Alabama Memories

Huntsville, Alabama is a town not well known for its culture of the arts and music. While it has beautiful rolling hills and tall, skyscraper almost, 50 foot pine trees, it also allows its residents to speak with a twang and be happy sitting on the back porch eating fried chicken on a Saturday night.

I was fortunate enough to live in Huntsville in the late l960’s, on the US Army Base, Redstone Arsenal. We had, what I believed at the time, to be a nice, roomy house, on a hill with a creek across the street, and a steep hill behind the house with a rope swing hanging from one of the trees. My younger sister Jennifer  and I would go there to play with our dolls and would make up stories about their castle on the hill, whereas my older sister was at school.

In the sixties, parental guidance was maybe not so stringent as it is today, and Jennifer and I, ages 4 and 5, would sometimes take a walk down to the creek. (If  you are wondering why I wasn’t in kindergarten – I didn’t go. It either wasn’t offered at the private school my sister attended, or possibly not at public school at the time either.)

One day, whether or not our mother knew it or not, when we wanted to do some exploring and possibly see a few minnows, a turtle or a frog, we noticed that our two year old brother Chris had followed along. A bit bothered, but allowing him to tag along, we meandered through the trees and stepped over rocks, squatted to see movement in the water, and threw in rocks. Chris dilly-dalleyed and poked along, sitting longer to observe. “C’mon!!” we insisted several times. Enjoying the beautiful day, we pounded sticks in the water and collected pebbles in our pockets. We wound down along the bend and when we had had enough, we turned around and went home.

Imagine our surprise when we arrived home and our mother asked us, “where’s Chris?”

And imagine our mother’s surprise when a neighbor called an hour later to report that she had picked up our brother on a busy street!

The word I wanted to note was actually a name that we made up with another family who had a similar number of children, that lived on Redstone Arsenal at the time. Their last name was Butler, and ours was Merlick. They had four children of almost the exact age as us, with each of us having a child born on the same day – my little sister and jenny – both overseas. Anyway, the name we came up with was “The Mertlers,” because the other name combination just did not work!

Written at the Lake Travis Library Memoir Group meeting, August 4, 2015

I wrote this after returning from a trip to Hunstville, and Redstone Arsenal, the weekend before, for Chumley's 50th birthday party.