Franklin Street in Fall and Winter

Aunt Mamie's house was a townhouse on Franklin Street in Clarksville, four stories of red brick and limestone above the street level. You exited your automobile and ascended the steps to the small yard, then ascended a second set of steps to the front door. I turned around to look at the tobacco warehouses across the street and down in the low spot across the street. Clarksville smelled of tobacco curing and stored. There seemed to be tobacco warehouses on every street.

There is an eternal fog on Franklin Street in my memory. I don't know why. Perhaps it is because we always seemed to be visiting my great aunt around Thanksgiving. Perhaps it was the ubiquity of tobacco smoke. Everyone smoked in those days, or seemed to. My grandfather was a tobacco farmer. His neighbors were all tobacco farmers. His father was a tobacco farmer.

But I remember sitting as patiently as a young boy could in the front room with the adults, gazing at the nick nacks and pictures from faraway lands visited by my great aunt. Being offered a cold coke cola at the end of our visit. Thinking about walking down to Goode Wilsons to spend the dollar our grandmother gave us. Comic books and scale plastic models of Frankenstein's Monster and the Wolfman.

Goode Wilson's was later turned into law offices and my last visit was a job interview one December during law school, when visiting my grandmother before Christmas. There wasn't much of the old drug store left in the building other than the exterior. I didn't get the job, but it was pleasant to step out on the slushy sidewalk in my topcoat and hat and brave the winds of December in Northern Tennessee.

I drove down Franklin Street to the center of town and headed back east toward St. Bethlehem and the farm. The skies grew darker and the snow began to fall like a snow globe of an antique country scene in Winter.