The Hatcher Place

It was a time and a place where the alarm clock was the screen door slamming as Grandpa left for the barn at dawn to milk the cows. It was a time when baths were taken once a week in a creek in the front yard and cousins ran free through the fields soaking in every second of the love and peace of that place.

It was once called The Wade Place, for the family that owned it when my sharecropping great-grandparents moved there, and was built by the Wilson family some time at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1954 my folks moved there and were finally able to buy the place a few years later.

We were recently given the opportunity to spend a few hours roaming the farm and listening to the old stories of life before smartphones, WiFi, and HVAC systems and in a strange way as I sat in that front yard surrounded by family, I felt as if I had returned home. I’ve never spent a night in that farm house, but all my life I have known that I am the man I am today because of the time my family spent in that farm.

My grandfather and his brothers buying the farm from the landlord showed me that family helps family; Grandpa’s steadfast faith during the hardest of times showed me that there is not a trial too big for God to see us through. The joy with which my father and his brothers talk about that place taught me that our circumstances don’t define us, and the stories of quarters being offered to children for going into the scary cabin up on the hill taught me that uncles can never be trusted totally.

After it was said and done, we all packed up our lawn chairs and cleaned up the watermelon rinds. We took that long gravel driveway back out to the highway and went back to normal life, but for a few hours on a Saturday we were all home again.

They say you can do that, go home again, but we know they’re wrong.