prairie point

Tales from Elm Flat

Growing up, I would listen as my parents sat around the kitchen table with their coffee and talked about places called Rural Shade and Elm Flat and the people who lived there. These were communities around Kerens Texas where they grew up, and which in their minds they had never really left.

They still had family there and about once a month we would load into the family car and go visit my grandmother with the sunny garden and the quilting frame in the living room, or one of my mother's many sisters and brothers. If we were lucky we would get to spend the night at a cousin's house, most likely sleeping on the floor on a pallet. Only a few times in my childhood did we go on real vacations. These trips to Kerens were about the only traveling I experienced.

Kerens attained a sort of mythological status in my mind, a sort of Eden that my parents had been forced from by the necessity of making a living. Eventually they were able to return there thanks to good health and social security, but by that time most of the people they knew were gone. Whatever gods of history or economics there might be had dried up the town until only a few abandoned buildings remained in the old downtown. Once there had been schools, garages and churches in the surrounding smaller communities. Now there are only a few houses spaced a little closer together than normal along a farm road.

My cousin Ivan was a little older than me and lived there in the years when the people and places in my parent's stories were still alive. He has started writing down some of his own stories in a series called Tales from Elm Flat. It's not quite a blog. I find them pretty entertaining and maybe you will too. The latest story is about the town doctor, who by the way, is the doctor who brought me into the world too.