I changed my Facebook Cover photo today using the photo above, and the childhood memories just started flooding back. We had so many trees in our yard and it was a huge job, raking those leaves into the road and burning them. Oh, what fun though, burrowing in the piles, and the smell of those burning leaves was magic. Since I was an only child and we lived in the country there were no kids to play with, so my playmates were dogs and cats. The dogs would run through the leaves with me, I can still see it all in my mind.
Fall was such a busy time at our house. I’ve blogged before how mother and I would trudge through the muddy popcorn fields in our rubber “galoshes," dragging a tow sack which we would fill with popcorn that was left in the field after the combine had picked the corn. Sometimes the mud was so deep it would suck the boots right off my feet and I would be left with wet socks to stuff back in them. We would spend evenings in front of a coal stove, shucking that corn and emptying it into quart Ball jars to store for the winter.
Late in the fall we would go to the pecan groves, where tractors would bump the trees so the pecans would fall and we would gather coal buckets full of nuts to be weighed and paid for. We also gathered black walnuts, messy nuts whose hulls would stain our hands and my favorite hickory nuts. Hickory nuts were so hard to crack, and it took many hours to pick the nuts from the shells. We would gather sticky persimmons to make persimmon pudding, always picked after the first frost, they were bitter if you didn’t wait and we would crack open the kernels because we believed persimmons predicted the winter weather.
If the kernel was spoon-shaped, you could expect plenty of snow to shovel. If it was fork-shaped, plan on a mild winter with powdery, light snow. If the kernel was knife-shaped, expect frigid winds that “cut” like a blade.
By mid-November the temperatures were cold in Southern Illinois and my uncles would butcher hogs. Sometimes we had our own pig that we raised to butcher, other times they would give us hams and bacon. Mother would sugar cure them with salt, brown sugar, spices and pepper, and hang them in a gunny sack from the rafters of our outbuilding. We hung them so that the mice wouldn’t get to them. I never cared for the cured meat, the flavor was too salty and strong for a little girl, but I spent many nights, racing to the outbuilding in the dark to retrieve those hams for mother to slice off pieces with a butcher knife and fry in an iron skillet for dinner..
At Thanksgiving she would make a hickory nut cake. I have so many of her recipes but that one escaped me. She also made black walnut divinity, always on a dry sunny day, for Christmas and she would store it in tins that she saved year after year.
She always made a fruitcake the week after Thanksgiving, chocked full of candied fruits and our pecans that we had shelled. She baked it in an angel food pan and would put it in a tin with a wine soaked dishtowel surrounding it and a brandy soaked towel in the center so it could age for Christmas. I never liked them as a child, and she would only give me small very thin slices because they did have alcohol after all and I never liked the taste. I probably would think they were wonderful now.
Fall always brought a new load of coal to be stored in the coal house for our winter heat. I wish I still had her old receipts, it would be interesting to see how much it cost. Coal was sold by the ton and we would get a couple of tons to last us through the winter. The delivery man would dump it in the driveway and we had to carry bucket after bucket to the back coal shed. The house was always cold when we got home in the evening, mother would fill the coal buckets to build a fire and It was always my job to empty the ashes in the driveway ruts to help us keep from getting the car stuck. We lived on a road that wasn’t graveled, so getting our car stuck in the mud was something that occurred on a regular basis.
We always put plastic on our windows to keep out the winter cold, usually nailing it on the windows on a cold blustery Saturday and it was a big job to unroll the plastic and cut it to fit the windows. The walls of our house weren’t insulated, only the attic, so it was always really hard to keep it warm. She always made me new flannel pajamas with big buttons in the fall and I slept on a feather bed piled high with quilts. Looking back I wonder how she managed to do all of that. She worked from 8-5 at the drug store five days a week, Daddy didn’t live with us, he worked in Northern Illinois, so it was just a woman and a little girl, doing the best they could with absolutely no luxuries at all and nobody to help them. No bathroom or running water, for years we didn’t have a pump, just a well and a bucket, but we managed and I have happy memories of my childhood.
I didn’t have a mother that played with me, I don’t ever remember her playing board games or reading to me. She had no time, she was always working because she had to do all of the chores herself. There was no television in our house until I was twelve years old, I listened to the radio in the evenings and played the piano (badly). I was always an avid reader, probably more so because there wasn’t that much to do in the country in the cold weather. No neighbors to talk to, no kids to play with, but if it’s all I knew, and it was okay. I’ve always admired mother for all the hard work she did. She didn’t complain or feel sorry for herself, and she worked from early morning until bedtime to make a home and put food on the table. She really was a strong woman.
The older I get the more nostalgic I am. My childhood stories are of a difficult life, but it wasn’t a sad life, I was a happy child, I was fed, clothed and loved and I was grateful for the things I had and proud of the accomplishments of daily living. I miss those days and go back often in my mind. Some of this you may have read some of this before, as I’ve talked about my childhood in my blog quite a bit through the years, but it’s always good to reminisce, to once again remember the way it was and to be reminded of how lucky I am to have the life that I have now...
