When I was married to Karen, my second wife, we lived with our daughter, Mina, in a very cool, old farmhouse in a strip called TALFORDVILLE. 
It was on a large farm out by Austin Bergstrom Airport. The owner of the land was a retired ex-constable, an African-American man named Talford Collins. He was a sweet old character. He and his wife would come by and collect the rent, personally….old school. He had a habit of putting 2 fingers in my belt for stability when he would talk to me. I think it was something leftover from his constable days, truants maybe, regardless he just did that and it never bothered me. He and Mrs. Collins LOVED Mina. There were’t any kids in Talfordville and they loved their little blonde baby girl. Talford always said, to Mina, “Do you love yo daddy? Is he a good daddy?”. She still imitates him to this day. Talford passed away many years ago. We loved him as did all of his tenants. There were 10 houses in the strip, 5 on the right and left of the driveway from D.G. Collins Road.
When we moved in we learned that a motorcyclist had been killed up on the bend in the road above the house. Hahahaha…sorry. Just thinking how we used to send my son, Graham, about 13 years old, to take the trash can up to the road and tell him “Don’t let the dead guy get you”…awful parenting. And of course we would turn off the porch light and lock the back door when we knew he was on his way back down,,,hahaha…terrible, I know. We still laugh about that, Graham included.
I had my first and favorite NEW car there. My White Isuzu Trooper. Man, I loved that car. I wanted to bury it in the yard when it finally died. It had those oval stickers that you get in European countries, on the rear door. France/Norway/Germany/Denmark/Norway/Holland/Switzerland/Austria and Spain. I wish I had thought to take a photo of that door…ahhh well.. 
We had the best dog there…JACK…he was a fine English Pointer-Pit Bull mix, smart, communicative..a gentle but manly dog. He would “point” out in the field in front of the house. He would sit beside me at night, after I got home from a gig, up on the couch and we’d watch TV. One time he got into some killer bees and was covered, head to toe, in bee stings. His head was so swollen…ouch. He survived that but was killed up on that same curve above the house. I buried him next to the house. I remember saying out loud “It’s OK , boy” when I was carrying him down from the road and thinking “This is what friends do”. Made me cry , now, just to think of it. Man, I miss Jack. He was a wonderful friend.
We also had 3 ferrets that ruled the house, Jezebel, Gizmo and Wendy. They were amazing little creatures. Jezebel was the smart one, she had a way to get out of the house and scour the backyard but always came back in. Funny, she often used the door when one of us was coming and going, but she made her way out through some hole somewhere but she would wait at the door to come back in.
I killed my first and only Texas Rattlesnake there. I walked out the back door and heard this sound that I thought was huge cicada,,,but it wasn’t. I looked over by the garage and there was this HUGE rattlesnake coiled up and rattling’ at me. I didn’t have a gun but I had a pump air rifle so I pumped it a gazillion times and shot the snake, 3 or 4 times. I could see blood on its head and I was pretty sure I had done the job so I called my band mate, Moe, who is a hunter type and said “I think it’s dead but it’s still moving. What do I do?” He said “Put a rock on t’s head and come to the gig. If it’s till moving when you get home…it ain’t dead”. So, when I got home, sure enough, it was dead. I called Moe again and said “What do I do with it?” He said “Skin it! And tack the skin to a board, salt rub it ad make a guitar strap out if it.”…so I did.
Now, I’m from Baltimore, Md and we don’t have much rattlesnake skinning experience there and I’ll tell ya, even after cutting of t’s head and tail…I was still afraid of that snake. I still have the guitar strap, though, and I feel very manly about it.
Oh yeah, in front of the house was Pilot Knob, an extinct volcano from the time when this part of Texas was underwater. It still looks like a little volcano, too.
One year I threw some pot seeds down where the washing machine drained about 10 feet from the house. It shot up like a tree, massive and the best pot I ever grew. I gave all of my friend weed for Xmas that year because it yielded several pounds. Free and easy!
When my mom died, a day or 2 after, she visited me. I had bought a guitar that came in the mail and had unwrapped it in the car. The plastic bag ended up under the back seat and every time I folded the seats down I thought I should throw that away, but never did.
On my way down to the corner convenience store I had the front 2 windows open.
Well, that bag came up out from under the seat and started doing figure 8’s in the air in the back of the SUV, spinning and swirling and never touched down until I stopped at the store. Call it what you want but I believe, to this day, that that was my mother saying “I’m having a ball!” Yep, I really believe that. I fell it.
Then, there was the ghost of a little girl 10-ish, in a school uniform. All 3 of us saw her, even my daughter. Always out of the corner of your eye, darting past a doorway…but she was there. I just got a chill writing this. She didn’t seem unhappy or malevolent she was just running around the house from time to time. Maybe she just liked the place….like we did.
My Entertaining Life-Steve Carter 