The earliest years of my life, from earliest memory until the age of seventeen are remembered in this collection of pastoral poems and stories that chronicle my experiences growing up as the son of a sharecropper on a cotton farm in Western Tennessee during the Great Depression. This is not a "rags to riches" story. It is a rags to a comfortable "middle class" life story. It may not be remarkable to others, but for me and my humble beginnings; it is remarkable. Every aspect of the authors life has been covered---family, friends, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, merchants and townsfolk of the community surrounding the small farming town of Trimble, Tennessee. Descriptions of living conditions, dwellings, family relationships, farm work, diet, money, speech and language, weather, education, religion, play, segregation, war, then and now, no more, transportation and clothing are presented in detail.