As a child I played on the warm stairs of my grandfathers house. I lived with him, his brother, my grandmother and mother in a rambling old two-story farmhouse that stood on a thirty-two acre tract of land in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Most of the memories, good and bad, of my early childhood center around that old house and those two old men.

   The stairs were warm and dark and more importantly were a sort of no-man’s land. My grandfather ruled the downstairs with a stern hand and upstairs my mother’s harsh looks made any deviation from what she believed or thought seem like a transgression against things most holy. There on the stairs though, I could sit and listen to the stories they told as they sat beside the old floor furnace. It was a large grill set into the floor and they sat on opposite sides of it and leaned forward with elbows on their knees as if sitting at a campfire. The stories they told were of work on the railroad and coal mines and of going off to France and Germany in the First World War. I could sit and revel in the lives of far off people and far off lands and I could feel as if I was connected to something. There was a feeling of contact with family and history that was not to follow me as I grew older.

   I guess it was just a few autumn days in a few years of my young life, though it seems like longer, when the indelible memories were formed. The sound of their voices, the smell of hickory nuts and my great uncle’s hand rolled cigarettes and three-in one oil they used to clean the shotguns as they got them ready for hunting trips into the surrounding mountains.

   As the years passed and I became who I was, I was no longer close to them, I did not hunt, I was an agnostic, and my views of the world were those of a teenager of the sixties, a world they were hard pressed to understand. So I disappointed them and they became the old people I avoided sharing my opinions with, and the stairs became just a way to go from one floor to the other.

   Well, they’re gone now, every one, and I see their faces and hear their voices on chilly fall evenings when my eyelids grow heavy from the warmth of my home. In case I forgot to say so, I miss them. So goodnight old gentlemen, I hope there is great peace where you are.