Growing Up in a Family
Family days are priceless days. And while you are rearing your children, every day is a family day. Be sure and make them memorable — happily memorable.
My “little” brother turned sixty yesterday. I’m grateful that Steve and I began sharing family days late in the evening on October 31, 1956.
Before Steve’s arrival, Daddy, Mama, and I lived in a little white house near the intersection of a state highway and an old country road in rural Cheatham County, Tennessee. My grandfather Daddy Leland had recently built his modern grocery store seven miles away in Ashland City. His recently abandoned country store, with its gas pumps out front and its big red Coca-Cola cooler inside, sat on one corner of the intersection. His and Mama Sue’s new red brick house sat on another.
Chickens pecked in our backyard near the outhouse which was still in use since we didn’t have a bathroom inside.
Early in the evening of October 31, 1956, Daddy took me to my Great-Great-Aunt Lizzie’s house nearby, and I came home with an apple. Mama wasn’t very happy with Daddy when we got home though, because she was in labor and more than ready to get to the clinic in Ashland City to have her second baby.
I was one month shy of four years old the night that Steve was born. We moved to town the following year, and I have only four memories of living in our little white house in the country:
- One of those chickens pecking my finger.
- Daddy holding me as he stood in the front yard and repeated the verse, “God made the moon. God made me. God bless the moon. God bless me.”
- Daddy kneeling by the bed to pray; and
- The night that Steve was born.
I have one brother and no sisters. Steve has one sister and no brothers. He danced the Mexican Hat Dance and the Bunny Hop with me to tunes on a little 45-rpm record we played on Daddy’s record player, and I played army with him.
(And lest you get the wrong impression, we fought and argued, too, as siblings are so tempted to do.)
When we left the country and moved into Ashland City in 1957, we moved into the center of town. Daddy Leland’s store was just beyond our back yard and our church was catty cornered across the street from our front yard. Steve and I liked to play church. Steve liked to be the preacher. One day he wrapped a blanket around himself and pretended to be Jesus. We used saltines and grape juice to pretend we were having communion.
Steve and I went sledding and built snowmen. We went swimming with Mama and her sister and our cousins in Marrowbone Creek. We rode the highways and backroads of Tennessee in the backseat of our two-door Ford Fairlane with Daddy at the wheel.
In other words, we shared a childhood. We shared family days. The memories are sweet.
Family is a blessing, but a blessing that takes patience and kindness and endurance and work. One of the promises that God gave to Abraham was this:
. . . and in you and in your descendants
shall all the families of the earth be blessed.
Genesis 28:14b