Little Things and Long Ago

Down A Sandy Dirt Road

By Mickey Dunaway | Used with Permission of Lake Norman Currents | OCT 2026

If you have read any of my columns recently, you know that I have been completely absorbed by the search for the ancestry of the Dunaways of northwest Florida and southeast Alabama. Working with Chat(]PT to transcribe written journals and oral interviews, I uncovered a truth for anyone seeking a family’s past: A family’s ancestry must be interpreted and presented as verifiable facts–the family archive. And then there is the family story–the memories, interviews, journals and letters that add meaning to the strictly historical archive.

Now, let’s get to the story of that sandy dirt road and see if there are truths for the reader in its telling.

If our dirt road had a name, I never knew it. Recently, I learned its name, but knowing it somehow diminishes my memories of when it was best left nameless. It was not an Emmylou Harris red-dirt road. Our dirt road was distinct because it was nothing special. Unpaved. Rarely muddy, since it was fashioned from the primordial sandy bottom of the Gulf of Mexico.

Our road was seldom scraped by a motor grader, maybe because it was so sandy. Perhaps because we were on a short side road off Highway 98. Not much going on to complain about. And truth be told, the few folks who lived on our dirt road were country people who accepted their place in life with few complaints.

Perhaps our dirt road’s anonymity was its most important trait, and no one wanted to disturb a condition that country people still cherish so much.

My earliest memories of it are fuzzy at best. I know we lived in a tiny shotgun house whose front faced the sandy road and whose back faced U.S. 98, several hundred yards away down the briar-infested sagebrush hill.

I remember the large family fish fries as a preschool urchin. But the seminal event that places my memory in that red-shingled house with the tin roof was the Thanksgiving when Daddy was shot in his right arm in a hunting accident by a cousin climbing a fence with a loaded shotgun.

I can pinpoint the accident and my age because we soon moved to Brewton, where relatives supported us while Daddy recuperated, and I attended first grade at WS. Neal. Granddaddy ran a little store on the same property as his house and sold candy and Cokes to Neal’s students as they came and went from school.

I was too young to understand the misfortune Mother and Daddy must have experienced during that year. I was living in Granddaddy’s house, and every day on the way home from school, he would sneak me a candy bar! At some point between first and second grade, we moved back to our sandy dirt road and the red-shingled shotgun house with the tin roof.

When I first wrote about those years, I didn’t know whether Mother and Daddy owned or rented the house. My ancestry research finally answered that question: Over several years and moves, we were renters, then owners, then landlords, then owners again.

I remember how cold it was in the winter, with no insulation in the walls or ceiling. We put our jeans on a chair in front of the space heater in the living room and jumped into them when they were only a fen- degrees from bursting into names. Once in those jeans, it was several minutes before you sat down and put on your shoes. I don’t recall whether we had another space heater in the house. I do remember we didn’t have a working inside bathroom. That was a significant addition a year or so later.

What seems quaint and so redneck now seemed perfectly normal back on that sand\- dirt road.
Our house sat across the road from the farmhouse of Granny and Granddaddy McAdams. Or, as I called them, Granny and Granddaddy Mac. They were not blood kin, but they might as well have been. They treated me like I was one of them.

I picked up their pecans for spending money at the County Fair, and Granny Mac was always there for me with a leftover biscuit, just waiting for me to poke a hole in the side, fill it with syrup and wolf it down with a glass of cold raw milk.

About a hundred yards up the road lived my Aunt Doobie (or maybe Dubie) and Uncle Elmo McAdams. Her given name was Gloria, Daddy’s youngest sister, but I only ever knew her as Aunt Doobie. Elmo got home from work every day about 5:00. 1 knew I was always welcome for supper at their house, and I often ate my first supper at Aunt Doobie’s, only to eat again when Daddy got home around 6:00. My double supper was the worst kept secret on our sandy dirt road.

Across the sandy road and behind Granddaddy Mac’s house were woods where not yet in middle school, I learned to hunt squirrels and rabbits with my first shotgun–a .410-gauge single barrel. A rite of passage for country folk. Sweet little gun. Wish I still had it.

Before I started high school, we left that sandy dirt road, but not its memories, which are still strong today.

These days, that sandy dirt road is a memory and maybe a metaphor, too. Back then, it was as natural as life could be for a country boy. Life was boundless. Times were frequently tough.

Fortunately for me, my family–biological and adoptive made sure I never knew it.