From time to time you
will read about my childhood and the picture above is one of the areas that I
lived. I have a lot of memories from
that house (middle one in the picture). We were surrounded by much woods and
fields that belonged to Doris Duke.
Today I am going to talk about the small rail road shack that was
located to the left of my house. I know
you can’t see it from the picture and honestly I can’t find it when I blow it
up, so it must be gone. The rail road track that was near the old shack was
never used and I assume it was closed off by the time I lived there in the
70’s.
Just a little bit of
information that you have to know to understand the memory is that we lived on
a street that consisted of only about seven kids my age at the time. There were of course the kids that came and
went, like any neighborhood, but for the most part there were seven of us that
were always together.
On this day there were
just me, my brother, two sisters that lived next door to me on the left, and
their little brother. We had often spent
much time in the field across from our houses, but his one day we decided to
see if we could find something new and we did.
As we walked up the
street, one of the sisters pointed to something that we saw before, but never
did we try and get to it, because there was a dirty pond that we would have to
cross. It was a spring afternoon, had to
be a weekend, since we were out in our play clothes since the sun came up.
You know I think about it
now and realize that I had no fear about snakes and mice or anything of that
nature back then. Funny how learned
behavior falls upon you. Today I have a
real fear of small critters and how back than I didn’t.
Anyways we made it over
there and the first thing we saw was all the coal that was in the back of the
building. The oldest sister, who was
three years older than me, gave us all a lesson about how back in the day,
people used coal to heat their homes and how dirty it was. She also went on to explain something about
diamonds or something. I don’t really
remember, because at that point I was helping her younger sister try to find
the perfect one to add to her rock collection.
We took quite a while
looking all around the small shack looking for treasures, little did we know
that the real treasures were actually inside of the shack. I remember that the shack had a strong mildew
smell to it. At that age, I am guessing
around eight or so, I understood time and dates and years. The only thing we saw in the shack were
papers all over the place and we almost left because of the smell, before we
even looked at the papers. My brother,
who didn’t care about the dampness and dirtiness of the papers, grabbed one and
looked at it. He stopped us and told us
that he didn’t know much but he could tell that these papers were quite old.
This new information
stopped the older sister dead in her tracks.
She went over to my brother and looked at the document and told us that
they were a hundred years old. I was
like wow that was older than my gram.
Which in a kid’s eye that was way old.
We started to tear
through the documents that were wet and full of mildew and saw that at one time
that little shack saw a lot of business. I remember that it started to get dark
and we had to go.
For the most part that is
the end of that memory, but I do know that from that day until my family moved
away, us kids were on a mission to find as much old stuff as we could all
around. We did find bottles and things,
but never did anything about it. If that
was today, I know I would have brought some of those documents out of the shack
and some of the bottles as well. I think
the only thing we did take with us from that excursion was the final lump of
coal that the younger sister added to her rock collection.
But now that shack is
gone as well as the tracks next to it. So
I have my memory to share with others.
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