We were poor in terms of money, yet we had as much as or more than the average family in our community. Papa was a carpenter, a blacksmith, a good farmer. And when automobiles came along, he became a mechanic.
We never left our hack out in the weather, we had a shed to shelter it. Our barn was second to none in our neighborhood, especially by the time we finished building sheds and stalls on both sides of it. Later on, we got a car and built a shed for it. We didn't call it a garage, it was a car shed. And one time Papa bought another house, moved it up beside ours, and joined them together.
We had a good well of water, a big windmill, and a cypress water tank on a tower about ten feet tall. The tower under the tank was boarded up on all four sides to form a room that was used for keeping milk, butter, watermelons, and other things cool. Screened windows allowed the wind to pass through. That was about the coolest place on the farm.
Next to the windmill was a garden, fenced rabbit proof and irrigated with water from the well. Every summer we had roasting ears, popcorn, cantaloupes, watermelons, peanuts, okra, squash, pumpkins, and more kinds of beans and peas than I can name.
The barn was filled with feed heads, corn, and cottonseed, both for planting and for feeding. There was room in the barn and adjoining sheds for horses, cows, chickens and hogs. And up in the loft, there were peanuts still on the vines.
Some of our neighbors had given up trying to grow peanuts because rabbits ate so many of the vines. It was all but impossible to keep the rabbits out of the patch. But we always grew peanuts anyway. When neighbors asked Papa how he managed to grow so many good peanuts, he told them he just planted enough for the rabbits and the youngsters too. I can't remember when we didn't have enough peanuts in the barn loft to last all winter. We stored them on the vines and then we picked them off as we needed them, and fed the vines to the stock.
I remember one sunny afternoon, four or five of us boys were sitting up in the barn over the horse stalls eating peanuts. I was sitting on a board that was nailed to the underside of the ceiling joists. Well, the nails pulled out of the board and I fell to the ground and hit my head on a wooden block. The block proved to be tougher than my head. It cut a two-inch gash in my scalp above my right ear. Papa took me to our family doctor and had it sewed up.
The story was told on us boys that, when we were all little, a mule kicked one of us in the head, and that boy was never quite normal after that. But then, as we grew older, we all got to acting so much alike that Mama and Papa couldn't tell which one of us the mule had kicked.
Many years later, during the depression of the 1930s, a neighbor was giving me a homemade haircut one Sunday afternoon and, when he discovered the scar on my head, he laughed and said, "Now I know which one the mule kicked."
Now let's get back to the story of when I was a boy on the Exum farm. I started to school when I was seven. In fact, most kids started at seven in those days. And since I was seven when school started in September, that meant I had been seven since last January 11th. In other words I was almost eight.