Speck Ridge Smoke: A Blend of Stories about a Schoolyard in Rural Kentucky as Told by my Mother

Playing under the trees, moonshine brewing in the hills, the love, the laughter, the sadness, and the choices-it was all there in a place in Kentucky called Speck Ridge.

Speck Ridge Smoke

The school bell rang and recess began but even before the boys and girls spilled out of the schoolhouse door the smoke would rise from the hollows close to Speck School. The cool, fresh water springing from Speck Cave was winding, heating, blending through copper, coil, and daub in an alchemy of alcohol.

As the games of squirrels in trees and ghosts in graveyards would begin with the boys, the girls would start building their houses under the big trees.  The boys would whoop and holler tearing through the play houses riding their imaginary horses through the girls’ tidy rooms.  The girls would shoo them out with their tree branch brooms as they’d seen their mothers do when a muddy boot dared thump on a clean floor.  Some boys would see the smoke rising from the valley below and note the location as one to go wide around by unwritten law, if out hunting within the woods.  Others would notice, too, and view it not as a wispy snaking cloud but as something a clan with them.  A Daddy, a Brother, an Uncle’s life was signaled in those hill country smoke stacks.

The boy would separate from the rest with shouts , come on, come back, but he would venture into the woods anyway.  He knew each path from here to there whether in afternoon’s dappled light or midnight’s clear black.  What drew him so?  Would draw him all his life?  Kin, tradition, friend, foe, taste, smell, or something in him, which was waiting to make him surrender? 

He’d come to his tree and lean awhile and take out his pocket knife and cut off a branch.  He’d smile as he saw the heart he’d cut, SAB loves SAP.  He laughed, he’d had to reach as high as he could to carve that heart, now it was barely chin high.  He loved her still and always would, forever forged together as a brother to her he’d be. 

His thoughts turned to the younger sister who would soon be sweeping out the dirt floor of her schoolyard house around the trees.  She’d probably play the Momma with a baby on her hip.  No way could he know how many in their life would be really cradled there and sadly how many times he would cause a worried brow.  But, he’d always be loved right till the end.  Couldn’t help but love him with that grin.  As he studied in thought with a whittled sweet gum brush in his mouth of the work there would be for him to do when he got home, maybe to tote a runoff load.  He’d have to do it to be a man but the boy in him would grab a hot baked sweet potato out of the stove and kiss his Momma before he’d go.

Before that though, he’d return to the well-worn playground even though he was too far away to hear the school bell ring.  It wasn’t a fear of a switching that hurried him back.  No, there were stories to tell, double dares to give, jokes to make, and marbles to hit.  Yank a few pigtails, pull a few pranks, and to be patted on the back by many as the school bell rang.  They’d all go back in after a drink with the dipper from the pail.  He’d be among the last and give a glance back before he entered the shadow of the door.

Sometimes early in life we choose a path urged this way or that, good and bad; most times a mixture of both.  That trail twists and turns like those steamy columns of air and he followed his as sure as Speck Ridge smoke.