Prairie Point

Just north of Kerens, Texas, on Texas Farm Road 636, a few miles before you get to Brown’s Valley, is the community of Bazette, Texas.  Population?  Probably less than fifty souls.  A few miles east by northeast, on a dusty farm road, you will come to a curve in the road, where Uncle Foy’s house used to stand.  The curve turns the road north again.  Just a few hundred yards north, one will come to what the Indians would possibly call a sipapu, a hole in this world that leads to the next, a portal between two existences, a place called Prairie Point. 

As long as I can remember life, I remember Prairie Point, the sipapu for many of those who I have known and loved, who have traveled through that portal to the next world.  Prairie Point is a cemetery.  A Methodist Episcopal congregation established it on June 5, 1855.  My guess is that there are a couple thousand graves among the three distinct sections of the cemetery.  However, I have never thought of Prairie Point as a place of death, but as a place of love, hope, life, and celebration.  Some of my fondest memories are centered around Prairie Point.  Every July, the third Saturday I believe, in a mystical sort of way, two worlds come together at a sipapu called Prairie Point at an event called the Prairie Point picnic.  Family, friends, and “others” gather around boards nailed to old trees that form the large circular dinning table, where foods of all types are spread out for all to eat.  Just across the dusty road that passes through the “foyer” of the cemetery is another group of trees, again connected by boards to form a pen of sorts, where the cold drinks are iced down and sold to the hot, thirsty crowd.

In my youth, we went almost every July to the Prairie Point picnic.  It was a pilgrimage of sorts.  Mother had grown up east of Prairie Point on her daddy’s farm and Daddy grew up and lived near Montfort and Chatfield, west and northwest of the area.  Mother and Daddy were married down the road in Bazette at the Methodist Church parsonage.  Their first two children, William Edward and Helen Jo, were born while living on Jasper Tramel’s farm near Prairie Point. Momma Bedie and all Mother’s sisters, brothers, and their children (my cousins) would almost always be at the picnic.  Uncle Elijah, Aunt Johnnie, and Florene would usually come from their farm near Tom Bean, Texas.  Uncle Jim and his family, Aunt Hester and her family, and Grandmother Nelson would also be there.  Uncle Tom’s wife, Lorene, would come most years.  Uncle Tom had long crossed through the sipapu into the other world, but in that mystical way, he was also there.  Also there, across the fence north of the picnic tables, were my grandfathers, William Jasper Tramel and Edward Jefferson “Ed” Nelson (both having passed away before I was born); both my maternal great grandparents, Elijah and Thena Davis Tramel and John and Sarah Carpenter Deskin; and, according to my Mother, seven generations of Tramels, including Danny Tramel whose grave always attracted me because of his little toys lying near his grave.