Cinderella dressed in yellow
Went to town to see her fellow
How many kisses did she get?
The above is a jump rope ditty that we sang/said before jumping rope. Sometimes Cinderella got a lot of kisses and sometimes not so many. In grades one through six, we always had recess and jump rope was one of our favorite activities. We also played Red Light Green Light, Simon Says, Drop The Handkerchief, and some hand clap/jive that we girls did.
I don’t remember studying that much. I must have because I don’t ever remember missing a spelling word.
The above was an aside. Today, I want to write about living in the country. We lived on a narrow dirt road that at one time was a railroad track. So, you can imagine how narrow that dirt road was. I’d say, about five families lived along that road. Farmland dominated the landscape. There were acres of corn, soybeans, tobacco, wheat…that’s what I remember. When we first moved…there was a pond on the farm but it soon dried up.
There were gullies of crumbly red clay where the pigs were. We would slide down the banks of the gullies and we soon found out that Mama did not appreciate our choice of playground. Red clay stains were impossible to remove from our clothes and I remember getting a switching after playing in the gully. We still did it. It was fun. There were white/pink wild roses at the top of the gully, but nothing grew in the gully. Raw, red earth and, with every rain, the gully would get deeper.
At some point, Dad decided that was a good spot for trash. Over the years, the gully disappeared. I haven’t been to that part of the farm in years. But, on the other side of the fence from the gully, was an orchard of plum trees. Mama made the best plum jam from those plums. There was a barn and a corn crib…the barn was for fattening a hog and the barn loft was for drying peanuts. The corn crib was actually used for storing corn that fed the hogs in the winter. It was also a quiet place to read.
There wasn’t that much traffic on that dirt road. Every so often, someone would shoot up the mailbox. Dad would replace it and check his gun that I think was a souvenir from his stint in the Army during WWII. I don’t know if the G’s were living on that road when we moved there. I know, by the sixth grade, they lived about a half-mile down the road. They moved and the C’s moved in. A half-mile along a dirt road is a long way, so we rarely interacted.
We attended a Baptist Church located on what I call the main road…N Road. I’m probably saying it was a main road because it was supposedly two-laned and paved. Most of the Blacks lived along that road. The B’s had a large farm. The Mo’s lived in a converted army barracks. The H’s had a small house and there were some other homes near the church. Mrs. T lived down the road a piece. We sometimes gave her a ride to church. She grew eggplants and always gave us some. She lived to be over a hundred and she always had a treat for us.
This was the sixties and you still had Blacks living on white owned farms in shacks. By the end of the 1960’s, most of the Blacks had moved from those farms and built homes in the community.
I will not say that much about a little country church except that my father was a deacon/other titles as there were only three, maybe four deacons in the church. We were regular churchgoers. My older brother and sister were ushers and one of my younger brothers and me sang in the junior choir. I don’t know what my youngest brother did. As I was saying, we were regulars until the pastor decided to build a sermon around my mother wearing a pair of my father’s pants under her dress on a bitterly cold Sunday. Picture this, we were the first at the church. The first people at the church had to build a fire in the woodburning stove. So, until the stove heated up the church, it was very, very, very cold. So when the pastor arrived the church was still warming up and he took offense that my mother had on pants and actually preached about it. My mother never attended church on a regular basis after that and neither did we. My father did. We stayed home with Mama.
We always went to church on Homecoming. Mrs. B had the best fried chicken. Sometimes, not often, there wasn’t enough food and we had to wait until we got home to eat. At church, we might get a chicken leg with a slice of white bread to tide us over.
We would visit my mother’s parents on Sundays after church. Back then, there was a lot of Sunday visiting. I suppose heat is heat, but the breeze from a box fan would be the utmost in cool and now a fan just seems to move around hot air. I remember one rainy Sunday being wrapped in a raincoat? and my father carrying me into my grandparents house. I guess he went back for each of us. Waiting for the rain to stop or abate wasn’t much of an option in a 1957 Chevy with five children under the age of ten.
We always went to the cemetery in A’ville on Memorial Day. Back then, it had character. One could landscape one’s plot. There was a plot with a fence. It was the only one and it had shrubs and flowers. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that Dad landscaped the family plot and he made sure all the graves were marked.
I read a lot…the encyclopedia, the dictionary, the Bible, my parents’ old college textbooks. You get the picture. I had a library card when I was ten or so. I would leave the library with a stack of books. Some way beyond my comprehension. I liked gothic romances and detective stories. I read a lot of fifties era young adult books. I must have been nine or ten when Mama gave me a Trixie Belden book for Christmas. I saved my money to buy those books. They only cost a couple of dollars. Harvey’s, a Nashville based department store was located in the same shopping center as Montgomery Ward‘s and Roses, sometime carried them. I still have those books. I never liked Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. That might have something to do with the setting. Trixie Belden books were in a rural setting and Nancy Drew books were in an urban setting.
You’d think on a dusty country road there would be a lot of animals. But deer were scarce. They’d been hunted until few were left. They have since come roaring back. I never saw a fox. My mother had a fox stole and that was the extent of my knowledge about foxes.
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