When I was very young my Papaw Clifton would take me to places he had lived many years ago. Back then as a kid, I thought we had traveled miles and miles for what seemed to be all day. Years later I realized we had never actually gone much more than a few miles from our family home just east of Corning.

As a youngster, I always looked forward to our grandparents coming back to Arkansas for a visit, which was not very often. Papaw Ira and Grandma Gertrude Clifton had moved to California when I was very young so my Papaw could work as a tool and die maker. Before they moved, they lived in upper Boydsville in a small pink house sitting on a hill. I can still see his blacksmith shop sitting just below the edge of highway 90. After leaving Arkansas, my mom Shirley “Barton” Clifton would often take me and my siblings to visit our grandparents little pink house to not forget them.

Grandma Clifton always had the neatest things for us when they visited. One time she brought homemade stuffed animals in the shape of camels and colored popcorn. Who back then would have even thought of camels let alone colored popcorn, we were just amazed! She was such a happy person determined to make us smile. To this day I can still picture that jar of colored popcorns and the little camels. But I also knew when Papaw Clifton came home to visit, this meant a road trip.

 

Papaw would normally take me towards Boydsville and into the hills that surrounded the area. If anyone knows the area, there is a lower and upper Boydsville. We would take off in his Ford Maverick and I would always think to myself, “Why didn’t he just get a Mustang?” My dad had a Mustang at the time and to this little girl it was like a car that wished it was a Mustang, if anyone knows what a Maverick was, you can relate. Papaw and I would take the back-roads to where he raised his family, my dad, Alan Clifton and his siblings.

I remember on one of our trips, driving down a small field road just south of upper Boydsville. Papaw stopped the car at an old place with a broken down old shed and wild flowers that poked out through the tall grass. We got out of the car and he lead me a short distance into a thicket where you could see the remains of an old chimney.

He said, “When your dad was a boy we lived here in a farm house that was here. I farmed the ground that surrounded it, planting soybeans and cotton. The house had no well so for water there was a spring we used to carry up water in buckets back to the house.”

In just a little bit, he was still able to find the old spring surrounded by some rocks. I remember taking my hand to get a drink of the water coming out from the rocks. It was cold like it had been in the refrigerator. In the flat lands, we didn’t have water coming out of the ground unless it had a pump to pump it.

He told me that years ago they moved from farm to farm share cropping and just about every forty acres was home to a different farm and home place. Each farm would have a house, generally a very small house and they would move following the crops and the seasons and families moved around frequently sometimes several times a year.

One of my good friends had told me her parents moved over fifty times from farm to farm during her childhood days. Neighbors worked together to put the crops in and take the crops out with only the help of a team of mules and occasional mechanical equipment if lucky, a tractor and a plow. This was how folks lived and survived. So, I guess this is what my Papaw was teaching me, not to forget.

I look back now and think how lucky I was then to have spent my younger days growing up on my mother’s childhood home place, the Barton farm. When I was a year and half old my Grandpa Vernie Barton passed away, he was only fifty-four, so I never really knew him. Mom often talked about her dad and how he thought I was a pistol. Grandma Virgie Barton shortly after his death, decided to move to the St. Louis where their oldest son lived at the time.

Mom said, “Grandma just didn’t have the heart to stay on the farm without him.”

 

We had lived just down the road from their house and later we moved into my Grandparents house. Moms always let us know just how lucky we were to live in the house she had spent most of her days growing up in.

The house was exactly what you would imagine for a country farm. It was a big white house with a long porch stretching across the front with big posts that bolstered up its tall roof. Every summer our job was to paint the porch’s wooden plank floor gray, I guess my mom liked that color.

 

The farm had everything; a huge barn set up to keep milk cows, feeder pigs and the winter’s hay in the loft, a smokehouse, a blacksmith shop, a brooder house, a chicken house, sheds for the farm equipment, a large garden area, pecan trees galore and a double seater out house, my mom came from a large family! My Papaw Barton thought of everything you would need to keep a farm going. Mom told me he was ahead of the times, he even had a walking irrigation system for watering his crops that could be moved from field to field and this was back in the 50’s.

Growing up in the country holds so many memories; the fun of playing in an old barn loft, collecting eggs from the chicken house or playing with my cousins in our fort which was a set of hundred-year old twin oak trees that had grown together with an opening between them in our front yard. These were just simple things but this was life at its finest.

I spent many hours playing with our cousins Vernie and Kelly who lived just down the road along with my younger sister, Sherry. Back then we would just walk or ride our bike from house to house, no worries about the crazies like we do now. It was on the farm that we played, without video games, hare we didn’t even have a TV ‘till I was in the fourth grade, the outdoors was our playground.

 

We chased chickens for my Aunt Kitty at chicken killing time, helped with the garden and for my eighth birthday mom bought me this huge orange colored hoe to help her chop the weeds in the fields. Now how many kids now days would even know what a hoe is! Funny but I never complained about getting up early every summer on my summer vacation.

Most days Mom would load us kids up and off we would go to the field. Sometimes to chop weeds or perhaps pick up chunks from newly cleared ground. To those that don’t know what chuncks are, it was large pieces of trees left behind after the trees were cleared to create farmland. We spent many a day picking up chunks and chopping weeds at Bunker Hill that sat along the Black River in my youth.

 

I always found each day to be an adventure, this is also where I learned my love of hunting arrow heads. I was quite good at it, finding even the tiniest ones. It amazed me at not only the variety of shapes and sizes but to think Indians made these so many years ago and lived on this same land. I spent many hours just walking after a rain to find treasures waiting to be found.

 

My dad had basically raised me as a Tom Boy since I was the oldest of four. I was driving a tractor and grain truck long before I ever received any kind of driver’s license. I could pull a disk, plow beans, water rice and yes chop weeds with the best of them.

Years went by and we moved from my mother’s home place to just a few miles north to where our mom still lives today. I drive out to see the old farm house from time to time, still there standing strong but all the other buildings are gone including the beautiful old barn. I look back now and think to myself, I was a lucky kid to have lived there so many years ago. The old farm place wasn’t old to me, it was a way of life and even as a kid, I loved it.

Mostly in part of the trips me and Papaw ventured to the many locations he had lived in earlier years. Him taking the time to show me the past at an early age from his perspective gave me an early appreciation of the past that I hold dearly.

I find now as some of my closest friends are years older even than I and lots wiser, that with each visit we are all still so very young at heart. To all the younger generations: take the time, listen, learn and appreciate the past.

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