12x16
Oil on Linen
SOLD
Every summer Friday afternoon back in the mid-seventies my mom would barrel down the Cooper Hill Road just outside of Windsor in her loaded down green wood paneled ford station wagon headed to Nags Head for the weekend. In the back seat crunched between grocery bags, casserole dishes and card board cases of Coca-Cola, I would beg her to drop me off at Bill White's where his son John (aka Boo, Boo John) had the run of the farm. The White's garden always had freshly cultivated rows of vegetables shaded by crooked wooden bean poles that buffered the family's brick ranch home from the farm "shop" with a rusted tin roof sheltering Mr. White's tractors and this red 1960's GMC dump truck used for hauling picked corn out of the field. I wasn't always successful with my pleading, but every now and then she would cave and pull in and drop me off for the weekend. Boo and I would play all over the farm and on the various equipment scattered about the shop yard until late Sunday evening when I was picked back up on the way home.
A few weeks ago I was driving down that same road in the mid morning and noticed a red truck parked under the Whites' litter shed for their six poultry houses that were built later in the late 1980's. It was a later model than I had remembered, but I pulled down the dirt path and started taking pictures of it anyway. Elizabeth Spruill, who lives down the path that leads to the lower Cashie River, drove by on her way out and said that I should paint another truck on the other side of the houses that had been sitting in the cow pasture for years. I walked down past the sixth house, and leaning down in overgrown weeds in a field scattered with butter cups was the original old truck.
