IN MY MOTHER'S DAY
If one climbs the steep rutted road up the hill, there’s hardly a trace of the farm where my mother grew up. A line of catalpa trees spread their falling popcorn-like blossoms. A large flat stone shows where the well once was, but not one stone is left stacked on another to show where the fireplace was. The fields are grown up in saplings as big as a man’s arm. The rolling hills of that part of West Virginia near the Ohio River are almost all covered with second growth timber now.
How little to show that in the 1890’s a man sold his small store and bought a hilltop farm! He raised eight children there, the first four all girls including twins. My mother, Theresa Mary, was the third child. She was only four when her mother died, a heart constricting, life altering event. My grandfather struggled along with help of his wife’s aunts for several years, and then courted and married a local school teacher. Her name was Oceanna, I think, but we always called her Ocie. She bore him four more children, two boys and two girls.
We grandchildren remember that our grandfather was famous as a checker player, a skill he no doubt acquired as he ran a country store. In his later years. I remember him sitting in a rocker in front of the fireplace, cutting an apple in half and scraping out the pulp with his knife because his teeth weren’t serving him well.
The 150 acre hilltop farm had rolling fields of hay surrounded by woods and steep hillsides where the cows had worn horizontal paths so the hill seemed cut into a series of terraces. Guineas warned the family of the approach of visitors. On visits we helped tend the vegetable gardens and shell beans. The barn smelled of leather and horses and hay. It must have been hard work to make a living on the farm. My mother recalls working so hard in the summer that her monthly periods stopped for a while.
But there were books and the whole family read. Ocie read aloud to the older girls as they combed her hair. To them, education was the way to get ahead in a life off the farm. The twins, the two oldest, and my mother boarded out in a neighboring town to go to high school. “Boarding out” meant that the high school student helped the lady of the house with chores before and after school.
High school was exciting to my mother. She loved to quote Robert Burns, and excelled in her studies in English Literature. She was especially fond of Emerson. Self-reliance was an idea she was well acquainted with. She was very proud of compositions she had written and saved them for many years. After she graduated, she was able to secure a teaching position in a one room school near home and returned to the farm. Her older sisters worked their way through West Virginia University. Her sister, Maude, youngest of the four, married a returning World War I veteran and settled on a farm close by.
My mother was short, not quite 5 feet tall, but she had a reputation as a firm disciplinarian. During the War to End All Wars, she had a beau who was in the American Expeditionary Forces in France, so she wrote to him all during the war and he sent mementos from France including a full sized pair of wooden shoes.
After the war, he came calling in a horse and buggy on Sunday afternoons, and they went for rides in the country. His father’s farm was more than ten miles away. Another suitor appeared on the scene, my father, and on alternate Sundays he came to call, but he drove an early Model-B Chevrolet.
He lived five miles away on a 400 acre farm with a good many acres of bottom land. My father was the oldest of seven boys and my mother had some of his younger brothers in school as well as her half brothers and sisters. From the time that the first cars appeared in the neighborhood, my father was fascinated by them and sometimes was able to buy one cheap when the owner could no longer made it run. Thus, he came calling in one of the new horseless carriages. Did that make the difference? Was my mother impressed by a car? Or by his stature? He was six feet 2 inches tall.
This alternate Sunday courtship went on more than a year, and my father finally persuaded my mother to marry him. The wedding was held at the home of one of her older sisters who was married by that time. My university educated aunts thought my father’s peach colored silk shirt was a little gaudy for the occasion.
After a year or two in a very small house on my grandfather Hogue’s farm, my mother and father moved to town. There my father found his niche. He sold Chevrolets for the local dealer. Some years he sold a hundred new cars and received a pin to wear in his lapel. My mother was a bookkeeper for the firm and the couple bought a small house. Finally at the age of thirty-five, they had me. They went on to have my sister two years later, and my brother five years after that.
The next column will continue our story.
-- Mary