the rims (hoop rings) would start getting a little lose on the spokes so we would have to take the wheels off the wagon and lay them in a stream so the water would make the wood swell and make the rims tight again. We also had an old rim (hoop) that we played with all the time. We'd get that thing out and roll it down the dirt road that went to our house and have a great time. You can see the old dirt road in the pictures above. The last time my wife and I were in TN we walked back up to the old home place and sat down for a while. While we were sitting there I said to my wife "Listen" and she said "I don't hear anything". I said "That's the point..... the only thing you hear is just the wind blowing through the trees." See below for a very short video...not very good quality. I always have such fond memories when I return to that place even though we barely had enough to survive.