Background

Now before we get further into this memory search, I will get to the real topic of my story. I will give you all some background of my young life.  It will help you understand my way of thinking, I hope.

I was born in the hills and hollers of West Virginia.  There were coal mines, gas wells, many little mountains and what we called hollers with small creeks and valleys inhabited by quail, rabbit, squirrels and snakes.  This is or was very pretty country to us children. Most of the time our house was at the head of the holler or on the top of the mountain. Sometimes we would go quail hunting-we only followed the quails and tried to catch them.  We never did succeed, but our lives were filled with the success of our hunts.  We got to know them well. Sometimes we would find a snake or two, but we had to be very careful what kind of snake it was.  There were some of them that were very dangerous. I cannot remember ever catchin one of the bad ones.  I guess our guardian angel was with us children-we never did catch one of the bad ones.  One of the little mountains was my favorite hunting ground.  It's face was covered with small bushes.  There were many sassafras trees and one was what my Mama called a haw tree, which had a small sour apple like fruit and once we had a big mulberry tree.  These berries were very good. There was another place we lived where the trees were called a paw paw tree.  This tree had a fruit sor of like a banana.  It had big seeds layered in it and the custard like fruit was delicious.  Sometimes we would find a mother quail who had a family and they would run real fast when they saw us.  The little quail would follow their mother in a straight line like little soldiers and run real fast.  Once there was a small mountain that was covered with a lot of rocks and had some kind of caves in the rocks big enough for us kids to crawl into.  There was a small plant that tasted like mint-we loved it.  We always had to send our old dog Nero into the cave first to see if there was any snakes and that was bad for one day there was a snake-that is another story.