Building Air Castles

My father recently told me a story about his parents.

Grandad and Mamaw Feathers lived in the green, rolling hills of east Tennessee on the Watauga River. Throughout my youth my family and I visited them on their hill top, shaded by giant maples and elms.

Grandad and Uncle Anthony built their house with tall, narrow gables and a wide porch. On that porch, me, my sisters and cousins happily passed summer days, sitting side by side, our tanned legs and sneakered feet suspended over broad chair swings at each end. We laughed and connived, swinging to and fro and to and fro.

Each swing was painted dark forest green to contrast with the highly lacquered battleship gray of the floor boards and crisp white of the clapboard house. These were our cradles in which we rocked together in shady cool on summer days or liquid nights with fireflies dancing in the dark above the gravel driveway. We whispered instead of talking outloud on that porch.

Mamaw and Grandad moved into the hill top home as a young married couple. Both my Dad and Aunt Marynelle were born and raised there. It was a good place to be from.

Grandad made his living as a carpentar and often worked in his brother Anthony's construction business. The two of them could build anything. They were never without work. Mamaw was an excellent gardener. She always had rows of turnips, rubarb, tomatoes, pole beans and an arbor of grapes growing.

Grandad kept cattle, pigs, and chickens. He cured hams in a smoke house and Mamaw canned beans and tomatoes and made pickles in Mason jars that lined the stone and earth cellar I loved to visit. In this cool dark place we discovered old toys and Mamaw's fruit cakes curing on wooden shelves.

There was always an abundance of food at my grandparents. It just seemed to ooze out of the earth and the kitchen!

But during the Depression years, things got very tight according to Dad. He remembers being hungry and no jobs or business going on anywhere. Grandad and his brother scraped together enough money to buy an old jalopy and actually drove to New York state just to work on a construction job building a gas station! Imagine.

Dad remembers his parents invented a game they called "Building Air Castles." This game lifted their hearts by firing up their imaginations. It probably took place on the swings. Either Grandad or Mamaw would start it off by describing a world just the way they wanted it to be, one or two sentences. Then the other would add to it and so on, weaving a world together.

They laughed and entertained themselves on many a day, Dad recalls, and they sometimes came up with really great ideas!

And so, keeping the tradition going, I decided to write a book about our human community and how we learned to live sustainably and in peaceful coexistence across the globe. When I began to share this idea with my friends and family, it seized their imaginations, too! People give me ideas and ask me, "Are you still writing that book, the one about the future? I sure hope so, I love that idea!"

It's title is Building Air Castles.