Spring
| Summer | Fall
| Winter
Spring
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2 | 3
| 4 | 5
Now,
back at the house, before the garden had to be gone over the first
time, the house was cleaned and the quilts sunned. All winter
the best quilts had been stored on the big, deep shelves in the
closet, smelling of moth balls. Now they were all carried down
from up stairs and hung over the clothes lines. Joe and I liked
to run through them but Mama and Aunt Merica didn't approve. A
day when Daddy was home, any everyday quilt that needed washing
was dumped into the outdoor kettle. Wet, it was more than Aunt
Merica and Mama could manage. Neither of these jobs could be done
on Monday, for then the lines were full of wash. In the evening,
before supper was started, all the aired quilts were carried back,
folded and put on the shelves and a liberal supply of new moth
balls tucked in. The washed quilts took days to dry.
All
the lace curtains were taken down and washed, curtains from the
house, the parlor, the dining room, the kitchen, the upstairs
bedrooms, the halls and the outside doors. Some of the curtains
were laid out on the grass and carefully stretched into shape,
but more often they were put an stretchers, a tedious job of pushing
down the edge of the curtain onto the needle sharp pins around
the four sides of the wooden frame.
Rag rugs might get washed. More often they got hung over the clothes
line and beaten. All the furniture got moved; all the beds, straw
ticks, featherbeds or mattresses put out to sun. The old quilts
between the springs and mattresses were washed or sunned. All
the stoves, the one in the house, the parlor, the dining room,
and the bedrooms, were taken down, the stove pipes cleaned out,
the stove and pipes polished, the flu stopper put in place. The
taking down of the stoves, the cleaning out of the pipes, the
storing of the stoves and pipes in closets was Daddy's work. Mama
polished. The snow white, slick plaster walls shown above freshly
cleaned floors. Everything was brought in, smelling so good, and
put back in its rightful place. The house looked so much bigger,
now that the stoves were down.
By
the time all this was done (and it took many days of work), the
garden vegetables were up and thriving. So were the weeds. Early
one morning, Mama and Aunt Merica put on their old clothes, their
old shoes and their bonnets; we all got hoes and set out to go
over the garden. The garden was big, the work was all by hand
with hoe and rake, the morning sun was bright. But no matter,
we worked. Close to the time to start cooking dinner, we stopped,
hot, dirty and tired. We looked like none of the people I saw
pictured in the magazines and seed catalogues, the ones out working
in their gardens in spotless clothes, their hair neat, a bright,
un-tired smile on their faces. We were sights not fit for company.
We took a pan of water to our rooms and after a while, after dinner
was cooked and served, after the kitchen was cleaned and put to
rights, after Mama and Aunt Merica lay down awhile, we were ready
to be ladies, sitting out on the front parch watching the passers-by
and doing handwork.
The peas were filling out; the young beans were hanging in tiny
clusters, the beets were almost ready. We would soon be eating
and canning all these new things. Canning began in the spring,
reached its peak in the summer and tapered off in the fall. The
six hundred or more cans which Mama and Aunt Merica filled during
this time got emptied for our meals during the months when the
garden was not producing.
Before that busy time got underway, Aunt Merica decided to make
soap. The supply had just about been used over the winter and,
likewise, the supply of waste grease had built up. We used the
best side meat grease for things like cornbread, fried potatoes,
fried cabbage, and scalded lettuce. Any fat we didn't want was
saved in a tin in the shed to be used for making soap. With lye
bought at the store, this waste fat was converted into soap in
the old (not the wash) iron kettle out in the back yard, heated
by a fire underneath just as water was heated on washday. Mama
must have considered this combination of lye, grease and fire
too dangerous for me to be around for I have no memory of seeing
the ingredients going into the kettle. Once soap was achieved,
Aunt Merica poured it into trays or strong shoe boxes, cut the
stiff mass into bars and left it in the sun to dry and- cure.
Most of the soap was yellow and strong, but sometimes a special
fat not good for making lard was saved at butchering time. This
made a whiter soap. White or yellow, it was stored in the shed
and there was where I found a new bar for wash day. Mama rubbed
the soap over the wet clothes laid out on the washboard, gathered
the wet mass together in her water wrinkled hands and scrubbed
up and down over the wooden grooves. The strong soap took out
the dirt but in the wash and rinse waters it left an ugly gray
scum.
All
around the house the flowers were blooming. Before going to church
on Mother's Day, Daddy and I and everyone went out into the yard
to find just the right flower to wear. Mama, Joe and I wore colored,
Daddy and Aunt Merica wore white for their mother was dead. On
Decoration Day we cut piles of flowers, enough for all the graves
in our squares and some to put on graves of people whose relatives
no longer lived in the neighborhood. Even cutting so many flowers
did not take everything that was in bloom. Mama, Daddy and especially
Aunt Merica loved flowers. They surrounded the house and garden;
spring was their most glorious time. •
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