On a clear day, Pilot Mountain is reassuringly visible as we turn out of our subdivision. Our move to North Carolina’s Piedmont has made me feel like I have come home. We are living out in the country in a spot less than twenty miles from where I spent most of my early childhood in Lewisville, North Carolina. It was there where I used to play deep in the woods with my friends. That is where we played football and baseball after walking home from school. Sometimes we used to go hunting squirrels after school. In the fifties no one thought much about young teenagers going into the woods with guns.
I have strong memories of the area from my years in the Boy Scouts and the many weekends we spent camping. I grew up on a red dirt road and used to marvel at the ice crystals when they forced the ground into contorted shapes. My early driving lessons were backing in and out of our gravel driveway. My love of water and swimming started also started here with trips to Tanglewood in the old activity bus. Summer meant the Mimosa tree would bloom, and North Carolina’s heat would make for restless nights. It wasn’t until the ripe old age of seven or eight that we got a room air conditioner for one room. On really hot nights, I would slip into the living room and sleep on the sofa.
Somehow I managed to not electrocute myself when chasing worms out of my mom’s flower beds for our fishing trips. I used a couple of screwdrivers and an extension cord. The worms were for fishing in farm ponds long ago paved over as four-lane roads transformed rural North Carolina even more than the dirt roads paved through strategic county ham gifts.
Sunday afternoons were spent under the shade trees with our relatives eating homemade ice cream or watermelons during North Carolina hot summers. Heat brought people out of homes in those days and encouraged them to gather in the cool of shade trees. Most of our relatives were in Yadkin County so coming home meant a rhytmically bumpy ride on old Highway 421 and its concrete joints and a trip across the old Yadkin River bridge where today there is a park. Sometimes we stopped at Poplar Tavern for a dog before coming home.
Our location between the coast and the mountains was a great stepping out point for all those magical two-week vacations that gave us a glimpse of the world beyond our woods, yards, and schools.
My deep roots and friends made it hard to leave when I went off to military school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. When I was ready for college, I felt the call of the North. Now over half a century later, we have chosen to come back to similar hills and dales not far from where it all started.
To say the area has been transformed is an understatement. There are subdivisions deep in the woods where we damned the creeks and chased minnows. Sleepy Clemmons is so busy that I have relatives that avoid it.
Thruway Shopping where I remember shopping at Woolworth’s now has a Trader Joe’s. Little remains of what used to be in the area except perhaps Dewey's Bakery and Krispy Kreme which now has a huge headquarters building in addition to its original location where we used to go as teenagers.
This is still North Carolina so you don’t have to go too far to find some farmland. I have already in the first month had a lot of fun connecting the dots and seeing what has changed. I look forward to writing about the area as time allows. It is good to be back to my roots.
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