Time traveling in a sermon

Mike Willock writes: In a recent sermon, Pastor Travis reflected on a mission trip in South Dakota where he and others built housing on an Indian reservation but never was able to meet the residents to talk with them and learn their stories. During the worship service, my mind traveled back to the late 1950’s and my grandfather’s farm in Celina, TX, a small farming community about 40 miles north of Dallas. There were no land acknowledgments then, but I have since learned that present-day Collin County was part of a buffer area shared by the Caddo, Cherokee, Delaware, Kickapoo and Tonkawa tribes. I remember rich, black farming land and rolling grazing land. Today Celina is slowly being absorbed into the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

For several summers in my early teens I traveled by train to spend a week with my Celina grandparents. The house was built on a hilltop and last painted in 1900, with a wraparound porch and swing. The porch ceilings were light blue and there were curved windows in the parlor. Only cold water was piped to the kitchen sink and bathtub. Water for washing and bathing was heated in kettles on gas stoves. The three-level facilities were a short walk out the back door. The bedrooms had chamber pots and gas space heaters for warmth and an armoire closet. There were unfinished rooms to explore on the second floor and a delightful breezeway down the first-floor hall. An Aermotor windmill made a lovely noise as it lifted water from the well. There was a garden at the side of the house and a barn for horses and mules with a milking parlor for cows and an old Philco radio. When I was there the horses and mules were gone. My grandfather John was known in the day to keep an excellent stable of mules. When I knew him, he plowed with John Deere tractors, but the barn still held the tack, an old racing sulky, and the wonderful smells of an old barn.

I loved being there. Mamaw would fix biscuits for breakfast and sometimes hot corn meal mush made from leftover cornbread. I would spend the day with John making the rounds to check on his fields and visit relatives, to the post office, to Grover Smith’s blacksmith shop where there was always a domino game going, to Nelson’s café for lunch. He would show me off to friends in the barbershop and café as Johnnie’s boy. I went with him to the fields and remember him walking with long strides over the plowed earth. I got to ride in the back of the pickup truck and stood on the hitch of the tractor when he moved it between fields. When I was old enough he let me plow part of a field for several hours while he ran other errands. Once at harvest time I watched him rub the wheat kernels in his hands and blow the chaff away to taste the wheat and see if it was ready for harvest. To this day, there is nothing like the taste of wheat kernels fresh from the field.

My grandfather John was born in 1894, the fourth of five children of his parents John William (Will) and Lilla. His grandfather John moved from Kentucky and bought land in the 1850s where Celina is today. John and his son Will settled on farms there in the 1870s. When the railroad came through, Will sold his farm and bought the land just west of Celina where the house was built in 1900. My grandfather John was studying to be a large animal veterinarian when his father Will died in 1917 leaving him and my grandmother, his new wife, to take care of the farm along with his mother and a younger brother, so John gave up his studies to farm the property. When a sister Callye was widowed in 1928 he ran the local dray line for her. When his other sister Willie was widowed in 1944, she moved in with my grandparents while John took care of her farm as well. Willie helped Mamaw with cooking and household chores.

Farming is a full-time job and John hired laborers to help with the work. I remember the time I spent with one older black farm hand named Dave. Dave’s death was the first in my family circle, and I cried bitterly when I learned Dave had passed away. Dave knew me as one of master Johnnie’s boys, and he joked that he was going to rub some of his black off on me. I hope he did. I loved Dave. 

God is good. All the time. Thank you, Lord.