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Memories of Golde Dicks Markham (1996) Golde Markham Dicks 14/125

I loved going to Aunt Aggie’s bone yard garden in Lake City with Grandma Tyre and

her three daughters. The girls were my aunts but they were all about my age: Hilda, one year
older than I was, was bom with a blind eye; Essie was a year younger, and Myrtle was two
years younger.
Grandma Tyre loved to visit the bone yard garden, filled with all kinds of flowers. This

garden contained the only green rosebush I ever saw. Aunt Aggie built arches made of bones
over paths. Confederate jasmine crawled up each side of the afch and spread over the top.
When those vines bloomed in late April, the scent was overwhelming. We could smell the

vines from quite a distance.
Aunt Aggie was nice to everyone. In the summertime when it was so hot, she offered
lemonade to all her visitors—and she loved to talk. I wandered all through her garden paths

many times. Her bone yard was located just north of the railroad tracks on the east side of
the street that crossed North Main.

This one experience was the most awful thing that happened to me in my younger
days. Ma and I were trying to finish hoeing a field of com and peanuts. We began working
early that morning. We had 'left our jars of drinking water in the shade under trees so that the

water would be cooler. By noon we had hoed our rows up even with the trees. Ma told me
to hoe another round while she went to the house to fix dinner. I got my jar of water and sat
down on the ground in the shade of two tall persimmon trees in .the field. I was so tired that I

didn’t think that I could even get up on my feet.
As I was drinking my water, I noticed a couple of round holes in the ground beside
me. I wondered what could have made those round holes which were about as large as a

silver dollar. Then I looked up. About fifteen feet in front of me was a black snake coming
right toward me. It looked like it must have been standing up on its tail because its head was

raised three feet high. I didn’t think the snake saw me so I jumped up to make it see me. But
it kept coming straight at me.
I started running and screaming. After I ran about 100 yards, I thought the snake

would have gone its own way. I slowed down and looked back over my shoulder—the snake
was still coming straight at me. I kept running and screaming.

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