Though I didn’t always appreciate it, one of the nicest things about attending college in the same small town where you grew up and your parents still lived was whether it was a matter of convenience or of necessity, you could usually go home. At least that’s what I thought in March of 1972, when I spiked a fever, went to the hospital in severe abdominal pain, then to my parents’ house in town. Consequently, I didn’t make it back to school for Spring quarter, and the friends who’d been staying at the pond with me had to find another place to live.

This might be a good time to mention that in late August of 1971, four months before I moved out to Screven County, I’d joined a group of students between quarters on a college-sponsored tour known as “Art Studies in Europe.” Orchestrated by the department’s art history instructor, this two-week whirlwind overview of cultural sites and museums for fine arts majors began with an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and ended with a three-hour final exam that was taken on the flight home for which upon passage, we received full course credit.

The first seventy-two hours of the trip, my eyes never closed. After arriving in London, we visited local exhibit sites like the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, and the National Gallery during the day, and at night my room partner and I met as many locals and discovered as much night life between Piccadilly Square and London Bridge as physically possible. By day four’s Sunday outing to Westminster, Winchester, Winsor Castle and the town of Winsor on the Salisbury Plain, I was exhausted, in fact, once we finally got to Stonehenge, after wandering around the ancient circle, I lay down on the flattest horizonal stone I could find and fell asleep. When our instructor discovered me and excused me to go to the tour bus, the long rear seat at the back seemed the best place to continue my nap.

As the lumbering vehicle drove the Amesbury Expressway back toward London, a compact car carrying an elderly couple and their two grandchildren crossed the line and we plowed into them, head-on. I awoke as my head hit a large metal ashtray, then I dropped four feet onto the divider in the foot-well. The grandparents and one of the children, a small girl, died at the scene. A second child, a little boy, was taken in the same ambulance that transported me, the bus driver, and our art instructor to Salisbury Infirmary. I don’t recall ever knowing what became of the boy, or the bus driver, but our instructor, who’d been sitting up front was treated for minor cuts caused by shattered glass and released the following day. I was admitted with a hairline-fracture, a mild concussion, and sharp pains in my lower back and left side. Due to the concussion, they gave me nothing for pain.  I was already sleep deprived and since my only relief was sleep, I slept so much the first two days they feared the concussion was causing it, and kept me for close observation. The other students, though badly shaken had escaped injury, so the tour continued on to Paris without me.

I was four days in the ward before I was up and walking around. But on day six, they determined I was well enough for release, and with help from the British consulate and a Londoner friend named Chris whom I’d met at the Wimpy’s hamburger shop located across from our motel, I was able to fly to Paris and rejoin the tour for its duration. Fully rested and youthfully resilient, I made it through France, Germany, Italy, and the exam on the way home without a problem. I had paced myself, but I was far from over it.

We arrived back home in the States just as Fall Quarter was beginning, and life at school went on as anticipated until right before Christmas break when my parents announced they were ‘separating.’ As a young adult living across town, it came as no surprise, just a big disappointment, and in some ways, a relief—they’d been heading in that direction since the Spring of 1968. But for my younger siblings, —one, off at college in Athens, the other attending high school in North Georgia, this Christmas would be a double-dose of reality.

During my Freshman and Sophomore years at college, a staggered load of one-to-five-hour courses had often required me to be at school all day and many times, at night. At first I lived at home and commuted, but at the beginning of my Sophomore year, I was allowed to move into a dormitory located right next door to the fine arts building at my parents’ request. By my Junior year, I was able to transfer to the Honor’s Dorm. It was reserved for students with high-grade-point averages or unique schedules that called for late hour courses and rehearsals including visual and performing arts majors, and as close to being off-campus as the college would allow. But in the fall of 1971, I’d long qualified to reside off-campus, and was living five minutes away in a trailer park in a trailer that my mother had talked my daddy into purchasing. With three bedrooms and a bath and a half, it had been cheaper to share with two rent-paying roommates than to pay the cost of on-campus housing or off-campus boarding elsewhere, only now the situation was quickly escalating into “fruit basket turn over.” Come January, while Mama would remain at our home in town, Daddy would move into the trailer.

In truth, my desire to finish what I feared might be a useless college degree was waning. After securing living arrangements for the upcoming Winter quarter, my trailer mates packed up and left for the holidays, but when I suggested I might drop out for a while, get a job, and rent a place of my own, Daddy mentioned the pond house as a temporary solution. Bless his heart – he wasn’t about to let me quit school. While Screven County seemed worlds away, I loved the place, and decided to take him up on the offer. As long as I could keep my 1969 Ford Maverick running back and forth, I was up for it. Thankfully, one of my dearest hometown fellow-student friends named Carolyn offered to help me pack.Three days before Christmas, neither of us had money to spend on gifts, so we collected milk cartons, bought food coloring, vanilla extract, cloves, cinnamon, and a large box of paraffin, and gathered all the plain white tapers we could find, and after repurposing the wicks, we slaved the night away in the trailer’s kitchen making layered sand candles for each of the members of our families.

Christmas Day in 1971 was on a Saturday. My parents, my siblings, and I, ignoring the elephant in the room, opened presents together at our house in town. Everybody liked the candles. Later, we drove out to Screven County in separate cars. Daddy and my brother, Frank, picked up Daddy’s mother, “Gran,” and Mama, my sister, and I picked up Mama’s mother, “Grandma.” Grandma’s younger sister, our great Aunt Mary, who never wed, was an avowed follower of Herbert Armstrong. She lived with Grandma, but didn’t celebrate Christmas, and didn’t join the festivities.

Both Gran and my granddaddy had lived with the aunties in the Screven County farmhouse at different times as had my daddy in his youth. Born in the late eighteen-hundreds after the Civil War, originally, there were five sisters and a brother in that household. Now, with great-great Aunt Lottie ten years gone, only Granddaddy lived there with our great-great Aunt Mary, the youngest and last surviving sister, along with her seventy-two-year-old nephew, Eugene.

As best I can remember, Cousin Eugene had always lived in the attic. A gentle soul who never married, reserved, and slight-of-build, he dressed as if he were always headed to town or to church. He didn’t talk much, and even after the aunties’ single downstairs bathroom was fitted with indoor plumbing and running water, he preferred to use the outhouse in the chicken yard. “That’s just his way,” Aunt Lottie would say. “Eugene keeps to himself.” It made good sense to me. Eugène was a walking enigma—not exactly a “Boo Radley,” just an unassuming eccentric, a smiling bee-charmer, content to share a slice of honeycomb with me at the farmhouse counter.

For many years, a deep well adjacent the farmhouse kitchen provided fresh water for washing and drinking, first by crank and bucket, then by a powered pump. As a child I remember thinking how even in summer, the handy faucet anchored above the porcelain sink yielded some of the coldest water I’d ever tasted. Enclosed by a window with folding panes, the well was perfect for storage, and over the years the shelves that lined its inner walls continued to keep food from spoiling when space in the electric refrigerator was limited. The well’s outer structure still braced the back steps leading up to the kitchen door.

The last time I saw Cousin Eugene was in October of 1974, three months after great-great Aunt Mary died. He was standing on those back steps looking much the way he’d always looked. He let me snap the above photo. As usual, I’d gathered with the family at the farmhouse that past December for Christmas dinner, but had moved to Atlanta in January, and was in Western New York State when the news came of great-great Aunt Mary’s death a few days into July. After I arrived back home that October, and learned that her property had been placed on the market, I drove my favorite back road east to Screven County, took photographs of the Ogeechee, and of familiar landmarks in Cooperville, and stopped by the farmhouse on route to the pond.

It was beyond strange, being there without Aunt Mary. The last time I saw her was in January before I left for Atlanta. Oddly enough, as I slowed in the twilight that evening to make the right turn into the field, I spotted her on the left, standing at the end of her driveway near the cattle grate, just a ‘hollerin’. When I stopped the car, and went over to investigate, she told me she was worried about Granddaddy. He hadn’t shown up for supper, and it was getting late, in fact, she and Eugene had been searching for over an hour. We agreed he hadn’t gone far since his green Chevy Impalla was parked under the big magnolia near the old garage, so I walked her to the house, gave her a hug, said I’d go looking for him.

Just past the middle of the field, my Maverick’s headlights fell upon a figure crawling around on all fours. Good Lord. It was Granddaddy, and had I been paying less attention, I’d have run him over. I slammed on the brakes, and threw the car in park. With blurry eyes, he looked up, squinted in my direction, and slurring the words, cried, “I can’t find my glasses,” and reaching around to pat the grass, he mumbled, something.

I jumped out to join the search, and after finding them in a rut nearby, I helped him into the car, but as I began backing out toward the highway he tapped the wheel. “Where’re you going?” he asked. “To take you home,” I replied. He shook his head, and frowned.  I knew he must be lonesome with a lot on his mind, so I took him with me to the pond house, called Aunt Mary to let her know he was okay, made us a strong pot of coffee, and before I dropped him off at her house on my way back to town that night, had a truly sobering, but totally memorable visit with this gentle, reticent, and somewhat bedeviled old manthat was my grandfather. Worried about my daddy’s health, and troubled about the divorce, he wished that my parents had worked things out, though he and my Gran never did. That’s why she lived in an apartment in town, and he lived out of his car. He still referred to Sweetie as mine, though he was the one who had cared for him after I had to leave, but lately, instead of sleeping at the pond or in the woods, he’d taken to spending his nights up at Aunt Mary’s, bringing Sweetie with him when he could. Evidently, the land didn’t feel as welcoming to him as once it had. I felt bad for him, but given the situation and the choices he’d made, I knew he was resigned to stay.

Nine months later, the old homestead was quiet. Both he and Eugene were there, but in the stillness of fallen oak and pecan leaves, an eerie solemnity had settled over the place, —as if frozen in time, but about to change forever. The house, the barn, the chicken yard, the scuppernong vines … all looked the same. The lightning-stricken, unrooted and tilted pecan tree I used to climb still stretched to the smoke house. The only thing missing, besides Aunt Mary, was the huge live oak that had faithfully shaded the west side of the yard. Granddaddy said it had also been struck by lightning, and had to be taken down, then he told me that Sweetie had been missing for a month, that he’d searched for days and feared he might have been snakebit. Knowing how I regretted not being able as a renter to keep the dog with me, he smiled and added, “That dog had a happy life, Cyndi. He missed you, but you don’t pen a good dog up in town once he’s been running free, and that dog was ‘bout as free as any good dog could be.”

This time, Grandaddy didn’t offer to ride to the pond with me. He gave me a hug, waved goodbye, and went back to picking up pecans. I’d spend the next six months back in New York State. I’d see him again next Spring, but not Eugene. Eugene went to an ‘old folks’ home after the farmhouse sold, and died in 1981. As I drove across that cattle gate for the last time with a glance over my shoulder and a camera roll of photos, I sensed it was the end of an era. The harvest was in. A door to the past had closed.

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But looking back on Christmas Day in 1971, despite the news of my parents’ pending separation and ultimate divorce, the gathering at that farmhouse was as merry and bright as ever. The old kitchen now sported an electric oven, but its original vented wood stove continued to function as a backup which meant you pretty much smelled what was cooking as soon as you arrived. Cousins from Jesup were already there. Others from Dover and Cooperville would be stopping in to exchange season’s greetings. Some would stay for dinner. Except for Sundays, holidays, and special occasions, the formal rooms of the house were normally closed off during the winter, but now they were open with oil furnaces burning. A cedar wreath with red holly berries graced the entryway and mistletoe hung in the central hall, but there were never any electric lights on the tree in the living room. Usually a cedar or pine, sometimes a holly, it was decorated only with colorful glass ornaments and silver strands of garland.

The long hardwood dining-room table was always dressed in white linen, its candled centerpiece sported crimson camellia japonica blossoms and green magnolia leaves that were shined with watered-down buttermilk. A sideboard cornucopia of traditional southern fare included a roasted turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing, country ham from the smokehouse, red-eye gravy, mashed Irish potatoes, sweet potato soufflé, steamed yellow squash, baked macaroni casserole, butterbeans, fried okra, field peas, hot biscuits, fresh-churned butter, scuppernong jelly, and bee-tree honey. Beyond the main course, there were side-porch delights such as pecan, coconut custard, and lemon meringue pies, banana pudding, chocolate or traditional pound-cake, and fresh-fruit ambrosia. After the table was cleared and the leftovers covered, the furnaces were lowered, the rooms in the front of the house and the hallway were closed off again, and the dirty dishes were washed in the residual warmth of the kitchen. While the spryer men went hunting, everybody else retired to the sitting room at the rear of the house to watch TV, play Chinese checkers, or nap by the fire. In my younger days I might be searching the pages of Aunt Lottie’s December McCall’s magazine for the Betsy McCall paper dolls, or scouring for cut-outs that I’d overlooked in previous issues. By the way, though the farm folks liked my candles, I don’t think they  ever lit them. Granddaddy said they smelled too good to burn.

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Those last days of December I spent in town at the trailer to finish packing, and on the evening of the thirtieth, my candle-making friend Carolyn accompanied me to Screven County. It was twilight and chilly as we hauled my belongings across the threshold. We didn’t stick around, and New Year’s weekend found us partying in town with friends. I took the last load of boxes out myself on January third. The day before Winter quarter registration, I ran into a couple still looking for off-campus housing. Daddy agreed it was a good idea since I’d be twelve miles out in the woods, and they moved in the next day… Not long after, I was given a three-month-old Labrador-shepherd puppy who soon grew into a super watchdog as smart as he was friendly. Daddy and Granddaddy were always dropping by to check on us — Daddy had left his loaded rifle over the fireplace and made sure the extra shells were handy.

As the quarter progressed, we adjusted to life in the woods. Each of us had managed to schedule afternoon and evening classes which made the time and distance more manageable, (even with late nights by the fire). The idea that we may have attracted a few ‘supernatural oddities’ along the way only added to the venue’s mystical appeal. Just when it seemed that everything favored our rural endeavor, some of the masked injuries I’d apparently sustained during the bus accident in the U.K. suddenly began to surface, and a flock of debilitating symptoms sent me to the Emergency Room over Spring break.

Initially, I was diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis, prescribed antibiotics, put on a restricted diet, ordered to bed, — and Mama insisted that I come home with her. Consequently, I remained in town, and was in and out of the doctor’s office. So much for returning to school or life in Screven County anytime soon. I was still hoping to be well enough to attend summer-school in June to make up for lost time, and resigned to continue the current situation of recuperation ,  … but even that was about to change.

Toward the end of April, my parents decided to sell the house in town to go their separate ways. They wanted to be out of it by the Fourth of July. The new plan was for my sister Carole to continue at college in Athens that summer, my younger brother Frank, soon to be home from private boarding school, would stay with Daddy at the trailer, and Mama would move out to the pond house. I was welcome there, too, but all I wanted was to remain in town and get well enough to go back to school in June, … a notion that I had to abandon after nearly relapsing toward the end of May. Luckily, again, I rebounded, but again, school had to wait.

By the time my parents’ house went on the market that July, Gran had offered me the sofa bed at her new apartment until I could make other arrangements. With school out of the question, I thought maybe I could at least manage a part-time job, so the second week of July, I applied to be a server at the local Holiday Inn just a block away from Gran’s apartment. A week later, however, I collapsed in the kitchen of the restaurant – all of the symptoms were back with a vengeance, accompanied by fever, cramps, nausea, muscle weakness, and a strangely increasing tingling and ‘pulling’ sensation in my right arm and right leg. The doctor didn’t even mention colitis, but said he suspected that a large uterine cyst might have ruptured and caused a serious low-grade infection. That didn’t explain the nerve-related issues, nor did anyone seek to address them. I left the hospital with more antibiotics, and went back to the sofa bed at Gran’s.

That weekend, I was still feeling awful, when another friend, a fellow music-major named Susan who had recently graduated, found out where I was and stopped by for a visit. She took one look at me and said she was packing my bag and taking me home with her, to see — of all people — her chiropractor, whose office happened to be next door to the apartment she was renting fifty miles away in Vidalia, Georgia. I’d seen a local practitioner in the past for headaches and ‘pinched nerves,’ but her “doctor of chiropractic,” a nutrition-centric graduate of Palmer College, turned out to be a miracle-worker.

A thorough review of my x-rays was shocking! Even the images of my upper spine were nothing like what I recalled from the x-rays taken by my local practitioner three years earlier. The new images revealed that from the atlas and axis vertebrae through the lower lumbar regions of my spine, the alignment had been dramatically altered – crimped toward the top, bent in the middle, and generally and overall, shifted to the right. When I mentioned the bus accident and how I was thrown forward and dropped onto the floor-well, my friend’s doctor said I was blessed to still be walking.

My treatment began with two adjustments a day. By day four, it was one. The following week, I was completely out of pain. I kept up with the exercises prescribed to strengthen the corrections, and by the middle of August, my spine was straight, I was maintaining a healthy diet that included a supplement for GI support, and the debilitating symptoms were gone and never returned. My friend Carolyn was also greatly helped by this same chiropractor that summer. For the sake of convenience, we both stayed at Susan’s apartment to undergo treatment that August, and by that month’s end, I was well enough to rent an upstairs room in the front of Miss Irby Franklin’s old house on South Main Street back in town. That September, I resumed a full schedule of classes for what would finally be my last year of college, and though I still carried some emotional baggage, my health had been restored.

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In retrospect, Mama didn’t stay at the pond house long. She rented a small apartment in town that July, — the same apartment Gran had just vacated in order to move into her new one. It belonged to a lady with whom Gran often played Canasta. While I was off getting well in Vidalia, my daddy and Frank continued to live at the trailer park until Frank went back to school. My sister, Carole, had an apartment in Athens and stayed away that summer. After our former happy home sold, Daddy spent most of his spare time at the pond implementing his plan to add a screened porch to the front of the house. Again, Bill Williams helped him.

The 1972 Christmas get-together at the farmhouse was a ritual feast for which all the usual suspects gathered, minus Mama and her side of the family. That’s when it finally hit me how quickly things can go sideways in slow motion, but I wasn’t looking to assign blame or pass judgement. I was well, again, and thankful for it, and as I drove back into town to see Mama, I was determined to cope and move on. New Year’s Eve found my friend, Carolyn, and I enjoying acoustic music with the locals at our friends Benji and Sally’s rustic farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Afterward, I drove home to Miss Irby’s alone.

From January on, I concentrated on finishing my degree. I’d almost accumulated enough credits to graduate in music. My friend, Susan, had graduated in music education and was now a high-school choral instructor. But I couldn’t picture myself as a teacher, and as there didn’t seem much for a theory major to do but to perform or write music professionally, I finished that June with a bachelor’s degree in fine (studio) arts and a minor in music.

During those long winter evenings on the final stretch, I set my easel up in my room at Miss Irby’s, and when I wasn’t busy at school, working on the third floors of the Foy Fine Arts Building, I’d steal downstairs to one of the music department practice rooms to bare my soul on the piano. I saw my family – maybe once a week. Some weekends, rather than stick around, I drove to Atlanta, which is where I might have been by Friday night, February 9th, had not my Maverick slid down an icy embankment into a ditch the evening before. It was the week of the Great Southeastern Snowstorm of 1973. Classes had been cancelled that Thursday, and I’d just left the Foy Building, where enough white stuff had accumulated on the roof of the forth-floor ‘walk-out’ for a bunch of gleeful students to be pitching snowballs down at passers-by below. Snow was a rarity, but I should have known better than to drive to that same rustic farmhouse on the outskirts of town much less to tarry there until it was almost dark. After a long cold trudge back through the slush to make a phone call, I ended up spending the weekend waiting for the wrecker to show. “Good thing, you weren’t stuck in Atlanta,” everybody said.

Meanwhile, Daddy had the trailer relocated to a different lot at the trailer park, and he and Frank continued living there. At one point, Frank also stayed with Mama before completing high school in town. Come Spring, however, Daddy moved to the pond house, took the trailer with him, and set it up just yards away from the house, perpendicularly facing the water. Frank stayed in it that summer along with his best friend J.D. They enjoyed a month of swimming, waterskiing, and general carousing before he left for Athens to join my sister, Carole, at the University of Georgia that fall. Carole had an apartment in Athens. She didn’t come home…

After my graduation that June, I was as anxious to “get out of Dodge” as anybody had ever been. I was definitely “twenty-four and so much more,”  and Dark Side of the Moon wasn’t just another Pink Floyd album. … Time was definitely slipping away. By August, I was still hanging around, and knowing how antsy I was to leave, Miss Irby allowed me to pay month to month.

Early in September, my friend, Paul, and I saw a UFO near Jones Landing at the Ogeechee River … Well, at least, I saw it. Paul was blind, but I described it to him in real time. Nobody else was out there. It was dark, under a clear night sky. We’d left the car and were walking on the bridge when, out of the blue, a big ‘star’ emerged from the tree-line, hovered, and zipped off in the opposite direction. Everybody thought we were crazy until they read it in the newspaper. We didn’t know it then, but they’d been reporting UFOs all over Coastal Georgia that weekend including at Fort Stewart, and Hunter AFB in Savannah, and on Tybee Island. Known by Ufologists as the Hunter Incident. it’s said that the government covered it up. You sure didn’t hear much about it after that, but I never forgot it.

Also, that September, friend, Debbie, and I, and one of her Atlanta buds, made a weekend pilgrimage to The Farm, the large vegan commune near Summertown, Tennessee founded by Stephen Gaskin. author of Monday Night Class. It was a fruitful, eye-opening experience, and the dedication to community and spiritual connection was impressive, but none of us were ready to commit to austerity. We didn’t stay.

Though my three-year position with the College Union Board ended at graduation, I had continued in an advisory role to facilitate concerts and artist accommodations. I’ll never forget the night Debbie and I took Z.Z. Top drummer, Frank Beard, sightseeing after the group played the Hanner Fieldhouse. Our driving tour of Statesboro also included county landmarks like the Mill Pond, Cyprus Lake, and the old Harville House, Much to the family’s distain, the house had long been labeled the area’s most famous ‘haunted house,’ since falling into disrepair years earlier. Granted, it was spooky, even in the daytime. Its outward appearance was houses usually featured in horror movies. The photo below was taken in 2014, but thankfully, a current effort is now underway to restore the grand old home to its former glory. Bravo!

Familiar with the local music scene, and venues, I’d initially met and friended several members of the Atlanta-based horn-band, Stagecoach, when they played The Flame that summer. When they returned in late September, those friendships were rekindled. In October, I traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, to join them on the road, but by the middle of November, when the flute/saxophone player that I fancied landed a high-paying job with Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders, it was like Waitin’ on a bus – Jesus Done Left Chicago and Pavone for a Dead Princess. While the money was excellent, and the opportunity was so special that nobody in the band blamed him, his departure prompted me – feminist that I was – to rationalize making a hasty decision. He objected. I was adamant, and though it took a while, I came to deeply regret it.

I arrived home at Mama’s on the third of December after driving fifty-five-miles-an-hour instead of my usual seventy. Only then did she tell me that a musician friend whom I’d known since high school had recently been killed on the way home from a gig. The band member driving the bus when it hit the log truck was also a long-time friend. He’d been critically injured. His recovery was long and painful, but he survived. It wasn’t until a year later when I stopped in Atlanta on my way home from New York State that I learned the former lead guitarist for Stagecoach had wrapped his car around a tree. He didn’t survive. He died instantly.

December seventh, I went back to Atlanta to visit my friend, Carolyn. My distressed state of mind was obvious, and knowing how sad and remorseful I was, she said the Lord had been speaking to her. A seeker, like me, she’d been reading her Bible and while it was comforting to hear it, I’d been reading everything but. While I was there that weekend, I stumbled upon an odd job painting Christmas decorations on the front windows of the corner gas station. It was a quick fifty bucks

I’d given up my rental at Miss Irby’s, so when I got home, again I slept at Mama’s, at Gran’s, or in the house or the trailer at the pond. By then, Granddaddy had adopted a second dog and named her “Lover” – a black stray female who followed Sweetie around like a shadow, and Daddy had a new lady friend that lived in Marietta, Georgia, whom he’d started visiting on the weekends. Except for Christmas Eve, my sister and brother stayed in town while they were home Christmas break. Granddaddy, the dogs, and I, might have had the pond all to ourselves had I cared enough to be there.

The day after Christmas, I met up my flute/saxophone player for a short trip to Biloxi, Mississippi, before the C.C. Rider regimen resumed. I was still determined to move. Most of my friends were already in Atlanta. By the end of January of 1974, I’d found a temporary place to stay in West End, and was chasing rainbows of my own, even applied for a job at the High Museum. I was a musician at heart, but my degree was in art. Go figure.

But I kept running into musicians that I knew; others, I met at clubs in Underground Atlanta, and by the Fourth of July 1974, still looking for rainbows in places I’d never even dreamed of visiting, I’d packed everything I owned and could carry into my Maverick, and by way of Dallas, Texas, a recent association with a band called Wild Bill and the Buffalo Yankees, my daddy’s Shell card, and help from what I’ve always believed was an angel, I’d arrived safely in Western New York…

At least I didn’t hitch hike. Clearly, someone was praying…

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PS: My Mama said that one night in 1972, during her brief stay at the pond, she saw lights moving through the woods across the way and wondered who might be walking around over there at three o’clock in the morning. Granddaddy said it wasn’t him. Daddy’s friend, Bill Williams, used to talk about “ghost lights.” Living up the highway, he’d seen them wandering the trees of the small island of wetlands located in the middle of the field that was never cleared for cultivation. The one-lane dirt road leading through the field served as the boundary between two parcels – the east side belonged to Daddy; the west side belonged to daddy’s first cousin, Aunt Charlotte. She leased it to a man named Weeks. Daddy dismissed the lights as swamp gas.

As I said in Part One, my friends and I shared some weird encounters that winter, including through that field, but we never saw Bill’s ghost lights, and it wasn’t until many years later that I learned that anybody beyond our immediate family had. Just recently though, I was told that on one occasion, much the same as Mama had described, lights appeared in the piney woods at the back of the big field on Daddy’s property, glowing like bouncing lanterns as if being carried by someone walking. That not anywhere near a spring.

My sister, Carole, reminded me of something that happened the following December of 1972. She and Frank were home from school, and the three of us had spent Christmas Eve in the trailer, making candles, and wrapping presents while Gran helped Daddy in the kitchen next door to prepare food for tomorrow’s gathering. Around midnight, Frank left to sleep at the house. My sister and I slept in the trailer – me, up front in my old bedroom; she, in the bedroom at the rear. Speak of rude awakenings, we awoke the next morning to find all of the furniture in the living area, strangely and quietly ‘rearranged’ – like somebody had ‘pranked’ us, and not Santa. Of course, anybody could have done it. With just the five of us, eleven miles out of town, the trailer wasn’t locked that night, but truth be told, if anybody, including Daddy, ever thought there was reason to worry, we, kids, would have been the last ones to know. But threatening or not, how such a thing could have been accomplished without waking one of us was beyond puzzling. Trailer walls are paper-thin and I’m a light sleeper. Given that nobody ever admitted to doing it, it’s puzzling still.

Frank doesn’t talk about ghost lights or rearranged furniture. He talks about the night in August of 1973 that he and J.D. were alone inside the trailer, just a stone’s throw from the house, drinking beer, and listening to music, when all of a sudden the thing rocked like something big had hit it. The jolt was so violent that the needle jumped, and skidded across the record. Rather than step outside with a flashlight, he says they sat in dead silence waiting to see if somebody or something might come crashing through the door.

And thinking back, … and as I’ve said before, I was never afraid of much, and most of the baggage that I carried in those days has long since been discarded, but there’s one incident from 1972 that baffles me to this day. It happened at the pond house, the second weekend of June, a month before my parents sold their house in town...

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