Posts by MaryCarol

I guess Y’all know the color of the eggshell is determined by what breed of chicken laid the eggs. I too love using brown eggs, not only are they beautiful but I imagine they taste better. A little old Lady I once knew, Eva Grace Atteberry, had all sorts of mixed up banty’s, half banties and regular chickens. She said each one laid the same sort of egg all it’s life and color too, of course. Some eggs were almost round, some long and pointy, and in all different egg colors. She said each day the egg would get a little smaller till the hen had laid out her clutch, plus the hen would lay a little later each day. Raised on a Montana ranch with a tutor for education, this poor old lady learned more about things on a day to day basis than anyone I know by watching carefully the world around her little home. Mind you I have nothing against pink, green or blue eggs as laid by the Aracuana chickens, but then THOSE are scarce as hen’s teeth ! 

We were visiting my Grandmother one Spring day. I guess I was about 3 or 4 years old and as I wandered around in the back yard I noticed her big bed of purple iris was getting ready to bloom .Since we didn’t have any Iris, I guess I was curious to see what they looked like inside. I was sorta bad about that sort of thing. I pulled all of the pretty purple buds and got up under the porch and peeled the petals off, one by one. The dirt beneath me became covered with lovely deep purple petals, as I sat there carefully unrolling them.. And one of the kids snitched on me. I remember they noticed me sitting there, bent down to see me better, but didn’t say a word, just ran and got Ma. She squatted down by the edge of the porch and looked at me and my lovely surroundings for a minute, then she asked me why I had done that to her pretty flowers. Ducking my head, I gave her the only possible answer….” Just ’cause….”

I am as in awe of Spring each year as any primitive person ever was who had no way to mark the seasons and didn’t know that Spring came around as regular as clockwork every year.

Where I grew up over in West Tennessee, folks planted lettuce and mustard on Valentines day. On top of the snow, if necessary I have done that myself, when the seed bed I’d prepared was covered with snow. I figured if you plant grass seed on top of the snow lettuce ought to do as well. I never plant mustard, as we don’t care for it that much. I think Mama mixed it with wild greens like poke salat and ‘mouse ear’.

When we were growing sweet potatoes to sell Daddy and my big brother Robert would burn off a plant bed real early in the Spring , piling extra brush on the spot so it would have the weed seed killed and be enriched. I’m sure spoiled hay and stable manure was tilled in. Long stringy seed potatoes saved from the last crop were laid side by side, end to end in the rich dirt and covered up with sawdust, etc. Daddy always kept a good sized area for Mom to have her own little plant bed for lettuce, radishes, green onions, mustard, etc. You see, he really loved ‘wilted lettuce’, and Mama was a dab hand at making it. She saved the tender green radish leaves to cut up along with the green onions, tops and all, and the leaf lettuce. Went mighty good with beans and cornbread, I can tell you! Makes me hungry to think about it, and next time I go to the store I’m getting me some leaf lettuce and other fixin’s so I can eat high on the hog like that!

Wilted Lettuce
My memories took me back in time to the days when Mama made big bowls of wilted lettuce for my hard working Daddy..He LOVED it ! When he burned off the plant bed where he set out the scraggly sweet potatoes to make plants, he always burned off enough extra space so Mama could have a lettuce bed…She also planted lovely red radishes and spring onions….I’m sure Daddy kept a close eye on those little green sprouts, hungering for something green on the table to go with all those beans Mama cooked in that big black dinner kittle…

One day he would come to the house smiling, toting a watering bucket just full of leafy lettuce and other things picked in the plant bed. Those greens had grown super fast in the rich black soil, and even the tender leaves of the radishes could be used, and there would be a bit of tender mustard greens…It didn’t take long for Mama to fry up some bacon while Daddy was out by the well house washing up the greens….The bacon was put on the side after it was crumbled , and a bit of water was poured into the hot grease…We little’uns were warned away from the cabinet as Mama poured that hot grease all over that big panful of torn up greens…We didn’t like it as well as Daddy did, but I’m sure each one ate their share.

I knew a Mr Carson  when I was a little knobby kneed girl. Mr Sherman Carson. Didn’t start out Sherman, just liked that name and took it when he was a decidedly odd young man. Mama said he got to wondering how much it would take to feed a wife, so he put aside the same amount of food that he ate for awhile and decided he couldn’t afford a wife – never married. He was the fiddler at the neighborhood ‘Play Parties’ where my talented Mama played her guitar and sang Redwing, Great Speckled Bird, Beautiful Brown Eyes,and other  songs.. She said everything Mr Carson played sounded like Soldiers Joy, but fiddlers were hard to come by in the country so he was welcomed.as much for his pixilated ways as for his fiddling ability…

When I knew of him he lived by himself in a weathered  old house that looked like it had never seen a coat of paint, way back in the boonies beside a woods road seldom traveled by anyone other than a farmer getting to a back field. We had 3 ways to walk the 4 or 5 miles from Lambs, our one room schoolhouse. A favored route on winter days led us through the usually mud free woods that went right in front of Mr Carson’s house. We never caught so much as a glimpse of him, but I bet he could hear us chattering away and would stand back from the uncurtained windows and watch us till we were out of sight. I think we ran more than we walked. Our arguing, laughing and teasing probably brightened the dreary days of winter for him. There was a long thick row of buttercups in the Spring, I remember. Those cheerful yellow flowers were the only spot of color among the weeds and dead grass in his yard, and we looked at them with envy – but never picked a single bloom that I recall.That old man who chose to live in so lonely a place was a bit
of an ogre to us little ones.

One day when I was about 8 or 9, I wanted to go by Mr Carson’s but none of the others kids did, so I just casually took off through the woods. Walking that far alone didn’t bother me and I was a very small girl for my age. As I got closer to Mr Carsons house I happened to think someone said he had raised a crop of peanuts that year. we didn’t. I walked up and knocked on his door, and he came and stood there looking down at me from a great height, it seemed. He asked me in and I went in and sat down on one of the straight backed chairs and looked around. The floor couldn’t be seen for a layer of dirt, chips, etc. Not caked on dirt, loose dirt from years of not sweeping, I guess. I asked him why he had the table legs setting in tin cans, and he said to keep the ants from getting on the table. Under the circumstances, that seemed very sensible to me….

After a bit more looking around while we sat there in silence I told him I’d heard he had grown peanuts and could I have some, please?   He didn’t say anything , just went in the front room and lowered a big square, deep split oak basket down from where it was hanging near the ceiling. Keeping them safe from mice, I suppose. As he went through all this he was mumbling to himself, maybe wondering how long that basket of peanuts would last if I came back and brought the rest of my family with me! He handed me a handful, for me, of the peanuts. I thanked him and went on my way. You can be very sure I ate every one of those peanuts before I got home, because even at that age I knew I had done wrong.

I didn’t tell anyone about that till I was a grown woman, then I told Mama and we laughed about it. The mind boggles at what COULD have happened. I imagine Mr Carson got quite a laugh out of it too. I couldn’t pronounce my R’s, and folks were always laughing at the weird things I said and trying to get me to talk. Gave me quite a complex, because I thought they were laughing AT me. This was back before my wee turned up nose, knobby knees, big feet, ears sticking out of my straight as a stick hair and so on all melded together into what folks say was a pretty young lady. As you know, I am no longer bashful, and have given talks on radio and in front of large groups, but folks still seem to think I sometimes say funny things!

 
Mullein and Rabbit tobacco don’t even look like kinfolks! The mullein has great big velvety leaves that are a rather strange color of green, and stay green through the winter. When it warms up they put up a tall stalk and bloom, then the entire plant dies. But the old brown stalk stands there all winter, and spreads it’s seed far and wide.These stalks are several feet tall , and the bloom part on top slightly resembles a skinny corncob.
 
Rabbit tobacco is about a foot tall and is topped  with a wide flat cluster of flowers in the Fall that turn pale silvery gray or white and are easy to spot. The leaves are dark,longish and thin and dry up on the stalk. It has a very herb like smell when you crush the leaves. Daddy made a corncob pipe once and smoked rabbit tobacco in so he could blow the smoke in our ears when they hurt. Seems like the Latin name is Americas or something like that and it has two names.
 
My younger brother Jerry very helpfully offered to teach me to smoke grape vines, and it only took one easy lesson to learn how to smoke them and  decide me that one try was enough – Geez! It was worse than smoking rolled up paper like we’d been doing. Less chance of sucking flame down your throat though – Must admit that.
 
Whomever said smoking was hazardous to your health was sure right. When Reba Dell caught the newly mown hay in the big chicken yard on fire certain parts of her anatomy were very painful for a good while ! Maybe if Mama hadn’t been all the way over in the cotton patch on the far side of the big pasture when she saw the black smoke rolling from somewhere around the house, where my Daddy was in bed with Leukemia and the 2 littlest kids were there somewhere in Reba’s care. She was about 5 or 6, much too young to start smoking. After beating out the flames that had consumed our playhouse with it’s wonderfully soft carpet of dry grass I believe there was something said to the effect that if ANY of us were caught smoking again. Well, my mind blanks out that part, so it must have been truly scary! You didn’t mess with my Mama when she was that mad. 3 of the 9 kids smoked cigarettes, the rest of us didn’t. Wonder if we remembered Mama’s warning ?

So many of the old traditions are being lost , and sometimes even large families don’t have a member that is willing to take the time to learn the old crafts and herb remedy secrets. You may have to go outside of your family. I know of a right young boy around here that did very well at marketing his chair bottoming talent. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a family reunion and got everyone together to cane chairs and other old time things ? If you can’t set something like that up, how about having someone with a video camera film YOU caning a chair, weaving a basket, making a doll or quilt, while you talk about family memories ? What a wonderful Christmas gift that would be, and you could get copies for everyone..

When I was about 6 or 7 Daddy got tired of having to sit in ‘rump sprung’ straight back chairs, so he undertook to bottom them himself one rainy winter day when the field work was just a memory of backbreaking work over till early Spring rolled around. There was a certain amount of grumbling, if I remember correctly – *smile*. I believe he used the inner bark of hickory trees/saplings, and it dried a lovely burnt sienna brown.. He  sent us kids out to scavenge up some pieces of broken ‘winder lights,’ as they were called, and used the edges of glass to smooth down rough edges. I have done that since then, too, on wooden things .

Now those chairs wouldn’t win any beauty contests when he was done with them, but they were still good and strong the last time I saw them. Seems like the chair wore out before the seating  did, with 9 kids roughhousing on them, and Mama just bought a whole set of straight  chairs with curved slat bottoms..

Didn’t nobody want that old fashioned stuff setting around back then any way. Why rassle’ with a heavy old iron teakettle when them aluminum ones was cheap and jist as light as a feather to lift offen the stove. While you’re at it git a “lumium” water bucket and dipper so’s we can git rid of that wooden bucket and dipper gourd. No more bringing
white sand up from the branch to scrub that bucket clean . Had to do that you know, to keep that well water fresh tasting.

And them ‘sad irons’! Mercy, if you ever used one of them things you’d know jist how they got their name. Pushing one of them around smoothin’ a weeks worth of wash would make anybody sad! Wasn’t nothing called Permanent press  back then — ever’ little thing had to be ironed. Yep, every stitch that went on our backs, and Mama wanted the piller slips gone over  as well. Oh me, I’m gitting too tired to live jist thinking on it! Reckon I’ll go set out on the porch and rock awhile – maybe drink me a cup of hot sassafras tea sweetened up with some of that honey Pa brought home when him and his brothers robbed that bee tree over on the side of the branch. I wish you could come and set with me for a spell. The hollers are still misted over this early mornin’, but the tree covered hills are flaunting colors to rival a Joseph’s coat….. Jeannie T

You got here jist in time for breakfast! Set down at the table and tell me about yourself while I dish up the food. My, don’t the heat from the old wood stove feel good on cool mornings? There’ll be a plenty to eat, ’cause this is our big meal of the day and I always cook extry. I’ve got golden brown cat head biscuits fresh out of the oven, country ham and red eye gravy, and I scrambled up the eggs Pa brought fresh from the hen house just a little while ago. The skillet of  luscious Chocolate gravy is thickening up, just about ready to pour over them biscuits. That Arbuckle coffee perking on the back of the stove is strong enough to float a saw log, but Pa likes it that way.You can weaken yours down with some of the sweet milk setting over there on the side table in that syrup can.
 
If you wouldn’t care, jist prise the lid off, git out the little jug of sweet milk and the pat of butter and put it on the table. Pa just set it over there out of the way after he drawed it up out of the cistern where it’s been cooling all night. That milk sure does have a thick layer of cream on top, but Jersey cows are knowed to give rich milk. Here’s a saucer to set the butter on, don’t it look pretty with the little drops of dew on it?  Ma left that butter mold to me, and it’s little sheaf of wheat makes our butter look fancy enough for a Squires table.
 
Them preserves are kinda special, cause they was made from the rind of that big old stripy Dixie Queen watermelon Pa won a blue ribbon on at the County Fair. If you would, just leave that chunk of lemon in there to flavor it up till it’s all gone. Watch your teeth on them cherry preserves, ’cause I just leave the pits in there when I make em up. Gives em such a good flavor, you know, and I just hate to pit all them cherries when they all git ripe just as the garden keeps trying to get ahead of me . Theres certain things I have to do around here by myself, you know. Pa just aint no hand atall at some things, though he is mighty good to try and help.
 
Git washed up, Pa! I hung a clean flour sack towel out there on the  nail jist this mornin’. You can see we got company for breakfast, and I want you to say a special thank you when you ask the blessing. “We thank you Lord for this food, blessed nourishment of our bodies, forgive our sins, receive us when we die, we ask in Thy name, Amen.”  ….Ol Granny, Jeannie T

Washday at our House
by Jeannie Travis

It’s such a beautiful day for a change we decided to do the laundry. Seeing the clothes strung out on the lines  took me back in time to when I was a little girl growing up on a farm near Dresden in Weakley County,TN.

Washday started very early at our house, as there was a lot to do. The boys had drug up limbs out of the woods the day before, and set the legs of the old black kittle up on tin cans so they could build a fire under it. We knew to be careful around that fire,’cause Mama’s aunt Margaret Bell’s long dress caught on fire when she was washing, and she burnt to death .
 
We drawed up water till the kittle was filled nearly to the top and built the fire under it , set up the tubs and filled them part way with buckets of water. Mama mixed up the blueing, and a pan of starch then she carefully toted buckets of hot water from the steaming wash kittle and mixed it with the cold water in the wash and rinse tubs till it was hot enough to just barely keep your hand in. Clothes were sorted into piles – Delicate white clothes on down to the work overalls and then the mop rags, etc…
 
Lye soap made back after we killed hogs in the Fall was rubbed onto the ridges of the scrub board, and the backbreaking job of scrubbing  clothes for 10 people began. Whites were boiled in the kittle, put through the wash tub if necessary then in the bluing to make them sparkling white. (This part of boiling the clothes is a little unclear after all these years) Bleach mixed with water was used in there, too.

When he was about 5, brother Jerry got a jar of this bleach water down off a shelf in the well house so little sister Reba could drink it. As I remember, he had trouble sitting down for quite awhile. Sis seemed none the worse for wear, but has trouble with her throat all these many years later and we wonder.
 
After hours of scrubbing, wringing, rinsing ,wringing, bluing, wringing  etc. the clothes were hung on lines that went around 3 sides of the back yard. They looked so pretty blowing in the breeze, and one knew how fresh and clean the beds would smell that night. After all the folding and bed making was over, of course!

We tried not to think of ironing all those clothes. Yes, just about everything had to be ironed, as there was no Permanent Press back then. Remember the pan of starch? Dresses, shirts, dresser scarves, etc. went in first, then the things you didn’t want heavily starched. When they came in off the lines they were sprinkled with water (A special thing could be bought to fit on a bottle) rolled up and set aside to be ironed the next day. With heavy flatirons heated on the cook stove, you used one till it got cold then traded it for another.
 
I was about 10 when we got our first washing machine. We had just done an unusually big wash when we saw a strange pickup truck coming slowly down our lane. It turned out to be a distant cousin and friends, and they had a truckload of used washing machines to sell. This wasn’t long after electricity had been put in that area, so they must have gone to a big town and bought up a load of washers. Well, Mama bargained for the best looking one, and we just couldn’t wait till wash day came around again.. Why, it was SO easy now! All we had to do was drag up the limbs to heat the water we had drawed up from the well, etc., etc., etc *grin*
 
Think of this the next time you casually load your washer, add soap from a box and fabric softener…Push a button and go on your way. After the machine has worked it’s miracle the clothes are tossed in the dryer…push a button, come back later and your clothes are ready to fold or hang.

Friend Kathy’s washer quit right in the middle of a load of clothes awhile back and she had to wring them out …hurting her wrist..I’m afraid I wasn’t properly sympathetic as I listened to her tale of woe, remembering all the times we washed, wrung out, rinsed, wrung out, etc.etc. clothes for 10 people!  Y’all ‘scuse me while I go put in another load of clothes and push that ‘magic’ button!….. Jeannie T

My earliest memories of the Peddler Man coming was of a man called Peddler John. He always wore a three piece black suit, in my memory, anyhow, and a black felt hat. I’ve read that these peddlers had stores in New York City. Every summer the salesmen would fan out across the country, walking and toting an assortment of merchandise on their back in some sort of pack…When bad weather came in they headed back home. I suppose they wired their base to send them needed sale items and picked it up in the next town. Some of our neighbors gave them a bed and food, but Mom and Dad weren’t that trusting. They might not have even asked to stay with us, because they were afraid they’s have to sleep with a baby peeing on them! I don’t really think they ever thought of doing it, though, because I remember Daddy telling us at supper one night that our neighbors had let the Peddler Man stay all night with them. He was laughing about them setting up late to talk. I bet he could easily talk till bedtime telling stories of the things he had seen in his walkabout through the South.

Another man used to come through our area each summer, but I never heard of him selling anything. I saw him driving a rubber tired wagon pulled by two horses, going up Ma’s lane, Quietly….no noise…just happened to see him. Of course I ran in to tell Mama and she said he came through there every summer. Wish we could have heard HIS story!

An old man in a T model or A model car used to come to our log house in the early 40’s and my folks would buy Folgers coffee in glass jars with a little top, among other things, Pencils, etc. The canning lid company made a special lid for it so folks could can food in it. That was back when nobody threw anything away,unlike today…I see big thick glass jars that most folks just toss in the landfill and I cringe. I re-use what I can of those and re cycle the rest. I imagine a person could special order items to be brought the next week. We used to gather around that old car like he was the Pied Piper. I imagine a little candy changed hands once in awhile.

Our last peddler man drove a bob/box truck, and had a much bigger selection. We saved our pennies to buy candy and Mama would have him bring a 100 lb. sack of cow feed as needed. I imagine he hated that, because the path up the yard to Ma’s house was really steep. I remember hearing his artificial leg creak, but he never complained – War injury. You could special order stuff, also. I think his name was Dan ? Owens.

Daddy’s brother, Charley Winchester, set up a little country store over on the Paris Highway between Ore Springs and Como for awhile, and Mama would write him a list of what she needed and he would bring it to us. I don’t remember any special favors like free candy, etc. Imagine he was struggling to make a living like everyone else….  Jeannie T

In my little hometown, Dresden, TN. there were two ‘Hitch yards’ where folks could tie up their buggies , riding horses or wagons and go up a sidewalk between buildings to get to the store fronts…There was no shade in the one Daddy used, but it was on the side of town he shopped at.

Another memory from this time…you could go back to the meat market area of the grocery store and buy bologna, crackers, and Hoop cheese to make a cheap lunch. The butcher would tear off a big piece of paper and lay out your food on it. I guess we were not ‘pore’ enough for Daddy to have to take a lunch and go eat at the wagon. Only my brothers were allowed to go to town with Daddy on Mule Day/First Monday to do the
trading. So we could only envision the delicious boughten lunch they told us about. What a treat !

I don’t know how much this lunch cost, but you could get a big RC Cola and a Moon pie for 10 cents. Big candy bars were a nickel, ditto a bag of potato chips or an ice cream cone or Wonder bar. Coke floats were high though – 10 cents and were a rare treat at the drug store. It cost 12 or 13 cents to go to the ‘show’ and you could stay in there all day if you wanted to. Popcorn was probably a nickle…..Happy memories!  Jeannie T

My earliest Christmas memories are from when we lived at the Jones place in a big old log house with a dog trot hall down the middle. Robert and Jerry slept across the hall in an unheated room and the rest of us slept in beds in the room with the big fireplace. The Christmases all roll into one about that time and I can’t separate them out.

One Christmas Eve I remember waking up and seeing Mama and Daddy sitting in front of the fireplace talking quietly .I sat up in bed and asked ” Is it Christmas yet ? ” Mama said ” No , go back to sleep .” We knew we had to be asleep or Santa wouldn’t come, might not even leave us anything if we weren’t sound asleep . Mom had told us of Uncle Louis struggling to stay awake on Christmas Eve so he could see Santa Claus. He felt a hand brush down across his face in the dark…Santa, seeing if his eyes were closed ! Best I remember he didn’t get a gift that year.

We had a big orchard there at the Jones place, and one late Fall day Daddy wrapped apples in pages torn from the Sears and Roebucks catalog  and laid them carefully in a big wooden box to save till Christmas. We’d never heard of anyone doing that and of course he made a big production out of it…him being a storyteller.We just couldn’t hardly wait till Christmas that year to see if the apples had stayed good. The box was placed in the boys room to stay cool, but it never occurred to us to sneak in there and eat one.- They kept pretty good.When we got up on Christmas morning Daddy had a big fire in the fireplace and we quickly opened our gift and began eating the candy from our stocking. I can remember seeing the flickers of lights the fire made to add to the soft halo of light from the coal oil lamp setting on the dresser. Most special of all though, older brother Robert had bought me a gift ! We never exchanged gifts as some families do. He had rolled up a comic book and wrapped it up as a gift for me. I can see us now, I’m sitting off to the side of the fireplace in a straight back chair, he’s bending over the back of it helping me roll the comic ‘the other way’ so it would lay flat and pointing out things in it. It seemed we were in our own little world and the happy voices of the other kids enjoying their Christmas morning seemed very far away. I don’t think I’ll ever get a gift that means more to me..

One Christmas while we lived in that big log house Christmas was a little different. When we got up our folks weren’t in the living room. Having breakfast in the big lean to kitchen maybe ? We rushed up to the fireplace to see what Santa had brought us and doggone if there wasn’t a big bundle of switches standing there! Uh oh! We’d been weaned on tales of how bad boys and girls didn’t get nothing from Santa but a bundle of switches. What if our parents found out we’d been bad ? We came up with a wonderful idea – just grabbed that bundle of switches and threw them as far as we could out into the yard, scattering them around so’s they’d blend in. Went back in giggling to each other. Now Mama and Daddy wouldn’t know we’d been bad! They didn’t see a thing, and Christmas went on as usual.

We didn’t hear Santa when he came, but Daddy said he heard the sleigh up on the roof. Couldn’t understand why Mama didn’t get a present, but she showed us a pretty little milk glass jar of deodorant cream, hidden on top of the cabinet, that Santa had left her. Daddy used to fill his shoes with fruit and candy when he filled our stockings, and had more fun than any of us.

As I think back over the long years of my life I’m reminded  of one time when my sister Joyce went to great lengths to find out what we were getting for Christmas. I was about 12, she was 19 months older. Sis knew Mom had hid something in the boys closet, but couldn’t figure out how to get back there in their room without Mama seeing her. She finally crawled over the partition in our closet into their closet. Unfortunately she stepped on the gifts getting down! Mama had got us two big girls a nice wall picture each. On Christmas morning, Joyce very generously volunteered to take the one with the cracked glass. Said Mama sure looked at her strangely. She never did tell her the truth, but years later she told me. Seems like a strange gift, but it WAS something we would keep and if we’d been careful it would have been a lifetime gift.

Looks like Mama would have handmade a lot of stuff for us while we were gone to school during the year. She was a very crafty person, but can’t remember anything homemade but youngest sister Jan getting a doll bed with covers made from material left over from a dress Mom had made for her. With all those children she had to do a lot of sewing. Sometimes we would come home from school and one of us girls would have a brand new dress. Mom would get the Sears and Roebuck catalog and find a style of dress that appealed to her and cut it out using one of the dresses that fit us as a pattern. She would use scraps of other fabric to make collars and cuffs, piping on a pocket, etc. to make it special. I think one reason she didn’t make things for us is because she just wasn’t
‘into’ Christmas, and Dad was so she missed him more at that time of year, maybe…

Yes, we were definitely ‘pore folks’ and only got a token gift from Santa, but we had special foods fine enough to grace the Squire’s table. Every single Christmas we had a freshly baked coconut cake (Remember how ladies used to save out the coconut milk and drizzle it on the cake layers?) and maybe one of Mamas special chocolate cakes, standing high on the cut glass cake stand she got for selling Lee salve door to door when she was a girl AND we had boiled custard, fresh fruit salad, and a Stack Pie In case you never heard of that it is about 5 pies stacked up with a meringue pie on top. Pie crusts are made a little thicker, and dark and light fillings are alternated as you remove the pies from their crusts and stack them on a serving plate. It is cut like a layer cake. And we had nuts, candy and some fruit bought with a miserly sum sent us by her ‘rich’ sister Clyde. She USED to send us 10 dollars a year, and Mama could buy a bushel of apples and a bushel
of oranges, then she started sending 5 dollars after the oldest of us  9 kids got up pretty good sized. Somehow they thought we could earn money. Where, in the middle of the winter out in the country amongst other pore folks ??? I griped about it one time and Mama said with a smile ” She doesn’t have to send us anything ” People amused her, I guess her sister wasn’t as bad as her husband Iven. Strangely enough he didn’t manage to take it with him when he died…I’m sure he thought he could.

Oh yes…We had a few fireworks to set off EARLY on Christmas morning! The oldest boys would set off the precious fireworks out in the front yard while the rest of us watched from the window if it was very cold… Those Roman candles shot the beautifully colored balls of fire into the cold dark skies with the bright stars as a backdrop and we thought it was wonderful…not ever having seen real fireworks. I’m sure we looked forward to our meager celebration much more than the jaded children of today. I figure Mama did fine for a ‘widder’ woman left with 8 youngens and one on the way …..Jeannie Travis…Awash in memories….

My Mama, Myrtle Buntin Winchester, lived through a terrible cyclone when she was a little girl…guessing around 1916. They all held hands and knelt in a circle, and the storm tweaked the corner of the house just a little bit, but Papa had hewed those big logs himself, and they stood strong through the storm that blew the potato house clean away, and hurt many people on it’s destructive path across Tennessee….

You might think blowing a ‘potato house’ away is a minor thing, but Papa built that too, and it was tall and had double walls with sawdust in between for insulation. Folks paid him to store their sweet potatoes for them…maybe it cured them a bit like you cure meat.  I have a log from under the window of the corner of the house tht got tweaked. It is notched like the big logs at the end are, and I have part of my little cottage collection sitting on the different levels.

Mama said for a long time after the cyclone blew itself out they found weird and strange items laying around .One thing I remember her mentioning was big old baking pans from a bakery far away and they used to sit in them and slide down grassy hillsides. One fellow found a diamond ring at the base of a tree. 2 Red Delicious apple trees, and 2 Yellow Delicious trees alongside Ma’s garden were fully grown and heavily laden with apples. When the storm cleared, only the 2 yellow apple trees stood..The grassy hillside was
thick with apples…

I remember picking apples from those same trees when I was a little girl. Ma allowed us to eat all the apples we wanted if we picked them up off the ground. I can remember selecting a perfect apple after climbing around in the tree, rubbing a bit of dirt into the stem end, and going to Ma and showing her that stem to prove I had not picked it off the
tree. I’m sure she was onto my trick, and probably got a good laugh out of my shenanigans. I was such a scrawny little bugger most of the apples were safe from me, just couldn’t eat enough to make a dent in the harvest from those 2 big trees. I didn’t tell anyone else that trick, because they had tattled on me before .

We loved to hear about that terrible storm , and I remember Mama telling us of a man that was caught out in the open by that same cyclone…She said he wrapped his arms around a young tree and held on till it was over, even though the wind was just whipping his legs against the ground.. Well, believe it or not, that very same day she was telling us this story MANY years later, that fellow drove up to our home. I’d never seen him before or after that.  Jeannie Travis.

“This nippy Fall weather reminds me of the good old days when times were hard. When I was growing up folks didn’t have a sorghum cooking apparatus, but one traveled around and would set up at one farm or another..You hauled your sorghum  to the Mill.I suppose the farms owner got a small portion of the sorghum…and probably got to run his through first. Wood supplied the heat but I don’t know who supplied that.

We grew the sorghum like corn, and in the fall cut it down after the men had gone through each row and knocked off all the leaves with a sort of wooden sword. . Then they went back through and cut it all down with a blade on a long handle..Then it was piled up at the side. I can remember cutting off sorghum heads when I was real little..maybe 7 years old. It was SO cold I was crying…remember cutting nicks out of my knees with the big Butcher knife Daddy made from a saw blade.

The sorghum was loaded onto a wagon ..all straight and nice, and hauled away. We took some of the seed heads to the house to feed the chickens, but I don’t remember Daddy saving all the heads for winter. A mule pulled the long handle{sweep }  that was attached to the crusher, and an elderly man sat up under that long sweep and fed the cane into the crusher. The juice came out one side and crushed stalks came out the other..Bagasse, I think they call it. The juice is poured into a big flat pan that has a fir burning under it. Men stir the syrup as it cooks till it get thick. Once Daddy was helping a neighbor make up sorghum and he brought home a quart jar of the golden foam that they had skimmed off.

That pan they cook the syrup in has always fascinated me. They keep on adding fresh syrup to it on one end , and it is stirred, stirred , stirred! The heat from the fires burning under it and the men’s paddles causes the liquid to thicken and is moved from one end of the ‘pan’ to another. It is then  drained out into glass jugs or jars and sold or used in the  home kitchen as ‘ Long sweetnin’..

On cold winter mornings the delicious thick syrup flowed slowwwllllyyy over the rim of the syrup jar ..It had beautiful amber bubbles in it and they would stretch out like a rubber balloon.  Folks said kids were as slow as Sorghum molasses… Sure tasted good when we mixed molasses and butter on our plate, and sopped it up with one of Mama’s big flaky biscuits”……Jeannie T.

PRICE – COATS – MOSELY – EZELL – SOMERS – RAULSTON – ROSS