Love thy neighbors

THE WORD FROM HOME is that our next-door neighbor, Linda Kirkland, is 86 today. That seems impossible. I remember when she came to Esto.

Linda, a Yankee from Ohio, married Doyle Kirkland, son of U.T. and Delma Kirkland, who raised me when I was little. She and Doyle met when he was in the agricultural inspection service, which was a source of employment to many young men in Esto in the 1940s and ’50s. There wasn’t much else to do. Then U.T. had a heart attack and Doyle came home to run the family farm and brought Linda with him.

Linda wasn’t like us. She talked funny and seemed to have little patience with the way we’d always done things in Esto. She stirred the pot. She encouraged us to think new things and try new ways. She thought we ought to sing our old hymns a little faster in church on Sunday mornings, and volunteered to lead the singing sometimes. Since I played the piano, she immediately sped up my life.

Doyle ran the farm, which was all around our little acre. He hired me during the long summers to pick peaches and plums and tomatoes and load watermelons. Even after the summer crops were gathered, Doyle would pay me to pull the weeds in the peanut patch — miserable work that made me know early on I didn’t have what it took to be a farmer. Doyle figured out pretty quickly that I wasn’t much of a field hand, but I could make change. So he put me in charge of the Kirkland Farms fruit stand in front of our house on Highway 79, just south the Florida-Alabama state line. He paid me $7 a day, which I saved in my new bank account.

Linda brought something new to our little town. She was a professional woman who worked with Builders Homes in Dothan to bring affordable and well-built brick homes, financed by the federal government, to our part of the world. She let me use her IBM Selectric typewriter — a true novelty in a time of manual Royal typewriters. She managed to “loan” it to me during my senior year of high school to type papers and publish The Esto Herald and the church bulletin on the mimeograph machine she’d replaced at work. Then she managed to have the Selectric declared surplus, too, and I took it with me when I went away to college.

I had a Selectric typewriter and a new red Pontiac LeMans I’d bought with the money Doyle paid me. I was on my way.

By then Doyle and Linda had built a new brick home of their own up the dirt lane from our house. I always saw them when I came home to Esto, either at home or at church, or both. I was more concerned about Doyle’s parents, who were getting older. U.T., who was a surrogate father to me, died young, when I was still in school, and it was a huge loss. Doyle’s mother, Delma — my Big Mama — lived on for nearly three more decades, and I never even considered going home to Esto without seeing her.

Now U.T. and Delma are long gone, and it never occurred to me that Doyle and Linda might get old. But here we are, all older than we once were. So before it’s too late, let me say to Doyle and Linda how grateful I am they have always been such good neighbors. They helped launch my life.