IN MY MOTHER'S DAY
The column last week was written by Mary and this is the continuation. Pennsboro where we grew up was a small town of two thousand people. Our life was a mixture of town and country life. We had electricity and indoor plumbing which my grandparents did not have for many years, but my father kept a Jersey cow in a neighboring pasture and barn. I often accompanied him on the short walk to milk and my sister, Bailey Ann, learned to milk. Mother made butter and cottage cheese. We had a garden at my Grandfather Hogue’s farm, and we canned many quarts of green beans, tomatoes, peaches, and applesauce..
During the hot summers, the whole family went blackberry picking on my Grandfather Hogue’s farm. Mother would wear a large brimmed hat and we all wore long sleeved shirts. That was hot, sticky work. It seemed to take forever to fill the buckets. We did enjoy the jelly and jam though. As she grew older, my sister often chose to clean the house rather than pick berries.
Spring house cleaning was a tremendous undertaking. Rugs were taken up and beaten on the clothes line, Mattresses were taken outside and aired and each room was taken apart, scrubbed and put back together.
Mother was an excellent cook and often baked bread. Every birthday she baked an angel food cake “from scratch” and that is still a favorite. Sunday dinner was often Swiss steak and mashed potatoes, and Sunday supper was strawberry shortcake in season, and applesauce on toast, or my father’s favorite, hot corn mush.
Summers were also fun times. Mother often gathered up four or five neighborhood children and took us swimming in a large community pool five miles away. Although she couldn’t swim, she held us up by our swimsuit straps until we learned. I was swimming in deep water by the time I was six. On the way home, we often stopped for ice cream. Until I was twelve, we had a succession of hired girls. During the depression, girls worked for board and room and sometimes as little as three dollars a week. They had usually finished the eighth grade and some of them went to high school while they stayed with us. After four or five years, they went on to secretarial jobs in large cities or they married. My sister and I were fond of them all and competed to be their “favorite”.
Since my father was the oldest in his family of seven boys and my mother had four younger half brothers and sisters, our home was often a place to stay when there were football games and other activities after school.
Summers I visited my Grandfather Lanham’s farm for two or three days. Aunt Kate and I gathered acorns and strung them together to make acorn dolls, and fished in the creek for sunfish. It was a little scary there at night, A gas well pumped and made regular bumping sounds all night long. In my bedroom, my Uncle Keith’s cat skeleton from his college biology class was proudly displayed on the dresser.
Visits to relatives were the only “vacations” I remember. What a work oriented family my Aunt Nell had! Her three sons and I and neighborhood kids pulled dandelions and other weeds out of the lawn so that we could have an ice cream party at the end of my week’s stay there. They had a rope hung in a tree which I never was able to climb.
Mother allowed Bailey Ann and me to travel alone on a train to visit our Aunt Mary in Covington, Kentucky when I was about fifteen. That train ride was a great adventure, and Aunt Mary took us to Coney Island where I got Rosemary Clooney’s autograph. Mostly, we remember Mother the disciplinarian. She made us feel loved and accepted, but moral principles were to be observed.
Mother and Daddy both taught Sunday School and Daddy sang bass in the choir. That meant church every Sunday. In a spirit of rebellion, I tried to avoid going one time. I went up in the woods and hid until I thought that the family would have gone to church. I misjudged the time and came back to the house, and Mother made me go to church in my “play” clothes.
Bailey Ann and I both took piano lessons. The deal was that you could sit at the piano and cry for thirty minutes or you could practice. She became an accomplished pianist who still plays for church, but I never could sight read easily enough to enjoy playing. Mother taught us stealing was a sin. When Bailey Ann went to the national Future Homemakers Convention in Kansas City, she brought the clean towels back with her. She thought they came with the room. Our Grandma Hogue’s laundry had many towels with hotel names on them from the West Virginia University days when the boys played football games away. Mother made Bailey Ann send them back with her own money.
When our teachers required a wild flower collection, Mother was delighted to search for wild flowers. She knew where the yellow lady slippers grew and she had a good wild flower identification book. On one trip, our brother Jimmie, a reluctant wild flower gatherer, kept splashing her when we searched near creeks. It probably wasn’t his class that required the collection. Finally, at an opportune moment, she paid him back by dumping a bucket of water on him.
Our lives changed when the family bought a large house with the idea of running a tourist home. This was in l939, and soon the war and gas rationing made that dream generate less income than we hoped. Since there were no new cars to sell, my father went with two of his cousins to Detroit to work in the War Plants there. Those seemed to be hard times for us. Bailey Ann and I went for the first time for the Christmas tree by ourselves and settled for one that someone else had cut down and left because they found a better one. Mother was gone a lot because she started teaching again in one room schools in the country.
Somehow they managed to send both Bailey Ann and me to West Virginia University. Both of us worked in the dining halls. Mother was a fine seamstress and made many of our clothes. Sometimes I wonder, “Did she ever have a vacation?”
Sadly, Mother died when I was 27 and Bailey Ann was 25 and I have missed her wise counsel all these years.
-- Mary