Y is for Yard

We always had dirt and weeds growing in the yard when I was a kid.  Any grass sprouted up by accident.  Once we moved to town when I was about fifteen, we had a regular house with grass in the yard, but the grass would be knee-high before anyone bothered to mow it.

I probably mentioned that Rosenberg Mamaw had a big garden, as well as the peach tree; fig trees, paper-shell pecan trees, a black walnut tree and a mulberry tree, but we always bought 50-pound bags of potatoes and onions and bushels of peaches at the fruit stands.  Everything was in big quantities and very cheap at those stands.

This is the closest thing I could find on the net to resemble my grandmother's house

When I think about her pretty yard all kinds of things come to mind from my childhood.  We would climb the mulberry tree when we got the chance and sit up there and eat the berries.  They were wonderful, long, purple, and sweet.  We never got away with this though because we always came down with purple hands and stains around our lips and on our clothes.

This is what berry juice does to your hands

The paper shell pecans, on the opposite side of the house from the garden, were enormous and wonderful shade trees.  The lower branches dipped down and touched the ground in places.  It was all molten leaves under there because it was too shady for grass to grow.  We would also find many pecans that fell off the trees.  We gathered these pecans, as well as picking some.  Daddy would take us down to the park by the Brazos River, so we could sell them by the coffee can full to cars that would stop.  There were more pecan trees down there at the river.  It was always tempting to eat them as we went because they were very easy to crack.

Pecan Tree

Several pink crepe myrtle trees grew in a line along the fence on that same side of the house.  The trees were loaded with lacy blossoms that looked pretty during spring and summer.

Rosenberg Mamaw loved figs.  She had about four or five fig trees on the highway side of the house.  She would use them to cook with and to eat.  She probably also canned them.

 Fig tree from Wikipedia

Sometimes I would get a crazy hair and mix up concoctions for my siblings to eat or drink.  I put figs in chocolate milk one time.  My sister, Thea, said after that she couldn’t stand figs anymore.

In the front corner next to the fence was a black walnut tree.  Those nuts were very hard to crack, so we generally left them alone.  Mamaw was happy about that because she used them in her baking.

Now that I’m grown, I try to keep a nice yard filled with flowers in the summer time.  Trying to grow grass is a constant battle with the heat.  Living in the desert takes its toll on everything that needs a lot of water; so many people leave their yards in a natural desert landscape except for right around their houses.  Actually, the desert landscape is very pretty in areas.  I took this pic behind my house.

Taken on the trail behind my house

X is for Xamined by Dr. Mamaw

That’s right.  My Daddy’s mother thought she had the perfect remedy for everything that came along.  She would mix up concoctions for us to drink or rub on all of our “ouchies.”  This didn’t seem to hurt any of us.  Whether it cured us of what ailed us, I can’t say.  We always got better, but it may have been a case of the ailment running its course.

She would mix up lemon juice with honey and a shot of whiskey for sore throats.  Maybe or was the whiskey that made us forget about our sore throat.  We’d go to bed and be much better in the morning.

The only pic I have of Daddy's mother

We used Vicks a lot.  We rubbed it on our chest when we had a cold and we’d even put a dab on our tongue and swallow it.  I don’t think people do things like that today.  In fact, I’m sure there must be a warning on the label not to ingest it.

When we had a bellyache, they instructed us to lie on the floor with our butt against the wall and our legs extended up the wall.  We had to lie there for about twenty minutes.  It usually fixed us right up.

We rarely went to the doctor for anything because we didn’t have the money.  They fixed most things on the farm with old-fashioned remedies.  The only time I can remember any of us having to go to the hospital for incidents was with one of my sisters.  Bonni was always getting into a mishap.  She had to have her stomach pumped once for eating some old medicine out of the garbage and another time when she cracked her head open.  Mama tried to stop the bleeding with vinegar and water, but that didn’t work because the gash was a big one, so they took her to get it sewed up.  However, it did stop by the time the doctor was ready to work on it.  I guess my sister remembered her first trip to the emergency room and her sheer fright stopped it.

Did you have any childhood mishaps or have to suffer through childhood remedies?

U is for Underwear

I remember the first time I slept without any underwear.  This was when we visited Mamaw’s house (Daddy’s mother) in the summers.  We would go three or four times a year in pairs to spend the night.  She told us to take our underwear off so we could “breathe”.  Of course, we thought this was very odd, but did as she asked.  It felt strange to us until we got used to it and then we laid awake half the night wondering why we had to wear underwear at home.  Of course, we knew why.  We had cramped quarters at our house and many people around.

We would lie in bed and watch the lights from the highway run across the walls until we fell asleep, occasionally hearing the whistle of the freight train.  The railroad tracks were on the other side of the highway, so very close to my grandparent’s house.

Do you remember the first time you slept without underwear?

S is for Scarecrow

Rosenberg Mamaw (what we all called Daddy’s mother) was a remarkable woman.  She made almost everything we needed on the farm, from food to remedies to soap to scarecrows.  She always kept busy and whenever we needed something, she used whatever we had on hand.

When the corn started getting tall and ears would come on, we had many crows that would make the rounds from farm to farm to feed off the corn.  Something was in order to keep them away because we ate the corn, as well as kept a good portion of it for the cows.

Our grandparents threw very little away.  Mamaw always kept Papaw’s worn out shirts and pants to make scarecrows for the corn patch.  I also suspect she pulled stuff out of this box of goods when it was time for Halloween.

Armed with an old broomstick or handle to serve as a stake, a stack of clothes over her arm, she’d head for the bran in search of loose hay.  It wasn’t long and she had several scarecrows made that she would place strategically around the field.

We played hide and seek in the corn patch just before harvest season.  The rows were so tall and thick and the field so vast that it was an excellent place to hide.  We could hear the caw from the dozens of crows that circled the area as we giggled and scrambled through the corn.  All these decoys made hide and seek even better.

K is for Kitchen

We spent a lot of time in the kitchen in the shacks so here is a little story about that.

Usually the crowing of a rooster would wake us up.  I could hear the voices of my parents in the kitchen, if Daddy hadn’t left for the field yet.  Usually he was gone early.  Once we started school, Daddy would drag us out of bed by the feet, if you didn’t get up when he called you.  He expected us to be punctual and not miss the bus.  Once our heads hit the floor, we were generally somewhat awake and didn’t dare crawl back into bed.

When we were younger, we all made our way to the kitchen for breakfast together.  It was a sparse room with worn linoleum floors so cracked and brown that the pattern wasn’t visible any longer, especially in the traffic areas.  The room was dingy with its unpainted walls and the single light bulb that hung on a cord from the ceiling.

 Cast Iron Skillet

Mama, looking tired and frazzled as usual, stood at the old stove in one corner cooking a big iron skillet of scrambled eggs.  I thought.  “Not scrambled eggs again!”  But they were plentiful on the farm with the one hundred fifty chickens we had.

The stove was a small apartment size with burners on the top and a mini-size oven underneath.  Later Daddy would buy Mama a full size electric stove.  Mama would love that stove except for the oven that would not heat very long and for some reason they never got it fixed.  Looking back on it, I imagine the reason was not enough money when we were doing fine with it the way it was in Daddy’s mind.

Daddy usually went to his mothers for breakfast.  Sometimes he would leave just before sunrise, long gone from the house by the time we got up.  After Mamaw fed the men, they would head out for another long hot day in the cotton fields.  She would join them after she did the dishes and walked out there from the house.

We all seated ourselves at the table that was to the left as you entered the room.  The older kids sat on a wooden bench against the wall that Daddy built for us complete with a footrest and boards on the side so we wouldn’t fall off.  The younger ones sat in high chairs arranged around the table, some of which didn’t have trays on them.  Daddy had placed a sheet of plywood on top of the original table to make it large enough to accommodate all nine of us.  I don’t think we ever owned a tablecloth in those days.  Did they even make one big enough to cover an eight by four foot sheet of plywood?

Next to the table on the left hand wall was a door to the outside.  This door was for ventilation purposes in the summer time.  Window screen nailed to the doorframe kept the door permanently shut and kept the bugs out.

The old white icebox sat between the outside door and the small opening that led to an open space with a few shelves for can goods and dishes.  This space had no door.

On the far wall was a freestanding porcelain sink with drain boards on each side, but no cabinets.  Starting at age six, I used to strand on a chair there to reach the sink and help Mama with the dishes.

 A view similar to this one except this is from creative commons.  We didn't have a camera in those days

Next to the sink, through a small window, I could see my grandparent’s house down the old dirt road.  The aged stove was in the far corner.  We inherited it, as we did most of the furniture in that old house.  The oven went out shortly after we moved in, so we did all the cooking on the top burners only.

On the right hand wall was a door with a window that opened into a hallway and the addition to the house that started out as three sharecroppers shacks joined together to make one house.  Also, an old bench once belonging to a picnic table sat in the kitchen.  This was the place we had to sit as punishment when caught doing things we weren’t supposed to do.

As I looked around the room, I thought there must be a better way than this.  I wondered why the only thing we ever painted in that house was the doors and they were a sea green color.  Mama explained to me later that they wanted the house to look old-fashioned.  Oh my, I would think it would look old-fashioned anyway.

G is for Garden

Mamaw’s garden was very large, or we used to think so when we helped her hoe in there to get rid of grass and weeds.

She always planted marigolds around the edges because she said they would keep many pests out.  She would also put eggshells and coffee grounds in there for different things and old shoes in the patch of squash and cucumbers to keep the bugs out.  I don’t know if this remedy worked or not, but she swore by it.  I know nothing got rid of the tomato caterpillars, which were much like the hairy caterpillars we used to catch in jars, but these green worms weren’t hairy and they had a horn on the top of their heads.  They were the ugliest things you’ve ever seen.  Mamaw used to pluck them off with her bare hand.  Yuck!  I swear nothing much fazed this woman.  She did what was necessary at the time.

 Similar to Mamaw's Prairie Bonnet

Mamaw was always in the garden in her big prairie bonnet and would take a basket or bucket with her for picking veggies.  This was after she spent most of the day in the fields alongside the men.

She would save coffee cans and cut the ends out to place over the small tomato plants so they wouldn’t get too much scorching sun when they were young sprouts.

Mamaw would can some things for the winter and had about every kind of veggie in the garden that you can think of, along with watermelon and cantaloupes.  She always had stacks of eggs sitting around her kitchen along with crocks of pickles.  We had to be careful chasing each other in there.

 The side of my grandparent's house.  This is the only pic I have.

Many times all of us girls sat on the planks on her porch with bowls in our laps, shucking black-eye peas, and breaking up snap beans while we laughed and talked, wishing for a breeze to cool the sweat on our faces.

C is for Chickens

We had about 150-200 chickens growing up on the farm.  There were lots of colors and several roosters.  Naturally, we had many eggs, which was a good thing because at times that’s all we ate.  It made sense to scramble a large cast iron skillet full of them to feed seven kids.  I got so sick of scrambled eggs that I can’t eat them to this day unless I doctor them up with all sorts of goodies first.

The hen house was a wood structure with boxes staked several rows high.  There was a narrow isle in between.  Mamaw (Daddy’s mother) stuffed the boxes with hay, so the chickens would roost in there every night, either in the boxes or on the crossbeams spanning the small space.

We kept the little chicks warm under a dome shaped incubator that had a light bulb in the top.  We’d also grind up corn for the chickens on an old grinder attached to Mamaw’s porch.

In the summers, we would help with gathering the eggs.  My sister, Scherri, was much better at this than I was.  I always ended up breaking several eggs because I didn’t have the delicate touch she did.  Because of this, she was the candidate to gather them once when a fox was lingering about.  She was scared to death, but Mamaw went with her and stood at the crook in the road to keep watch while she was in the hen house.

 Chickens

And of course there were always many chickens to wade through too because they squawked and made a racket until you fed them.  They would be in frenzy and pecking at each other to get at the food.  Because of this behavior, at times some of them had bare spots where feathers were missing.

Our father’s mother would have made an ideal pioneer woman.  She took to farm life and everything seemed so natural to her, even when it came to ringing the neck of a chicken for the stew pot, which she did many times.  Sometimes she’d take a small ax to them on the chopping block that sat outside the gate to her yard.  She would bring a big pot of boiling water out and have it standing by.  With the deed completed, she would immerse the chicken in the hot water to loosen its feathers.  These feathers she saved for pillows and comforters.  Not much goes to waste on a farm.

Once she plucked the chicken, she would singe it over an open flame on her gas stove.  I remember entering her kitchen and watching her do this lots of times.  I will never forget this smell.