It has never once occurred to me that I need therapy to recover from my childhood, or perhaps require hypnosis to unearth some long-buried dastardly deed that ruined everything and totally screwed me up. In fact, I have never considered that my childhood – or that of anyone I knew – was anything but normal. But what would anyone in such a small town know about normal, at the end of the day? Where I grew up, I suppose we all thought everything was going along simply swimmingly, but we had very few things against which to measure life.

That life was confined chiefly to the tiny little town in which some of my luckier, more prosperous friends lived; I was an outside-the town-limits outcast, with an address of Route 3. Today, I give total credit to the mailman who must’ve had a small amount of genius to discern between all the “Route 3s” to which he delivered. I suppose he simply knew everyone in such a tiny town and the surrounding environs, but at the time I wasn’t focused on his small-town geniality. Mostly what I did was silently swear in my very limited lexicon of naughty words when we got stuck behind him, driving as he did at his inevitable snail’s pace, perched in the middle of his bench seat, left hand on the wheel, right hand reaching out to fill the rusting boxes stretched out along that two-lane road. Only worse were the times we got stuck behind a tractor or combine, because then there was almost no escape; they were too wide to pass on a two-lane road, at least in the family Chrysler, which was itself like an ocean liner. But “Ed” the mailman offered a way out, since he drove a rusting sedan that was narrower than farm machinery, but which rivaled the mailboxes in its state of disrepair and equaled the farm machinery in its lumbering speeds.

A few years later, when the town’s movers and shakers decided that a little more specificity was in order, it became Route 3, Box 60. Many years later, after I had moved away – no doubt in a final re-numbering geared toward modernization (and, I suspect, toward helping the EMTs find you when you keeled over in your too-big garden) – it became 1724 Highway 205. Still the same zip code, however. It’s not as tony as 90210, but it is, by crackey, 28103, forever and always.

Today, I might be inclined to count those boxes and find out, once and for all, what determined that we were “Box 60,” because I have to tell you, there were not sixty boxes between our house and the “city” limits. Maybe they numbered the boxes by tens, because I can’t remember more than about five or six houses that lined the road between the town and – where? What was the end of the line? If you were the child who lived at Box 200, I cannot even begin to imagine how isolated your life was. (I think there are still the same exact number of houses on that two-lane black-top. I’ve tried my best to think of new additions to that little stretch of road, but the only thing that ever shook up that section of Highway 205 was when these city-slickers moved into an old, but architecturally interesting, house and did a little updating. He was an Artist, and she was a Dancer. They were impossibly gorgeous and put a modern sculpture in the yard, and we all secretly lusted after them; they were carnality personified. When they showed up in church a time or two, believe me, heads turned and the preacher didn’t stand a chance.

But beautiful strangers aside, most days just blended one into the other, constructing a never-ending cycle of the years that formed the basis for my childhood. Some times were better than others; when there was rain, there were corn crops and soybean crops and the hay grew, and the hogs and chickens and cows were fed, which in turn fed us. Well, not the hogs. We didn’t raise hogs, but did, for a small period of time, have some chickens. They are truly nasty little creatures, I must say. Quite messy keepers of their little hen houses. Gathering a few fresh eggs is not even close to being worth it when you factor in the smell, and the chicken poop on your shoes, and the real possibility of an irate chicken. Maybe you’ve heard somebody say “she was as mad as a wet setting hen”? Well, let me tell you, that person had obviously come beak to nose with a pissed off chicken. When a mad momma hen comes flying toward you in the dim light of a chicken house, sunlight filtering through the weathered slats, and her feathers are flyin’, your little freckle-brown country legs, strong from climbing trees and running in the woods, will carry you out of a hen house mighty fast.

Although sometimes the chicken coop yielded interesting things, like double yolks, or the eggs that might’ve sat untended a little too long, and when you cracked them there was a sort of partially-formed little chicken inside. Sort of neat and gross at the same time when you’re a kid. Especially when you’re the female child on the farm who was always shooed inside whenever the dogs got “stuck together.” Or the cows were giving “piggy-back rides.” These were, of course, the ways we got puppies and calves. But the young and innocent eyes of a Southern Baptist girl had to be shielded from such acts of nature, and I was typically sent inside to dust the furniture or handle some other chore for my working mother. Eventually, I grew to know better than to pose a question about such things, and found my answers to reproductive curiosity in other ways.

For some things, however, there is only one answer, such as the proper ingredients for a pound cake: don’t even get me started on the eggs, and Dixie Crystals sugar, and Crisco, and real vanilla extract. Oh, how wonderful was the smell wafting from my mother’s oven when said pound cake was nearing golden-brown perfection. And even in the winter – because my mother had been so very wise and had frozen some delicious strawberries, which of course had to be thawed for absolutely hours and hours and possibly a couple of days, because this was long before the microwave had become widely available – you could have “fresh” strawberries on top of the still-warm pound cake. When you compound the Crisco in the pound cake with the fact that for absolutely years my mother cooked with nothing but bacon grease or some other animal fat that was saved almost religiously in a left-over coffee can on top of the generic stove, it’s really amazing that we are still kicking – and she, who passed away at the ripe old age of 94, was the most confounding testament to cooking with artery-clogging animal by-products.

I am certain that those young years, during which I was taught to cook when I was yet so small that reaching the stove meant standing on a kitchen chair, have impacted my (in)ability to cook today, for there is not a lard-filled coffee can in sight (and frankly, I have no idea where they came from then, because my parents were not coffee drinkers). My culinary education consisted of taking a package of butter beans or green beans and some other accompanying vegetable like sweet corn out of the freezer, throwing them in pots of boiling water with some salt, pepper, and two heaping tablespoons of the grease from the can – and sugar if it was the corn – then waiting, mouth watering, until they had simmered to readiness. If you were really lucky, it was summer, and everything was fresh, including the vine-ripe tomatoes that still make me drool. There is such a huge difference between those sweet, juicy, brilliantly red tomatoes and the mealy, pale things one generally finds in the grocery stores today.

Regardless of the season, however, it was all perfectly timed to coincide with the readiness of whatever meat product was accompanying the vegetables. And sometimes that led to a vegetarian meal for me, because if it was hunting season, that meat might well be a few doves or quail from the day’s hunt, and I absolutely refused then, as now, to eat something some barbarian – i.e., my brother or father – had gone out to shoot just for sport. (I suppose if I had known then what I know now about the mob-style offings at the abattoir, I might’ve refused to eat old Bessie the cow, too).

I would not eat the little birdies from the sky because, while we weren’t the richest people in the world, it wasn’t like we didn’t have some money for groceries (both my parents worked, and once we stopped raising chickens, the Sunday fried chicken came from the grocer’s meat counter, after all). Despite the Food Lion grocery store in town that stocked everything we could’ve needed, my parents simply and firmly believed in living off the land, even in the last quarter of the 20^th century, and this meant that I, along with my older brother, had to go out into our acre-square garden (I kid you not) and hoe and rake and weed and pick, and then shuck and shell and silk and pare and peel, and every other possible thing you could do to the wide variety of things grown on that plot. Watermelon, cantaloupe, okra, green beans, green peas, tomatoes, squash, corn, potatoes, even beets. Ugh! How I loathed the smell of beets cooking, a dislike even stronger than my fear of the pressure cooker that was, we were told, a veritable death trap if not handled correctly.

Well, I shouldn’t say “we.” Because my brother, as a male, was chiefly excluded from “woman’s work,” required instead to help my father feed the cows, and the dogs, which were not our lovely little pets, but working dogs who lived outside in kennels, and whose chief collective requirement was possessing the aptitude to learn how to point and set, taught by my father, who did so wielding a bird’s wing tied by a string onto a long stick. Or if they were bitches, their job was to spawn a litter of adorable little pups that could do so; once any of them showed extraordinary promise, they might be kept on as future accessories to crime or might, like some of our cows, become the property of some man who arrived from who knows where to get his new prize animal.

The only dog we ever had that came close to being a pet was Jack, who also lived outside, but not in a kennel. He had the choice spot under a beautiful old shade tree, with his own dog house and a little “run” he could access while still being tethered to a chain. This might sound cruel, but we didn’t want poor Jack to start out chasing a bunny or squirrel and end up squashed by a Ford pick-up; Highway 205 was, despite its rather unimaginative name, a fairly busy and somewhat heavily traveled thoroughfare connecting not only the farmers to the FCX, but also connecting our town to another nondescript town known only, as far as I know, for its fish camp.

Those of you who didn’t grow up in the boonies may have no idea what a fish camp is, so I will enlighten you. It is not a place where little fish go to learn the flute or trombone, or where they are taught the finer points of spawning upstream, but is, typically, a very rustic structure, sometimes (usually) with fake wood paneling inside, equipped with a kitchen and populated with a plentiful supply of rickety, cheap linoleum-covered diner tables or picnic tables stocked with plastic squirt bottles of ketchup and seafood sauce and tartar sauce, and where you can go to get a deep-fried seafood feast, complete with hush-puppies and Cole slaw (the sweet kind, not the vinegary kind, if you please). As I have always steered clear of fish with bones, having been born with a natural aversion to anything that requires some work to eat (ribs: a definite no; crab claws, also not worth it), I almost always ordered the fried shrimp.

Sometimes it was popcorn shrimp, with which a kid could have great fun, trying to spear as many as possible onto the sadly misshapen forks rolled in practically useless paper napkins that had to be discarded almost immediately, soaked in grease as they soon were, and supplanted by the equally ineffective napkins stuffed into the table-top napkin holders as bent and dented as the forks. Other times it was the grown-up version, huge shrimp encased in some light and airy batter, always fried to golden perfection and practically begging for that red seafood sauce peppered with just enough horseradish to make you pucker a little – but as a brave little kid you ate it, eyes watering, and washed it down with Coca-Cola. The real stuff, then; this was long before the days when I began to imagine that Diet Coke was the cure to all my problems and, in fact, probably long before Diet Coke had even been invented. (You could get a Tab, though, because of the plentiful supply of generously-proportioned Southern women who believed that Tab was the cure to all their problems). 

By now you are surely imagining that, with all this talk of food, I am one of those over-nourished belles; perhaps you envision a tragically obese woman wearing a caftan in her house-trailer, with cakey, streaky makeup and bright fuchsia false fingernails adorned with little butterflies, the pads underneath those Lee Press-on nails stained with Cheeto-orange sludge that will surely survive nuclear disaster, perched precariously before her computer on her swiveling, over-stuffed chair and grunting with every keystroke, wistfully remembering the days before her doctor put her on a diet intended to circumvent impending cardiac arrest.

Somehow I evaded all that and have turned out to be a relatively normal woman with acceptably negligible body fat and am living in Texas – a place where beef barbecue trumps pork barbecue and breakfast tacos reign supreme over bacon and eggs, but where you can still get a glass of sweet tea. Texas is not in the South proper and yet not quite in the Southwest, but somewhere in between. One might think it sounds like limbo, and perhaps so; for it may just be far easier to recall those carefree and halcyon days of one’s youth, far better to live in a place with some similarities to one’s past than to come, as one might’ve in the chicken coop debacle, beak to nose with the startling reality that, despite an extraordinary childhood, one has arrived at a very ordinary, hum-drum middle age.