Around the Town: Checking the wild violets

By Loretta Humble/Around the Town

The wild violets are blooming on my little piece of the old Sims Place. I took a walk in the woods Sunday to check on them, like I’ve done nearly every year for at least 70 years. I can report that this is a bumper crop year for violets. And every single year I get excited when I see them. Winter is past. Things are new again. Soon poke salad will be peeking through the brush.

Another thing that happened was that the electricity went off. Just for a few hours at a time, a couple of times, but during that time, there was no television, and after the charge played out, no telephone. So it was real quiet out here fora little while. Seeing the violets, and then having to be quiet for a little while gets a person to thinking.

I’m sitting in my living room on the part of the farm my parents gave me, looking across the road where I can see the pecan trees that once surrounded the house where I was born. Daddy planted those trees, and long before that built the house. It was where he and his first wife raised his first family until he lost her when the kids were teenagers. A few years later Daddy met Mama through a newspaper version of Match.com. When they were married Mama was 22 and Daddy was 44 with four teenagers stairstepping down from 18 years to 12. The next year my sister Mary was born, then, sadly, they lost two babies. By the time I came along, Mary was 12, and the first set of Daddy’s kids were in their twenties and very early thirties. The Sims place covered a lot of acres back then, and I was free to explore it all as soon and as far as my legs would carry me there. No children lived close by, but I always had several dogs to keep me company. The part of the farm where I live now, was always my favorite part, long before I knew it would be mine. This is where I looked for the violets, and always got the same rush when I found them, from the first time I followed Mary looking for them.

I don’t remember ever getting into any danger running wild out here, but I got into a little trouble with my parents once, when I was four or five and decided to walk down the road instead of through the woods. I ended up at Uncle Pat and Aunt Annie Williams’ house, more than two miles up the road, just south of the site of Watt Norman’s present home.

“Etter! What were you thinking about?” exclaimed Aunt Annie. “Don’t you know something bad could have got you?”

“I had my dogs,” I told her.

The road was dirt then, kept okay by road graders, and much less traffic. When a car passed, you looked, because there weren’t that many passing. You could often find arrowheads in the grader ditches after a big rain.

The walk to Aunt Annie’s was several years before I met my best childhood friend Barbara Sheppard, who lived on down the road another mile or so. Once we found one another, we spent as much time as we could together, prowling both our properties. Seven or eight years ago I bought the house Barbara grew up in, that I spent so many nights in, and moved it here to turn it it into my home. Barbara has lost her memory now and was in our nursing home until recently when she moved to the nursing home in Athens where her granddaughter works. Even after Barbara had lost most of her memory, she could still remember and liked to talk about some of the best adventures we had as kids.

Barbara had come onto the scene by the time Daddy and Mama decided to tear down the old house where I was born and used the lumber to build a smaller, tighter house. First thing they did was build a “camp house,” which was one big room, behind the big house, and we lived it one summer while they did exactly that. I was in the third grade.

Barbara and I loved that summer in that little house, I can’t remember any details about the demolition or the construction, but I remember that camp house, and that sometimes I got to cook supper. When I bragged to my teacher about cooking, I remember she was shocked at the nutritional value of my meals. I don’t think we thought much about balanced meals in those days, but more about filling our bellies. Anyhow it doesn’t seem to have stunted my growth.

The new house was much more modern. Daddy scrounged an ancient commode from some where, and he fixed up a shower which was basically a pipe with a spigot on the end, hooked to a big recycled tank standing on stilts outside the bathroom. It was a pretty good solar water heater, which worked better than you might think.

I had a room of my own, painted pink. Mama ordered me maroon bedspread and yellow curtains with orchids on them. They were all plastic. I don’t know if plastic was common then or not, but they were pretty, and worked alright for a while. I have a later memory of spring wind blowing through gauzy curtains, a quilt on the bed, and a big pastel braided rug on the floor. I like that memory a little better.

All of us Sims children were given a part of the farm, and all are gone now but me. Wesley Anding, great-grandson of Daddy and his first wife Carrie, lives in a nice home over among those pecan trees across the road. The house where all the kids were born, and the one they built to replace it are distant memories. Wesley and I are the two only descendants of Walter Sims still living on what was the original Sims place. It’s nice to know Daddy’s genes—and some of Mama’s—are still walking these acres he worked for so long. I hope when I have to leave, some of my kids or grandkids will replace me. Or if not, just somebody who loves the place.

Somebody has to check on the violets.