For those of you unfamiliar with Town & Country it's a small subdivision off of Reynolda Road that's comprised of 50's era houses built on rolling hills and situated around a couple of ponds.  Granny and Grandpa's house was on Loch Drive and their back yard was a steep hill that ran down to one of the ponds.  The hill was terraced, but in such a way that it looked like a series of ripples running down the hill so if you started from the top and ran down like an idiot you were almost guaranteed to spend the last half of the trip plummeting down head over kiester until you slid to a stop at the bottom.  What 10 year old boy wouldn't love that?

One year my uncle climbed one of the tallest trees in the back yard, tied a rope to a limb near the top and created what had to be the best rope swing in the city. The tree was situated about a third of the way down the hill so if you grabbed the rope and walked up the hill all you had to do was lift your feet and you were off like a shot. The only problem with the swing was that it didn't go over the pond so there was nothing to leap off of the swing and land in without breaking your neck.  Not to be denied my brother and I would aim ourselves at a stand of trees towards the bottom of the hill and if we managed to hit one we'd grab it in a bear hug, let the swing go and then slide to the ground.  We gave Granny fits, but I think Grandpa thought it was pretty cool.

The summer that I was thirteen years old I took one of my grandpa's bamboo-and-string fishing poles down to the pond to see if I could catch anything.  In earlier years I'd managed to catch a bunch of little "sun" fish (our term) that could have only weighed a couple of ounces each, and bless her heart Granny would cook them up if I asked her to, but this year was destined to be my year.  I hadn't had the line in the water more than five seconds before this monster hit on my line and about broke that bamboo pole in half.  I grabbed the string and yanked as hard as I could and a nine pound catfish flew past my head and smacked into the hill behind me.  I sat there for a second looking at the thing and started trying to figure out how I was going to unhook it.  All I knew about catfish was that they had some kind of stinger thing and I would be damned if I was going to touch that fish before I figured out where it was.  Then I remembered that Grandpa was home so I ran up the hill dragging that catfish along behind me the whole way.  My Grandpa heard me yelling and came out to meet me.  As soon as I saw him I said, "Grandpa I caught a big ole catfish, but I don't wanna touch it or it'll sting me!"  My Grandpa took one look at that fish, covered in grass clippings and conspicuously not gasping, and after he was done laughing said, "Son, that fish is as dead as it's gonna get.  Lemme show you how to unhook one of these things now that we know it can't thrash around."  With that he grabbed the fish, then grabbed my hand and put it on the appropriate part of the fish and showed my how to best unhook it.  I haven't caught another catfish since, but I still remember him showing me how to unhook it so I figure I'll be okay the next time I do.

I asked my Granny if she'd cook the catfish and for once she declined. She said that catfish were "garbage fish" and she wasn't going to mess up her skillet with it.  She did offer, however, to freeze it so that I could take it back to D.C. with me the next week.  I really wish I'd taken a picture of the look on my Mom's face when she saw that thing.