Marked Tree My Home Town

Marked Tree My Home Town

I have gone to school in Marion all my life, but Marked Tree is my true home town.

Marked Tree is a small town of about twenty-eight hundred people. Marked Tree is nestled half way between Jonesboro, and Marion on highway sixty-three.

I lived on the corner of Sixth and Barbra Allen, near the highway. My back yard butted up against the highway, so I have many memories of the highway. When the highway was originally constructed the government didn’t have very strict laws on controlling how vehicles accessed the highway. In Marked Tree, we didn’t have overpasses or on ramps, so to get to the other side you had to cut across four lanes of traffic traveling at seventy miles per hour. This led to many wrecks, and deaths.

It’s a beautiful day in Marked Tree. I just got home from school. (I am six at the time) I am walking down Sixth Street, when all of a sudden I hear this horrible sound of crushing metal, honking horns, and the smell of burning rubber!

I ran through the empty lot between my house and the highway, not thinking about the monstrosity that awaits my young eyes.

As I got closer to the wreck I could hear the moaning of the men who were scattered all over the highway, covered with blood. Many lying limp on the cool Asphalt now stained with blood. I am now looking at twelve motorcycles, fifteen men, 3 dead, one without a leg, and an uninjured truck driver. Within ten minutes they had the entire highway shut down and a helicopter in the median. That has to be one of the worst memories of Marked Tree.

Because of this and many other wrecks they have redesigned and are still updating the highway so that it will become future I-555.

At the end of our cul-de-sac was a gazebo. It was a small white gazebo. It has a beautiful back drop with the mature trees, and rose bushes in the back ground. The gazebo was a popular place for weddings. There were usually four to five weddings a year.

I remember asking every time there was a weeding if I could help them set up chairs or tables for the weddings. They normally would let me help, but one summer I remember they paid me fifty dollars to help set up chairs and other miscellaneous wedding things. I thought I was the riches kid in the world. Fifty dollars to a six year old is like giving them the world.

 

            Our neighbors, the McCrary’s, had a gigantic side yard, between their house and the gazebo. I remember all the neighborhood kids playing wiffelball in the yard. They soon made it into a regulatory wiffelball field, with a fence and everything you need to have a wiffelball field. I can remember hitting my first home run over the fence.            

            It was another beautiful day in Marked Tree. Me, Anna, Brodie, Jagger, and Bailey where all playing wiffelball. Jagger was pitching, and I was up to bat. I had two strikes. He pitched me the ball, I swung. Foul ball. Another pitch. foul ball. If I remember write, I hit six foul balls. Until finally I hit the ball solid. When I hit it, it seemed as if the ball stayed in the air forever. But finally it fell out of the sky and onto the ground, on the other side of the fence! I didn’t even run around the bases, I kind of had a casual stroll around the bases.

 

                Even though there are some bad memories of Marked Tree, I wouldn’t change a thing about where I am from or my home town.