When I was a child my grandmother, who lived with us, thought she had to have a cow because she had always had one. The winters were very cold, and when my mother gave her an old fur coat, she decided to wear it to the barn to milk Rosie. When my grandmother appeared in the barn one frosty morning, the normally gentle Rosie panicked and knocked her down trying to escape from the large furry beast. We had to take Grandmother to the doctor to have her head stitched up. The wonderfully warm fur coat ended up in the trash.
Soft clouds of dust puff up from under my feet as I run down the path to see where they are making molasses. I run around the boys who have drawn a circle in the warm summer dirt to play a game of marbles. This is an exciting day in Kessinger. All the kids have gathered to watch the mule patiently walking in a circle to turn the press that squeezes the juice from the sugar cane. It takes all day to boil the juice until it turns into thick warm molasses. Workers skim the foam that forms on the top of the boiling juice and ladel it into an old dented pan. An old man carves a spoon from the hollow sugarcane for me to dip the sweet foam onto the biscuit that I have brought from home. As I took the last bite I felt something crunchy in my mouth. I pulled it out and it was a grasshopper bleached white from the hours of boiling in the molasses.
Boxes and cans were stacked on the shelves up to the ceiling. Bailey and Grace were much too large to climb ladders-their total combined weight must have been 700 lbs. They had a broomstick with a nail pounded into the end, and they would catch the nail under the rim of the can or spear the box. My Rice Crispies always had a hole in the box.
We bought coarse salt from another keg. It was scooped out and weighed. The thoughts of a tomato hot from the garden sun dipped in coarse salt still makes my mouth water.
So now I send this by email from Virginia to my daughter in Ohio to be posted on the Web.
Attached to the store was a feed room with stacks of bags of feed for cows, chickens, or pigs. The bags were made of heavy fabric died with bright prints. My grandmother was going to make me a new skirt, so I went to pick out the bags I wanted. It took two bags to make one skirt, but the print I wanted was on one bag of chicken feed and one bag of pig feed. So the chickens ate pig feed one winter, but I loved my maroon flowered skirt that flared out so nicely when it was starched stiffly. I wore that skirt a long time. I kept growing but the styles were getting shorter and shorter and I didn't get any bigger around just longer and longer.
My cousin Jo Ann visited one summer. I thought she was incredibly worldly because she had lived in Japan. We bought ice cream cones from the grocery. I got chocolate and Jo Ann strawberry. Jo Ann's cone had a fly in it so she complained and they gave her a second cone. Jo Ann dipped out the fly and ate both cones.
The grocery was truly a general store. You could order a sandwich, and they would slice thick slices of bologna and cheese or spear the end of the pickle dog (pickled sausage) coiled in a gallon jar on the counter. It was served on white bread with a Moon Pie and RC.
The back room was filled with blue jeans, shoes, bolts of cloth, and a case of brightly colored thread. If you bought fabric, Grace would cut the dress out for you without a pattern. She just judged your size by looking. My grandmother would never allow that. She cut her own patterns from clothing that we had ordered from the Sears catalog. She just made them a little larger.
A work in progress