Here is the old two story, white house that I grew up in until about the 7th or 8th Grade.  Shown here, it is located on Queens Creek Road, directly across the street from the current Swansboro High School.  Until about the 1970s, the house was located at the corner of Queens Creek Road and Hwy. 24.  Shown below is the Swansboro Burger King.  The old white house was located about where the children’s play area is located, and facing Hwy. 24.  The kitchen would have been about where the drive thru is located.

There were several tall old oak trees in the front yard, which either by rot or other damage were eventually cut down.  There was a Gardenia bush that grew by the front steps.

There was a ditch that ran along the back of the house, just off from the kitchen.  It ran under Queens Creek Road in one direction and angled back to Hwy. 24 in the other.  There was a large vegetable garden about where GoGas is currently located.

NOTE [ 11/20/23 ]:  I’ve mentioned it elsewhere, but along the ditch that ran behind the house, off from the kitchen, there were several items planted.  There was a rose colored, flowering Crepe Myrtle tree.  The bark is soft and peels from the tree.  Next to it was what we called a “Mock Orange” plant, but many years later I found that wasn’t what it was actually called (a Trifoliate Orange) which had many long intertwined thorns and little, hard fruit about the size of a golf ball.  Then there was some space and there was a tall narrow Pomegranate bush/tree and beside this tree was a wooden plank which crossed the ditch in order to walk over to the pasture area and on to the “pack” house.  The ditch was deep and I dreaded crossing this narrow, bowed plank bridge, but I don’t think I ever fell into the ditch.  The ditch could be almost dry at times, and at other times, after a good, few days rain, it could be filled almost to the brim with clay colored rushing water.  At times, in the warm summer, the water would be low, but clear and trickling and many water plants growing just beneath the surface.  And when the water was just low enough, and when it was a warm summer day, I might get down in the ditch to bother one of the local crayfish, a freshwater crustacean.  The entrance to their lair would be a clay pillar along the side of the ditch bank.   And some of the clay, would be a beautiful smooth light gray color, which I would form into a small cannon ball.  Set on a shelf somewhere, the clay would eventually harden and become almost rock like.

There is a picture of me, taken by Mary Ann a week or so after my birthday, listed as “February 1960.”  I’m standing on the back porch, by the kitchen, on my bicycle with the limp bicycle chain, the mule across the ditch, behind my head, Lyde’s little “lumber jack” house, the old car and the Wisteria bush vines.

Lyde was one of several in the family that had Tuberculosis and needed to “live apart.”  There is another photo of Sis, smiling, sitting on the front steps of the McCain Sanitarium near Aberdeen, NC when she was recovering from TB.  I think the story is that Buddy (mom’s brother, a Merchant Marine) died grotesquely on the back porch, spitting up loads of lung and blood.  Mom having to get towels to soak up the mess.  I think the story goes that someone drove the dead brother up to the hospital in Jacksonville, maybe stopping by Sis’s house in Hubert along the way.  *I may have confused Buddy’s death with someone else’s, but in the story the dead man’s feet are sticking out the back of the station wagon he is being transported in.

Lyde’s little house was off the end of our kitchen.  It was small and a small, single bed ran from front to back.  I think there may have been a “hot plate” for heating coffee or simple cooking.  After Lyde died, the little house was sold, and went away.

And, because I grew up around people who had Tuberculosis, I test positive for TB each time I’m tested.  Apparently the area they prick you with, gets a little more red and “about the size of a quarter” if you are infected.  **I’m not pursuing the possibility, but I think at some point in my later adult life, I realized that if my health became poor, there was a possibility that the TB might try to take over.  Like something bad that, can be kept in check, but never really goes away.   ***Maybe like the way I feel about my pacemaker.  Yes, it was major surgery.  Well, any time someone operates on my heart, that’s major to me.  But after I healed, I have had no problems with the pacemaker.  It has done it’s job, keeping my heart rate from going too low (and me passing out)… and the drugs keeping my heart from beating too fast.