some kinda good

(Catlett's Station, around 1862)

Catlett was a little village when I was born and raised in there in the 1960s. The kids all went to church together until age 6, when they started going to school together, too. Our elementary – grades one through four – was four classrooms and a long cooler in the hallway for three-cent lunch milk. The building was wooden, painted white, with huge tall windows that opened to the breeze, and with a huge bell swinging in the belfry.

My great-great-grandfather had moved to the village when it was called Catlett’s Station, and he put a general store right on the railroad in 1866. Just four years earlier Jeb Stuart and his men had raided John Pope’s supply lines there, during second Manassas.

My father, who was born in 1931, farmed the same land his great-grandfather and grandfather had farmed. His father ran the mercantile, then still spitting distance from the railroad tracks. When dad was a kid, the business sold everything there from caskets and crackers to moonshine.

My grandmother and I walked hot rolls and soup to the shut-ins. Two curious men, Chicken and Preacher Parsons, strolled together all day, never working, living their lives to mystify me generate conversation around Catlett’s 6-o’clock-sharp dinner tables. Every summer the community had a fireman’s parade and a July Fourth celebration with fireworks and a hamburger stand.

Catlett held all manner of entertainment to a small child: fishing and digging and playing with friends. And it was the most boring place on the earth to a 16-year-old.

Catlett is still on the map; you can drive through it to places with names we’d never heard back then – Fair Oaks Mall, Nissan Pavilion.

But Catlett is gone, too. And I am grateful to have been there.

Winterbrook Farm