Here I am again—I was going to say—looking pretty country. But I don’t see anything here to 
signify country. I do know, though, the picture was taken of the porch of the house in South Carolina, the one the old man built out of block and that had four rooms but no bathroom. Note the brickwork. That was his doing, but so were those steps to the porch: four blocks just plopped next to each other. The old man suffered from a slight attention to detail problem. I remember those block now that I see them. They used to wobble when you stepped up to the porch.
The lawn clearly is in need of a mowing. Ha. Ha. Nobody had lawns back there and certainly nobody bothered to mow them. Mostly people had dirt yards; sometimes they would sweep the dirt yards to get the dirt off. Ha. Ha. Those weeds are just whatever stuff grew in front of the house.
I am wearing shoes so it probably isn’t summer, but I am wearing shorts though so maybe it is. I am wearing one of my trusty t-shirts, and I didn’t wear much of anything when it was hot summer. So maybe it wasn’t summer. But maybe they had been dressed up for the photo session. So I guess I don’t know what time of year it was, except that it probably wasn’t winter.
I don’t know what that thing is off to my right on the porch. It looks like a fish, but what’s a fish doing on the porch. We didn’t eat fish; the old man didn’t like to pick out the bones. He did say, though, they had fish fries when he was a kid. Folks would gather by some lake, they would pull a truck up next to the lake and use it to power a live cable they would throw into the lake to electrocute the fish. They would just come bobbing up and all you had to do was collect them.
I could be five or six in that picture. I don’t know, but if you ask me I look pretty boney. Back then though I was always boney. But maybe this was during my sickly period when I was sick all the time with strep throat before I had my tonsils out.
I look sort of pensive. I wonder what I was thinking about. Maybe my head was completely empty or maybe I was thinking about eating dinner, or what the hell I was doing sitting there. I have been told I was a thoughtful child and very curious. So maybe I am thinking, why am I here, what’s going to happen, what’s the point in all of this, why have I been put on this earth and is there a purpose.
The usual stuff.
Why on earth would anyone build a house without a bathroom, were septic tanks hard to come by? Or were you all just that dirt poor? I remember Grandma Tingle telling me a story about sweeping the dirt over the phone before she passed. That was about as much as I ever knew her. Over the phone from the kitchen in Casa De Ora. I guess I was back there for one trip when I was really little. And I can recall it some what. Sitting on her porch with a splinter in my foot at her telling me she warned me not to go out there with no shoes on, that I would get a splinter, so of course that is what I did. She had no sympathy for me as I had been warned.