https://leemartinauthor.com/2025/11/24/berryville-illinois-i-was-listening-to-your-lessons-on-love/#comment-12799 Author Lee Martin offers a thought for Thanksgiving.
Author Lee Martin's post today sparked memories of my life when neighbors and family helped each other just because they cared.
My father who had worked in a cotton mill since he was a child, was finally able to buy 125 acres at the age of 41.
My brother Max said, "We moved during school holidays at Christmas when we boys were there to load everything on a pickup truck; tools, animals and all. Ray drove and we made lots of trips across town and out to the new place."
Because of a government loan available during Franklin Roosevelt's administration, my father and his future neighbors could buy land that had once been a large plantation but was divided into small farms. Mr. womble bought 125 acres adjoining ours. He was living in the house on my family's land when my brothers and my father arrived to move in.
The land Mr. Womble had purchased had no house on it, so he moved into the one that he thought was available. Daddy evicted him quickly, but gave him, his wife, and his little girl permission to live in the tenant house on our farm until he could build a house on his property. Mr. Debary, a neighbor who bought land behind our farm was also a good carpenter. He built Womble's house.
Our old farm house was rustic, almost unlivable, but Mother made it home. She was surely disappointed to find herself with no bathroom, no running water and no electricity. I was a toddler, and she was seven months pregnant.
A fireplace located in the front room was the only heat. In the kitchen was a wood burning stove and it warmed things up when it was in use.
My baby sister was born in February. Neighbor women were there for the birth on that day. Mrs. Womble had kept me during the labor and birth. My brothers were in school.
I still remember my joy when I rode into the backyard astride Max's shoulders.
"You have a baby sister," called out a neighbor lady from the back porch. My mother was so happy to have a girl so she and I could grow up together.
Neighbors were important to the families that lived in the rural area of Fleming Road and County Line Road, Dougherty County, Georgia. Mother was close friends with all the women.
I remember people, black and white, working on the farm during peanut picking time, bringing in hay to store in the barn daddy had built near the house. Two of our neighbor farmers were black people and my family had only praise for their work ethics, and their cooperation with their neighbors. I think my father bought the first peanut picker in the area and it was used on several farms each fall. Peanuts and cotton were grown on all the farms at that time.
None of these people were perfect. Mr. Womble had a drinking problem. They had flaws and so did my father. Daddy had a quick temper. They had disagreements at times, but always got along together. They respected each other and were empathetic when hard times came.
Our relatives in town had all the modern conveniences available in the forties, and I was impressed as a child when we visited Aunt Mildred and Uncle Lawson who lived near the mill but had a nice house. He was not a lowly mill worker, but a supervisor.
Mr. Debary, who also bought his farm when my father did, built our "new house" that was erected in the front yard of the old house. I was still a small child. It was a three bedroom house with one bedroom for the three girls and one for the four boys. At first there was no running water so the space for a bathroom became a storage room. The men in the family took cold showers outside. Mother heated water on the stove for us little ones.
My brothers used battery power for radio to listen to music.
They had been given a record player and it, too, was battery operated. All of them loved to sing as did Mother who eventually had a piano.
Electricity reached our area in 1947. Poles were erected across fields and down the roadside. Single light bulbs hung from farm house ceilings. Mother no longer used a wood stove. I grew up in that house and talked on a party line telephone, took baths in a bathtub with hot running water and used a sink and mirror with overhead lights. We became a pretty modern household.
In 1960, the brothers, married and with their own nice homes, felt it was time for Mother to have one, too. Although it was difficult to persuade my father, a pretty brick house with a new electric stove, big refrigerator, and even a dishwasher in the kitchen was built where our home had been. That made the third house built on the same spot. The house where I grew up was sold and moved away.
We lived in a tenant house on the farm during construction. We roughed it, but I was away at college during most of the building.
The new house had an attached garage, and it eventually became home to Mother's big car. Daddy had his own private bathroom and he liked that.
The new house became the home he enjoyed for the rest of his 88 years.
As Thanksgiving is approaching, those days growing up on a farm in southwest Georgia linger in my memory.
The seven children and their families gathered at my parents' home every year until, in 1975, Mother suffered an aneurysm that left her unable to cook. She was seventy years old. We were devastated.
My life changed drastically after that.
