in the beginning

i moved to bronaugh with my dad and grandparents in 1974, when i was three. we had been living in moundville, a whole 6 miles north of there.

we moved onto a 3-acre spot of land, into a single-wide mobile home. it was white with gold trim and had a corrugated tin "skirt" to keep passersby from seeing the wheels, i guess, and also to keep animals big and small from getting underneath and tearing out the wiring and insulation.

unlike a lot of people in town, our land was not to be farmed. instead, my grandfather had a junk yard, "carpenter salvage," officially. we had engine blocks, car bodies and piles of everything imaginable. some of my favorites were the barrels of rotary dial phones and cast iron bathtubs.

the only bloody nose i've ever had resulted from pounding on one of those tubs with a sledgehammer, when i was about 8. after one particularly hard whallop, a cast iron shard broke off and shot up my right nostril! luckily it fell out (and even more luckily, it didn't lodge in one of my eyeballs), leaving only a scratch...albeit a deep scratch that bled profusely enough for my grandmother to notice and demand an explanation.

why was i pounding on a cast iron bathtub with a sledgehammer? well, there wasn't much else to do in bronaugh...