(Note: In one of my delightful writing groups, we were challenged to write on the theme of spring. These prompts are much more wide open than they might appear at first glance. This was my offering. It’s a true story.)

Daddy grew up in the poorhouse.

It’s probably not what you think.

The former Johnston County (NC) poorhouse , aka County Farm and Home, is a private nursing home. The building stands as it did when it was first built in the early 1920s.

His father was hired to oversee the place during the years of the Great Depression, and the entire family of nine got to live and eat there, cost-free. Not that they weren’t owed that. Grampa’s salary was paltry to begin with and got cut as the Depression worsened. Not to mention that Gramma was expected to oversee the cooking, the laundry, the cleaning, and the nursing of the county home’s residents for no salary whatsoever.

Daddy said there was a lot of sickness at the poorhouse—and a lot of dying, too, what with the inmates, as they were called, being frail and elderly, developmentally disabled, or previously homeless—sometimes all of those things simultaneously.

Most people, Daddy said, when they came to live at the poorhouse, they also came to die there. And when that happened, unless a family member came to claim the body—and usually no one did, Grampa held a simple service, then the unembalmed body was placed in a plain pine casket and lowered into an unmarked grave which had been dug by Grampa, his sons, and the fittest of the inmates earlier in the day. It was a real potters’ field.

Well, with death always lurking around the corner, Grampa stored truckloads of pine boxes in a room of one of the old outbuildings on the property, where they sat waiting for the next person to die. Daddy and his brothers knew the darkened space as the coffin room.

It was one of their favorite play places.

It was where they hid when they thought a chore was about to be assigned, and it was a fine destination during a neighborhood game of hide and seek.

And Daddy, who once fancied he’d grow up to be a preacher, picked the coffin room to practice his oratory. For some reason, there was an old bed stored in the coffin room, too, and it was a springy thing. Daddy used the bed as his ‘pulpit.’

During his sermon sessions, he jumped up and down on that old bed. With its iron springs, it acted kind of like a pogo stick. Now, Daddy was a fiery orator, and as his fervor increased, so did his bouncing. He’d spring higher and higher until both he and his message finally fizzled out.

Well, Daddy never did get that call to be a minister. He reckoned the world just wasn’t ready for a preacher with so much spring in his step.

(P. S. You can find more stories about Daddy’s youth in my book, Boyhood Daze and Other Stories: Growing Up Happy During the Great Depression.)