I’m old enough to remember the drought in Texas during the 1950s; it cost my grandfather and every farmer in his township their crops until a small shower dumped almost 8 inches of rain one night. The town of Santa Anna, Texas, had prayed for a miracle, and it came. Just enough to save some of the crops, but many had already lost their farms to the banks, sold their cattle, and given up, moving to Fort Worth to work menial jobs.

My Grandfather was too much of an old hard-ass to do that. He figured Johnson grass was good for something, so he cut it and sold it for hay, at a discount to his friends. Cotton, grain, corn, maize, nothing would grow. No rain, no plants. It wasn’t the 1930s, but it was too close, and they survived those years as well.

Days of playing on the farm, 100-degree-plus temperatures, it was so hot the Rattlesnakes wouldn’t come out, or for us to shoot them with our BB Guns. The chickens weren’t laying, Granny wasn’t making money on eggs, and my grandfather, Papa, had crops that shriveled away like a neglected plant on a hot windowsill. The cows were constantly thirsty, which kept the windmill pumping the well full-time whenever there was a breeze. The stock tanks were dry and cracked; there wasn’t even enough mud for a crawdad to survive.

The farmhouse had no air conditioning; no one had that in those times. It was windows open, pray for a breeze to dampen the sheets at night, and hope to wake up the next morning without the Mountain Boomers stealing you from your sweat-soaked bed. It was a slice of hell on earth, but my cousins and I were young kids, and it didn’t affect us the same as it did our families. I didn’t notice the worry and desperation in my grandparents’ eyes as they went about their chores. I happily shot chickens and snakes with my BB Gun. Children are often clueless about adult misery.

To me, my grandparents were old. They were in their early sixties at that time, so that was ancient. They both looked twenty years older than their actual age: wrinkled, sun-baked, and worked to the bone. A hard life produces a hard exterior

I was six, on the forefront of my life’s journey. A city boy raised by a country mother and city father, playing country kid in the summer. It wasn’t Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but it came close. They both worked from daylight to dark hoeing weeds, trying to keep what they could alive, suffered monetary problems that would drive a man to drink, and would count change to buy food at the small local grocery store that was less than any convenience store we have today. Whatever food they could grow was immediately canned for the winter or eaten that day. Those good old days, the 1950s, weren’t all that good, looking back now. At the edge of Seventy-Seven years old, I’ve outlived my grandfather by more than a decade. But he thought he was healthy until he wasn’t. Years of cooking everything in lard and saved Bacon grease took its toll on his system, and he died young from a long list of medical issues. Clogged this, hardened that, bad heart, diabetes, you name it, he had it. I personally thought it was all the chicken. All of their children were on their own with families, so no one wanted the farm. Granny sold it for a pittance, moved into a small public housing unit in town, and finished out her life there. The days of the farm and the misery of the drought years of the 1950s are all behind us now.

This relentless heat and drought in Texas give me pause to remember my childhood summers. I’m old now and remember the good times, but this heat and drought bring it all home. The good old days.