Category: Family & Childhood

A few years ago, my brother Reginald said something that has stayed with me. Now Reginald isn’t one to talk just to hear himself talk. He’s always been a better listener than talker. So when he says something, I tend to pay attention. We had been talking about a close family member who was getting…

Today I headed to Danbury to visit my Aunt Dean and her roommate at LifeBrite. And of course, you can’t head to Danbury without making a couple stops along the way. First stop was the Red Top Cafe. I picked up four hot dogs all the way for Aunt Dean and her roommate. Now whether…

Sunday morning I got a Facebook message from Jane over at Priddy’s General Store. She was asking about my dad’s church. What time did service start? What was the address? Now if you know anything about Primitive Baptist churches, you know they don’t exactly advertise much. Most of them have been sitting in the same…

There were a bunch of us boys running around the farm back then. I was the oldest, around thirteen. Charlie and Phil were the younger ones, and Reginald, Barry, and Gene were somewhere in between. Which, as it turned out, didn’t mean we knew any better. It was tobacco season, which meant mornings started early.…

As best as I remember it, when I was growing up, during the school year there was one phone call you could count on just about every single morning in our house. It didn’t matter if it was cold, raining, or one of those mornings where nobody felt like getting out of bed… that phone…

Thanksgiving has a way of pulling us back to where we came from — to the people who loved us, shaped us, corrected us, lifted us, and sometimes carried us when we couldn’t quite carry ourselves. And the older I get, the more I realize that gratitude isn’t something you say once a year. It’s…

It was the early seventies, and life was simple, dusty, and full of adventure. For us, adventure was never far away — it usually started and ended somewhere around Papa’s house. Papa was Elder Levi Scales, our grandfather, and the center of just about everything that mattered in our world back then. Down the hill…

Every fall, about the time the air finally starts to lose its summer thickness, three sisters pack their bags for what they call The Sisters Trip. They’ve been doing it for years now — ever since their mom and dad passed on — and it’s become as dependable as pumpkin spice and football Saturdays. The…

Back when we were growing up in rural Stokes County, we farmed tobacco, raised our own hogs, sometimes had a milk cow, and always kept a large garden. That was just life. When we were early teens, my brother Reginald, my cousin Gene, and I hired out together. Gene and his brother Neal spent a…