As a kid of nine until I was sixteen and struck out on my own, I lived with my Uncle Howard. He was a tall thin man with graying shaggy hair and always wore faded blue overalls. He smoked a pipe and was never known to talk very much except about the weather and the crops. His deep blue eyes were set back in a sun baked face with too many wrinkles to count. Life had not been easy for him trying to raise eight children on a share cropper's wages without a wife to share the load. I never knew my Aunt Jessie. She had died of pneumonia nine years ago right after my cousin Elmer, the youngest, had been born.

I don't know why he agreed to take my sister and me in when our Mom skipped out on us with her latest boyfriend. "Gone to Dallas," we were told but no one knew for sure when she'd be back. We had rattled around from one relative to another not really feeling welcome anywhere. That is until we landed at Uncle Howards.

He never had much "book learn'ng" as he would tell us but "by golly" we were going to get "edukated." Every Monday morning in the fall and winter he would get us up and see that we started our 2 mile walk to school. Of course, we had chores to do first before we could start out toward the old one room school house. He'd see that each one of us had fresh scrubbed faces, clean clothes, and our syrup buckets packed with lunch. He was a proud man. "No kid of his was going to show up at school looking like white trash," he would tell us many a morning. In the spring we missed school to help him with the cotton crop.

Once a month he would take the older kids to town in "Old Betsy." She wasn't much to look at and had seen much better days. To us it felt like a royal coach. Uncle Howard never did learn to read, I guess, and never had a drivers license but that didn't matter. We would load up and off we'd go at the phenomenal speed of about 15 miles per hour. Creeping down the farm to market road and then once onto the main highway to town he'd drive only on the shoulder. After-all, he "wasn't legal" to drive on the pavement. Cars flying around us, dust rising up from the hole in the old girls floor boards, wind blowing our hair. Oh, what a glorious ride!

My Uncle has passed on now. The old place sits back off the road in the middle of a cotton field. I drove by the other day and felt a little pain in my heart. Still sitting there now quiet and abandoned in the cotton field against the house was Old Betsy. She sat there all rusty and falling down, windows all broken out and bullet holes in the door from youths taking pot shots. She sure served her purpose, I thought. A lot like my Uncle Howard...steady and dependable. I sure am thankful that he had been there when two lonely kids needed him.