A Few More Memories

After writing my silly poem about the outhouse I started thinking about a lot of other things from back in those days on Highway 81. We had some indoor plumbing before moving in. The well had been dug and there was water inside the kitchen. With 4 kids already that was necessary. There was another little house closer to the back door – the well house. It had shelves inside where Mom stored her canned goods. Those shelves were always overfilled by the end of the growing season.

We lived with our maternal grandparents while the house was being built. I think almost all of my aunts and uncles lived with the grandparents at one time or another. I slept in the room with my two aunts while two of my brothers slept in one of the other rooms that were unoccupied at the time. All the bedrooms were upstairs, except my grandparents room. They didn’t have indoor plumbing at all. There was a well where they drew the water needed for drinking and cooking, while we used rainwater, caught in barrels placed under every downspout for bathing and washing our hair. I sometimes wish I still had some of that rainwater for shampooing. It left our hair so soft and manageable, although today I seriously doubt it would work. With all of the pollution it might melt the hair off our heads.

There was a hay barn behind our house, filled with hay and belonging to the uncle who sold dad the 5 acres across the pasture from the grandparents, and at the edge of his farm. My older brother had sneaked downstairs one night while the house was being built and watched Dad showing the adults how the cinder blocks the house was being built of wouldn’t burn. He lit a match and set it on the side of the block and they watched while it went out without burning the block.

A week or so after we moved into the house my brother, who had been entrusted with a couple of matches to burn the trash with took me into the barn to show me how the blocks wouldn’t burn. Naturally he had to add a bit more to the block, so just inside the barn he stuffed the holes in the block with hay before lighting his remaining match and applying it to the block. After the inevitable happened and the fire jumped across to the loose hay in the barn he pulled me out and we hid in the chicken house. I think one of the neighbors called the fire department while others held Mom back when she tried to run into the barn looking for us. All the neighbors rushed in and formed a bucket line to attempt to save the barn, but by the time the fire trucks arrived all they could do was keep it from spreading to the house. Time has dulled the memory of what happened after we came out of the chicken house, but I can remember the usual punishments and imagine that one was the worst ever.

I can vividly remember my uncle standing in the ruins the next morning, shaking his head as he surveyed the ruins of his barn. He had quite a great sense of humor though and laughed it off but he had intended to tear it down anyway after removing the hay so maybe he saw it as saving him that trouble. I never asked and of course, being 4 years old no one ever told me since back then kids didn’t question adults — with the usual “why”? that kids today still ask.

I can remember that Dad and my uncles still living at home dug a trench across the pasture and ran water from our well to my grandparents house during our second summer there. While they still saved the rainwater they put a concrete slab across the well at that time to keep the grandkids from falling in, or more likely tossing the cats in to see if they could swim. Only one cousin did that, but we all learned that while the cat could swim it couldn’t climb the walls of that well.

Right now I’m trying to write down all of my memories of those slower times way back when. I don’t know that my children or grandchildren will ever care enough to read about a slower life style without the electronics they have grown up with. Well, the grands grew up with them. My three grew up in the country on the other side of town where we had indoor plumbing, but the old outhouse still stood, leaning with age, in the pasture behind our pre-Civil War farmhouse, complete with a buggy house that had an upstairs room, a smoke house, and a couple of barns behind it. But that’s for another time, another story.

Back to highway 81T

Once again in my memory I am back at that white stucco house just down the road from my grandparents and it is Christmas Eve. The baking and candy making is finished, we have prayed the rosary while trying to remain awake until it is over, and most of us are in bed. And the memories begin.

A week or so before Christmas dad would load us all in the old ’39 Ford and we would go out to the backroads in search of the perfect tree. It was always a cedar and that is the smell I most associate with Christmas. The cedars grew wild around the creek and dad knew every back road in the county. We would stop several times to check out the stands of cedars we passed, usually finding something wrong with them all in the beginning. After a while we were feeling the effects of an overpacked car and weren’t so critical. Mom always had the last word on them but we all piled out to stretch and give opinions. Dad would cut the winner down and tie it on top of the old car and we piled in again. we each had our own place with T. up front between Mom and Dad, I would be lying in the recessed area where the back window met the trunk, and the rest were elbowing each other for more space in the back seat.

Back at home the tree was taken down and carried into the enclosed back porch to be put in the tree stand we had used from the beginning of time, a large pan would be filled with water and the tree placed carefully into that pan to drink it’s fill. Mother would already have the ornaments and tinsel out *{we called them icicles}. Dad would then check the lights to see which ones needed replacing before stringing them on the tree. It was always the same, the lights first, then the ornaments placed carefully on appropriate branches, then always be moved to different areas by Mother who had strict rules about trimming a tree. Small ornaments on the flimsy top and heavier ones at the bottom. Then each icicle was separated from the rest and carefully put in their places until the tree was just about perfect. Cedars, not being very large here drooped if too much heavy stuff was at the top and since we all had our favorites.= in place. The icicles, used each year until they were too old to care about, had been taken off the year before, one at a time of course, and carefully draped across a piece of cardboard mother had salvaged and it was a simple matter to place them on the tree separately. It paid off in the rippling effect on our windows.

The lights always looked enormous to me with a glow radiating out of each one until they ran together in their beauty. For me they ran together a little bit more each year. I don’t know how old I was when my vision began blurring but it seemed so natural that none of us ever really noticed it. One of my teacher finally realized something was wrong when she would write test questions out on the blackboard and we would copy the questions and then answer them on our paper. She told Mother that I was getting the answers right, but I was not getting the questions she wrote on the board correct. I did get credit for the answers, but I also got an appointment with the optometrist. He told Mother he was surprised I hadn’t been hit by a bus because I couldn’t see the tip of my nose clearly. So just before Christmas when I was in 8th grade I got my first pair of glasses. It made a huge difference, but the lights on the tree just weren’t as pretty. So, to this day I remove my glasses when I am looking at the lights and marvel at how beautiful they are, all those radiant globes with the rays running together.

But I digress. After the tree was trimmed we had eggnog and cookies before being sent to bed. Of course as we got older our bedtimes were later and sometimes we even helped Santa place the gifts under the tree. None of them were wrapped in those days, but each child had a mound of items of our own. And we always got an orange, an apple and a banana, things that weren’t on our menu very often.

As we got older we would go to Midnight Mass, something I always loved to do. I sang in the choir and usually one or more of my brothers would be the servers. Mass in those days was in Latin, and I think we all learned the English translation of the comforting old prayers. Home from Mass we were each treated to a small glass of wine. Mogan David wine to be exact. It was a long time before I discovered that there were much better wines in this world, but not being much of a wine drinker I didn’t get the same thrill from sampling new and different vintages the rest of the grown family enjoyed. To me Champaign tastes like stale beer..

Morning came early when the younger children woke us all (okay, so for a few years I was one of them), and we would then gather in the living room to see what Santa left for us.

Dinner would be in the oven, usually a fat hen from our henhouse, and Mother’s dressing, made from biscuits we baked for breakfast that morning. She knew just how to season it and it is still one of my favorite things. I learned how to make dumplings a few years later and would always make a huge bowl of them, huge in spite of the fact that all of the boys were vying for first in line as official taste testers. Mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, peas, cranberry sauce, fruit salad and the brown and serve rolls Mom made only for special occasions rounded out the meal with jam cake for dessert in the beginning, then the applesauce cake I had found a recipe for, and finally the orange slice cake mother got a recipe from someone for.\

And now that I have done the menu I’m beginning to want something to eat! So, even though it’s late at night I’m about to raid the fridge and then hit the sack! And here in my part of Kentucky, it is 11:30 p.m. so in half an hour it will officially be Christmas in Owensboro and surrounding areas.

Merry Christmas, everyone!