MAPLE CREEK MEMORIES XXIII

UP THE BRANCH

Part VII


And speaking of the strawberry patch, this was where, for a time anyway, we tried to grow a garden. Back in the late forties, we were a family of eight trying to live on a very few dollars. Times were hard and so we had to do anything we could to keep body and soul alive. And it was difficult. The place we tried to grow the garden was was on a hillside above the house. The land was probably about seventy-five to one hundred feet wide and went from one end of our land at the trees to the wash about two-thirds of the way to the other end. We owned four acres, about two hundred feet wide and almost 900 feet long, alongside Maple Creek Road, all steep hillside. On the other side of the wash was where an old barn had stood in earlier times. There were a couple of small plots of garden land near it that were fairly flat, the only flat land we owned.

But raising food for eight people required more than that, so we had the larger, steeper land plowed and tried there, as well as using the two small plots. We called this larger area the flat but it wasn't. We tried potatoes, corn, beans and so on. Our harvests were not great. The land had been used for corn so many years that the fertility was gone long before we tried. It was also so steep that we joked that when we dug the potatoes they just rolled out and over the hill and we could walk along the ditch at the road and pick them up. It reminds one of the tale of the mountaineer who planted his corn with a shotgun (if you've heard the tale, you know what I'm talking about, if you haven't, you just did.)

There were a lot of wild strawberry plants scattered all over the land, so we gathered all we could find and began planting them in rows in some of the more fertile areas of the hillside. As strawberries will, they reproduced well and soon we had enough to cover three sections of the hillside just above the house. After a few years of replanting the newer plants, we had about all we could handle to pick those patches clean each year. We had plenty to sell, and people would come from all over, even as far as town, to get our fresh strawberries. We sold them for a quarter a basket, a dollar for four baskets (we used quart baskets.) We younger boys picked basket after basket to sell and we received a nickel for each basket we picked and sold.

During the peak seasons, after the season had ended, the entire family went to Camden Park with some of the profits we made. We would get up early on a Saturday morning, catch the Logan Bus into Huntington, and there we would board the Ohio Valley Bus Company bus and travel all the way down to the park. We would stay until about five or so and then make the trip in reverse.

When I was in the fifth grade, that would have been about 1952, my teacher wanted some strawberries for his mother to use for jam, so I picked a gallon for him. I hit the patch about four-thirty and then discovered that most of the good crop was gone. I didn't want to give him scrawny berries so I picked and picked and looked and looked and picked and picked. I had promised him the berries the following morning so I couldn't let him down. Finally I had five quarts of good berries. The extra quart was our dessert that evening, and the next morning I went off to school taking his berries to him. I got to keep the entire dollar for myself and felt like a king having that much spending money in my pocket all at once.

Back then seemed to be a magical time for me. I was young enough to be innocent but still old enough wish I wasn't, I guess. But even then, as young as I was, I could remember some things that had happened earlier in my life. For instance, what do younger kids do when all the older ones have gone off to school? My earliest recollections, whether real or imagined or told to me by someone else and thought of as my own remembrance starts at about age three or four. They center around the back yard of our home or around the cellar door. Why, I don't know, but there they are.

The older boys had all gone to school and I was there by myself with Mom. My father had gone to work and Mom was napping on the bed in the front bedroom. It was early fall, warm and sunny. I went outside, looking for trouble, and I found it, too.

Winter was coming on and I knew we needed wood for the stoves. I walked over to the the chopping log and there was the double-bitted axe. Sharp on both sides. Ready to chop that kindling. I put the log on the chopping log, picked up the axe and let it fall. It went about an inch into the log, three more drops and I'd probably get it apart. Wouldn't Mom be surprised and happy when she saw that I could help the older boys get the wood in for winter?

I pulled the axe out. It was hard to do but I got it out. Now to lift it and let it fall again. Missed the log. Try it again, this is hard work. Let it fall. Hit the log and fell off right onto my foot. Oh, no! My toe hurts! Look at the blood! MOM! ! ! MOM! ! ! Run into the kitchen and slipped on my bloody foot. Went right past Mom coming through the door.

She almost fainted, put my foot into the water bucket--oooh, that was cold water. She got sugar and cloth and tape. Wrapped my toe in cloth and taped it after putting sugar around it. Terrible hurt for a few days, but it got better and the only permanent result was a split toenail for a few years, then a rippled toenail for the rest of my life.

The next spring, I got stupid again. Fell off the back porch railing onto the mowing scythe blade. I hit it with my left pinkie finger between the first and second knuckle. To this day, I have a puffiness in that part of my finger. She used the same treatment for the finger as she had for the toe.

I also remember being in the front bedroom and seeing the older kids coming up the road from school one day in the spring. The girls from up the road were wearing dresses that flowed in the wind. I remember yellow and green. I remember some of the girls' names but not others. The same with the boys. When I was a kid, boys in the country seldom wore undershorts at such a tender age. It was just too expensive. And we were poor. Mom made my clothes all the time. I'm not sure I ever had any store-bought clothes until I was nine or ten, if then. If I did it was probably just pants, as Mom could make really nice looking shirts.

So, here I go. Out of the bedroom, out of the front door and around the path in front of the cellar, right above the road. Why? I don't know--I began removing my shirt. The kids yelled and hollered. I went ahead and removed my pants (actually I was wearing shorts Mom had made me, blue, from feed sacks) and stood there stark naked with all the girls pointing at me and laughing. And Mom at the window telling me to put my clothes back on. But I didn't, until the kids had gone on up the road.

There were no televisions, computers or modern day entertainment back then. Just what could be done by individuals interested in having fun, and we did have fun.

Guitars, banjos, and fiddles--and the more the merrier; no booze, unless it was kept in the jalopies the musicians or guests drove; cold cuts (we just called it lunch meat back then) and hot food (which was always cold before it was eaten) like fried chicken; a warm summer evening where you could sit out on the front porch and listen to the raucous music and conversation going on inside; friends young and old; good hillbilly music--there was no such thing as country music, it hadn't been invented yet; sounded a lot like bluegrass, swing and old-time folk music played by a string band.

Some memories just get better with age. Back when I was a kid, maybe five or six, we had the music at our house. Mom and the older kids worked for a couple of days to get it in shape, not only the house but the grounds, too. That meant cutting the grass and sweeping the dirt in the yards so that not a stray clod was anywhere to be found. It also meant making sure the chickens were in the pen before dusk turned to dark. At the same time, having music meant that the food had to be prepared early and kept on ice or in a refrigerator until time for the music to arrive.

But as the time got closer for the folks to get there, there was a renewed feeling of anticipation in the air. All the local family except Grandma and Grandpa had gotten there and had a bite to eat (didn't want to eat while the company was there, that food was strictly for the company, the musicians who needed it to keep the music going and the dancing men and women to keep them strong.)

Everybody sitting on the front porch high above the dirt and rock road which stretched for about a mile farther up the hollow to where Grandma and Grandpa lived. There you could get out of the car and hike up the old road to the ridge to go to the church in the old schoolhouse if you wanted to (but who did unless they had to?) The house sat perched on oak and locust posts set on rocks, a small four room board and batten cottage that normally held eight souls from father and mother to the youngest of six children ranging in age from sixteen to six. But tonight--tonight, there would be many more there, more than likely somewhere between forty and fifty depending on who did the counting and how many times they counted each person--everyone kept moving about and it was pretty hard to get a handle on the exact number.

The sun set about a half hour ago and we are all ready. We've invited a few of the neighbors but most are family and musicians from all over the county. There aren't many chairs for all this crowd but we did borrow a few extras, and, besides, who wants to sit anyway, unless it is to sit on the bannisters on the porch where it is nice to be outside away from all that heat inside.

Of course, this is all for the old folks, us kids just were wide-eyed and wondering that such a thing could happen here at our house, AT OUR HOUSE, and us as poor as dirt and there's all those big shiny cars and trucks stopping in the dirt road at the end of the path and women in frilly dresses and men in fancy shirts and string ties getting out and opening up big black trunks with locks on them and there's those beautiful guitars and banjos and fiddles with the pretty wood and funny shape and there's Uncle Lee and old Bumgardner and nobody plays as sweet as Uncle Lee and there's Frank and Ab and Ab's dancing with Mom right there in the road and Mildred's just laughing and there's Bud with his new Cadillac and his old wife and now Grandma and Grandpa are getting out and Bud's helping Pa up the hill to the house and could there ever be a better night in the whole world and I never dreamed it could be this good and I hope it never ends.

But, it did, of course. And for a few days, the glow lingered. Eventually, it faded entirely and the reality that we were still dirt poor and, while we would never forget entirely all the fun we had, we also knew that we needed to work the garden truck and get it canned and get the wood in off the hill for the winter and re-dig the coal lot so we could get a load to burn later on when it got so really cold in that drafty old house.

That drafty old house got torn down and burned sometime in the late sixties. We had moved out in 1959 when I began college in town. The man who bought the place from Mom and Dad wanted to put a trailer there for his boy and his wife. I guess that was okay, and even though the trailer is still there, every time that I come up this hollow I still see that ramshackle old place with the front and back paths and the privy setting on the bank and I hear the strains of that wild hillbilly music in the air.


(Next--Play Ball)