Photo: "This is my daughter, Eva "Sassy." She was about 5-6 years old in this photo. She loves to play in the mud!” LeeAnn (and Todd) Garrison of Mt. Hope
Growing up, I had the best of both worlds. I had city grandparents and country grandparents. We lived just a few blocks from everything in town; the school where I went backed up to my grandparent’s garden, I went there for lunch every single day. The Piggly Wiggly was just across the street from where I lived, and best of all, the library was two short blocks away.
My country grandparents lived about seven miles outside town, on a farm that I thought must have been utopia. There were always kittens in the barn loft, cousins with which to have corn cob fights, make mud pies with and race around the house all day playing cowboys and Indians, or Red Rover, or Steal the Flag, or whatever pretend games came to mind.
You could be a kid in the country. In the city you had to be a ‘little lady.’
My grandmothers were very different. One had lace doilies all over everything lest someone touch it with sticky hands. The other had hand me down furniture that you could sit on without such guilt.
My city grandmother’s garden was amazing…grape vines, strawberries, corn, squash, cucumbers and all kinds of beans and peas. Everything she touched magically grew into food that was served at the big round oak table in fancy matching dishes with pretty flowers. Her biscuits were so light that we had to eat them fast to keep them from floating away and she made the best pound cake in the state of Alabama. She was a perfectionist who could sew, cook and garden, and she read a lot. Her favorite saying was, “I’d rather have cobwebs in my house than in my head.”
My country grandmother grew up right across the road from the place she moved to when she got married. She literally married the boy next door, and together, they had 11 children, 26 grandchildren, 42 great-grandchildren and no telling how many great-great grandchildren.
She had the special knack of making each one of us feel the most beloved. To this day, there isn’t one of us who doesn’t think that she loved us the best. I can tell you right now that it was me, but so can my 41 first cousins, and our children. She just had that gift…
She worked a garden that fed all those people, plus what she gave to visitors and took to church suppers and dinners on the grounds. When I was little there was no indoor plumbing, so I’m very familiar with outhouses, and taking baths in tin tubs on the long screened-in back porch where there was a freezer longer, deeper and wider than any casket you’ve ever seen. She kept it full of vegetables and fruits, plus she stocked shelves with canned vegetables in the storm house nearby. Meat was hung in a smokehouse for longer than we would think sanitary now, but no one ever got sick from eating it.
Fruit from their trees was cut up, then we kids had the chore of putting all those little chunks of apples on top of the tin-roofed barn. When I think of the flies and birds that must have flown over that barn, I shudder, but no one ever thought anything about it back then, and no one ever turned down one of her fried pies because of it.
Their water came from a well filled with sulfur. It was as awful as it sounds. And it stunk to high heaven. Rotten eggs would have been perfume compared to that water. But with it, she made the best sweet tea that has ever been served anywhere in the nation. She could wring a chicken’s neck in record time, and after it ran around a while looking for its head, she would pick it up, dust it off on her apron and turn it into something that would be the envy of chef’s everywhere.
One of the best things about being in the country is that a kid could get dirty. In the city you have to keep up appearances, no telling who might come to the door! Preachers, neighbors, delivery boys or whoever, you always had to be clean. Not just clean, spotless.
In the country, they made you play outside all day long and thought they were punishing you. It didn’t matter how dirty you got, no one scolded you for it, they just dunked you all in the same big tin tub at the end of the day and put you to bed.
None of us ever got sick from being dirty, either. People who scrub their kids to a farethewell have no clue what they are depriving them of. I think it probably takes a little dirt to make a child grow into a well-adjusted adult, that’s the beauty of being a country kid. You may well learn which fork to eat with in town, but in the country, you can just be a kid…
