Maybe it’s the times we live in where tensions and uncertainties create a presence so fragile, so unstable, that I keep finding myself wanting to look back at places and people who brought assurance and strength to daily life. That’s what the Old Hyde Place is for me. It was the first home I knew and was so until we moved away my junior year in high school.

I want to write about this now because it is the foundation for almost everything I think and write about 80 years later. This is where until I started to college that I quietly and mostly in solitude came to understand what life was about.

The Old Hyde Place was a rocky, rolling 20 acres of southwest Missouri farmland that would never have much value until years after my family was gone from the land and it could be broken into lots for a housing subdivision.

But for me, especially as a youngster in the late 1940s and 1950s, it was a world apart.

As was the wont of country folk in the mid-west in that period of American history — and perhaps still is today — farms became known by the name of the family that first settled it or who had lived there the longest. And even though we lived there a decade and a half after the Hydes moved away, it was never known as the Old Renfro Place.

The last Hyde who lived there was George Hyde, cigar-smoking stump of a man who would snort and cackle through his nose when he laughed. And he laughed easily. With a short, burnt-out stub of the cigar between his teeth, he would also emit grunts on some predetermined schedule as he listened to others talk. I used to watch him with great interest and would delight in thinking about him as a character in a book I was sure I would someday right. And when he was gone, I would practice his speech pattern to make sure I could repeat it on command.

Frankly, the Old Hyde Place could barely qualify as a farm. Only about half of it was tillable, and while Dad always had crops of corn or wheat or lespedeza he planted, they never produced enough cash to sustain the needs of the family. He also had to work a 40-hour-a-week job to pay the bills.

But, we acted like it was a farm. And more importantly as a kid, it was my world.

There is a sound that takes me back to that childhood, that immediately fills me with a nostalgia, a sense of time not so much lost as left behind but still retrievable. A catalogued memory that makes me pause and rehearse exactly what I heard as a kid. It is the sound of a powerful airplane motor droning overhead in a blue sky on a summer day. It is a whine, but not a steady one note. It is round. And full. And it is mobile. It is moving across the sky. It’s going somewhere.

I remember lying on my back in the summer grass, looking up and paying attention to nothing but sky and clouds, when I begin to hear it. I’m a plain-faced farm boy always thinking about a world I haven’t seen. Imagining what it’s like to be busy about the world.

I hear the motor before I see the plane, and sometimes I can’t find the plane at all. I only hear the drone passing overhead and finally fading away. When I did see the plane, it would usually be a four-engine passenger plane. It moved people.

I would watch it and think about it being full of people going somewhere — on purpose. That was what grownups did; they went places and did things on purpose. They had a destination, and they would do something when they got there. But as a child, lying in the sunny grass under a hot, blue/white sky, it was the sound that made the moment palpable. Without the drone, the vibration in my ears, there would only be a silent specter moving across the sky. It was the sound that provided the romance and filled my young mind with prospects of adventure.

It doesn’t happen anymore. Today’s passenger planes fly so high we can neither see nor hear them. But the memory of those early airliners — the avionic equivalent of the ocean liner — triggers the full experience for me of being my younger self, growing up at ease on that farm that wasn’t quite a farm.

And it is also a memory that brings me peace in later years when the world is behaving with an unusual level of rancor and noise. It calms my mind.

I’m suddenly, fully and for only a brief bit living without any other purpose than remembering how it felt as a Missouri farm boy on the Old Hyde Place.

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