When Naomi and I were in high school, Cleo gave us each a beautiful expensive skirt and sweater for Christmas. One spring morning, I asked Naomi if I could wear hers to school. She finally agreed. I loved the color. It was pink and gray with pleats all around and the sweater was pink. After milking the cows and getting ready for school, I was running late and had to walk and run the 1/2 mile to catch the bus. It had rained hard during the night and the road had two-foot deep ruts in it from the milk truck. I was trying to get around them and my feet slipped in the mud and I fell flat on my face in the mud and water. I never was so sick in my life. My sister’s beautiful outfit was covered with mud! I just walked back home and I missed school that day. The dry cleaners were able to get it clean, but they ironed out all the pleats. I am reminded of the old saying “Into each life some rain must fall”. It poured on me that day. Ha!
aunt naomi
Aunt Naomi’s Story (Part 40)
How dear to my heart are the scenes of my childhood
When fond recollections presents them to view
The orchard, the meadow, the deep tangled wildwood,
And ev’ry loved spot which my infancy knew.
I was born at Selma’s Place on Tanner Bridge road, but we moved to the “7th Place” before I was one year old. The farm I grew up on was 140 acres. It had three springs. One was at the edge of the southwest woods so we never saw it much but the other two were close by. One lay in the ravine to the south and the other in the ravine to the north. The farm animals drank from these. The south spring ran on down to what we called the first waterfall and then on down through the Watergate to the second waterfall. This is were we liked to fish and sometimes swim. Further down from the second waterfall was a real good swimming hole. Erosion has changed all of this since I was small, but the springs are still there.
We had an area of flat, blackish rocks, like someone poured bumpy concrete, to the top of the west hill on our land. We played house here a lot. One of the rocks formations looked like a bed with pillows.
Aunt Naomi’s Story (Part 39)
The garden was very large and lay to the east of the house and smokehouse. Down the center was a row of concord grapes. They were the best snack in the world – unless you ate them before they were ripe and ate too many of them. We used them to make jelly and juice and just to snack on. The entire north side of the garden was used for potatoes. We used potatoes for almost every meal. Breakfast: Fried potatoes and eggs, mush, oatmeal, bread and jelly with fresh butter and fresh from the cow milk. Lunch was a smaller version of dinner. Mother made the best meals. She fixed riveil soup, brye, and milk soup. Fried chicken, potato salad, mashed potatoes and gravy that you would die for. We planted the other vegetables in the south side of the garden – every kind of vegetable you can think of was planted. Mother fixed the best oyster plant (salsify) and okra, asparagus were all a specialty that left the mouth watering. When we dug the potatoes, we had a “grader” that we poured them through to get them sized. We sold a lot of them and the rest we stored in the cellar under the smokehouse. Smaller potatoes were used for potato salad and the larger for peeling. We would grow peanuts sometimes. We would roast them, but sometime mother would boil them in salt water, and they were really good.
Aunt Lolly’s Story (part 13)
One summer while the older family members were making hay with the team of horses and wagon, when Naomi and I were little, we got the bright idea of hauling in our own load of hay. We filled our Radio Flyer wagon with hay, stomped it down, and hitched our dog “Bertie” to the wagon. That dog would not help us. She just laid down. Well that was another big disappointment in our life. We had to pull the wagon ourselves.
Aunt Naomi’s Story (Part 38)
Now we come to the most important structure on the farm. The outhouse. A wonder of wonders. Stocked well with supplies of JC Penny and Sears Catalogues, the softest paper you could get on the farm! You may get locked in by a sibling who had it in for you. You may wish to tease city kids or nieces and nephews and lock them in for a good scare. You might wish for indoor plumbing when it is 20 below and you have to GO or when wasps, snakes and spiders visit your outhouse. You always look into the hole before you go to make sure old sneaky-snake is not there. You end up simply being glad you had the experience of an outhouse! In our community very few farm homes had indoor plumbing. We got our indoor bathroom shortly after I graduated from high school.
We had a huge woodpile south of the yard fence. We would fill the Radio Flyer wagon with wood and bring it in to the kitchen or stack it on the back porch. We also had to find wood chips for kindling. This was one of our chores as children growing up on the farm.
Aunt Naomi’s Story (Part 37)
We would buy chicks early in the spring and put them in the southeast brooder house. Sometime the weather turned cold after we had them in the brooder house, and we had to make a fire in the stove to keep them warm. The wood burning stove set in the middle and there was a two foot screen around it to keep the chicks from getting burned. I had the job of going to the brooder house to “stir” the chicks. If they were not stirred, they would crowd up and trample or smother each other. The floor set a foot above the earth and the floor was made our of ½ inch screen-type wire nailed to two by fours in the floor. This allowed the droppings to fall down to the earth, keeping the “floor” of the brooder house clean. I liked sitting there, stirring the chicks with snow coming down and the wind howling outside listening to all the little “peep, peep, peeps” in my cozy domain.
There was a large chicken house on the south side of the farmhouse. There were roosts and places built for egg-laying. I had to get the eggs and some of the old hens would peck you when you reached under to get eggs. There was a room behind this area but I can’t remember what, if anything, it was used for. I remember playing in there and I think it had some kind of loft area? We did have a pig pen for a while. It was down in the south field by the pear tree.