My father grew up in Soddy-Daisy, a small town in eastern Tennessee that sat between a lake and a mountain. His parents continued to live there throughout my childhood and a few times a year we would head from Maryland to Virginia, and drive down 81 to Tennessee. I loved these trips because there was always an adventure to be had. We would stay at their house for a few days while my grandfather took me fishing and spoiled me with pocket change and candy. But, there was always another trip in mind. One year it was the World’s Fair in Knoxville, many times it was camping in the mountains or spending the evening in Gatlinburg. This was back when Gatlinburg was still quite small and not the mini-Vegas it seems to be nowadays.

My grandfather, Morris Henry Jenkins, was a WWII Marine corps veteran who became a game warden with the Tennessee Fish and Wildlife Service, and therefore steward of the lands Tennessee Valley. He was one of six children of a country doctor who was one of seven sons of a coal mining family. My grandfather believed that the wilderness and the wild things that lived there were a sacred gift that must be preserved. He also believed that educating the people about their environment and local wildlife was the key to getting them to believe that as well. He spent many years bringing wildlife to the state fair and other outlets to do just that.

Strip mining was a constant threat to the rivers and lakes in Tennessee and so Grandaddy would send water samples to the EPA on almost a weekly basis. As one might imagine, the mining companies were not a fan and he endured many threats including an armed man making his way into his office one day and promptly deciding, with a little encouragement, that perhaps shooting a federal lawman was a terrible idea.

My grandmother, Dorothy Liles Jenkins, was a pianist and music teacher. She also spent a lot of time teaching poor women to read and caring for children who’s parents could not, regardless of their race. When taking a child to the dentist for emergency care on the local bus, the driver demanded this child sit in the back because of his skin color. Gran let him no that simply wasn’t going to happen. She always got her way.

My grandmother felt very strongly about education and worked very hard in order to build a college fund for my father and his sister, selling bait minnows she raised in the pond next to their house. She continued to support the education of her grandchildren and great grandchildren throughout her life.

My grandparents’ one-story home sat back off of a quiet street just a five minute walk from the ten or so businesses that made up the downtown of Soddy-Daisy. There were boxwoods around the front porch that sat to the left of the formal front room. The porch had a swing that my sister and I could just about swing up high enough to kick the ceiling if no one was watching. The garden out back, its soil dark and rich, took up most of the back yard and was always bursting with squash and melons, beans and tomatoes, collards and okra. When my grandfather would cut one of his big watermelons into quarters and hand me one, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.

In the pond where Gran once raised her minnows, lived “Whiskers”. He was a big old catfish I caught in a pond up on the mountain. After hearing it cry the whole ride home (Catfish have whiskers, but they also meow like kittens), I begged Grandaddy to spare him. We put him in the pond and fed him chicken livers, which Grandaddy claimed to do for the remainder of the summer. He gave me regular updates on his well-being Whiskers was always there when I returned, though not always the same size or shape. Rumor has it, Whiskers may have made more than one pilgrimage down off that mountain over the years.

The formal front room of my grandparents home, like many in the South, had its own dedicated air conditioning unit and the curtains were always drawn to keep out the oppressive heat. There was a fireplace built into the outside wall and sitting across from it was a parlor style couch with delicately curved legs and a white vinyl cover, yellowed with age. On either side of the hearth were two large iron pots that my mother claimed had once housed a rattlesnake or two. In actuality, the only incident involved a non-venomous hognose snake which likely played dead as soon as my mother was asked to remove the lid and “take a look”. This happened the first time my father brought my mother home to meet his parents and she was convinced he did this so she would go back home to Pennsylvania and leave my poor father to marry a nice southern girl.

Grandaddy routinely had wild animals all around the house that he either rescued while out fishing or hunting or reclaimed from people trying to keep them as pets. He used many of these animals in his educational fairs and they ranged from possums and snakes to groundhogs and bears.

Towards the end of the long front room was my grandmother’s piano that had belonged to her mother. Gran taught music lessons as another way to contribute to the family income and had taught students from all over the state. That piano, now restored and regularly tuned, now sits in my living room.

At the very end of the long room sat a dining room table and two doors adjacent to one another in the back left corner. One led to the kitchen, the other to the rest of the house. The house itself was old and had wooden floors throughout and therefore smelled slightly of seasoned cedar and oak in addition to woodsmoke and a faint mustiness that was not strong enough to be offensive.

The kitchen door was a swinging door and led straight back to a room crowded with humming apliances and was always warm and well-lit. I would often go into the kitchen to get away from the chill of the air conditioning and check and see if that red velvet cake with one slice missing was still in the standing freezer. There was always one in there and for years, I thought it was the same cake.

The other door opened up to a long hallway that led to several other rooms. When my sister and I were little, we used to share the pull out couch that was in the first room on the right. It did not have an air conditioner so we didn’t typically go to sleep until after night fell and the chill of the mountain air sunk down into our open window. I remember falling asleep to the sound of crickets, the smell of the rich earth of my grandfather’s garden, and every so often, the whistle of a distant train.

All I knew about trains in Tennesse when I was little was the Glen Miller song, The Chattanooga Choo-Choo, which my grandmother would always request it if we were out at a restaurant with a piano player. Chattanooga was about 16 miles south of Soddy-Daisy and just north of the Georgia border. It was a major train depot for most trains headed south in the early 20th century.

My grandparents took us on a number of adventures around the state over the years when we visited to tell us about the land, the contributions my grandfather had made towards preserving it, and our family’s role in the history of the state as educators, union organizers, and abolitionists. We visited many of these historic train stations over the years and although being around trains up close tended to frighten me, I still loved hearing that whistle in the distance. The Chattanooga station was lost to demolition many years ago, but it’s memory is preserved in a historic hotel complex containing original departure signs and some original tracks and cars.

When my husband and I first moved to North Carolina in 1999, we lived on the south side of Durham near Jordan Lake, about ten miles from downtown Raleigh. North Carolina was a big tobacco and textile state and freight trains have been the lifeblood of commerce and industry here since the 1850’s when the rail system was first commissioned. Both freight and passenger trains travel the rails from the coast all the way inland to Charlotte. Sometimes late at night, when the air cooled and distant sounds carried further, I could hear the whistles from the passing freights and it would remind me of Tennessee.

I live in Raleigh now and there are no trains close enough for the sound to carry at night, but every so often I’ll hear one when we are away from home. It reminds me of those cool summer nights with the damp smell of rich earth, the crickets playing their chorus in the background, and falling asleep under a patchwork quilt sewn by someone long gone but well remembered. It reminds me of the sound of my grandfather’s boots on a warm kitchen floor and the squeak of the refridgerator door when I followed him into the kitchen for a glass of milk long after dark. It reminds me of my grandmother playing piano in the late afternoon when the house was quiet and the shadows were long. Most of all, it reminds me of how much they loved me.

The link below is music is from a podcast I have been enjoying, Nocturne. The artist is Kent Sparling and this short clip of crickets and train whistles sounds to me like a night in Tennessee. Enjoy!

Possum Music: for the Nocturne podcast by Kent Sparling