Growing up Vernon

Tennessee Crossroads came and did a feature on the old, old Nolensville school. Not the one that I attended as a child, that's now the rec center, but the one that my dad attended, that was once the rec center.

The old school is now a museum. I've only been once, when I found out that my aunts were in the Nolensville sports hall of fame!

Mom sent a picture of the show where it showed Grandma and Papaw Vernon and their display of their WW2 memorablias. All I could think about while seeing those pictures is that Grandma and Papaw are on TV, and probably the same TV channel that their man Lawrence Welk once showed up on! Any Saturday nights spent at Grandma and Papaw's house included Lawrence Welk!

My mind just went into overdrive with memories of my beloved grandparents. A lot of people may not know their story of how they met. Everyone knows that Vernon's sprout out of Vernon Hollow and Papaw was no different. He was born in the hollow, went to school at the little school house on Pleasant Hill Road and then dropped out of school after the 8th grade to farm. Grandma on the other hand, was born in Nebraska, and moved to Los Angeles when she was 13. Yes, Grandma lived in LA!!! She went to a high school with 500 kids in her graduating class. There are some cool pictures of Grandma back then in LA, all fancy and what not.

Both joined the army and both were sent to Europe during WW2. Papaw was on Normandy, a few days after the initial wave. He was injured and was sent to London to recover and to continue working in the army. That's where he met Grandma. Somehow they both ended up in Paris, where they got married, supposedly! Their paperwork got lost, so they remarried once they got back  home.

After the war, they moved to Vernon Hollow. It had to be love for Grandma to give up her LA ways for Vernon Hollow in 1946!!! As most know, they lived in Vernon Hollow, had 5 kids, a bunch of grandkids, me being the youngest, which I won't let anyone forget. Everyone loves the baby!

Vernon Hollow was a 2nd home to me growing up. I probably spent just as much time there than I did at my own house. Every day after school we would go to the Hollow. Shelby and I always wanted to go to Grandma and Papaw's house, but really we wanted to go because that's where our cousins, Tom and Jessica were for us to play with and get into trouble.

Tom is 2 weeks older then Shelby. He is like a brother I never had. Jessica is a few years older than Shelby and Tom, so she got tired of us while we were still young! I've said it many times before, and I'll continue saying it, they are the reasons I'm brave and not scared of very much in life. How I, or any of us for that matter, survived the 80's in Vernon Hollow is beyond me.

There are 2 things they would never let me do. I could never swing on the rope swing. This may be a good thing as there were multiple people who broke their arms on this swing, so it was taken down eventually. And they would never let me on the roof of DD and Mary's house that was an "A Frame" to slide down on the tin with them! It was safe for them to use the roof as a slide, but not me!?!?!

Tom "discovered" a path when we were kids and I thought he was an absolute genius!!! It has since dawned on me, that the path follows the road, therefore it probably wasn't that genius and our older cousins before us also used this path. We spent lots of time on this path, going up and down the road.

Somehow or another, we also ended up with this 1950's car that Tom found and managed to get started. Shelby, Tom, and I would sit in the front seat, as it was a bench seat and cruise all around Vernon Hollow. We would take it to a field and do doughnuts and since the door didn't shut good, it would fly open while we were doing doughnuts. We also thought it was amazing that the seat wasn't bolted down, so for fun, Tom would drive really fast and slam on the brakes so the seat would fly up and hit the dashboard. We LOVED this! (I'm not really sure if our parents were aware of this) The car also once broke down at the end of Vernon Road and guess who got to walk all the way up the big hill by herself to get help?!?! The best time it broke down was when Shelby and our cousin Christie decided to ride in the trunk of the car from our Uncle Earl's house to Grandma and Papaws house.  They get in the trunk and the car won't start!! They were in there for quite a while before we got the car going. I almost feel like we coasted down to the house, but can't remember. Why they felt the urge to ride in the trunk is beyond me, but they still get grief for it!! Of course, there is my extremely intelligent sister, who was shocked when she realized the car played regular radio stations and not just 50's music!!!

When Tom got his first 4-wheeler for his birthday, we were just too cool for school. Tom would drive, Shelby would sit behind him, and there was lil ol' me, on the back, flapping in the wind! Shelby refused to let me sit in the middle, even though I was the youngest. A few years later, once there was a 4-wheeler for each of us to drive, I got to drive that first 4-wheeler of Toms. It didn't have brakes on it there at the end. So, of course that meant that I got the 4-wheeler with no brakes. We would ride all around the farm and then to get back to the house, you had to go down a pretty steep hill, the hill that everyone would sled on when it snowed. At the bottom of this hill was an electric fence and a creek. I learned to coast down the hill and turn the 4-wheeler just in time to miss the fence! I did break my collarbone on that hill, but it wasn't due to faulty brakes on a 4-wheeler!!

Shelby and I would spend the night at Grandma and Papaws house and generally Tom would spend the night too. We would beg to sleep in their camper. Grandma would say, ask Papaw, Papaw would say, ask Grandma, and every time we'd end up sleeping in the camper. No clue why we always wanted to, but we did.

That camper was awesome. It was the type you drive, with the area in the back and a bed above the drivers seat, so you could sit up there and look out the window while driving. We used to load up in that camper and go to Twitty City at Christmas time. I also remember loading up in it and going out for Grandma's retirement dinner. Yes, rednecks coming to town!

Of course, my whole family were farmers. Papaw always had pigs. And of course, we liked to play in the pig pen! One year, Papaw let Shelby, Tom, and me have the runt of the liter. We obvouisly named this pig Wilbur and loved him, maybe too much. When he got big enough, we'd ride him around the pig lot! Eventually, we ate Wilbur. How I'm not scarred for life is beyond me. I've had too many pet cows and pigs that ended up being quite tasty at the end of the day!

I could go on and on about stories. We'd have Vernon Trick Day, we'd go to the house and make up recipes, basically pouring everything in a bowl (not the same as Vernon Trick Day)! We started building more treehouses then I can count. We'd "clean" the creek out. We had funerals for our pet ducks. We'd play SkipBo or Uno for hours on end.  We use to love Friday nights, we'd get together for pizza or go to Quincy's and chow down at the buffet! I've fallen off of a horse while riding bareback, I've kicked my foot through a pane on a window I was using as a ladder, and of course the famous broken collarbone. Luckily nothing too major happened to any of us!

I think about these times and it seems like a whole other lifetime ago. Even though I don't remember it, the Vernon's used to get together for Sunday lunch. This eventually stopped. According to my older cousins, my dad and Uncle DD were cool uncles until they had kids! Sorry guys! I'm thankful that the Vernon's are still close. My aunts and uncles are good about making sure we still get together. Of course, everyone still hangs out at Vernon Hollow every afternoon. The Vernon girl cousins go out to dinner occasionally, although we are way past due. Just to give a reference to these cousins, for those who really know me and my sister, there are basically 6 of us, all alike!! We all have "blonde" moments, we all have the same sense of humor, and we can all cry from laughing too much when we get together.

I tear up thinking about these good times we had together and how loving Grandma and Papaw were toward me and the whole family. I was blessed to be with them both when they took their last breath. I'm lucky to have received 28 years worth of wisdom from Papaw and to have my grandmother for 34 years. To say I miss Grandma and Papaw is an understatement. Anyone who ever met them, loved them.

To wrap this up, my initial thought of writing this. Being a Vernon in Nolensville in the 80's and 90's was amazing! I wouldn't trade my childhood for anything! Even with all of our crazy stunts that we pulled, I think we all turned out pretty well!

13 years

Today my memories on Facebook included a picture I posted a few years back in honor of a throwback Thursday. It was a picture of Leah, me, our house, aka Beckley, our car, and Jim, a Canadian hitchhiker. It dawned on me that it was 13 years ago, right around Labor Day that a small town girl from Nolensville boarded a plane to fly to New Zealand, then onto Australia, and Fiji for 9 months. All I had was one hiking backpack with my belongings.

College is great, but for me, graduating was somewhat scary. There were so many unknowns. I honestly had no idea what I really wanted to do. I had an idea of what would be ideal for me, but that becoming a reality was crazy! I had worked hard for 5 year, yes, as dad says, I squeezed 4 years of college into 5, and the end was approaching and it was not easy! I knew I wasn't ready to move back to Nolensville, but wasn't sure if Chattanooga was where I wanted to stay either. I was looking at jobs across the country, with the mind set that if I find a job I liked, I'd be willing to move for it and experience something new.

Graduation was approaching and I took a long road trip to Pittsburgh with my friend Leah to visit her family. Leah knew what she was doing after school. She was backpacking Australia. After this very long car ride to Pittsburgh and then back to Chattanooga, Leah had me convinced that I wanted to backpack Australia with her! I think I actually called my parents from Pittsburgh to share this news with them. I'm sure they thought it was another grand Becca idea and I would lose interest as soon as I got home. Nope, that wasn't the case. I graduated college, packed up my apartment, worked half the summer in Chattanooga while sleeping in another friends extra bedroom while her roomie was home for the summer and then moved back to Nolensville mid summer to do some traveling before packing up for Australia.

13 years ago, I knew nothing about Myspace or Facebook. There was no Snapchat or Instragram to make staying connected to your family and friends easy. I did not have a smartphone with FaceTime on it. This was pre texting days. I did not have a digital camara and I had to use a calling card to call home. Sometimes I could talk to my family and friends via AOL Aim! HAHA! Old School!

I sent frequent emails to a bunch of people of my trip. I still have those and would love for one day to print them all off and bind them into some type of book so I can look back and remember that I once was a hippie. What's so funny to me is who all my emails made it to. I found out that my emails were being forwarded to friends of friends of friends! Co-workers of friends and so forth. There were tons of people reading about my adventures and asking about it. There were people who have never met me that kept up with my adventures, which was pretty amazing to think about. I still cherish the file folder we found after Grandma died that I had all of my letters and post cards I had sent her over the years, including the ones from Australia.

For those who did not know me during this time frame of my life, here ya go. I flew to New Zealand for a month and traveled around. I've always said that New Zealand is the best kept secret in The Pacific. It's breathtaking! It was around the time that The Lord of the Rings came out, so that was all the fanfare back then. To this day, I've still never seen those movies.

We left New Zealand and flew to Australia, where I had my 4 month working visa and 3 month travel visa. Leah and I started up north in the Darwin area picking mangos, which is where I ended up in the ER due to my mango allergies! LOL! I'm pretty sure my parents loved receiving that phone call from me telling them that I was in the ER on the other side of the world! I should have their input on these thoughts!  Since the mangos didn't work out, we ended up in Perth, where I went to work in a road house (gas station) in the middle of now where. Literally. You could only buy green bananas from the grocery store! It had about 100 people in the town, if that many. The closest town with anything big in it was a good  2 hours away. It was a farming community, where you farmed during the day, came to my road house for lunch, and went next door to the bar at night. It was great. I also thought I wanted to buy this roadhouse, as it was for sale at the time! This is where I mastered driving a manual Ute (truck) on the wrong side of the road! I loved cruising those backroads.

After the stint ended at the roadhouse, I met back up with Leah in Perth. We knew we wanted to see as much as we could within the last 3 months. After researching, we decided our best bet would be to purchase a car, so we could see Australia at our own pace. So, we found an awesome Station wagon, that we named Beckley and this was our home for the next 3 months. We figured we could pay for the car, drive around, and not worry about staying in hostels to save money.

For 3 months, we drove the outter of Australia, from Perth, across the nollabar, to Adelaide, Melbourne, took a ferry to Tasmania, back up through Sydney and all the way to the top of the eastern side of Australia to Cairns, where we sold Beckley before flying out.

For 3 months, I was in the ocean daily. We would find random off the trail beaches in go swimming. This was part relaxation part shower! We lived in a car, the ocean was our bath! LOL! For 3 months, we parked our car on the side of the road or in a parking lot and sleep in it. We initially bought a tent, but decided the front seats leaned back were better. Since I'm shorter, I had the drivers seat, so I would lean my seat back, throw my feet up on the steering wheel and be fast asleep! This is something I would never do in America!

We had some amazing adventures on this trip and some crazy stories! We met so many amazing people, which is another reason I wish Facebook was around back then so I could have friended them and kept up with them. I do have a few still that I'm in contact with.

We left Australia and flew to Fiji. Fiji is the most laid back country ever, so it was a natural fit from our free spirited lifestyle we had been in for the past few months. We got a boat tour, and island hopped for 3 weeks in very remote islands. It was the life for me. Laying around in a secluded area on the beach, was amazing! I was blessed to be able to go back to Fiji for my 30th birthday and it's still one of my favorite places.

Coming home was not easy, to say the least. After this 9 months, my savings was non existent and my only option was to move back home with my parents. I had a hard time adjusting. I went from being carefree, sleeping in a car, to moving to Nolensville! I would forget that I could take a shower. I remember trying to go somewhere and contemplating taking a shower and was like, I took one a few days ago! WHAT! That was my wake up call that I was back to normal land and could take showers daily! I also went up to my dads shop one day when I was home and visiting with his employees and Kenny saying, "Becky (he is the only one who can call me Becky!), you see all that grey hair on your dads head, that's from you!" He was right, dad got a lot more grey hair in those 9 months.

Man! 13 years, 13 years, it seems like a life time ago. I think about and I don't regret anything. Yes, I did move back to Nolensville sooner then I had anticipated, but I always said I wanted to be in Nolensville if anything ever happened to my grandparents and when my sister started having kids, so it worked out.

It took awhile to adjust back and sometimes I miss those hippie lifestyles. Never thought I'd be in a job on the 8th floor of a downtown Nashville building! Leah is in the states for a while with her husband, which is awesome. However, Leah continued traveling and is now a dual citizen of the USA and Australia. How crazy to think about!  We are forever bonded by our 9 month adventure and for that, I'm eternally grateful!

My favorite quote was, Always pursue your crazy ideas. I pursued and conquered my crazy idea!