Do you remember the first house you lived in?

I once read an article by an author named Bill Roorbach, who made some suggestions on how to bring back hazy memories of the past. One was to draw a map of your earliest neighborhood. As I pondered that thought, I knew I couldn’t do it because we moved away when I was around 3 years old. Yet, surprisingly, I can visualize the first house I lived in — the house where I was born. It was located in an Alabama coal mining camp. I can picture the house and yard in my mind because of the pictures my parents had and the stories they told me.

I can’t remember them sitting me down with the photos in hand or pointing out things, yet they must have done so. Our house was one of a row of unpainted houses that sat on a hillside in Belle Ellen. It had a big front porch with a swing on it. A picket fence enclosed the front yard. My parents and some neighbor children pulled me around the yard in a little red wagon.

My daddy had some hunting dogs. I know that he called one of them Shine. Daddy, who had midnight black hair, thick eyebrows that met each other on his forehead, and hairy arms, was quite handsome in a picture made in the back yard with those dogs. He wore a cap and knelt with a gun in one hand.

I can also visualize the commissary where Daddy was a butcher. Someone snapped his picture with three other store employees. They all wore long white aprons and stood with their arms crossed in front of their chests. One year I had a copy of that picture put on a mug for a birthday gift for my mother.

In later years, during a camping trip at Tannehill Historic State Park with my husband, I saw a photo display of Belle Ellen that included the commissary and some other buildings. It had long been a dream of mine to return to Belle Ellen and visit my birthplace. Sitting in a little church on a hilltop at Tannehill on a Sunday morning, I heard the park director call out a familiar name on the prayer list. It was the name of one of the men wearing a white apron standing beside my daddy in the picture.

I couldn’t wait to ask the director about him. It was then that I found someone else who was born in Belle Ellen, the director himself. I had never run across anyone else who had that distinction. I never have since. He shattered my dream about visiting Belle Ellen, though. He said that many years earlier, it had been strip-mined out. However, my parents’ friend lived close by. We drove to his house, popped in unexpectedly, and enjoyed a delightful visit.

I couldn’t draw a map, but Roohbach’s method of memory jogging worked for me.

Nina Keenam is a retired journalist, who formerly worked at The Foley Onlooker.