Pictures Found

I found a few pictures in my dad's Vietnam album that were out of place in time. The farm. My childhood.

That's my brother and my Uncle Grant at a cabin we lived in in the mountains. The men would gather up their wives and children to live together in this off-the-grid cabin. The men would go hunting and the women and children would hang around, cooking, playing on the big tire swing in the back, talking, singing, drinking beer. We'd stay there for a few weeks every season. I remember fireworks, finding crayfish in the cricks, fireflies, sitting around fires listening to folk ghost stories. I remember the men drinking in the kitchen around the rickety table with peeling white paint, still in their camouflage and bright orange caps- throwing darts at a board that had a poster of a naked woman pinned to it, the bullseye was her nipple.

The goat in the lawn chair is Angel, she was our favorite. She died and it was a really hard time for us. It was a rainy night and my dad was with her for hours in the shed, trying to save her. He came down to the house, drenched and tired. He told us all and we cried together. She was really rambunctious and bad and would eat everything. This picture was taken while people were over for some kind of barbecue or hog roast. I know that because there are a few cars parked in the yard and, if you look closely, the dog you can hardly see in the center is chewing on a big bone.

That's our dirt and mud driveway. There are a couple of goats and one of our pigs in the background. If you could follow the road up and out through the photo you would find grapevines and blackberries, wild guinea chicken eggs. In the back there were sumac trees and we'd take the red berry cones to stain our shoes with and to use as ammo against my brother and his friends who rode past on four-wheelers and dirtbikes. The girls would hide behind the trees and wait for them to pass and then we would lodge the cones at them, smashing the sides of their bikes, smearing and staining them red. They were so mad. We had to run fast and hide good to avoid an ass-beating.

I was always fascinated with the slanted roofs and off-center architecture of my dad's sheds and coops, seeming to lean into each other or to be sinking into the mud after a hard rain. Their little, dusty and drafty rooms contained so many treasures to find- the fish and tackle box full of gummy, colorful little things I would play with, accidentally cutting myself on the hooks. There were old time tools, antique things my dad had had passed down to him and didn't use anymore, but didn't want to get rid of. There were boxes of old magazines, old anatomy books with the layered transparencies. Those were awesome. There were moths of many colors, hornets, bees, birds, gnats, so many living things swirling around you when you crept inside.

There were always animals coming in and out everywhere. There was always a pig to trip over or a cow to run into. We had a one-legged rooster that chased us. He was fast and angry, probably about the leg.