Beingst" (?) its approaching Christmas, it would be appropriate for me to further revive your memories of old times in southern West Virginia with a few church stories. However, I have decided to let them wait for awhile so that I could wrap up tales about my school days. Meanwhile, collect your old church stories and be ready to join in on that subject later on. I look forward to your comments, good or bad. I never know which stories are allowed to pass through to the mailing list, so let me know if you receive them. We must not forget another important aspect of school life "back then," and that is what we did on our way to and from school. I enjoyed school as a child. That first year was filled with many marvelous discoveries and learning experiences outside as well as inside the classroom. My list of friends grew rapidly as I met other children at or near my age who were attending school at Matheny plus various people that lived along my route to school. Some of those people showed acts of kindness to me that I count as even more valuable to me today than they were then. Students usually walked and played together to and from school. Uncle Al Rollins (not my real uncle) had three boys, Jack, Jim and “Dare” (Darrell), who frequently joined our group of school children who regularly traversed Coon Branch from early September until late May. Dare was my age and he liked to fight. More accurately put, he liked to fight me. Once we had a huge fight and I got in a lucky punch that bloodied Dare’s nose. His older brothers joined the fray, whereupon Denise, who was several years older than I came in on my side. The dispute fizzled out quickly after that and the incident was all but forgotten. We all continued to be friends. Parents had mysterious ways of finding out things then that could measure up to any modern CIA communication device. My Mother and Daddy were ready for me when I got home. Seeking sympathy and thus avoid punishment, I told them that Dare Rollins attacked me and bloodied my nose. My flimsy attempt to parry blame might have worked were it not for my lack of an explanation for the bloodstains on my back left from Dares profusely bleeding nose when he had me down on the ground pounding me. Aunt Valley Stewart lived in a large two-story house farther down the “Branch” from us. Aunt Valley always kept a large drawer full of gingerbread cookies and was generous in distributing them to those of us who often lingered at her house on our way home from school. There was a huge black walnut tree above Aunt Valley’s house and another below. When the frost came and the walnuts fell, the road was covered from one side to the other with walnuts. These trees were significant landmarks and cause for my being late from school on many occasions. The logging trucks traveling the road helped to remove the outer, stain- producing hulls from the walnuts, but they didn’t complete the job. Cleanup was left for the school kids. The longer the unhulled walnuts lay on the ground, the softer and nastier they became but the easier it became to remove them. The walnut stain that we had on our hands would wear off eventually, but it was ground into our clothes forever. We made a game out of cracking walnuts with stones and seeing who could extract the biggest portion of the kernel without breaking it. Apple trees grew wild in many locations along the road to our school. Some were holdovers from earlier orchards and others were from suckers that had sprung up from ancient trees or seeds in those same old orchards. We knew every one of those trees and the type and quality of fruit it yielded. The walk home from school was one huge feast from one end to the other. Pawpaws started to ripen shortly after school began. They were a delicacy for youngsters of my day. We ate the ripe ones that had fallen to the ground and picked those that were nearly ripe from the trees and hid them from the other kids until they finished ripening. I know the location of only a few Pawpaw trees now; however, they flourished in southern West Virginia when I lived there. Close behind pawpaws in desirability were chinquapins. Those little miniature chestnut look-alikes grew in only a few select places even in the thirties. I am told that they have essentially disappeared from the area. My favorite place on Coon Branch, which was a tightly held secret, was high on a hill behind Uncle Lon Scott’s house. There were lots of wild persimmon trees along our route. Those wild fruit trees were very interesting; that’s the best thing I can say about them. Those persimmons bore no resemblance to the fruit by that name found in our modern supermarkets. Although all the persimmon trees looked alike, their fruit could be quite different. Some of the trees were characterized as being males and never produced any fruit. Persimmons don’t ripen until well after the first frost or into winter, and even then only youngsters with dead taste buds could tolerate some varieties. We knew of a few trees that yielded a small deep orange, wrinkled persimmon that was delicious, but the somewhat larger varieties were best used for slingshot ammunition. Never try to eat a persimmon before it is ripe. Only one is enough to produce a pucker such that your best friend might misunderstand you, and the feeling that the inside of your mouth is coated with sheetrock dust persists for several minutes. Other wild delicacies that renewed our hunter-gatherer instincts in season were hazel nuts (“hazenuts”) and hickory nuts. Like the chinquapins, you had to know where to look for hazenuts, but their whereabouts were well known to the young boys of my generation. Beech nuts were delicious, but were too small to justify the effort required to gather them. The same could be said for many of the large hickory nuts. It was worthwhile to only gather the nuts from the shell-bark hickory trees; the larger nuts from other varieties of hickory were too hard to crack. Besides we wanted to leave something for the gray squirrels. There were several large buckeye trees that were usually loaded with large attractive nuts. Two nuts were contained in a single outer shell and we were cautioned by old timers to not eat but one of the nuts because one of them was poison. I never was brave enough to try to figure out which was the poison nut and verify if there was any truth in the advice. Blackberries and mulberries were all gone by the time school started. We were cautioned not to eat the mulberries because they contained insect eggs; but we ate them anyway. The resulting sickness was due to gluttony, not insects.