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Coming of Age in America
Part 4


Our home was a single-story house with a large screened in front porch. There were three rocking chairs, a wicker bench, a small table and a swing that filled every available space. On hot summer nights I often grabbed my pillow and went out to sleep in the swing, hoping to catch a breeze. The swing was also where Daddy would grab a nap in summer months after his lunch. He claimed he was letting his food settle before returning to the fields. If he was sleeping in the swing, I knew to stay away from the porch.

There were two ways to enter our house from the front porch. One door led into our den, where the television was located and the other entered into the living room, which we seldom used unless we had company. It was Mother’s special room.

I remember once returning from our neighbors, the Boswells, with a small lard bucket full of toad frogs. I loved to play with frogs and they always had lots of frogs in their well house. They told me I was welcome to come down anytime I wanted and catch them. I took them up on their offer.

That day I had packed the little lard pail to the brim with frogs and had crammed the lid down to keep them in. As I came up the driveway I noticed a strange car parked near the sidewalk. Curious, I walked onto the front porch and peered into the living room. There sat our new pastor, Brother Lewis and his wife visiting with Mother. They all looked at me, the little boy with a pail and started trying to make small talk. Kids aren’t good at small talk.

The preacher’s wife asked what I had in the bucket.

“Nothing.”

“Surely, you have something in there. Let’s see what you have.”

I shook my head, “You probably don’t want to see it.”

Then my mother said, “Just dump it out on the floor so we can all enjoy it.”

She should have known better than to have said that. After all she’d been living with me for a few years already. So I obliged. I pried off the lid and dumped the frogs onto the floor. For a moment they all just sat there kinda stunned - both the visitors and the frogs. Then those frogs realized it was their one chance at freedom and they took off. They began to flee in all different directions. Some went under the chairs, others under the coffee table and beneath the couch. More hopped into the dining room, and some started hopping up the hall.

The preacher’s wife was hysterical. She was screaming and clambering all over her chair. The preacher was laughing his head off. But my mother was still in a state of shock. She wanted to snatch me up and wear me out. She most likely would have, too, but the preacher was there and saved my little soul. Not in a religious way, but it was good enough at the moment. I guess seeing the preacher laughing so hard he was about to turn blue was the only thing that held her back.

He told my mother that she had asked for that one before he got down on the floor and helped me round’em up and put them back into the bucket.

Our home had zero insulation in the walls. I can remember sitting in the living room on cold, windy winter days and watching the wallpaper move in and out. It was almost as if the walls were breathing.

The living room was where we put the Christmas tree every year. The only way to get warm in winter was to stand directly in front of the propane space heaters that were in some of the rooms. We would get toasty warm on one side and still be freezing on the other side.

Just off the living room was the dining room where we ate when we had company. The dining table was a beautiful long table my parents had purchased from The Colonial Terrace, an old boarding house, in town that had gone out of business. The china cabinet against a wall next to the kitchen was a massive dark thing. Whenever we walked into the dining room, the cabinet shook and all the plates inside rattled. The floor was a tad bit weak!

The huge old china cabinet came from an old home in New Orleans by way of our cousins, Norman and Ruba Parks, in Philadelphia, Mississippi. That was where they owned and operated a furniture store for many years. They had taken the old china cabinet in on trade when a customer negotiated for a newer one. When Mother baked cakes and pies she would place them in it to let them cool. It had a door that locked, thus keeping the good stuff out of our hands.

Mother was an excellent cook when she was younger and folks loved to come to our house for Sunday dinners. Every meal in the dining room was an event for her.

Sadly, I did not appreciate her cooking when I was little like I should have. I guess I took it for granted that everyone cooked like her. She could have given Paula Dean cooking lessons, but as she got older and had more and more problems, she lost her touch in the kitchen. Her heart was there, but she lost the ability to end up with the desired results.

Next to the dining room was the kitchen my father had specially built for her. She was short and all the counters and cabinets were made to be accessible by her. It was HER kitchen and we were only allowed to walk through it to get to the back porch or to eat at the kitchen table.

The downfall of her being queen of the kitchen was that us guys never learned how to cook. Cooking became like a foreign language to us.

There were cabinets covering all the walls except in the eating area. On the wall at the end of the table was a needlework picture she had sewn of Jesus. He had one hand pointing skyward and the other was outstretched toward the viewer. It was a reminder to us from where our daily bread and blessings came from. I suppose being the child of believing parents made me constantly aware that we depended on Him for our very existence. He was never far from our thoughts, a measuring stick to live by.

One of our cousins spent the night with us once and he would not drink his milk. Mother told him he had better drink his milk because Jesus was watching him. He looked up at the picture, picked up his plate and started to move to the other end of the table. That didn’t go over very well with her. He drank his milk.

I can’t say I blamed him for not wanting to drink the milk. It was terrible and I hated it, too. We had our own cow and that was the milk we had to drink. It was fresh and it was awful, especially during the summer months.

That blooming cow would invariably eat wild onions, bitter weeds or some other gross vegetation, then wash it all down with muddy pond water. Whatever the cow ate or drank is what the milk tasted like. I was so glad when we could afford to buy pasteurized milk at the grocery store.

Every morning when I walked into the kitchen for breakfast she would be bustling around and the radio was always turned on to WLSM in Louisville. Besides my mother’s voice, David Childs was the first person I heard every morning. Daddy would have been long gone to the barn or the fields.

In later years our kitchen became a bit livelier when my niece, Mindy, came along. My father thought she needed a pony to ride when she came to visit so he found a very gentle white Shetland pony we named Snowball.

He fenced in our backyard and kept him out there like a pet dog. When we went out the back door Snowball would hear us and come running. After a while he turned out to be one of the family and Mindy loved him.

Our Aunt Alice was visiting once and remarked to my father that he loved that horse so much, it wouldn’t have surprised her if he became a house pet. That sparked an idea.

The next time Mindy came for a visit he had it all planned out. The kitchen door opened out onto the back porch where Snowball often stood at the screen door whinnying for someone to come play with her.

Everyone was seated at the kitchen table for dinner and Mindy had been placed in a highchair facing the back porch. As we were eating, Snowball was whinnying at the back door. My father looked at Mindy and said, “I believe Snowball wants some dinner, too. Don’t you think we ought to let her in?”

Mindy nodded. Daddy put a plastic plate down at the head of the table and went to the back porch where he kept her corn. He put an ear on the plate before opening the screen door and letting her inside. Mindy’s eyes got very big.

Snowball stepped onto the porch and Daddy led her into the kitchen to the table. She began to chomp at the corn. Mindy was laughing and giggling because Snowball was having dinner with her.

All was well until someone decided it was a Kodak moment and took a picture. The flash from the camera startled the little horse and she jumped. Her feet started slipping on the slick floor and she almost fell. When that happened my mother who was opposed to critters in the house in the first place, said it was time for the horse to go.

After that she remained outside where she belonged. But that was one dinner Mindy remembered for a long, long time.

(To be continued)


Unknown. I have often wondered if this was the pastor that married my grandparents in the middle of Main Street.

Before there was pull the tail on the donkey there was pump the tail on the cow to see if it would give you milk.

_______________
Rick Algood
August 20, 2021

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