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Dalton
Roberts |
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Hillary Clinton wrote a book about it taking a village to raise a child. That title resonated with me and since the death of Dixie Jean Harding, it feels like the community of Watering Trough has died.
Her parents, Joe and Etta Harding, were a lot of the glue that held the community together for a half century and Dixie was equal parts of each parent. Joe was a big freewheeling, freethinking, generous man and Etta was the extra mother of every child in the community. Together they owned and operated Harding’s Grocery at the second watering trough on Harrison Pike.
Joe would have died a wealthy man if he had ever collected all the grocery bills owed to him. When any breadwinner in the community had an illness of lost his or her job, Joe kept right on letting them have groceries until they got back on their feet. His brother, Lev Harding, played fiddle in one of my early bands and he said it was “unbelievable” how much money Joe wrote off. He offered to collect some of it for Joe and I am certain he could have. He was a tough old bird and would just as soon fight you as to fiddle you a tune. I know if Lev had come to my door wanting to collect an old debt, I would not have quibbled with him for a second.
Lev said when he made his offer Joe just said, “All those people are my neighbors who came on hard times. I ain’t missing any meals so let’s just forget it.”
Etta was equally kind and generous. When I was in college, the Lord had a little chat with me about all the candy I took from behind the counter when I was a kid. I wrote Etta a letter of repentance and enclosed five bucks. She shot it right back to me with a note saying, “I love you way too much to take this money but your honesty and thoughtfulness is worth a million dollars to me.”
The center of community life was the pot-bellied stove in the middle of the store, surrounded by nail keg seats. America would be much better if every little community had a small family-owned grocery store with a pot-bellied stove and a few nail kegs to sit on. It was around that old stove that I learned a lot of the “adult things” a boy is so curious about. The sex education was subdued and accompanied with many winks and grins but it got through and was better than reading those old books with boring drawings of human anatomy.
So what did the death of Dixie Jean have to do with all of this? Like I said at the start, she was equal parts of Etta and Joe. She was one of the most loving, kind and generous beings I have ever known. Her Joe-like laughter would fill a room. She loved that community until the say she died and it broke her heart to see it lose its “communityness.’
Right before she died the assisted-living place where she lived asked me to come and play for the residents. I said I would play free if they would arrange for me to have lunch with Dixie.
We had a warm and wonderful lunch with many reminisces. She was a little late getting to the room where I entertained. She immediately spoke up and said, “I want to hear ‘A Cool Drink From the Watering Trough.’” I had already done the song but I did it again, dedicating it to her.
I was in Alabama when they had her funeral. It was best that I not be there because I don’t like to make noise at funerals and I know I would have cried like a motherless child.
She and the community are alive and well in my memory
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