Year number five, we moved inside the place we’d live the longest.

My dad and my uncles built it with only the work of their hands,

Often competing to see who was strongest,

Then they built their own places on the edge of our lands.

 

We grew up with all our cousins around

And our great grandparents lived beside us.

They tilled and turned and sowed the ground

They grew corn we could hide in and they never even fussed.

 

I got to see Mema again, at least once every week.

Like most folks in the South, we went on Sundays for tea.

She had moved too, a big house with a creek.

One time, I fell in and my Grandaddy laughed at me.

 

I loved her house, it was safe with a peaceful air.

I never wanted to leave it, I wished that I lived there.