Random Remembrances

 My first remembrance of life is  a recollection of being in the front room of what I think is the first house our family lived in. The house was a wood frame house on the property of my dad's Uncle, Hollis Wiley Sanders outside the small Alabama town of Goshen. 

 

I have a memory picking cotton at Uncle Hollis'. I was standing in between rows of cotton with a "croker" sack, standing with my mother.

I remember sitting on what was called the pump house in the back yard of Uncle Holis & Aunt Ethel "Ahny". This pump house was made of cinder blocks with a green flat top. It seems like the top was metal of some kind. I remember being given peaches and slurping them up because they were like candy. The backyard was grass with a line of pecan trees that separated the yard from the field to the west.  The peach trees were on the north edge of the lawn, again separating the yard from the field.

While Dad continued construction on our home in Florida, we seemed to always have a pile of gravel near the house. I guess dad would use this gravel when he repaired the tar & gravel roof or when he was mixing concrete. I had an old bat that had a split barrel and one side was flat. I loved baseball growing up. I played on tee ball and little league teams. But most of the time I was out next to that pile of gravel with my "flat" bat using the pebbles as baseballs and hitting the over the clay Hurlburt Road into the field beyond. I imagined myself facing such greats as Whitey Ford or Sandy Koufax and hitting homeruns. I also imagined myself being in the Home Run Derby held before Old Timers Games at Yankee Stadium. I would spend hours wrapped in this cloud of imagination. I got pretty good at hitting those "rock" baseballs!