And I thought my kitchen was inconvenient! After all, I had to walk across the room from the sink to range and fridge! But a letter written by my mother recently surfaced telling what their Tennessee farm life was like a hundred years ago!
Here is how they prepared breakfast: First, the children had to go to the spring for water and for milk and butter that their mother kept in a box anchored in the ice cold water that sluiced around them. Next, my future Mama and her siblings ran through their orchard to pick up apples the wind had blown down in the night. Grandpa liked fried apples for breakfast. Then Grandma made a foray to the smoke house to slice off a lean chunk of ham to go with the eggs the children had scooted under the house to gather from the nest a hen had hid out. They also picked up a few duck eggs floating in the stream!
I'm sure they all had a ravenous appetite after all that exercise. And they still had to go to school, to which my eight-year-old Mama rode her horse. She wrote about the nice saddle and bridle she had for Dudley, as she had named him. I recall stories she used to tell about riding him to her Uncle Robert's country store where she would buy things they couldn't raise themselves, such as tea, sugar, coffee, etc.
This wasn't in her letter, but I remember her saying once she was sent to the store, and her eyes fell on a new pack of crayolas lying on the counter. The colorful, waxy-smelling crayons were so tempting, and she felt her hand reach for them and put them in her pocket! When Grandma discovered them, she sent the crestfallen, but repentant little red-head straight back to return them. I can't imagine the devout mother I knew doing such a thing, but that was before she knew the Lord.
A hilarious part of the 14-page letter relates an even younger experience at age 4 when she had been at a relative's house and heard a man using interesting words she had never heard before, not knowing they were curse words. Later Grandma heard her skipping on the porch and making a sing-song of the bad words to the kittens she was holding and cussing roundly!
The love for her country home came through loud and clear as she described the interesting activities that were really work that kept the kids occupied: Taking sticks to knock off the fat worms on their Papa's tobacco crop; knocking the fodder off their sugar cane and later enjoying sopping the molasses from the big pot where it was boiled at the molasses mill; jumping up and down on the dried beans that had climbed the corn stalks so Grandma could winnow them by tossing up in the air for the wind to blow away the chaff, not to mention rocking baby brothers and sisters, whom she believed came in the trunk of the doctor's car!
Incidents of sadness and tragedy too, were intermingled in Mama's memories, but they were dimmed and softened by the happy times she related, as I'm sure the joys of heaven now eclipse and surpass her amazing life on earth!
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