Weinie
Posted on 09/18/2006 10:29:02 PM PDT by DollyCali
Your're welcome!
& Thank you for sharing.
Keep 'em comin'!
You're welcome. I am glad you enjoyed the song. I really love his music and this one seemed so fitting!
I remember going to downtown Houston with my parents the day WWII ended. People were in the streets and others were throwing confetti out of windows.
I remember my first rubber ball--hardly bounced--and playing jacks with rocks and a golf ball because we didn't know what a rubber ball was.
I remember candy packaged in cardboard tanks and watching home movies when there were black-outs.
Uh, oh! I remember all that better than what I did yesterday!!
I drift in and out of sleep as Mama mixes the biscuit dough in the large wooden bowl before turning it out onto the floured biscuit board, where she punches and kneads until the dough is just right for rolling and cutting. I hear the oven door slam. That is my signal to get up and dress, and make my way out of the back door and down the path to the outhouse. If I'm lucky Buster, the huge white rooster will not see me. If he sees me, he will chase me all the way back to the house. I am a pretty fast runner.
By the time I fill the wash basin from the water bucket on the back porch, and make a pretense at washing my face and hands, breakfast is on the table. Smoked Tenn. ham slabs, eggs, grits, red-eye gravy, homemade jam and those wonderful biscuits hot from the oven.
After breakfast, Papa goes to the barn to milk while Mama washes the dishes in a dishpan set on the stove. The resavoir provides hot water for rinsing. I help by drying the dishes with a dishcloth made from a flour sack.
The dress I am wearing is made from a printed feed sack, and my feet are bare, as befits a child on summer vacation. When the dishes are done, I am free to go help Papa at the barn. He finishes the milking by hand and we go back to the house where he strains the milk through a clean cloth and puts it in the root cellar where it will separate. The cream will rise to the top where it will be skimmed off and churned into butter by hand, using the wooden dasher in a crock churn.
Papa and I go back to the barn where he hitches the two horses to the plow. He lets me ride one of them down to the corn field. As he plows the ground, I walk the furrows behind him, sometimes picking up worms in the hopes of talking him into taking me fishing later. When I grow tired he puts me on the plow where I ride until the dinner bell rings from the back yard.
Dinner (not lunch) consists of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans or fried Okra, tomatoes, cornbread, and Blackberry Cobbler. Now I am expected to help with the dishes again and my day in the field has ended. For the rest of the day I am required to stay with Mama and learn. She teaches me how to embrodery and quilt, but not until the floors have been scrubbed and all the plants watered. By 3:00 p.m. we have completed the major work for the day, and we go to the front porch where I love to swing in the wooden porch swing. When I grow tired of swinging, I go out and climb the large Maple tree in the front yard. I climb as high as the limbs go and I sit in the last fork and sway in the wind. Up there I am sure that Heaven must be like this.
As dusk comes, Papa comes in from the field and washes up. Mama puts me in the washtub on the back porch and scrubs all the dirt off that I've accumulated from my day. We eat a light supper of leftovers, or just buttermilk with cornbread crumbled in it and sweetened with sugar. Then we retire to the front porch to enjoy the cool of the evening. I sit on Papa's knee and he tells me stories of the "olden" days when he was a boy. He tells of the time he had to kill a bear and all he had was a rusty ole spoon handle, or the time he was riding home on his trusty steed and was passing a graveyard and a ghost followed him. When the Lightening Bugs started twinkling, I go get a jar and start filling it with bugs. Later, as I lie on my pallet, the tree frogs and Chicadas raise a chorus fit for any king, and I drift off to sleep as the Lightening Bugs provide the only light in the room, the lamps long since having been blown out. It was a good day.
Weinie
Another keeper Bob. I will soon have a book full. Your poetry always makes me cry because it is so "real".
I was trying not to think about that Weinie. That is why I can't come here lately. It is too painful.
Wow! What an awesome narrative! of your home life growing up...
Like a page right out of The Little House On The Prarie books!
Only not as early of a time line.
Laura Ingalls...Wilder wrote of similar stuff.
Hi dutchess. take care of yourself and get some sleep.
Try to remember,Time For Beanie with Cecil the Sea Sick Sea Serpent.
Rural Tenn. life when I was a child was no different from Laura Ingalls'. No electric, no running water, no indoor plumbing. It was very primitive and it was the Great Depression, which was worse in the South because we were still recovering from the Civil War. I wish every American could experience that kind of life. It would be a better country for it.
A wonderful narrative!
I grew up with much of that scenario. The outhouse, coal-oil lamps, a woodstove in the kitchen, and bathing in a big washtub.
I had a favorite oak tree. Its limbs hung down so that an enterprising boy could clamber up to a gnarly set of crossing limbs that suggested a throne to me.
I sat up in my throne and watched over my world.
That tree is still there. Climbing takes a bit more effort.
When electricity came to us, it came in the middle of the room. We tapped into that magic with a cord hanging from the ceiling light. Mom used her electric iron, with the ironing board set up directly under the light.
We had a pitcher pump out in the yard over a shallow well. In the Winter we had to thaw the pump before we could draw water.
The shingles on our house were just like the shingles on the roof, except they were a different shape.
We tended to the animals, and they provided for us in their turn.
And it was all here. Right here in this house that has seen so many changes.
I was born over there. I guess I haven't gotten very far in this life ... yet.
Thanks Maj! :)
My first encounter with electricity came with WWII. I was 9 when we moved to the "big" city of Huntsville, Ala. where my Dad was assigned to work at a chemical plant. We left my grandparents behind. They were the keepers of the homestead where so many of my childhood memories dwell. My father was a chemistry teacher, so was drafted for war work. The new home in the city had electric, running water and indoor plumbing. I was amazed. Thought we had become very rich, though the house was a small two-bedroom, one bath row-house. Modernity had come to our life along with the big war.
Sorry, I must sign off. Had hoped to have more time tonight, but with company going to bed next to my office, I had best close down. God bless all.
It's Howdy Doody time....it's Howdy doody time..that's all I can remember of the tune ;)
we are all just too busy, aren't we? thanks for saying "hi"..
Great stuff!
I am a child of the 60's.
The saying is "If you can remember the 60's you weren't really there", but I remember almost everything that was here in the first few post.
(Howdy Doody was a little before my time).
Wow, thinking back on it all, it brought a tear to the eye of this mean-spirited redneck. ;)
I wish I could show my kids just one day out of my childhood summer.
I remember when most men wore ties and quite a few still wore hats, every day.
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