The place we went to was an old family farm, though it consists of so many hills that it was never much more than hard scrabble up there. When I was a kid we let cattle wander those hills, and did our best to make a little hay on the hillsides. We stored hay in the lone barn and we salted cattle on the old, flat limestone rocks in front of a long-abandoned house.
My best memories of the place, though, were when we had time to just mess around. Daddy would take me and my brother hunting up there, and would walk us back and show us old chimneys and homesteads. Mint grew alongside the spring, planted by those who lived there before our memories. One winter it was so cold that Daddy competed with us, seeing who could run and slide the farthest on a frozen pond. Those were the good old days.
Today we were stopped by a fallen tree, which was not expected, so without a chainsaw we decided to tie to it and pull it out of the road. Which, on the little road we were on, was an adventure. Cal, my son, was out of the truck in a flash and was busy clearing brush and doing everything he could to help. Once the road was open we drove back, until it was smarter to just stop.
Once stopped we all walk down to the old spring (dry because we've not had rain for weeks) where we used to play, and Cal got down in it with my dad. Honestly, my dad should not have climbed down there, but there was no stopping him. So there we were with an 82-year-old explaining to the boy 70 years his junior how the spring worked and how he was going to get back up there with a crawler and clean it out.
On the way out of the "holler" Cal took a picture of the tree that we were able to move, and he never even realized what today was for him. Today was one of his memories, it was one of his good old days.
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