De ja Vu or Raising Cane

Whew! What a lot of groceries we had bought, I thought, as we unloaded our purchases. The next day Howard was looking for his cane, which was no where to be found. I had already looked in the car for it, but not in the rear compartment, so I volunteered to search further. No, it wasn't in the back of the car either.

"Why don't you call the store and see if it was turned in?" I suggested to my concerned mate.  Sure enough, when we made the call, after describing it, we were relieved that it was held in lost and found. Howard sat in the cane-less car while I went in and recovered his favorite cane. Obviously, it was left in the grocery cart and rescued by a thoughtful employee.

Since this was the second cane we had recovered from leaving one in a cart, I thought about something my mother included in a memoir written in a letter to one of her brothers, Uncle George Jr.   Mama grew up in Tennessee until she was 12 years old, when they moved to Texas at the insistence of an uncle.

Mama wrote of the bucolic life style they enjoyed in their big Tennessee farmhouse with two fireplaces, smoke house full of meat, home-canned vegetables, apple orchard, preserved food in big stone crocks, and horses to ride to school. After school, the kids did chores such as feeding the horses, milk the cows and feed the hogs. Grandpa raised tobacco, and the kids had the responsibility to go to the field with sticks to knock the big fat worms off the tobacco plants.

Which brings me to the point of my story. Among other things, Grandpa raised sugar cane.  The children had the chore of taking sticks and whipping all the fodder off the stalks, so that when Grandpa came into the field with a big knife he would cut it all down and put it into the wagon.  The wagon load of cane was hauled to the molasses mill to cook the juice into molasses, poured into buckets when the kids got to sop the pans!

Other stories of shucking corn, taking it to the mill to be ground into corn meal, corn-shucking parties and candy pulls were written of in her letter. Those memories kept her warm until she passed in 1996, the most godly woman I've ever known, and she never used a cane!