Wayne Welch

My mother was a schoolteacher in the remote areas of far Western North Carolina. We moved a lot and frequently lived in houses with no electricity, no running water, and no inside plumbing. In one house the fireplace was boarded up to prevent “haunts” from getting out. A man had been murdered and his body burned in the fireplace. My mother was not afraid of “haunts”. We obtained our water from a spring so running water was me with a bucket in each hand. We had an outhouse with Sears and Roebuck catalogs for toilet paper. We did not have TV, computers, or telephones. We did have a battery-powered radio which we could play for short periods of time in order not to run the battery down. We were poor but we lived in one of the most beautiful places on earth. We were surrounded by majestic mountains and trees. I spent a lot of time in the woods. My mother taught in one-room schoolhouses with eight grades in one room. She did not drive so we did not have a car and walked to school and back, sometimes about a mile, sometimes more. Most of the students were related to one another so I was the outsider plus the teacher’s kid. I was bullied a lot. Our school was set in several miles of woods so at recess we played fox and dog, a game where one boy was the fox and all the other boys chased him. I was always the fox. I learned to run very fast. May 1 was a liberation day for me because that was the day I got to go barefoot. I did not wear shoes again until October.

Later I went to live with my grandparents in Webster, population about 500. I had two rabbits, a buck and a doe which I kept in a cage my grandfather built for me. I had two litters of eight baby rabbits each but I finally sold the rabbits (that many rabbits were a lot of work). A friend later gave me a young flying squirrel which I kept in the rabbit cage. My flying squirrel slept during the day so I put him in my shirt pocket and took him to school. I loved my flying squirrel but he was eventually able to escape and return to the wild where he belonged.