APPALACHIAN-LIFE-L Archives
Archiver > APPALACHIAN-LIFE > 2004-12 > 1104099728
From: (paul)
Subject: Re: [AppalLife] The weather is simply frightful.....
Date: Sun, 26 Dec 2004 17:22:08 -0500
In-Reply-To: "charles friedly" <mfriedly@adelphia.net>'s message of Sun, 26 Dec 2004 15:14:54 -0500
Back home in the 30's, my Mom told us about "Old Christmas"..it was on
January 6th, and it was an old tale that animals could, and would talk
if you caught them at the right time(about midnight)....Now, we had an
old cow in the barn, and Mom and 3 of us kids decided we would go to the
barn to see if our cow would speak to us, so we took the old kerosene
lamp..
(we did not know what a flashlight was)
and tiptoed into the barn..it was getting close to midnight, and we all
stood around, gazing at the old cow...she started to get down on her
knees, and she sorta' opened her mouth a little, and someone said "She
is going to pray!"
..we panicked, and started to run out of the barn, and my brother
dropped the lamp and set the hay on fire, and we had a hard time putting
the fire out...later, we realized that all cows get down on their knees
when they are going to lay down..and we realized how crazy we were...
My Dad would buy a big stick of peppermint candy at Christmas time, and
after out Christmas dinner was finished (which was no greater than our
regular dinners) he would gather us kids around him and take out his
pocket knife and crack each of us a piece of that big peppermint
stick..,,sometimes we would cut a tree and decorate it with colored
loops of paper made into a long length and hang it on the tree...
We had a long kitchen table with an oil-cloth tablecloth..the little
kids sat on a bench on one side of the table, the older kids sat in
chairs on the opposite side, Dad at the head, and Mom at the other end
of the table..Dad would lay his fiddle bow across his lap when we ate,
and if you got out of line, he could reach down across the table and
crack you on the head with it..you had better get what you wanted when
the food bowls were passed, because they never came back around the
second time...now, when one of the older children married, and moved
out, the oldest child on the bench "graduated" to their empty
chair...Mom & Dad both chewed tobacco, and some neighbor boys would
come by, and "bum" Mom for a "chaw" of her tobacco...she did not want to
lie, and say she did not have any tobacco, and she did not have money to
keep her (and them) in tobacco, so she devised a plan.....her apron had
2 pockets, so she named one of the pockets
"the world"...then she kept her tobacco in the OTHER pocket, and when
those boys would ask for a chew, she would say, Honey, I dont have a bit
of tobacco in the world.....so she did not tell a lie, as it was not in
"the world" but in the OTHER pocket..I remember Mom having the toothache
real bad, and we did not have money to go to the dentist, and she would
take a chunk of alum and melt it on the top of the cook-stove and place
it on her tooth to help the toothache..times were hard there in Wise Co,
VA and Dad fathered 18 children...he outlived both wives and 3 of his
children..only 3 of us kids left, now..aged 74, 77, and 84 ...as Dolly
Parton says ..those were the good old days when times were bad...
Ole Paul...
keep the mail comin' to Ole Paul
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