Two Swing Front Porch

There is a spot on Sugar Ridge, the place where I grew up and live now, that once was a place of comfort, laughter, music, philosophy, physics, Bible study, mechanics, hotrods, and life in general.  All that remains of this place of profound debate and hospitality is a concrete slab with part of the brick walls that enclosed it.

For year it was a dirt floor with two boards that held the roof of what would become our front porch.  We lived a shack that most folks would have not used for a barn.  Built the old timey way, the shack stood atop some big rocks used to hold the floor off the ground.  Dad started building it around 1956. 

We moved to Illinois from Alabama in 1957 for dad to find work.  He worked for Beloit Iron Works and we, mom, dad, my sister, and I, had a prosperous and productive life until mama tired of ways of Yankee land and we, now with a newborn, returned to the poverty of the south.  We moved back into the unfinished house with primitive and limited things to live in the spring of 1960.  That fall the last of the Hopper children arrived.

Ten years later we would install two more rooms and an indoor toilet and bathtub.  I helped dad set the commode and tub.  I had tried out for a football scholarship that morning.  My dad and two brothers poured the concrete for the porch slab.

It was the place where my dad, brothers, and I spent most of the time.  We thought we were somebody because we had two swings on the porch.  One swing faced the west, the other the east.  It was from the swings that we discussed life.  On the swing facing west, we hung two big springs from a truck’s hood giving the swing an energy of its own.  It was fun to watch our victims sit in the swing and get a quick lesson in physics.  A couple of laws were in play.  One was what goes down must come back up.  It was sorta fun to watch the theory of what goes up must come down, but when the victim went down, legs went up, eyes opened wide and squills got high.  When the swing bottomed it came up, legs went down, eyes shut tight, and the yell was loud.  What followed was a series of ups and downs and smiles on the hopper men folks.

The swings were not attached according to any safety regulations.  Dad placed two oak 4X4’s over the rafters and wired the swing chain around the 4X4’s.  Worked fine until one morning my middle brother and I had called a truce on our fighting and were sitting together looking at the newest of Hot Rod Magazine which came in the morning mail.  Mamm had threatened to kill us several times that morning for our fighting but most of the time they were idle threats.

Sudden in Biblical judgment speed, one of the oak 4X4’s fell from the heavens, naw the porch rafter, and hit me across my shoulder.  Taller than my little brother, the board hit me first and we were sitting on the floor.  My brother got the worse though.  Where the chain wrapped around the 4X4, hit him in the head and blood was flying everywhere.  He was crying as I dug us from the rubble.

With the swift judgement of the Arch Angel Michael, momma come flying out the front door with a rod of judgment and began to whup me screaming, “I told you to leave your brother alone.”  My brother crying, “Momma, Bobby didn’t do anything.”  Momma had blind justice and kept whuppin.’  I kept digging us out.

Many great and wonderful things happened on those swings. I’d love sit facing mom and dad and discuss life again.  Sunday afternoons the swigs and bannisters became a stage to sing.  It was the place to share heartaches, bad news, good news, to hug, to kiss, and reflect on life.

Dad had a brain tumor, and he would swing after having radiation treatments.  One day my daughter Angel had a marker and was sitting in the swing with dad playing tic-tac-do on his bad head.  The Chemo people had drawn a diagram for treatment and dad was allowing his only granddaughter to play.

Oh! The memories of a two-swing porch.

 

Peach, Plum, and Black Cherry Switches

The Front Porch Swing

I went by my mom's grave and placed some flowers for her birthday and Mother's Day.  I had promised to place flowers there because she loved it when I brought her flowers.  Today's blog is another flower placed in her honor as we close another chapter in the book of life.

Mother’s Day reminds us of the great sacrifice that a mother makes for her children.  I remember when daddy moved us to Beloit, Illinois.  Momma never adjusted to the North.  It was too cold in the winter and Southern hospitality did not exist.  She insisted that we move back to “Sweet Home Alabama.”  Staying up there was a sacrifice she did not want to make.

Momma was not your TV sitcom mommas like June Cleaver of Leave it to Beaver, but she did act comical like Lucile Ball on I Love Lucy.  She loved working outdoors.  We spend most of our time outside washing clothes in a ringer washer with a set of number three washtubs.  Most people had automatic washing machines inside or in an outside building.  Momma heated water on the stove and we carried outside in buckets and poured it in the washing machine tub.  She sacrificed convenience to wash our clothes.

Momma was a disciplinarian.  Her favorite saying was, “Go cut me a switch.”  Her preferred “rods of discipline” were black cherry and plum.  If you think plums are sweet, you should taste them when they sting your naked back and legs.  They ain’t so sweet then.  She sacrificed black cherries and plums to correct us.

Momma would switch us several times a day.  She was not quick on the draw and was longsuffering.  She warned us many times before actually executing judgment on us.  We knew she was serious when she would call us by our full name.  If she said Bobby Earl Hopper, I had crossed the point of no return.

On one particular occasion, my brother and I had been fighting all morning.  You know important issues such as I was older, and he was younger.  Momma had gone as far and to call me by first and middle name.  I was on thin ice. 

Suddenly, the mailman delivered the mail.  We loved getting the mail.  It was a treat to get the Sears or Spiegel catalogs.  Momma called them wish books.  On this stop, the mailman left a Hot Rod magazine.  I had gotten a free subscription from selling magazines for the school.  Momma said we could not afford magazine subscriptions.  If they were not free, we did not get them.

My brother and I were in peace and harmony as we sat on the front porch swing and looked at all the cars in Hot Rod.  We called a ceasefire in our battle and were united by hot rods.

Daddy had not secured the swing very safe to the porch.  He had brought some rough oak four by fours home from work.  The kind truckers use for stacking so that a forklift can remove cargo.  He had laid them across the rafters and wrapped the chain of the swing around them. 

My brother and I swung back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth.  With the quickness of a streak of lightning, one four by fours worked off the rafter and fell across my back and across my brother’s head.  I was much taller than he was, and he took the brunt of the lick.  The chain wrapped around the four by four hit him on the head.  He screamed, and blood went flying.

As I tried to get the four by four off us, momma came through the front door with a big switch and flogged me.  She yelled, “I told you to stop hurting your brother.”  I was trying to stop my brother’s bleeding head, which appeared to momma that I was beating him up.  My brother was pleading for me, but momma had turned deaf with anger.

We could not convince momma of what happened, and my brother and I laugh about it now.  I did not deserve the whipping that time.  Overall, I did not get as many as I deserved.  I thank God I had a momma who loved me enough to discipline me.  I always believed that momma would not kill me when she disciplined me.  She sacrificed too much for me to beat me to death.

My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:  For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck (Proverbs 1:8-9 KJV).