Well done, well written, and thank you for taking us to your “home.”

Also, I was born and raised in Lubbock, not far from Abernathy. In fact, in junior high school I dated a guy from Abernathy, Tony Loper. (Dating in junior high? Yes, and married at 18! And still married after 37 years to the same guy!) My best friend dated a guy named Neal (I don’t remember his last name). We had some good times. I always thought Abernathy was a quaint place, especially compared to Lubbock! Small world!

Your desire to leave that area and then missing it once you did mirrors an experience of mine. I can remember, as a kid and then a teenager, going up and down those cotton rows, either chopping or picking, in NE Arkansas and hoping against hope I’d one day be someplace with sidewalks and streetlights! The first spring I actually lived in Memphis, I noticed missing something that had never become a conscious realization before…………….the smell of the fresh earth as it is being prepared for planting in the spring! That, and the smell of people burning off their ditch dumps then, in the fall. It had never surfaced in my mind that these smells were so sweet until I could no longer smell them! Thanks for bringing the memory back once again.