Home Grown

« My Cousin Wasn't Vinny | Main | Not Pretty Pictures »

June 13, 2005

Childhood Revisited

I have been tagged by Missus Judy over at Just Ask Judy to complete this meme of childhood memories.

The rules:
Remove the blog at #1 from the following list and bump everyone up one place; add your blog's name in the #5 spot. You need to link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross-pollination of your chosen blogs.

1. Soliloquy http://nbond.blogspot.com
2. Lyvvie's Limelight http://lyvvielimelight.blogspot.com
3. The Cerebral Outpost http://thecerebraloutpost.blogspot.com
4. JustaskJudy http://justaskjudy.blogspot.com
5. Home Grown http://www.bigredcouch.com/journal/

Next: select four new friends to add to the pollen count.

No one is obligated to participate. I'd love to see what these people have to say about it:

1. Mistress Mary - http://mistressmary.typepad.com/my_weblog/
2. Kate - http://www.adailydoseofpower.blogspot.com/
3. MommaK - http://petroville.blogspot.com/
4. Susie Sunshine - http://underpaidkeptwoman.blogspot.com/

I would have chosen Flat at The Complete Flat but he is killing meme's. The man has excellent stories of his childhood.

Now, please write about five things you miss from childhood.

1. Summer meant being free from school. It also meant that there was a large period of time in which I could go stay with my grandmother. My grandparents did not have air conditioning and the days in her big old house were hot. Her kitchen was humid by midday. She always started the big part of her daily dinner in the very early morning when the air was cool so as to have time for it to cool down before finishing up and putting the meal on the table. I was always in charge of making a tossed salad. She and I were the only ones who ate it. I never saw my grandfather eat one bite of salad. She would say, "Put everything in it. I like it with plenty of things mixed in." So in went the lettuce and tomato, cucumber and radishes, little green spring onions or chopped red onion, bell peppers, green and/or red. Whatever was in her refrigerator. Salad was always eaten with Thousand Island dressing. I was a teenager and spent the night with a friend before I knew there was any other kind of salad dressing.

She passed away last September, I can never go back to those days when I would pick up the phone and call her, saying, "You know the (insert food item here) you made when we were kids? How do I make that?" Her recipe would never have measurements. It was all trial and error judging a scoop of this or a nice handful of that. Liquid was hard because she would say add just enough so that it looks like .... whatever, oatmeal, cornbread mix, dough, thick grits, syrup. I always managed. No one has the recipes of grandmother like I have. My momma has some but not the quantity that I have. Most are metally filed away. Many times I use this journal to chronicle the things she taught me.

2. Miss Rachel was the wife of one of my step-father's friends, Mr. Luther. They lived in the older, quiet, upper crust section of Augusta, Ga. When I wasn't with my grandmother, I was at their house with their daughter, Ann, who was 1 year older than I. I would stay a week at the time and then Ann would come to our house and stay a week with us. In Miss Rachel's kitchen I learned about streak-o-lean and the very best vegetable soup that could be made from summer garden produce. The ultimate creamed corn came from her hands. I was 13 years old and she let me take over her kitchen while she observed and directed in her patient manner. I miss Miss Rachel, Mr. Luther and Ann. Miss Rachel passed away a few years ago. Mr. Luther passed away a few years before her. Ann died when her brother-in-law lost it all and went bizzerk and shot them all after finding his wife was cheating on him for the hundredth time. It was a very sad demise to wondeful people who made my childhood better than it should have been.

3. I miss the innocence of childhood when money meant relatively nothing. We were not poor and we were not rich but we didn't really know the difference. After my mother remarried we lived a very simple life. I do not miss the things that happened in those first years. What I miss is the ignorance of youth. Not being able to put 2 and 2 together and seeing the picture of the life we had. Itg many ways it sad and cruel. I try not to linger on the bad and that makes the good even more sparkling clean.

4. When my mother remarried we moved away from my grandparents house. That move meant I would never get to spend another night with my great grandmother. In her kitchen that did not have running water and we pumped it into buckets from a hand pump I learned about cooking peas, butterbeans and eating them with red sliced tomatoes all washed down with a 6oz. bottle of coke. The real thing. I do not miss how mean my cousin was to me when grandma took a nap every afternoon. She would go inside on the pretence of getting something and then when grandma was asleep she would lock me out of the house. I was left to sit on the steps until grandma woke up and got to looking for me. I think she was jealous of having to share grandma. She lived with grandma, not with her mother. Unless I was around it was only her and grandma and she always got her way. Things were different at grandma's house. Everything was done the old fashioned way. No indoor plumbing, no running water, chickens that had to be fed and eggs collected. I can close my eyes and see the tiny white and green house and hear the chickens calling in the morning. My grandma died the year my oldest daughter was born. She only saw her great great grandchild a few times. I have one photo of 5 generations of our family all together. (Please note grandma in this paragraph is in reference to my great grandmother. I called my mother's mother and my grandfather's mother both "Grandma". Everyone knew which one you were speaking of at the moment and there was no confusion.)

5. I miss running barefoot through fields and playing in the creek below our house in Ga. The water was ice cold and cooled you down really quick. I remember being so cold playing in the water and by the time we walked the half mile back home we were so hot and sweaty we would turn around and go back. The creek banks was nothing but red Georgia clay. One time my uncle, 3 1/2 yrs older than I, was down for the summer. We played in the mud and ended up having a mud fight. It was in our hair, ground into our clothes and streaked up and down our arms and legs. Momma made us wash under the hose pipe in the yard when we went home. Then she had to bleach us to get the red stain out of our skin. It did not all bleach out. We looked like our indian ancestors for about a week. Oh, my momma was mad. Mad as a wet setting hen. We didn't get to go to town with her at all while we were stained. It was one of the best summers ever. We would pick our shirt tales full of hogplums. We also would walk across the fields to old Mr. Corley's plain white farm house and he would send us home with a big watermelon. You should have seen the two of us each trying to carry a watermelon nearly as big and as heavy as we were. Those were the days of real innocence. Momma would put the melon in the refrigerator or set it down in the freezer for a couple hours to get it cold. After supper we would sit outside and eat huge slices of watermelon with salt. There were never left overs. Momma hated watermelon in the refrigerator after it was cut. Not only did it leak juice but it gave everything the taste of melon. We ate ourselves silly on red ripe watermelons nearly every evening.

It seem like most of my childhood memories are closely tied to food. Especially cooking. I guess that is because in the era I grew up in eating was a social event and almost everything was prepared from scratch, not boxes and frozen bags. We started the day together at the breakfast table. In those days there was always at the minimum 7 people eating together. Everyone was also expected to be at the supper table, no excuses. It was a time of the day we looked forward too. We didn't get snacks in the day. We only ate at mealtimes, so yes, we were hungry, but it was the time when we were all together and bowed our head in prayer together. I still require the same now. Everyone sits at the table together. We talk about the day. The kids laugh and tease. Steven is terrible about doing gross things at supper to make the kids laugh. Things have even fallen as low as noodles being flung across the table. We are making memories by the ton.

Posted by Angie at June 13, 2005 07:12 PM

Comments

Posted by: MistressMary at June 13, 2005 07:29 PM

Posted by: kenju at June 13, 2005 08:27 PM

Posted by: Hope at June 13, 2005 09:12 PM

Posted by: Mommak at June 14, 2005 07:51 AM

Posted by: kenju at June 14, 2005 08:00 AM

Posted by: J&J's Mom at June 14, 2005 08:42 AM

Posted by: J&J's Mom at June 14, 2005 08:44 AM

Posted by: Old Horsetail Snake at June 14, 2005 10:04 AM

Posted by: Dave Morris at June 14, 2005 10:37 AM

Posted by: Raehan at June 14, 2005 08:24 PM

Posted by: MistressMary at June 14, 2005 08:38 PM

Posted by: MommaK at June 14, 2005 09:50 PM