When I met Lucy, it was love at first site.Not romantic love, but the best kind, true friend love.A freckled redhead, Lucy’s hands were covered in warts.Everybody knew you got warts from playing with frogs.I played with frogs every chance I got, but so far had not been able to acquire the warts I coveted. Naturally, I still had to ask, admiringly, How’d you git them warts?”I always took the subtle approach. “How do you think?From playin’ with frogs, Dummy.Frogs’ backs is covered with warts.”My admiration grew exponentially, a girl who liked frogs and wasn’t afraid to say “pee” without looking around to make sure her mama couldn’t hear.I had a hard life.My own mother made us say “wee wee” and swore she’d know if we EVER said “pee.”“Pee” was vulgar.I’d had my behind paddled more than once for getting caught. “Have you got any frogs now?I want to see them warts.” I had to know. “Sure.There’s always some at the creek.”She took off with me following. Wading in, we were soon rich in frogs. Catching a couple, we examined them, finding their backs splendidly populated with warts. We passed an idyllic afternoon with those frogs in the cool creek.I still remember the feel of those scratchy warts on my fingers. Tadpoles frolicked joyously in shady pools, just out of our reach. Wet and muddy to the waist, that day I knew perfect joy. Time stood still. Long before I’d had my fill of warty frog fun, Mother called out saying it was time to go, but not before I slipped a couple of frogs in my pocket. “Oh no!I gotta go.” I whined. “That’s okay.Next time you come back, we’ll git you a snake.” She promised. I got the snake, but never did get my warts.
Thursday was payday, so buying groceries was paramount in Mother’s week. In fact, Wednesday evening she would have probably made supper(not dinner)from the few remaining items in the pantry, possibly a box of macaroni, ketchup, a dented can of mackerel, and dried lima beans. Yum! It takes a talented chef to whip up an appetizing meal from that poor fare. Alas, Mother was no chef, but we were always ravenous, so we ate it. We knew better than to complain. Wednesday breakfast would have likely have been oatmeal, no butter, or God forbid , flap jacks. Mother’s flap jacks were her last resort breakfast. When she got that low, she was likely out of the eggs or milk needed to turn them into decent food. I believe her recipe was:
mix self-rising flour with equal amount of water. Stir until consistency of mashed potatoes. Drop gobs into near-flaming grease. Turn just before gobs ignite. Can be served with pear or fig preserves if you don’t have butter and syrup. Failing that, they can be served with thick brown gravy. Be sure to cook in blazing skillet so they swell up before burning black on both sides Dough should ooze out when pierced with a fork. There should be ample leftovers.
They were as horrible as they sound, nothing but fried dough balls.
These need to be about four times as thick and several shades darker
My parents usually owned one car, meaning Mother had to drive Daddy to work at 630 and rush back home to get the babies before the big kids caught the bus. All this took place after being up at five-thirty to milk the cow and cook the delicious breakfast described earlier.
Then, she was on her way to pick up Daddy’s check and do the banking. Next, she drove by two small grocery stores to check the specials posted in the windows. She usually managed the bargains with groceries and babies in one buggy. Then, off to do the real shopping at the A&P. Pushing her buggy along, she heaped it up with canned goods, cleaning supplies, big bags of potatoes, dried beans, sugar, flour, butter, meal, produce, and meat. The babies rode along in the second with paper goods, cornflakes, and lightweight items stacked carefully around them.
The car fairly sagged with its cargo. With no availability or funds to purchase lunch, Mother changed and fed the babies a makeshift lunch in the car. Hopefully, they’d be napping amidst the shopping when she got back to pick Daddy up from work.
Back at home, Phyllis and I would be pressed into service to doodle in innumerable parcels, put away groceries, tend babies, and help get dinner started, while Mother got ready for evening milking. In time, Phyllis and I had to milk, a repulsive chore. According to Daddy, men were forbidden in the Bible to milk. “Thou cannot take what thee cannot give” He couldn’t cite the chapter and verse, but knew it was in there. He quoted lots of convenient %#|^ from the Bible.
The financial reckoning came after supper. As Phyllis and I cleared the table and started the dishes, Daddy pushed back from the table, lit a cigarette and asked. “How much did you spend on groceries?”
Mother dreaded this. “I spent about eighteen dollars at the A&P and eight dollars on chicken and hamburger at Barrett’s Market. Oh, I got a box of day bread at the bread store for a dollar.”
“I told you, can’t keep on spending like that. You’ve got to cut back! You need to go get your groceries and bargain with the manager on price!” Daddy had never been grocery shopping in his life, but had to know better than that.
“Bill, I’m not doing any such thing! That’s not how grocery stores work!” and they were off!
The old school bus camper had lived a rich life before falling into our family’s lap. After spending years transporting kids safely to school, it had been relieved of most functional parts and converted into a rustic camper. Some intrepid do-it-yourselfer had gutted it till nothing but the shell remained. Two shelves graced by full size mattresses stretched across the back. Stacked army cots flanked both sides. An ancient stove was wedged near the door. A wildly patterned floral vinyl rug completed the decor. I thought it charming.
Immediately before coming to us, it sheltered a destitute family of four, on the banks of Dorcheat Creek, all that stood between them and homelessness. Unheated, except for the death-trap of a leaky stove, they had to leave the windows open should they get desperate enough to use it. They cooked outside, unless it rained too hard.
Akins, a decrepit old geezer had courted and won the heart of Mary, an pathetic child of fifteen. It’s hard to imagine the life she’d hoped to escape if she imagined that sickly, wheezing old man was the answer to a prayer. Only eighteen, she hugely pregnant and mother to two wormy-looking babies when Daddy met the family. Upon Loy’s desperate plea, He purchased their battered home for fifty dollars, allowing Loy to buy a battered station wagon. Loading his family into the ancient vehicle, he moved them into an unpainted shotgun house some charitable soul had offered up rent-free out of pity for Mary and her growing family. With all its flaws, it was a much better home for the desolate little family. Mother was furious when Daddy blew fifty bucks on a useless piece of junk when she needed groceries.
Shotgun houses are three-room dwellings peculiar to the South. Built with three or four adjacent rooms with aligned doors, in theory, one could fire a shotgun through the front door with the bullet emerge through back unscathed. I never heard why anyone would want to shoot through a house, but this was the South after all.
Mary was grateful to move her poor little family into a house with a wood stove since they’d been living without heat. Their only luxury was electricity, a single bulb hanging from the ceiling in each room. They did have cold running water, but no bathroom. The ancient toilet stood behind the house. The local church gifted them with clothes, household goods, and groceries so their lives was vastly improved. Mary was over the moon at the gift of an ancient wringer washer. It stood proudly on the droopy back porch.
Shotgun House
Loy was unable to work, so the family scraped by on public assistance. Most of the time, Mary was able to shame him into helping her cut wood for stove when bad weather was coming. Though Mary often had to ask the church for food, both she and Loy were chain smokers.
Sometimes Loy made a bit of money by repairing bicycles or lawnmowers, picking peas, or perhaps driving someone to town. Mary was known for her beautiful ironing, a bargain at five cents a piece. Mother was also pregnant with her fifth at the time, so if she could squeeze a dollar or two out of her overstretched budget, she was glad to hire Mary to do her ironing. The industrious girl had some sewing skills and sometimes got fifty cents for hemming a skirt or a nickel apiece for hand-stitching button holes. The neighbors competed for her services. The pair made a little money this way when times were hard.
It seems remarkable to work so cheaply, but in 1960, bread was $.22 a loaf and whole milk $.49 a gallon. Mary’s hard work put something in the hungry children’s stomachs.
Mother gave birth to her youngest. The baby had milk allergies. The baby’s formula was changed several times with no let up in symptoms. Finally, the doctor had mother put warm jello in her bottle instead of formula and give her supplemental baby food with cereal several times a day. The baby thrived.
Mary gave birth to twins. She claimed they were identical except one was a boy and the other a girl. Seeing the red jello in Mother’s baby’s bottle, she inferred it was Kool aid, even though Mother had explained the situation. It was probably a bit of wishful thinking as well. Kool aid was only a nickel a pack then; milk $.33 a gallon. Mary switched her babies to Kool aid. Two or three days later, she came over pleading for canned milk. The poor babies were crying incessantly and refusing their Kool aid. Horrified, Mother explained and sent her home with canned milk. The babies straightened right up. They liked milk.
Mary was a tragedy of fertility. Perpetually pregnant, she gave birth to six children in record time. Sadly, she lost several teeth. By the time they moved away, she had aged tremendously.
The couple stopped by to visit a year or so later. Not surprisingly, Mary was hugely pregnant, smoking up a storm. By this time, the older kids seemed like ferrel children, ripping madly through the house, determined to disembowel every drawer, closet, and cabinet. They ran screaming in and out of the house, doors banging in their wake.
The exception was a two-year-old- girl, Merle. Loy spoke harshly, demanding Merle sit on the sofa, while the others ran wild. She was a precious little toddler, dressed in a pretty dress. The other kids were poorly dressed and mostly shoeless. A time or two, Merle made a move as if to get down. Loy reprimanded her sharply. When she crimped up to cry, Loy raised his hand as if to smack her leg. Mother had one of her little girls bring Merle a toy and encouraged Loy to let her get down and play but she didn’t move, clearly bullied into submission. Once Loy had demonstrated his control over the child, he spent the rest of the visit praising her behavior while the other kids tried to tear the house down. It was a miserable time.
This was in the early sixties, before the time child abuse would have been reported. After they left, I remember my parents discussing the strange situation. They felt sure the purpose of the visit was so Loy could show what a good little girl Merle was. We never saw them again.
Daddy not only disliked reading, he was offended by it. “Don’t you have anything better to do? Put that book down and clean out your closet! Wash the woodwork! Get out there and rake the yard!” It didn’t do to let Daddy catch you reading if he was in a bad mood. It didn’t take much to stimulate a bad mood, in the unlikely event he didn’t already have one going. You could always count on getting caught with a book to do it.
Mother was a voracious reader and a casual housekeeper, a problem for Daddy. He needed an illiterate automaton. It set Daddy on fire to stomp through and find Mother reading, especially with dishes stacked in the sink or the floor needed sweeping, which frequently happened. Not to mention, she had five children, ensuring in inordinate amount of work, even for an organized person. No one ever accused Mother of being organized.
Not only that, Daddy frequently pulled Mother away to help him or sent her to town for something he needed. Both Daddy and Mother had more work than they could do. In addition to his paper mill job, Daddy was building a farm and cattle herd. Mother had to put biscuits in the oven before she went out to milk the cow and feed chickens. Neither ever had a minute to spare. Like all farm kids, we were pressed into service as early as possible. Everybody worked all the time, building fences, gardening, making hay, on and on, and on.
Mother read whenever she could steal a minute, while rocking a baby, while drinking coffee, while Daddy and the kids watched TV at night. Daddy hated that. He said “If I had time to read, I’d read the Bible.” I wondered at the time why he didn’t do that instead of watch TV, but didn’t bother to ask.
He’d only read two books in his life, Old Yeller and The Lilies of the Field, probably for school.
Naturally, several of his children did plenty of sneaky reading.
See this great old school bus. It is so much nicer than the one Daddy acquired for the unbelievable sum of fifty dollars. He purchased it from his brother-in-law, who’d gotten stuck with it as payment body work. Daddy was ahead of his time In acquiring this Tiny House. Mother was furious. Fifty dollars would have bought more than two week’s supply of groceries. Though he gave Mother no end of grief about her extravagant spending at the grocery store, he wasn’t short-sighted and saw the great potential in this bus-camper. It would be a wonderful shelter when he and his buddies went deer hunting, and oh yes, the family could use it for camping, too! Now our camper wasn’t nearly so nice as the one pictured above. It had been partially hand-painted bright silver and lacked a motor. The good news was, we could finish it up any color we liked and motors take up a lot of unnecessary space better used for storage. In that special storage area, items were stored in boxes on one deep shelf or in boxes on the floor beneath the shelf. While the rest of us were out fishing, swimming, or just running wild in general, Mother drug boxes out and dug through them for dishes, pots and pans, and food, all this with two babies in diapers. She complained about her back constantly. What a whiner! .
See how comfortable and well-appointed the camper pictured above is. Ours was nothing like this. There was no refrigerator, lighting, water, bathroom, hard-wood floors, or Benjamin Franklin wood burning stove. There was, however, an ancient gas range Daddy hooked to a propane bottle. It had two functioning burners and a defunct oven. That was okay, since Mother insisted it had a propane leak and she was scared to use it longer than it took to heat a can of beans or cook eggs. She cooked with all the windows open and made Daddy cut the fuel off every time she got through. In fact, it did have a propane leak in the line, but that’s a story for another day. Two full-size bunk beds filled the rear of the camper. Two sets of old army bunks were stacked along either side. Of course, we fought over the top bunks. The lower bunks served as seating. A lantern and flash lights served when light was needed. It was perfect. I remember one wonderful camping trip when Daddy pulled it to a creek bank. We swam, fished, swatted mosquitoes, cooked outdoors, only going in to sleep, so exhausted we hardly moved till morning. Mother got up several times every night to spray to camper with bug killer and spray the covers and any exposed skin with mosquito repellent. We scratched bug bites and poison ivy for days after we got home. That was our only family camping trip. Daddy used it a time or two for hunting, then gave it up as too much trouble. It had a couple of other incarnations as a home for a farm laborer who confirmed the stove fuel line leak before it descended so far down the social scale it ended life as a junk shed on Daddy’s farm. To me, that camper was worth every cent!
A jogger running down a country road is startled as a horse yells at him “Hey-come over hear buddy”. The jogger is stunned but runs over to the fence where the horse is standing and asks”Were you talking to me”? The horse replies”Sure was, man I’ve got a problem. I won the Kentucky Derby a few years ago and this farmer bought me and now all I do is pull a plow and I’m sick of it. Why don’t you run up to the house and offer him $5,000 to buy me. I’ll make you some money cause I can still run.” The jogger thought to himself,”boy a talking horse” Dollar signs started appearing in his head. So he runs to the house and the old farmer is sitting on the porch. The jogger tells the farmer”Hey man I’ll give you $5,000 for that old broken down nag you’ve got in the field”. The farmer replies”Son you can’t believe anything that horse says-He’s never even been to Kentucky.
Upon noticing the festive music, floral embellishments in the yard and the parade of guests, we surmised there was a wedding in the works across the street. We were vaguely friendly with the Becketts, but often went weeks without having a real conversation, so we weren’t surprised not to have heard of their plans, nor would we have expected an invitation. I alerted the kids to steer clear of the revelry making a point to walk our dalmatian, Annie, in the opposite direction, so as not to interfere with the Beckett’s plans. Annie caught a whiff of the tantalizing aromas wafting from the Beckett’s back patio and realized how desperately she needed to check the situation out. She enjoyed a close relationship with their dog, Scotty, and realized she’d being meaning to check on him. Like us, the Becketts had children who were likely to leave doors open, enhancing their dog’s social life. Annie and Scotty had enjoyed many adventures together. Consequently, the dogs felt very comfortable “dropping in” whenever the opportunity arose. We knew Scotty far better than we did his owners. Annie had no doubt her invitation to the Beckett’s shindig had gotten lost in the mail. She pulled on her leash, anxiously to join the fun.
I dragged her home. With nose pressed to the living room windows and her eyes glued to the front door, she barked, whined, and cried her heartbreak at being kept from the party. She would have scratched through the front door if allowed. With so many guests, Scotty ran wild and free, making a trip or two through our yard, looking for Annie., keeping her desperation at a peak.
Finally, one of the kids left the door open. Annie was out like a shot, making a beeline for the party. She got there just in time to bound joyously around family and friends queued up to shower the bride and groom with congratulations as they emerged from their nuptials, the bride resplendent in her lace, the groom tall and handsome. It was a lovely sight. Annie was so overcome, she squatted in their path and presented her gift, a huge poop. She’d been shut in too long to be denied.
Two guys were hiking in the woods and decided to have lunch at one of the picnic grounds along trail. They discovered a big hole at the edge of the picnic area and wondered how deep it was. So they decided to drop in a pebble and listen for it to hit bottom. They dropped in a pebble and nothing happened. No noise. They dropped in a boulder and there was still no noise. They decided to scout around for something really big to drop in the hole and came across a railroad tie. They pushed and pulled it over to the hole and dropped it in. Still no noise.
Suddenly a goat ran out of the woods and jumped into the hole.
As they were packing up their lunch, a farmer came by and asked if they had seen his goat. They said the only goat they had seen that day had been running in the woods and had come out and jumped into the hole.
The farmer said, ‘It couldn’t have been my goat. He was tied to a railroad tie!’
Nutsrok 