Oh Threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise! one thing at least is certain---- Thislife flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is lies;------ the Flower that once has blown, forever dies!
1
When I was a little boy, my Grandfather told me if I had the faith of a mustard seed, I could move a mountain! Of course, he told me a lot of things; like if I played with frogs I’d get warts, or if I wandered out of view of the house I’d be eaten up by a mad dog. However, despite all those admonitions, I would forget and play with frogs every chance I got, and now and then, I would slip off and go a mile down the road to the general store for a sack of smoking tobacco or an RC cola and a moon pie. Well, I never got warts and I never saw a mad dog; although, I have to admit, I wrestled with that mustard seed idea for quite a long time. I was never able to make any sense of it and eventually just stored the idea back there somewhere on the rivers of my mind along with many of my Granddaddy’s other famous sayings. It was not until several years later when I was near morally and spiritually destitute, and my best friend had lost all hope, that the concept of “faith” became a prominent theme and driver in my life.
Ty Hardy was my friend; we had always been good friends. We had known one another all our lives and in fact were born only a few days apart. I am not very sure, but I believe I am just a day or two Ty’s senior. The Hardy place was the second farm south of ours. My great Aunt, my Granddad’s sister and her husband Rousseau, or Rusaw, as we called him, owned the farm in between. Ty and I lived about half a mile from each other on that old dirt road. We were born during the “great depression” and were born not only during hard times, but we were born in a “hard” country. What folks called farms there in those Appalachian foothills was more like five acres of tillable bottomland and a hundred acres of rocks and hillsides, much too steep on which to plant a crop of anything edible.
A good example of the futility in trying to feed a family or even grow a crop of corn on one of those hillsides is the year my father attempted such an overwhelming feat. In fact, I am sure this was the reason he just threw the towel in when it came to farming. He worked like a dog through one fall and winter clearing one of those hillsides in hopes of growing a decent crop of corn come planting season. He cut down the big trees, chopped them up into stove wood, dynamited the stumps out of the ground and burned them. I remember the s
