​In an earlier post on this site I cdescribed Sunday feasts at my grandmother’s house in Greensboro. Now I will address other childhood food adventures.
 
I was never afraid of the kitchen. A great joy of my early years was to play with pots and pans on the kitchen floor while my mother was cooking, and then I learned the pleasures of helping her, especially in grinding things up. I’ve never been afraid of cooking, although I spoke truly when once, on being asked if I loved to cook, I replied that I loved to eat and therefore I had to endure the other.

​King David and Annie Pearl Turberville's house stood on the east side of Demopolis Street, as Alabama Highway 69 is called as it heads south of Greensboro, Alabama, toward Demopolis. My best guess is that they moved there with their growing family from the Old Smith Place, a half mile or so downriver from old Lock Six. It was a small house of about four rooms on the side of a hill with a large number of steps leading down from the front porch to the front yard. The back door would have been at ground level. The house consisted of the front parlor, the front bedroom, my grandparents’ bedroom, and a wide hallway separating the front bedroom from the other two rooms and running down to what I recall as the dining room in my time but was in those earlier years the big kitchen. In addition to the front porch, there was as a side porch off the kitchen to the south with a pantry at the west end.

​I’d venture the answer is no.

​I watch The Long Day Closes every year during the Christmas/New Year period. Most years I watch it at some other time as well. I never tire of it.

That one above is Tom in 2007, a couple of months before his death at the age of 85. Had he lived until October 24, 2022 he would have celebrated his 100th birthday. No reason why we can't.

​What follows is an array of photos from his life, with accompanying verbiage.

[Jonathan Brooks and Nicie Elizabeth Kinnaird May (my grandpaarents) with children and some grandchildren. That little boy with the big black tie in the front row is my father, Jonathana Bryan. My guess is that the photo was taken in the first decade of the 20th Centuery.  The family is seated on the porch of the old May house on the farm west of Sawyerville. That house burned in 1934.]

​

​I still find it amazing that my great-grandfather, John William May, was among the first wave of settlers of Alabama, moving to that new state in 1819 from South Carolina as a 4-year-old boy accompanying his parents, James F. and Charlotte Willingham May. The family set up a homestead in Hollow Square, Alabama, but not in the small community that lay west of present-day Sawyerville where the only remains of the settlement is Hollow Square Cemetery. They lived on what became known as the Jud May Place, about 3 miles to the north of present-day Sawyerville and east of the Crackerneck community.

​“How different is the home life of our own dear Queen.” So, it is reported, a Victorian lady remarked after watching a performance of Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” I wonder what that same lady might have remarked had she seen Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginal Woolf?” I have just finished watching Mike Nichols’s’ movie version of that, probably for the first time in at least 25 years, and the work still has the power to shock.