It’s a Friday night in the summer of 1967, and my dad has just gotten home from work. Mom has supper on the table, and we all gather around for the evening meal like families did back then. No one is staring at a phone. No one is rushing off to separate rooms. We sit together and talk about the day.
But me and my sisters are in a hurry to finish eating because Dad has announced that we’re going to visit Aunt Nell and Uncle Dan over in Markeeta.
That was all we needed to hear.
The grownups would spend the evening drinking coffee, playing cards, and discussing whatever it was adults talked about in 1967. Meanwhile, the house would fill with the wonderful chaos of cousins finding their favorite cousins.
Layne would be in the den practicing his trumpet, trying his best to master The Lonely Bull by Herb Alpert. Danny would be in his room lifting weights and working on his abs long before most folks even knew what abs were. Tony, the artist of the family, would be quietly painting an oil landscape somewhere in the house.
Curtis and I usually disappeared into his room where he’d proudly show off his latest model airplane while giving me a complete military history lesson on every aircraft sitting on his shelf. I remember thinking that I wished I were even half as smart as he was.
Janet would gravitate toward Stephen while Lisa spent most of the evening with Cindy and William.
To modern teenagers, it probably sounds unbearably boring.
To me, it sounds like home.
Nobody turned on the television. We didn’t need it. We talked, laughed, played games, and entertained ourselves just fine. Curtis and I played several heated games of Battleship while secretly discussing our real plan for the weekend.
What our parents didn’t know was that Janet and I had already hidden a change of clothes in the car.
We intended to spend the entire weekend in Markeeta.
Our parents simply hadn’t been informed yet.
When it was finally time for Mom and Dad to leave, we casually asked if we could stay. It wasn’t much of a battle. Aunt Nell and Uncle Dan never seemed to mind a couple of extra kids underfoot.
We changed into our pajamas and went to bed, already excited about Saturday.
Saturday mornings in those days had their own rhythm. We’d get up early and watch a little Popeye the Sailor and Woody Woodpecker while Aunt Nell cooked breakfast. We had grits with cream and sugar and washed them down with cold milk.
After breakfast, nobody paid another bit of attention to the television. There was a whole world outside waiting for us.
The older kids headed out toward the abandoned strip mines that had closed years earlier. Lisa, Cindy, and William wanted badly to go with us, but we waited until Aunt Nell distracted them before slipping quietly out the back door and heading up the ridge.
About a hundred and fifty yards behind the house sat one of the old strip pits. We’d stand carefully at the edge and peer down before taking the trail south toward another pit closer to Interstate 20. That particular spot was good for finding fossils, and before long we had all collected little fern impressions trapped in stone from some forgotten age.
From there we wandered farther west toward the old Red Diamond Mines and crossed the remains of an old railroad trestle. By then the rails were gone and most of the bridge dismantled, leaving behind only the massive stone pillars standing like ancient ruins in the woods.
By lunchtime we were starved.
Back at the house, Aunt Nell had a giant pot of goulash waiting on the stove. We each grabbed a bowl and another tall glass of milk before heading back outside almost immediately.
The day was far from over.
That afternoon we walked down the Markeeta Road toward the old commissary building, abandoned even then after the mines had shut down. Years later someone would restore it into a home, but at the time it stood empty and weathered, like a leftover piece of another world.
We turned left at the commissary and headed toward the old Number Eight Mine. As we got closer, large cracks appeared in the ground with foul-smelling smoke drifting slowly upward. Somewhere beneath us, coal was still burning deep underground. I later learned there was no safe way to extinguish those fires, so they were simply left to burn themselves out over time.
Even as kids, we knew better than to go exploring inside the mine itself.
Bravery only goes so far.
Instead, we followed a worn trail down to the Blue Hole along the Cahaba River. We spent hours exploring the riverbanks before finally taking the long trail back home, eventually coming out near Aunt Nell and Uncle Dan’s backyard once again.
At the time it felt like we had walked a hundred miles that day.
Truthfully, it probably wasn’t all that far.
But time has a funny way of sanding the edges of memory smooth. Distances seemed longer back then. Days lasted forever. Summers felt endless.
And the memories somehow grow sweeter with every passing year.
I’d love to walk those old trails again someday, but time has changed the route. Fences now block many of the paths we once wandered freely. Houses and shopping centers sit atop places where mines once ran deep underground. And while my seventy-year-old mind still wants to explore every inch of those hills again, my seventy-year-old knees occasionally suggest otherwise.
Still, every now and then, on a quiet evening, I can close my eyes and hear Layne practicing his trumpet, smell Aunt Nell’s goulash cooking on the stove, and see a gang of cousins disappearing up the ridge toward another summer adventure.
And for a little while, Markeeta lives again.
