Hickory Houses

Above is my Grandmother and Grandpa Isenhour's house, where my mother grew up and where my Isenhour grandparents both lived until their deaths. We visited there often as kids, and our Uncle Mack and Aunt Nancy and their daughter Julie lived right next door, with a row of short pines and what I remember as a grassy field separating the two houses. A row of hickory trees, appropriate for Hickory, North Carolina, lined Grandmother's driveway. It and the road the house are on were gravel then, and my sister Leslie recently shared that she remembered sleeping on the way there from Knoxville and waking up when the tires of the car hit the gravel road.

I was amazed at how huge the pines that separated Uncle Mack and Aunt Nancy's yard from Grandmother's have become, and the hickory trees are, alas, no more, though I am now far too old and well-behaved to be asked to make that long walk out to cut a hickory switch that we all dreaded as children. The area between Grandmother's driveway and Uncle Mack and Aunt Nancy's old place is completely taken up by the pines, and the grassy area between the houses is gone.

Some of my memories of those visits include Uncle Mack taking me crappie fishing, playing in the sand in the back yard with jars and spoons and visiting Grandpa's chickens. He always kept a couple of them, and he kept their feed in an old car that we used to like to play in and on. Sherry was shocked to find Pepsi products more prominent than Coke during our recent visit, but Pepsi was always more popular in Hickory than Coca-Cola, which I learned in childhood. I have almost always been the first person in a house to wake up in the morning, but I remember sleeping in Uncle Mack's old bedroom or on a cot in Grandmother's kitchen and waking to Grandmother cooking breakfast in the dark before dawn.

Mom and my sisters lived in this house in Hickory in the early 1980's, which is when I moved to nearby Granite Falls to attend Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute in Hudson. We were in the car, and I didn't give Sherry a good camera angle for this photo. I thought I'd include it anyway.