Preston joined this earth in 1887, and Bertha, his wife, six years later. Their loves and lives of the early years are muddled if not lost, until they came together out by Jet, watched their family start and continue forward in this house (this home ) that Preston built, with Bertha’s heart and hands with him, in the 20’s. The 1920’s. They began this journey two centuries ago, in the 19th, lived in the 20th and left just shy of the 21st. They left their home to the rest of us, to see, to think, and to watch it fall....maybe it will last another hundred years.
The House By The Park
Preston Smith. 74 years old, had been one that a lot of had known, but fewer and fewer they grew, until there were (or are) so very few left .
Amazing times around that place, that house beneath the windmills blades, where for sixty years the vine has grown, right from the bottom to the top, no stopping has come its way.
Bertha had kept the floors all clean, with her half-dollar broom and her rags and mops, and married that man before, before we knew her, and loved that beautiful house.
The rugs would be brought out twice a year and hung from the clothesline standards, and slapped with the thick wire rattlers, to beat the dust away.
He was a hunter of sorts, who could bring a deer from a few steps away from the park, kill it, clean it, make short-work of its hide, trim it and roast what she wouldn’t cook, and wrap the rest for winter. All out of sight of the rangers watching the park.
He wore collared shirts, and trousers, and a hat that was clean, and a hat that was dirty ( depending on what his day would bring), and she in her dresses, blue, pink or white, covered in her apron to cook or to clean.
To the tiny church in Vining, where most Sunday’s they would go and sing, through heartaches and wonder, they would make the trip, to sing of His praises, or teach Sunday School, for years, or hold the hands of the ones left behind.
From horse and cart, to Model A or T, to the old Oldsmobile, to that fifty something Chevy that was long as any car you could get, they made their way around the dirt roads and the paved ones again and again.
The trees were dense around the house, the room by the windmill was big and held her wash buckets, and canned goods, and wrench’s, hammers, and was the shed that held those things the inner house could not.
When he had left this earth, she kept living there, cooking in the kitchen, using that porcelain pan by the sink to wash her hands, that silvery bucket that held the lard, to make the oil, to make the potatoes fried. The little grandma bank that would hold pennies put inside by the grandchildren, helping her to save.
The house was built for their three children, and they all slept out on the screened in porch for the summer, bed to bed, to couch, all in the screens that kept out the bugs and the boogie man and kept them dry when it rained.
That porch became a dining room with table to table to table, a mixed bag of folding chairs with wooden seat, and iced tea in metal jugs and water in another, drawn fresh from the well, with a ladle hung from the low rafters.
When more would come, the tables would spill outside, where the sun would begin to set on the other side, and make a place where watermelon, yellow and red, would be resting in cool well water, and cut up for a nice desert.
The laughter rang louder than church bells, and the family grew and got much bigger, and the honeysuckle grew in the fences, and the grass would be green over half a year, and Bertha would grow old.
Alone in the house another thirty years; family came from time to time, seemingly less and less. Kids would play outside, coming and going through the fences, through the gate, that lead to the road, that lead to the towns where the children had gone to live.
One day, like another, she had gone to live with one of the kids, the house and property stayed abandoned, and it’s soul was becoming weaker, its life, going out, and Bertha was gone as well.
The children’s children have been to the house, but they can no longer go, as the outside, is becoming the inside, the floors turning up with the soil, as the vine reaches the top of the wind mill, and time bringing it back to the earth.
Ralph Peck
Photography by Connie Estes
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