I guess I thought Grandpa Watlington was about the smartest man in our neighborhood.
He knew within a minute when it was going to start raining, and he could tell exactly when I should leave his yard in order to reach home before sundown.
I played many summer afternoons with his grandchildren in the yard of their frame two-story house which sat on a high hill about a mile down the road from our house.
You could see the yard from our front porch as the crow flies but I was always leery of snakes and chose the dirt road, rather than cut across the deep grass and marsh of their pasture and through the cornfield where the stalks cut my bare arms until they bled, when I went to visit.
Grandpa Watlington always sat beneath a big oak tree in the front yard between meals with his cane bottom chair tilted back on two legs against the trunk of the tree. His straw hat, which had seen many a summer following the mules in the fields, sat squarely on his head as though he were still in the sun. Most times he kept his eyes shut and slept but he always perked up when we would drop at his feet to rest.
He would start a story with his soft drawl that kept us glued to the ground until he reached the end. Most of them were ghost stories, about haunted houses he had known and occasionally he would slip in one about the towering attic room of the house beside us, and caused many a sleepless night among his listeners.
He was never sick himself, but he could feel your head and see if you had fever, and spit tobacco juice on your toe if you stumped it till it bled, and tell at a glance if a bone was fractured or just felt like it.
Grandpa Watlington could tell you if you needed to take a coat, if you planned to be away after nightfall, and he would cast an eye toward the sky and stretch a bare arm out from his body and decipher the temperature to the degree.
If a dog ran slobbering into the yard, he knew whether it was just thirsty or rabid and he could tell without opening his eyes who had just passed down the dirt road by the sound of their motor.
If you were hungry he could always find a stick or two of licorice candy in his pocket.
Grandpa Watlington had 11 grandchildren to love at his house but he always had room in his heart for their friends.
