The Path, as creative Non-Fiction

Sometimes I wonder if the path I tramped into the soil between 8811 Old Homestead and 8814 Eden Valley back in the old Pleasant Grove neighbor hood of Dallas is still there. I’d learned early on that the cookie Mom would deny me at home on Old Homestead could be had with just a quick trip up to Grandma and Grandpa’s house on Eden Valley. During the long hot summers of childhood, that path would lead to where I could nip into Grandma’s kitchen to snatch the salt shaker before raiding the cherry tomato patch Grandpa always planted.

At least once a week, my Mom’s feet would join mine on that path as we went to Grandma’s house to do the weekly washing using the old time washer kept outside just below Grandma’s kitchen window. Mine, and all the ladies clothes were washed separately with the under clothes. To save money the men’s work clothes were brought home to be laundered separately, then ironed.

Oh, how I wanted to help. But adult caution kept me away from that fascinating machinery.

“No, you may NOT put the clothes through the wringer!” Mom would yelp when I asked. “That thing could squash your fingers clean off!”

“Not if I didn’t let my fingers get caught!” I would mutter as I angrily stalked of to sooth my hurt feelings with one of Grandma’s Vanilla Wafers.

Where there is a washer there must be a clothesline. Grandma and Grandpa owned a full half acre on Eden Valley, so Grandpa and Dad had built a huge clothesline. There were three upright old telephone poles with metal and wood cross pieces, which held up four thick wire lines. These lines stretched east / west across my path up to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. With no trees over the lines, any clothes hung on them could get sun all day. The access to sun all day was important on cool or damp days when it took more time than in the hot, dry summer for the clothes to dry.

As I grew taller, I found myself hauling clothes that Mom had washed at home up to that clothesline and wearing that path just a little deeper. After Grandpa died, my feet compressed it deeper still going up to Grandma’s house to get the washing she needed done, and taking it down to our house where Mom would wash it in her newer style washer and dryer. Then, the clothes crisply dry from the dryer and folded, I’d haul them back up to Grandma’s along that same path that went under the now seldom used clothesline.

By the time I entered college, the path was worn so deep it was still there whenever I came home from school on holidays. It was just part of home, the quickest route up to check on Grandma or visit with relatives who came to visit.

After earning a BS, then four years in the Army, and a failed attempt at setting up a soil analysis business in Kentucky, my old course along that path was reversed. It was 1977 and my uncles were paying me to be live-in care for Grandma. I was saving the money so I could go back for a master's degree. I had to go down and visit Mom and Dad occasionally, just to keep in touch. I was an only child after all.

It was a good thing that path was still there when I came home in the spring of ’82 for my father’s and then my grandmother’s funeral as grief hung over me like a dark cloud. I moved on automatic between the two houses during the family gatherings centered on these two tragedies. Even after leaving ET for the last time that year with a brand new master's degree I felt surrounded by loss, by death. Despite that I bought out my Uncle Wayne’s share of Grandma’s land.

Then came the yuppies; the ones who cared not a whit for the land, the neighborhood, or the people who lived there.

“Hey! Hi, there! My name’s Muffie! My husband and I bought a lot just down the street and a block over from here! We’re getting up this petition to change the ordinances to keep farm animals and large dogs out of the neighborhood. We’d like you to sign it!” The woman said perkily after I stopped mowing and came over to see what she wanted.

“What do you mean by farm animals?” I asked, leaning on the wide double gate across my driveway. The gate kept in my big dog and my horse as well as my roomy',s big dog. Hopefully, it would keep other dogs out as I was thinking of getting some more chickens.

“Oh, you know,” she grinned, “The smelly and noisy ones like chickens, goats and horses.” Her face showed her revulsion. “And those horrible big dogs! They can get out so easily and frighten people! Not to mention the loud barking!”

I looked her up and down. She was dressed in the highest fashion. Right down to the high heels wobbling on my gravel driveway. Her big fancy car was parked right at the end of it. I hadn’t been paying attention while I was mowing but I suspected she’d driven from the house next door. I turned toward the half acre of my grandparents land I’d just finished paying off, and whistled a couple of loud notes sure to attract every beast I had that connected the sound to food before turning back to the yuppie.

“Why?” I asked as I turned back. “Why no animals like that?”

“Why, because they lower property values! We’ll never get the property in this neighborhood up to a decent value with all these farm animals around.” She continued, though obviously curious about why I'd whistled like that.

“Now why would we want the property values to go up?” I asked reasonably, as my, and my roomy's big dog loped up in answer to my whistle. “You do know that’d just cause the taxes to go up even further, don’t you?”

“B-but,” she stammered as my horse came out of the shade of the small bunch of trees behind me, and her eyes widened even further than the appearance of the dogs had caused. “T-then you could sell your property for more?”

“But not enough to buy anything where we could keep our critters,” I pointed out. “Not here in Dallas. And some of us old timers here might not want to move. So you just keep that silly petition. I hope to hell no one else is dumb enough to sign it. Bye.” I turned from her and walked back to the house to make a glass of lemonade. I almost started crying as I sat in the shade of a tree I’d ‘helped’ grandpa plant beside the driveway, and drank my ice cold lemonade. I knew that yuppie was just the first salvo of change . . . a change I couldn’t stop.

That path and the clothesline were still there when I sold out and moved to Lone Oak. I don’t know if the yuppies got their silly petition passed. I do know that the city tore up the creek where I’d learned the basics of geology from my dad. Then the police helicopters started shattering the night with their low flying whup whup whup and the bright light they carried while looking for the drug dealers who were hiding out the creek. The stolen car found abandoned there was the last straw. The big city was oozing out to envelop me, my animals, and my land. The only things I could pick up and move to safety were myself and my beasts.

I found a place. It took all the money my parents had saved up and left to me plus most of what I managed to get for the land and two houses I had inherited and bought. I, and my roomy, with the help of some relatives who really couldn’t understand my need to leave, loaded up a borrowed box trailer, a two-horse trailer, and the back of my pickup truck before pulling out one warm day in February of ‘85. We headed for Lone Oak and a life far from the problems of the big city.

For me that move was as if there had been a final death in the family. I had hoped to live out my life on that land. I had had no other plans.

The clothesline is surely gone by now, the land divided up into at least three lots, maybe more, with “little houses made of ticky tacky” built on them. Perhaps even the path is gone.

Yet, in a way that foot path goes on. I’m wearing extensions of it on the twelve plus acres I bought here in Lone Oak. Paths I’m wearing on land I bought with money left to me by my parents and from the sell of the land I‘d inherited; land I’d worn that old path on. So, perhaps Tolkien was right. The path does “go ever on” from the place where it begins.