Uncle Barnard

Today is Uncle Barnard's eighty-seventh birthday. He is still in good health and works two different jobs. I think that's what keeps him going. He has never stood still for too long at a time.
He never married and helped raise me and my two brothers and sent my Aunt Jean and Uncle Guice through college. He is always visiting "old" people in the nursing home, hospitals, or the homebound. He taught us to do the same. He is a most awesome man.



I don't know what we would have done as we were growing up without Uncle Barnard. He bought all my school clothes. Right before school started every year, he would come home with seven to nine dresses and tell me to pick my five favorites. I always was looking good when I went to school that first day. On my birthday, December 29, the whole process was repeated.



Every Friday evening when Uncle Barnard came home, he would come with a trunk load of groceries. We would all go out and help bring them in. Every other Sunday he cooked a pot roast with all the trimmings. On the other Sundays, Mama cooked fried chicken. We never knew how many people would be coming to eat. We always had cousins, other aunts and uncles, and friends who would show up on Sundays to eat with us. Most of the time the preacher and family would be there too.



We had a host of friends who would come on Saturdays or Sundays. Sometimes Uncle Guice would play the Hammond organ and Uncle Barnard would play the piano. Donald Hammonds would play the piano too. Donald taught me to dance "The Pony, and the Mashed Potato, and the Watusi" in grandmother's living room. Uncle Barnard would cut the rug with me too. The Meyers Sisters worked with Uncle Barnard years before I was born and came often to visit. Uncle Guice's sweetheart Nelli Burt was usually there too. The bigger the crowd the happier we all were. I still love to have company and I guess I got this from Uncle Barnard and Mother. Our door was always open. I don't remember our door ever being locked when I was a child. I don't even know if there was a key to the house.



Uncle Barnard lives in the home place that my granddaddy built out of huge rocks that he and my mother snaked out Town Creek with oxen. Some of them are four to five feet tall. The outside and inside of the house are made of these. It doesn't take a lot to keep it warm in the winter or cool in the summer, but if the rocks ever get cold in the winter it takes quite some time to warm them up! When we were kids, Mother and I slept in the back bathroom, Grandmother in the front, Uncle Guice in the bedroom off the kitchen, Everett and Terry slept in the attic, and Uncle Barnard slept in the little house out by the road. I don't know how but we all fit and we often had company too. Uncle Glysco, Aunt Lela and Mickey would come for a visit once a year and so would Uncle Edward, Aunt Ethel, Butch and Laura. Aunt Eulene and Uncle Yewell came every year with Melinda and Robert. Uncle DeArmond and Aunt Hazel came once a year too. By the time I was old enough to remember, their kids were already grown. When I was little, I thought our house was huge. Now it is small. Isn't it a wonder how our perspective changes when we grow up? There was always enough room for everybody though. The kids would sleep on pallets and as soon as Grandmother got up we had to too. We had to fold the quilts and put them away in case we had company to visit whatever company we had.



We would always sit outside when it was pretty. We had lawn chairs every where and a picnic table. Grandmother would make sweet tea and we drank it out of those aluminum glasses that everybody had in the sixties. They gave the drinks a sharp taste that I loved. There was nothing like water from the spring in one of those glasses! We would have watermelon cuttings and them cut the rinds up to feed the cows. Uncle Barnard never really liked the cows. It was something that Uncle Guice and I did. Uncle Guice always kept a milk cow until Everett and Terry graduated from high school and it almost broke my heart when he sold the last milk cow. Of course, I never had to milk! I might have felt differently about it if I'd had to do it.



Aunt Jean and Uncle G.B. came with Brian and Tim nearly every other Sunday to see us. I would run out to the car and tell them every thing that had happened since they were there last and Aunt Jean would say that they never needed the news when I was around. I guess I still do that through my blog. Aunt Edith and Uncle Lester came pretty often on Sundays and I never could figure out how they went to church at 11:00 am but got to our house, an hour away, at 12:00 noon. I was probably in my teens before I figured out that twenty-five miles away the time changed! Aunt Edith never came to visit me without bringing me a gift. She made me an Easter outfit several years when I was a little girl. When I would go to visit her on Lookout Mountain she would put me in her little VW and take me to Loveman's in Chattanooga and buy me an outfit. Then, when I was properly dressed, gloved, hatted, and shod she would take me to the Reed House for lunch. Most of the time I thought she was the cat's pajamas but sometimes she was stern like Grandmother and I would want Mother to come get me.



Vondell, Glenda's husband, would fly over the house sometimes in his little plane and buzz us several times. He'd actually holler out the window for us to come to the airport and pick him up. He took me on my first airplane ride. I thought I was going to die when we went over the edge of Lookout Mountain and we hit the down and up drafts! It was the first time I saw our house from the sky. I thought our little farm was beautiful.



At Christmas, Uncle Barnard and I would take a van full of toys to the United Methodist Children's home in Selma. I never could understand why children of divorced parents could be in an orphanage. I couldn't understand that there were children with two parents that at least one of them didn't want those kids. Everett, Terry and I may have had divorced parents but we never had to worry where our next meal was coming from or be cold or without nice clothes. Uncle Barnard and Uncle Guice took care of all our daily needs. Our other aunts made sure we had treats through the year. Aunt Jean would dress me up and take me to see Santa Clause and have my picture taken even though I didn't really believe in Santa anymore. Aunt Flora, Grandmother's sister told me there was no Santa Clause when I was four. She used to keep me when Mother worked at Forrest Avenue Elementary School and it was against her religion or something.



Uncle Barnard has always been kind and wonderful to all of us in this huge family we had. I don't know what we would do without him and I hope he has many more birthdays to share with us. I hope I get to emulate the wonderful life Uncle Barnard has had so far. Living Life...sure has been a trip with Uncle Barnard.