COUNTRY JUBILEE

I grew up on a 10-acre farm just outside Nashville on Lone Oak Road at the intersection of Granny White Pike where Eddy Arnold, Minnie Pearl and other Grand Ole Opry performers lived. The oldest of four kids born to Archie and Margaret Boone – Daddy an architect/contractor and part time farmer, and Mama a registered Nurse, who made us kids her lifetime patients – my brother, Nick, and I took turns milking the cows to provide the milk we all drank, and helped raise chickens, rabbits, some pigs...and helped Mama grow vegetables. Those early years are a happy blur of play and church, and love and laughter shared with our two younger sisters, Margie and Judi. It was hard labor for Nick and me in the summers, digging ditches and pushing wheelbarrows of concrete for the houses and churches Daddy’s small company was building. Our earnings went to help pay the tuition for the Christian high school we attended, and we didn’t have a family car till I graduated from grade school. Good weather or bad, we all packed into the Boone Contracting Co. pickup truck, Nick and me on a wooden bench in the back that Daddy built. It was a financial “scramble” we only partially understood. We might have been considered “poor” in those days, but we weren’t. We were rich in love, family, fun…and worship of the God who was helping us through thick and thin. Some of my fondest memories take me back to the swing on our front porch where I sat on warm Tennessee nights enjoying lightnin’ bugs and crickets singing, and the yard Nick and I had just mowed exuding that sweet aroma of fresh cut grass. I had parents that loved me, a God who blessed me, a safe and secure home…and a future I could only guess would be something useful and fulfilling, though I was somehow confident that it would. That old porch swing is still there, the house as well. After us kids all moved away, Daddy converted the attic into a “second floor” where I always stay when I’m home to visit, even to this very day. And if I could manage it, I’d spend my last hour on this earth on that porch swing…awash in the happy growing up years of my boyhood Nashville home.