Blog 3695 – 12.17.2025
The Sound of Rain on a Tin Roof
One of the added delights of spending time in our RV Camper on our property in the East Texas Piney Woods is waking to the sound of rain on the roof which sounds very much like the sound of rain on a tin roof.
Some of my fondest memories from boyhood are of driving with my Dad, Mom, and little brother to my dad’s Aunt and Uncle’s farm in north Georgia about an hour’s drive from Chattanooga. Aunt Maude and Uncle Wes’s farm house had a big porch and a tin roof. They must have enjoyed waking up to the sound of rain on that tin roof. They had a well on their back porch with a bucket and crank. The water was cool and tasted great, much better to me than the taste of warm milk out of one of their freshly milked cows. They also had an outhouse that was not the most pleasant place for a city boy to do his necessaries.
Inside the farm house in the living room was a fire place large enough for a small boy to stand in. I recall large logs glowing red, crackling, and shooting sparks in that fireplace. In their bed room, just off the living room, was a tall dark wood bed with a thick feather mattress. When I first heard John Denver’s song Grandma’s Feather Bed, I thought of Maude and Wes waking up to the sound of rain on a tin roof in that marvelously bed.
Aunt Maude and Uncle Wes already seemed ancient when I was a boy, but there were a couple of framed pictures of them on the table next to that feather bed. Uncle Wes was in a doughboy uniform from the Great War, World War One, and Maude’s picture was taken a few years after the war and she looked like a flapper with bobbed hair. They both looked so young. Years later I visited Uncle Wes with my dad. He was living with one of his great nieces in Dalton, Georgia. His beautiful flapper Maude had already passed and he was about to turn eighty seventy-seven, the longest living member of my dad’s family, his mother’s brother. I sent him a birthday card and he joined Aunt Maude shortly after his birthday.
This morning as I awoke next to my lovely and loving wife to the sound of rain of the roof I thought of my Great Aunt Maude and Great Uncle Wes waking up together in that big feather bed to the hauntingly beautiful sound of rain on a tin roof.
Your friend and fellow traveler,
David James White
Seventy-five and counting, intending to break Uncle Wes’s record by at least thirteen years and planning to post blog number ten thousand before I do.
Grandma’s Feather Bed
theencouragingword 