Memories

Wintertime on Barfoot Mountain-Part 1

Looking to the north toward the Bank's field from Barfoot Mountain ca. 1958

Work never stopped when you lived on a farm. Wintertime just added to it, with more jobs to be done, especially during the coldest months of the year. For example, we ate sweet potatoes almost every day throughout the winter, and if they froze, they rotted. That meant that Daddy had to keep a fire in an old metal barrel stove in the sweet potato house to keep the potatoes from freezing. He would stick some sweet potatoes into the ashes and offer me a nice, hot cooked treat when I would go out there for a visit with him.  I didn't know then just how healthy sweet potatoes are, but I knew that I liked them!

 

One of my jobs, when I became big enough, was to load the wheelbarrow with wood that Daddy had chopped out at the wood pile. I would then bring it to the south side of our house and stack it inside the porch. Two big loads were usually enough to keep the fire in the fireplace through the night. On really cold nights, my Dad would sit there by the fire to keep it burning so that we could at least warm one side of us as we got ready for school in the morning. 

 

I had to just make myself leave the warm fire, run down the path behind the barn, through the woods, down the hill to our dirt road, across the branch on a log, and then to the public dirt road to wait for the school bus. At that time, the public road hugged the toe of the mountains, east of where Highway 91 is now. Not long after I started school, Daddy built us a rain house with an opening so we could see the bus as it came around the road on the other side of Ott Parson's house. Was it ever cold!  At least, we were fortified with a nice, hot breakfast, and on those super cold days, we had hot chocolate to warm us up inside. 

 

 

Christmas Memories

By the middle of November, the fruitcakes were made, wrapped in cheesecloth, with apple quarters tucked around them, and stored in the big aluminum pressure canner. Every few days, Mama would give the cakes a good soaking with her homemade blackberry wine. The Christmas cards that we had received the year before were brought out so that we could play the "Who send us this card" game, over and over again.  We made another game of who could recite "T'was the Night Before Christmas", without missing a word.

About a week before Christmas, Daddy would go out into our woods, chop down a cedar tree and bring it home.  We would then make paper chains and string popcorn to decorate the tree.  Mama would put up a red tissue paper garland that would criss-cross the living room ceiling, with a big red tissue paper bell in the center. 

When I was about 6 years old, new decorations appeared.  They were made of shinny colored foil, with red, green, blue, gold, or silver on one side and silver on the other. They were made in the shape of stars, balls or bells and stitched through the center, with the string long enough to hang them from the boughs of the tree.  The ornaments opened up to become three dimensional and when hung on the tree, they would twirl first one way, then the other, all the while, reflecting the light from the fire all around the room.  I thought those ornaments were magic, the way they twirled around.  It was only years later, when I was a grown-up, that I realized that all of that twirling was caused by the drafts of cold air moving through the house. 

A few days before Christmas, Daddy would go to town in the wagon and bring home a bushel of red delicious apples and a crate of oranges. That would be the only store bought fruit for the year. The fresh coconut that he brought home would be cracked open, grated and made into our Christmas coconut cake.

On Christmas Eve, we each placed our shoe close to the Christmas tree so that Santa would bring us a candy cane.  Then we would go to bed early, eagerly listening for sleigh bells.

The Sears Roebuck Christmas Catalog

By this time of year, the pages of that wonderful magnificent wish book were beginning to be frayed and worn. From the day it arrived in the mailbox until Christmas Eve, all my free time was spent wishing, dreaming and imagining what it would be like to have my pick. Which toy did I want more than any other? I had never seen a toy store, had never seen a store dressed up for Christmas. The Sears Roebuck Christmas Catalog had everything you could ever want. I only remember one time that I got what I had pined for but the wishing and dreaming was so good. I think that I learned a lesson from that book,  that served me well over my life, that wishing is often better than the getting

Fall Bounty

In the fall of the year, we could walk out into the woods and find all kinds of good things to eat.  I was reminded of this recently when I found a ripe persimmon laying on the ground.  Of course, I popped it into my mouth and ate it.  It brought back those memories of how, when we were growing up, we would go walking through the woods and find ripe muscadines, sparkle berries, hog halls, sugar halls, possum grapes, persimmons, and hickory nuts, which we would crack between two rocks.  There were times when Mama would get an empty flour sack and take us to gather hickory nuts.  Our first stop was always at the scaly bark hickory trees, since their nuts had a better flavor.  She would crack those nuts and use their meats in cakes that were similar to pound cakes.  Very good!
Daddy always gathered sacks of black walnuts from the fine black walnut trees on the land on Thacker's Creek.  Mama cracked their hard shells with a hammer, picked out their meats, and used them in candied sweet potatoes, her sweet potato custards, cakes, and candies.  Even today, black walnuts taste like home.     

Mud Pies

My interest in cooking started early. When I was about 4 or 5 I started making mud pies. The mud pies came about because of that little rusty tea set I had. It was made of tin and was all rusted through. I didn't want to just drink water out of my tea set. I wanted to have some other food so I made mud pies and I knew to make them good they needed eggs. So I started going down to the chicken house and getting an egg and mixing it into my mud pies. Until my momma, like any good farm wife, knew how many eggs the chickens were supposed to lay every day, started watching what happened to them and put a stop to my mud pies with eggs.