This oil lamp is well over 100 years old. My grandmother ran a little country grocery store in Water Valley, Mississippi back in the 1950s. An old man came by with no money, and he needed a gallon of gas to get home.

Nanny told me that she spied this old oil lamp in the back of his pickup truck and offered to trade him a gallon of gas for it. So the deal was struck. As a matter of fact, Nanny struck so many deals like this that Dado almost went broke, and packed her back to the family farm!

I have almost as many precious childhood memories made at this old store as I do from the farm. Nanny and Dado lived in a little white house next to the store. And until I was about 4 years old, we lived with them.

Nanny would walk across the yard every day to run the store. When I was 5, Nanny and Dado moved back to the farm, and my other set of grandparents took over the running of East End Grocery. They lived on a high hill on the opposite side of the little cinder block building. So until I was 5 years old, my entire world revolved around “the store.”

Some of my most treasured memories were made out back. There was a circle dirt drive that went around the building, and standing just off the drive was a huge oak tree. My grandfather hung a swing with a wooden plank seat there for me, and many a summer afternoon he pushed me, “Higher, Pepaw! Higher!”

No grass at all grew under this tree. The red clay dirt was bare. And my friend and I would scratch around, making mud pies. I had a little toy muffin tin and several other little toy cooking items. Not many. Not like kids do today. Today, children have so many toys, they don’t know which one to play with!

At lunch, back then in the 1950s, farmers would bring their field hands in at lunch. The bed of the pickup trucks would be loaded down with them and their hoes!

Memaw would make bologna sandwiches back at the meat counter. Most ate bologna, but a few would order liver cheese. Some would buy a can of sardines or a can of Vienna sausages and crackers. And ohhhhh…the bottled Cokes! Pepaw kept the old Frigidaire refrigerator run down as low as it would go, and when you popped the top, they would frost up, all icy, almost all the way to the bottom of the green glass bottle!

People here in the South called all bottled soft drinks Cokes. What kind of Coke do you want? I’ll take a Dr. Pepper please! I’ll never forget the first time my mother’s brother visited from Chicago. He called the soft drinks Pops.

The field hands would take their Cokes and sandwiches out back to eat under my oak tree. Yes, it was MY oak tree. They would turn old wooden Coke crates on end for seats.

I remember one old black man in particular. His hair was snow white, an I loved him to death. I would climb up in his lap every day and beg him to sing me a song. I wanted the same song every day. It was about a little lamb that had gotten separated from its mother, died, and the butterflies were eating out its eyes. Morbid. Yes. And I would cry and cry every time he sang it. But every day, I asked for that same song.

Several years ago, I ran across the lyrics and learned that it was an old slave song:

Go to sleep little baby.
The wind's from the west
and the turkey's on its nest
and I can't get my rest for the baby.
The old sheep lost its lamb
way over in the meadow.
The buzzards and butterflies
Pecked out its eyes
And the poor little thing cried mammy.

What I would give to spend one more day under that old oak tree! It is gone now, like all of the friends and family who used to gather round it. Make memories every chance you get!