firesmith

I can’t remember the first time I saw her, or for that matter, the last time. She was a little girl, tiny, and stood beside the road waiting for the school bus with the other children, five or six of them, and she waved at me. I waved back. So, every morning, five days a week, she would see my truck, she would wave, and I would wave back. Some of the other kids did, too. But she never missed a day, if she saw me.

Of course, some days she was not there, playing sick, actually sick, skipping school, holidays I didn’t get, and some days I was playing sick, skipping work, and sometimes writing.

Late August I would look for her, and she would be there, and wave, and I would wave back.

Then went on for years. Literally, it went on for years. The first time I saw her I was still married, Bert was an only dog, and my future uncertain. As far as I could tell, the first time I saw her she was in the first grade, and that too is an uncertain time.

Years later, I noticed she was wearing a skirt that was, well, uh, too short. That’s when I realized she had grown up in front of me, one workday at a time. She started wearing her hair fixed up nice, she was growing upbut she still waved.

Maybe it was high school, or she went later in the day, or maybe her family moved. But she was gone after a summer. The next year she was still missing. I never saw her again.

About a mile from where she once lived, a cat appeared, many years after. It was a dark orange cat, deep richly orange, and the cat would haunt one yard and another across the road. It never waved at me, but I did blow my horn one day when it timed the run across the road too close.

Today I saw a flash of orange a mile from where he usually haunts, on the side of the road, and that was that. I went back, just to make sure, traffic buzzing by and people blowing their horns at me. But the orange cat was dead. Dead, dead, no possibility of life at all.

 I wonder if the little girl, full grown adult by many years, likely a mom with kids of her own, maybe a graduate of some school somewhere that handed her a piece of paper saying she was smart and could make good money. That’s what I hope. That’s what I want. I also want her to be out there somewhere and telling people she remembers an ancient man, likely dead of old age years ago, who used to wave at her in the mornings, before school.

There’s hope in every child. Every tiny human has in them the endless possibilities of life. I hope her parents never lost sight of that in her. I hope they did right by her.

Outside cats, however, especially near a road, are always living on borrowed time.

Take Care,

Mike

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Troupville no longer exists as a town, but a Historical Marker, rarely read, will tell you it was once the County Seat of Lowndes County. The government of Troupville tried to pry concessions from the railroad company to allow them to come through Troupville and so the railroad went through Valdosta whose government was willing to sell their souls to get a railroad. Valdosta flourished and Troupville became a good place for a Historical Marker.

Troupville Road still connects Quitman with a major State Route going into Valdosta, and the once sleepy little backroad is getting crowded. The road is narrow, with even slimer shoulders, but more and more houses are popping up along the twelve miles of asphalt.

An Industrial Dairy has twenty-four hours a day bright lights going on so what once was deep night no longer exists. Their machines prowl the road during the day, rutting the sides of the paved road, and causing traffic problems. Industry cannot be stopped.

Spec houses have sprung up, with subdivisions and houses with small yards here and there, eating up farmland and the wild areas, and forcing deer to feed on the side of the road, when they aren’t crashing into cars.

The state built a bridge, a concrete bridge, over Millrace Creek back in the 50s, when a lot of construction was going on in America, and that was when the Interstate projects began. They just replaced that bridge a couple of years ago, and it won’t be long before they either widen the road or four lane it.

To me, it’s an alternative route from US84, which was four laned back in the 1980s. I remember it being one of those roads if you got behind a slow-moving tractor or something like that, you might be stuck for an hour or so. Now, it’s a highway I avoid and risk tractors and deer to keep away from cell phone distracted idiots traveling at speeds unheard of back when Troupville was trying to extort the railroad.

A woman friend of mine used to ride her bike the length of Troupville Road and back again, every Sunday morning but a man followed her home one day. This was back in ’92, right after I left the area for the first time, but she called me and told me about it. She moved away not long after, in search of someplace safe for women, but unless she left the country, I do not think she found it.

When I first moved to Hickory Head over twenty-five years ago, I met a moonshiner who told me would ride his horse down Troupville road, and he’d stop at a farm to water the horse. The owner of the farm had a daughter. Eventually, the two met, and he courted the woman, and they got married. He went off to fight in World War II, and when he returned, three years later, she had a one year old child.

He never quite got over it and never went down Troupville Road again.

Take Care,

Mike

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