Attached is Daddy’s essay “The Old House” which was read at his funeral. Several people have asked for copies. It really does capture his spirit and his love for the home place in Hagerville and has helped me cope, somewhat, with his loss. I chose not to correct most of the slight grammatical and spelling errors. Daddy banged this out on an OLD manual typewriter, without the benefit of spellcheckers and other modern tools. (I’m not even sure liquid paper had been invented then!) Also, I kinda like some of his spellings better. So this is almost exactly as he typed it. 

Sincerely,

Robin Tanner

(Robert Owens Tanner, Jr. - “just like my Daddy”)

"The Old House"

The old house is gone now, dismanteled log by log to save it the disgrace of falling. It’s warped and rustic outline no longer crowns the hill above the creek, where for so many years it stood; a gaunt grey-hided sentinel, watching over road and fields and forests. Now, the unkept fields are growing up in brambles, weeds and bushes. The forest is reclaiming what was kept from it so long - some say, since before the Civil War. Only the narrow dirt road that tied the old place to that world beyond the woods still holds it’s own against time, and natures green and creeping march.

How quickly, once the house was gone, the fields were overrun!! Till then, I hardly noticed - while the old house leaked and leaned but a trifle more each year - that the bottom fields and hillsides bit-by-bit were giving way to the low but growing tangle that’s now so evident.

We were the last to live there, and as a family still together, it was our final home. We moved there - parents, sons and daughter - twenty years ago, and laughed and grew and disagreed behind those ancient walls until the age of parting. Then we went out one by one, from that sincere and simple world, to the complex one beyond the woods. And as we did we left behind, not only home and parents, but something else - a way of life - rustic and streightforward, like the old house at it’s center.

To me, the old place was like an island, set in but not a part of a green, encircling sea. And I can see it now as it would then appear when, homeward bound, I reached the turn where the road slips from the woods and the clearing, ringed with treespires, suddenly unveiled, before me lay exposed to the open, azure sky. From there, the bounding woods sweep wide on either side in jagged, green half-circles that cross the creek, the bottom fields, mount the slopes beyond and, curving inward, meet again on the ridge line past the house. From there, streight ahead, the road’s thin sandy ribbon unrolls across, and so divides, the scene the tree-tops circumscribe. To the left beside it, about halfway across, at the brink of the first steep rise above the valley’s narrow floor, the old house sits - and sags and leans a little - grey and weatherbeaten, beneath the tall pecans.

Now, the twin pecans still tower high above that vacant site, tho they seem a little lonely by themselves against the sky. Beneth them, in the front yard by the road, the myrtle bushes blossom and the yellow johnquils bloom the same bright and fragrant welcome as when the house was there.

Such change, they say, alone is certain; you can count on nothing else. But there is something just as sure about all that’s in the past. And our old home is there somewhere - I see it now and then - beyond this realm of certain change, immune from time at last.

written by Robert Owens Tanner

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