Memories of Evening Shade, Arkansas

What an appealing name for a town! The summer before my senior in high school, I was invited by one of my closest friends, Conway Massey, to go with him and his parents on a trip to his maternal grandparents' home in Evening Shade. I think his grandfather's name was John, if I remember correctly. It was a very relaxed and enjoyable trip and the Crofts were most hospitable. In entertaining ourselves, Conway and I invented the game of roofball. One of us would throw a ball into the air so that it would bounce on the roof, and the other person had to catch it before it hit the ground. The strategy was to make the ball land on the second bounce right at the edge of the roof, because then the other person had to gamble. If it went just past the edge, then we had to run in close to the house to catch it. But if we misjudged it, and it bounced on the edge of the roof, then it would land well out in the yard. I remember that we dubbed our contest the John Croft Memorial Roof Ball Tournament.

Evening Shade is in Sharp County and in the 2010 census had a population of 432.