When I finished the sixth grade, I learned there was another move coming. This time, we were moving to Georgia and again the first was a temporary move until we could find a more appropriate house.
It was a rancher in a development with lots of kids who spent their summers playing outdoors. At dark you could hear parents calling their kids in for the night.
I had just gotten interested in the new rock ’n’ roll music of which Elvis was at the top of the list. Sandy and I were only allowed to play outside with the other kids until dark.
After dark, catching lightning bugs in a jar was my sister’s favorite pastime, but I set up a portable record player in our carport to play the latest music.
“Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes” were my first Elvis records and I admit to being a lifelong fan of his music, not just the popular ones but especially his gospel music. “How Great Thou Art” is only one favorite.
By 9 p.m., though, I, too, had to go inside and get ready for bed. Being the oldest still didn’t give me privileges of a later bedtime.
My youngest sister said she has no memory of any of the places we lived during the years in Tennessee. Her first memories are of Georgia. But the first place she remembers there was the house we finally found in Decatur, where we could have pets again — cats, of course. There were three of them, Jerry and Gary, who were gray and white tuxedo cats, and a black and white kitten that was my youngest sister’s buddy.
Our house was on Ponce de Leon Court in Decatur. The street had about a dozen houses (ours was the second on the left after you turned onto the street). The street ended in a cul de sac in front of what was once a beautiful old southern home — not plantation size but bigger than the other houses on the street. Instead of a single-family home, it had become three or four apartments.
It was a quiet neighborhood with several older folks, some couples without children and a few children on the street including us.
Of all the places we lived growing up, this was the only one where I remember we were allowed to go trick-or-treating on Halloween. At other times and places we would be able to go to Halloween parties but not trick-or-treating.
My mother kept us close and we could only go to places alone if she thought it was safe. I was 12 so I really only went along to chaperone my sisters.
In Decatur my school was within walking distance and I was in the seventh grade. I remember Mrs. Mills was my teacher and I thought she was very pretty with her dark hair pulled back and she wore lipstick. None of my teachers in Tennessee wore any kind of makeup.
The school had a patrol where the older students helped by acting as monitors when school convened in the morning, during lunch and when school let out in the afternoon. I signed up and my station was at the door between the first and second floors. I wore a sash with a badge indicating that I was a monitor.
This was the first time I felt I’d been given any responsibility.
While I still had an early bedtime, I found I could stretch it out if there was a topic of interest I could discuss with my parents. They would keep talking until my mother looked at the clock and realized I was past the proscribed bedtime and shooed me off to the sack.
The house on Ponce de Leon Court (I loved the name of our street and quickly learned who Ponce de Leon was — good old southern history). It was another house that we quickly learned to love. It had a screened-in front porch that led to the front door of the house and the living room as well as French doors to the dining room.
The bedrooms were off the living room while a breakfast nook was behind the dining room and the kitchen beyond that. The breakfast nook was where my father typed his weekly reports for work. There was a back porch leading to the yard, which had a small patio and barbecue pit.
There was a basement and the door to it was in the kitchen. Mother fed the cats at the top of the basement steps. One day she commented that she didn’t understand how the cats could still be hungry and wanting more food right after she’d just fed them. It was a mystery, but it wasn’t long before it was solved.
She opened the door to feed the cats one evening and lo and behold two raccoons were there waiting for what they perceived as their meal. For a little while she was feeding both cats and raccoons until she found a humane way to get them out of the basement without disturbing the cats’ access to their food.
Mona Ridder is a former Times-News reporter living in Martinsburg, West Virginia.