Living in the Country

We moved out into the country during the summer after my sixth grade year. What is now a housing edition on the corner of I-20 and Pleasant View Drive was 2 4-acre plats that my folks had bought. Pleasant View Drive was a 1/2 mile or so dirt/gravel road off of Pleasnat Ridge Road. Pleasant Ridge was a narrow, winding poorly maintained two-lane asphalt road. It was maintained by Tarrant County Precint 2 which meant there wasn't a whole lot of money for upkeep.

East of Pleasant View on Pleasant Ridge was a steep hill. It was called both hiccup hill and Morales Hill. Kelly Elliott Road ended at the top of the hill and that was how wide the hill was, just enough for the narrow raod and then it dropped off on the other side. When you drove over the hill your stomach would come up in your throat and cause you to hiccup. It was called Morales Hill becasue a guy named Morales owned the 4-5 acres on the north side of Plesant Ridge down to where Kelly Elliot started again going north at the bottom of the hill. The hill was full of slum shacks that Morales rented out.

Mom and Dad had bought the first 4 acre tract where we actually put our house a few years before we actually moved out there. I can remember having a garden with lots of tomatoes. I went to all the houses up and down and around Sharon Street in toen selling about 2 pounds of tomatoes for 10 cents. The first tract was heavily wooded, except where we put the garden. The second 4-acre tract was almost barren of trees. An old farmer had owned it. They had several kids and they all lived in a 4 room shack of a house. They boys slept out on the porch during warm weather. Of course, they were gone by the time we moved out there. We used the house for a hen house where we kept out chickens.

We also bulldozed out a stock tank (lake) and built a barn with 3 stalls for our horses. The lake was stocked with perch and largemouth bass. Crappie and catfish washed in from the stock tank on the adjacent property when it rained heavily and the water ran over their spillway. We had a great time fishing in the lake. We brought my Little League team out there for a party after we had finished 2nd in the city. I remember Steve Perry got a hook stuck in his head when he tried to cast out his line. I can also remember fishing out there in the summer when the fish were so hungry they'd bite anything you threw out there. After running out of grasshoppers, worms, and nits of cheese we tried sticking dried leaves on the hook and they even hit that! We caught 50-60 fish in one day. I never cleaned a single one. My mom always did that.

The chickens we had were really unique. A friend of my mom had some chickens that they'd hatched from eggs sent to them from an ad in the Weekly Reader. The chickens were from Chile and they laid different colored eggs. As I recall there 3 or 4 hens and one mean rooster. The rooster was black with a golden neck. When we gathered the eggs we had to keep an eye on him because he would pack at you and spur you with the claws on his feet. He was really mean. One of the chicked was kind of a mattled black and white and was smaller than the rest and dashed around everywhere very quickly. We called her Speedy. She laid blue or bluish green eggs. Another was reddish brown but had feathers coming on either side that looked like a big bushy mustache. We called her Whiskers. She laid brownish pink eggs with purple splotches in them. The other hen was an ordinary reddish brown. I don't remember her name and her eggs were solid brownish pink. We had our picture taken ans a story was run in the Citizen Journal about our chickens that laid the colored eggs. My mom is holding Whiskers in the picture with Gary and me on either side and some of the colored eggs and a normal store bought white egg lying side by side in front of us.

Our first horse was Brown. That was his name and that was his color. He was an old horse, really more of a pony. He was larger than a Shetland pony but not as large as a normal horse. We learned to ride on him. I think we paid $75 for him including his saddle and bridle. The second horse we bought was Beauty. She was a dark brown and white Paint. Her previous owner was a barrel racer and Beauty was her horse. However, Beauty had one rear hip that was higher than the other so she wasn't a competitive quality horse. She has avery easy nature and we had her several years. As we got older Brown was too small so we sold him and bought a pool table with money. We also bought anotherPaint mare. Midnight was a back and white paint. When we had races she always beat Beauty. Just up the road from us a guy had bought the land and started clearing the land to build a house. He also put in a nice dirt road that made an ideal race track. We'd take the horses up there to race them. I'll never forget day when Verne was over. He was riding Midnight and Gary or someone else who'd come over was riding beauty. The went up to the track to race. It was about a 1/4 mile away. My dad and I and I don't know who else were sitting in front of our house waiting for them to come back. We heard someone holler "Go!" and we knew the race was started. 10-15 seconds later you could here Verne hollering, "Whoa! Whoa! Whoa dammit whoa!" I still laugh thinking about him hollering and trying to get Midnight to slow down.

We built a swimming pool ourselves using a kit that we bought from Montgomery Wards. There was a natural depression and gully out in front of the house by the garage, so we put the pool there. There would be less dirt to dig out that way. We dug the deep end until we hit sandstone and couldn't go any deeper. Then after digging around everywhere else to the specifications of the plans, we lined it with sand, and put in a vinyl liner. And, that was the pool. We had a lot of church swimming parties and played a lot of "baseball" games in the pool.

Growing up in the country was great. Swimming, fishing, and riding horses were great. On the down side was cleaning the pool, cleaning out the stalls, and hauling hay. We literally shovelled the crap out of the stall and into a wheelbarrow. Then we dumped it in a pile outside the barn. Later we'd come back with the tractor, scoop up the manure, and dump it in the garden area. That would later get plowed under for the fertilizer. Hauling hay wasn't much fun either. It was hot, sweaty, and itchy. Gary and I got into more than one fight while hauling hay. One time we were hauling hay in using an old 1952 pickup over in Kennedale. We were making 8 cents a bale to haul it out of the field and stack it where the farmer wanted it. At the same time he was paying another couple of guys by the hour to use his tractor and his trailer to stack bales from ther same field. After talking to them we realized that they were actually making more money and using the other guys equipment. ALso, they got to goof off whenever the owner wasn't around , which was half the time. It didn't look so bad becasue they could put a lot more bales of hay on the trailer than we could on the truck. We got back at them though toward the end of the day. A big rain storm was coming in and the farmer wanted us to haul in hay from an alfalfa field. Those bales were a whole lot heavier. He offered us more money, 10 cents, but we said no. We needed to get our own bales home. The other guys had to work doubly hard with the owner right there working with them before the rains came.

Since this has been a book already, I'll quit. I may revisit this someday.