The church is small and white and is built into the side of a hill.

The pews are dark red and are dotted with crocheted throws, old Bibles, and baby toys.

The windows face just south enough to let a blinding amount of sun shine through during the Sunday sermon in late spring and early fall.

We have pitch-ins, baby showers, graduation parties, and Vacation Bible School in the shelter house that stands behind the church, up the hill, in front of the cemetery.

Every week, the minster asks if anyone has a song? Sister Mary reads us poems and excerpts and sings songs to us that we’ve never heard, and she doesn’t have the accompanying music, so it’s a capella, off-key, and amazing. Uncle Harry sings “Near the Cross” often, and we all sing along to his particular melody -- “til my rap-tured soul shall find rest bee-yond the ri-ver.”

We are having a foot-washing. Clyde and Flo are here. They are 100 years old if they are a day, and still as dapper as can be. Clyde, in his bomber jacket, and Flo sporting sassy lipstick and sassier spirit. For the foot-washing, we separate. Men to one room. Women to another. As the ladies chatter, and we nervously yet enthusiastically participate in this age-old tradition, Flo tells us how it is.

“Isn’t it just a like a man to spring this on a person? Men, they don’t think about some things. Like a woman wears pantyhose to church. When you get to be my age, you can’t just pull ‘em off so easily to do things like this. You’d think they would warn you. I'll just do it anyway, right through the stockings. Men, they just don’t think about some things.”

We are having a yard sale out front to raise money for a youth trip, or camp, or VBS. We start early. Fortunately, breakfast tastes even better when you eat it at church.

Sister Louise can’t have any sugar, but she loves coffee. It is in that moment that I learn that coffee doesn’t have sugar in it. It had never occurred to me. Occasionally, when I’m adding sugar to my coffee, I’ll remember that moment of clarity and see Sister Louise smiling at me.

We put on Christmas programs, and everyone who wants to gets a chance to sing. No auditions, and no one is left out here. We gather for weekly Youth Group, and giggle about things that are new to our developing bodies and minds.

We form bonds. We are a family. Nothing designates where my family ends and your family begins. We are all one.

Food.

Fried potatoes. A staple with every meal. They are a little more done on one side than the other, dripping grease. Nana cooks them in an iron skillet and doles them out on Styrofoam plates. She makes Papaw’s plate first. He likes to eat his dinner cold, for some reason.

Sweet tea. The instant, caffeine-free kind. Shaken and chilled in an old two gallon milk jug.

Nana’s homemade chicken noodles. She rolls the dough out on the cutting board and uses a little plastic gadget, with 6 wheels across the front, to slice the noodles into thin little strips. I like to eat the raw dough, with some flour still stuck to it.

Zebra cakes. First, you eat the icing from around the sides. Then, you peel the icing from the top. The bottom is pretty tough to get just the icing. Then, you lick the crème filling from the middle. You eat the cake part last, because it’s leftover and you don’t want to waste it.

Generic root beer. No family gathering is complete without generic pop, but especially without generic root beer. It is warm from sitting out in the van or the jeep, but you drink it just the same. It’s tradition.

Sissy’s deviled eggs. She makes them with the perfect blend of sweet and tangy. Troy sneaks one when he goes to get them from the car, and comes back with little bits of yellow fluff in his whiskers.

Andes Mints. We get Troy Andes Mints at Christmas time. He doesn’t like them. He gets them every year. He takes them home, stashes them in the freezer, and the rest of his family munches on them.

Vegetable soup. If Nana is at work and Papaw has to make his own dinner, it’s going to be microwave vegetable soup with crackers. Nana stocks up on it when she knows she won’t be home to make dinner.

Mountain Dew. The Mountain Dew is Mom’s. Don’t touch it. Don’t even think about it.

Banana pudding. This is mine and Papaw’s favorite.

Cake. Nana makes cake for everything. If you have a birthday or it’s Halloween or it's a Wednesday, Nana makes cake. White cake. Chocolate cake. Angel food cake. Homemade sugar crème icing. It sticks to the spatula when you try to get a piece, so you scrape the clump of icing along the side of your plate and dip the cake in it, like dressing.

Mom is making me go to Mean Vicky’s house. I hate it here. We get up really early in the morning, when it’s still dark and still cold. I am bundled up in layers of hats and scarves and jackets and carried to the car. By the time I start to feel awake, we are almost there. I start crying because I know what’s coming.

We pull into her drive. It’s raining. It’s dark. I can see the raindrops falling in the beam of the headlights. The windshield wipers are working over time. Mom unfastens me from the car and carries me up the walk. I’m crying. I hate it here. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me with Mean Vicky.

“Hurry. Finish your cereal. It’s time to lay back down. Time to nap,” she says. I am staring at the little tan O’s floating in the milk in my cereal bowl. I push them to one side and then the other with the spoon.

“Eat it! Quit playing with it.”

Finally, she’s had enough. She takes my cereal. She dumps the milk. She leaves the rest of the soggy Cheerios in the bottom of the bowl. When she says to hurry up and eat, she means it. I’ve never been treated this way before. I wasn’t finished yet!

At nap time, we are not allowed to play in the living room with the toys. She has a chest full of toys, and the lid is propped half open. I can see them from my nap spot. Bright pinks and blues, shiny plastic balls, doll hair, levers and handles. They peek out of the top of the trunk. No one is allowed to play with them during nap time. Even if you can see them from your nap spot. And even if you'll be really quiet and not wake up anybody else.

Nope, no one. Mean Vicky said so.

So why do I see a girl sitting in the middle of the floor, playing with a doll or a truck or a bouncy ball? She has long hair and she’s older than me, but she’s still a kid. Why isn’t she taking a nap? And why does she get to play with the toys? That is against the rules. Mean Vicky said so.

Just when I think I cannot stand another minute, Mom and Nana come to pick me up. Oh, what joy!  I am saved at last. I hope they never make me come here again. I tell them in the car  about my poor, abandoned Cheerios, never to be sweetened and eaten. I cry to them. She’s mean. Who does that? Pours out your cereal like that? Just because you didn't eat it fast enough. I tell them about the girl, the one who got to play with the toys.

“That’s her daughter,” they tell me. They say it like that is supposed to make it okay. I’m someone’s daughter too. What makes her special? Better yet, what makes her more special than me? To not have to nap or follow the rules?

I beg them not to make me go to Mean Vicky’s house again. But I know they will. They have to work.

Rufus lives in a shack in the woods. My brother and I found it once. Old, rickety, a lean-to, really, at the base of a tree. Rufus scratches the side of the house at night, looking for children to steal. He takes the ones who won’t go to sleep when they’re supposed to. And we hear him. Scr-r-ractch-ch-ch. His gnarly, claw-like hands pawing at the house, hoping to find a way in and take us away.

We’re snuggled up in Nana and Pap’s waterbed. It’s warm. The blankets are warm, the bed is warm. The love is warm. Nana has an illustrated Bible that she props on her knees and reads us one story each night. She puts her finger to the page, searching out the stopping point from the night before, takes a breath, and says, “Okay….” That’s how we know it’s time to get down to business.

She wears a robe. The color changes, but it’s always thick and it’s always fuzzy. The belt is tied haphazardly at an angle. She has curlers in her hair. Pink and plastic and right out front to hold her bangs through the night.

When the story is over, we curl up on a pallet on the floor. She’s made us a cozy cocoon of blankets and sheets and pillows. We sleep there, between the bed and the wall, and she wakes me up in the night to use the restroom and have a glass of milk and a cookie. Sleepy and cozy and wrapped in Nana’s robed arms, Rufus is forgotten.

One night, I hear Rufus scratching outside the bedroom wall, hoping one of us will stay up just a tad too late. I notice that every time Rufus scratches outside, Papaw’s arm moves above his head, against the headboard. I know now. I’m in on the secret. But I do not tell my brother.

At night, we snuggle again on the semi-tipsy jiggle of the waterbed, making waves when we can get away with it. We read a Bible story. We curl up in our little nest by the bed. We wake to bowls full of dry Cheerios, already sprinkled with sugar, on the mornings Nana has to leave for work before we get up for school. So much sugar. Everything has a hint of sweetness – the tea, the Cheerios, the cookies. It tastes a little like sugar. It tastes a little like love. 

Trick or Treating is tricky around here. I am jealous of all of those kids on TV who live in neighborhoods and can set up lemonade stands and ride their bikes on the sidewalk and walk door-to-door collecting candy on Halloween. We get dressed up in homemade costumes, patched together that day. A tie-dye vest here, a drawn on mustache there, and we’re ready to go. Unless we are Power Rangers, or Trolls, or M&Ms. Those we buy at the store. We pile into the car and drive to a select few homes. Usually Nan & Pap, and Sissy & Troy. Sometimes, Mom drives us to random people’s homes and we walk down long, dark driveways and ring the doorbell because their porch lights are on.

The real treat is Artist Drive in Nashville. Here, there are sidewalks and doorbells and everything seems just like on TV. I hold my sister’s hand and gather candy in my bucket well past the age I should have stopped, but she’s a baby and I’m carting her around, so I figure it doesn’t hurt to be rewarded a bit for that, right? It’s weird to see my friends outside of school with their parents. Seeing them in their family units is much more strange than seeing them in costume or with painted faces.

At first, we get some packaged candies as well as some homemade treats. Popcorn balls, apples, brownies. Then the news tells us that people in some town far, far away from Nashville are hiding razor blades in apples and poisoning popcorn balls. After that, we just get candy.

The best is when people splurge and give you the full-sized name brand bars, like Hershey’s or Reese’s. Or at the end of the night when it’s almost curfew and people start throwing candy into your bucket like it’s yesterday’s trash and they can’t wait to be rid of it.

Nana always prepares way too many goodie bags of candy, just in case a passel of kids decide to make the long trek up the dark driveway because their porch light is on. They hardly ever do, and we always end up divvying up the extras. It doesn’t occur to me that some people don’t know their grandparents. 

“Papaw, what’s this scar for on your belly?”

“That’s where they cut my beans out.”

Each time he leaves his long-sleeved, button-up, always-flannel shirt undone bare-chested, we have this conversation. He’s standing by the window in the kitchen, munching on buttered toast, watching the birds flit and scatter around the birdfeeder out back. It’s chilly. Mornings with Papaw are somehow always chilly. It’s also the weekend. His mailman hours have him out the door by some ungodly, 6am hour every workday morning. But this day has to be a Saturday, or perhaps a Sunday since Nana is running a hot steamy shower in the big bathroom, getting ready for church.

The kitchen smells like coffee and ladybugs. So many ladybugs. At some point, someone trimmed a comic from the newspaper about the ‘bajillion’ ladybugs on the windowsill. Only, in the cartoon, the boy called out, “Dad! Look at the ladybugs!” but our copy is modified, scribbled out and replaced the first word with “Pap!” Our version.

Maybe it’s chilly because it’s fall. Leaves are scattered everywhere. The walnuts have all fallen out of the trees that line the drive, and they crunch and pop under the tires of The Jeep. The Jeep. That’s how we always refer to it. Nana had an accident in The Jeep once, and slid off the road in the ice. She hurt her shoulder and had to kick her way out of the passenger side door. For a long while, she called her shoulder her “broken wing.” She also ran over TJ in The Jeep. He wasn’t hurt too badly. She was backing up, still in the driveway, and she didn’t see him basking in the sunlight, lying on the gravel. He had a bit of a limp after that, but he was a tough dog.

My brother and I had our own version of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” that went something like, “Jingle Bells, Papaw Smells” and “The Jeep-mobile lost a wheel and Troy did ballet! Hey!” Clever children.

Chilly morning. Toast. Fallen leaves. This means Papaw will get out on the tractor today and scoop up all of the leaves on a huge tarp, dragging it (and us) along behind him. He makes the biggest leaf pile you’ve ever seen in the Creek. He just dumps them all there. And we just jump in them there.

When lunch time comes, we are a sweaty, dirty, covered in leaf debris and starving
todeath.

Nana brings us macaroni and cheese on Styrofoam plates, which is so bad for the environment but so tasty and creamy and cheesy and we don’t care. We drink purple Kool-Aid from Styrofoam cups too. Kool-Aid, shaken not stirred, in an old milk jug. Milk jugs hold every consumable liquid in the refrigerator. Papaw makes instant Nestle tea with 3 cups of sugar. You have to use warm water to mix it, though, or the sugar won’t dissolve, so he’s sure to pour the last of the old jug into a cup to keep in the refrigerator and sip on until the new jug gets cold.

She brings our lunch out to the club house, or the garage, or the trampoline, or the porch, or wherever we happen to sit still long enough to eat it. Papaw is on the mower now, or maybe still on the tractor, or working on a car in the driveway. She brings him a cup of cold, sweet tea. It may be chilly outside, but he’s always working up a sweat. And she’s always bringing him cups of cold, sweet tea.