Sometimes the brain unlocks memories. Because of the huge swaths of mine that are locked away, I get immeasurably tickled when one pops up.

My grandpa Willie died when I was ten. Because of alcoholism and domestic violence, I was lucky enough to live with him and Grandma when I was very young. After that, I was doubly lucky to be able to spend a couple of summers at their shotgun house in Rich.

My grandpa still drank when I was very young, much to the shouting chagrin of my grandma Nellie. Although I don’t remember the specifics, we walked from Rich down to the little town of Monroe so that he could score plug chewing tobacco or a bottle of something cheap. From their first house across from the White Cemetery to Monroe was about two and a half miles. By the time they moved to the last house Grandpa lived in about a mile North, Grandpa was no longer making the walk to Monroe. He had to have been physically tough, though, because he dug and constructed both tornado shelters that Grandma demanded, doing most of the initial stage with an ax.

My grandparents didn’t drive. And their days of mules for transport were long behind them. It’s hard to believe that at 65+, he sometimes would pick me up and carry me when my bare feet became too hot. He didn’t do it often (or for long) because kids were supposed to be able to walk for miles. It boggles my mind that I’m three years younger than he was in 1970.

These sorts of age comparisons are useful to anyone who does family trees or genealogy. The fog of time invariably takes over for generations past our grandparents. Grandpa was born in 1905, when indoor plumbing, electricity in every house, and telephones weren’t a reality.

Shoes were for getting into someone’s car or going for a visit. No matter how many snakes were out, how hot the pavement was, or who was coming over, Grandma and Grandpa would have never asked me to put shoes on. My feet were like leather. And that love for walking barefoot stays with me. Even now, if it’s summer and I’m deep into the woods being suffocated by heat and an absent breeze, it’s not hard for me to remember being surrounded by the plants in the field and the blazing sun doing its best to boil my noggin.

One of the memories that keeps popping up more frequently is of his Cannon Ball tobacco. If we were on the porch looking out across the cotton fields, he would pull out his pocket knife and cut a plug from the square of dense, sweet tobacco. On rare occasions, he would let me attempt to cut the sliver for him. It’s a good thing the porch swing faced away from the screen door at the front. Grandma would have a conniption fit if she thought he were letting me handle his knife.

Grandma was mostly unaware that Grandpa let me use his hatchet if I wanted to go out and chop clay from the dried perimeter of the crops that always surrounded us. It’s not so much that he would “let” me use it. I didn’t realize until I was older that using essential tools came with responsibility. A hatchet was one of those tools that was cared for, sharpened, and kept, even when another handle was needed. Now I laugh about Grandma’s contention that more snakes were to be found in the fields. All of the major scares I had with snakes happened right in the yard.

Now that I can write freely, it became more poignant for me that Grandpa and Grandma knew that the biggest danger to me wasn’t critters. It was the two-legged kind that couldn’t drink away the anger that consumed them.

One of the memories that came back recently was that he always told me to make sure that I handed the knife back open. You were always supposed to give the knife back the way it was handed to you. Because I’m curious by nature, I dived into whether this was actually a “thing.” For many southerners, it was. For small children, you were way more likely to cut your fingers closing a knife than by actually using it. This is one of the memories that was locked away from me until recently. I have no idea what triggered it.

Grandpa also did his best to teach me not to be afraid of wasps, hornets, or the thousand other things that could fly around and sting you. I got stung a lot because I loved to catch the flying critters in little jars or in my fingers. If we were outside, Grandpa took out his Cannon Ball plug tobacco and rubbed it on the sting. His insistence that it helped undoubtedly provided just the right amount of magic and placebo to convince me that it did. Grandma preferred using bleach and breaking out a cube of ice from her metal ice trays. She fussed over a wasp sting. Grandpa considered it a necessary tax for living in the fields.

Every once in a while, he would cut off a tiny sliver of his tobacco, leaving it on the blade of the knife and offering it to me. Most of the time I would laugh. Sometimes I would pluck it off the blade and stick it in my mouth. I have a theory that this amusing joke of his contributed to my love of burned food and things most people wouldn’t consider to be edible. Old school tobacco, especially the kind that was compressed into heavy, dense plugs, was not for the faint of heart. It’s so rare to see someone with plug tobacco anymore.

I never dipped or chewed tobacco. Every once in a while, though? I wish I could take a knife and cut a sliver and foul my taste buds with the earthy, overwhelming flavor.

That’s what nostalgia does to us. We mostly forget the army of mosquitoes, the sweaty nights without air conditioning, and even the initial gag reflex of what many would have considered to be inferior tobacco. It is the people of our past and the anchors they placed inside of us that draw us back into memory. If Grandma got out her absurdly long insect spray and doused the room to the point you thought you might combust, it was necessary.

I can get on Google Earth and look at Highway 39, the pair of cedar trees that still stand where the house once stood, and across the fields. The narrow beige road is now faded asphalt. The ditch where I once spent countless hours digging has been sloped. Old farming equipment sits in the yard and where the house once stood.

Summer triggers recollections of those years for me. Only a small change in my life would have kept me in Monroe County. I’d probably be wandering the old roads like Grandpa once did, and maybe even jumping a train like he used to.