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While I say I come from Oak Grove, we only lived in Oak Grove proper for a few years, about 1969-1975. When we lived in Oak Grove, we had a house-trailer, which was parked on a rented lot. This leads to the story of the dealer that sold it to my mother, and what happened when they would not deliver the trailer as promised. I remember that the birds used to wake me up in the morning, sometimes, hopping around on the metal roof of the trailer. A hail-storm came, and beat up the west side of the trailer pretty bad, and it broke the window in my bedroom. The "new" water tower was about half a block away, and it drew lightening. I remember mother walking across the living room to unplug the air conditioner just when a bolt struck the tower. A tiny part of that jumped from the plug to mother's hand as she reached out. She decided the AC unit would just have to take its chances. Both mother and the AC were OK. We had central heat, but the air conditioner was a window unit in the living room. It sure was nice when it was not broken, and we could afford to run it. It really took the edge off the Louisiana heat. While we lived here, a number of humorous or interesting things happened. Our neighbors found a little boy lost in the rain. My cousin the electrician, who never bothered to turn off the power before working, decided to start. I learned that you can't build a camp fire on a metal plate laid on the floor of a wood frame building. My sister learned many new words from a later set of neighbors who got drunk and fought about 1 night a month. Another cousin got drunk (desolate because his girlfriend had broken up with him) and my uncle brought him to our house to sober up, which led to a broken bed and a hilarious quote from my sister. This is where my dog Lucky (she wasn't) caught a bird out of the air, and I have never seen anyone or anything more surprised than that dog. She also caught a cicada - which we called a locust (pronounced without the "t") - on the ground. I swear I could see the indecision on her face: should she bite down or let go? She chose discretion and "locus'" lived. She eventually gave birth to "Puppy", a "marble-eyed", gray-with-black-speckles cur who became the biggest dog I had known up until then, and the only dog I ever heard of who knew what to do when he caught up to a car he was chasing. While we lived here I saw a drug deal (and did not know it until I was rooming with a cop, at Northeast). We lived here while I mowed lawns. Mrs. Snow, who lived next door, taught my sister to crochet. I mowed her yard for $1, right up until I got out of the mowing business. I used to make enough money each year to buy, repair and feed gas to the mower, and to have spending money. It also kept me from dying of boredom, but I did not know that at the time. Hal Wooden, whose parents found the boy, and I built a "tree-house", which resulted in my first experience with 0-gravity when the nails tore loose... I fell asleep one afternoon, and when I woke up, I thought it was morning. It took a while to straighten out. I used to get started on a good book, and hide under the covers with a flashlight reading, long after bedtime, until mother would yell for me to "Turn the flashlight off and go to sleep!" I could never undestand how she knew... |
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