Our family had gotten so big there
wasn’t enough room in the little kitchen to feed all of us, so Mama moved the
kitchen to the other big room across the hall, or dogtrot. To make enough light in the room. she cut a
hole in the wall to make a window. The
pipe from the cooking stove was put through the roof. One Sunday in summer the roof caught on
fire. I was scared to death. They soon got it put out, but the house could
have burned to the ground. They passed
the buckets of water up a ladder. There
was no garden hose.
These
were bad times, but everyone was having bad times. But I used to love for Aunt A and Aunt
S to come to see us. On a holiday
Aunt A would bring celery and sage to go in the dressing and
cranberries. She probably brought a fat
hen, too. And she could bake the best
cakes. She made one she called a “log
cabin.” She’d bake the cake in corn
stick pans and then stack the logs and pour a fudge icing over it. It would be great. She also made a peanut butter cake. She’d beat egg whites and make a stiff
meringue and put peanut butter in it, then she’d ice the cake with it. I thought it was great. I loved to go to her house. She usually had light bread from the store,
and it was so good with butter spread on it.
We never had that at our house.
I
remember one time I was at Aunt A's house, and she decided to make apple pies-- fried
apple pies. She cooked the apples and
made the crust, and I could hardly wait for one to be fried. She rolled the dough out. Put on the apples. Folded the dough over the apples. Crimped the dough and put the pie in the hot
skillet of grease. The crust on the pie
broke open and apples oozed out. It
smelled so good. She picked up the
skillet, took it outside and dumped the skillet of apple pies out. She also threw out the apples and the crust
that she was working with. There went
the apple pies. But that is how she did
things.
I
though Aunt A was rich. She had the most
beautiful chamber pot I’d ever seen. It
was white china with roses on it. I
don’t think I ever got to use it though, but I admired it sitting under the
side of the house. We usually had a lard
bucket. I saw this pretty chamber pot
one time when I went with Inez to stay a few days with Aunt A. I was out behind the house crying by myself, because I was homesick and wanted to go home.
Aunt
A let me go over to the C’s (some of her friends) house to play and
when I started home, an old man who was visiting there told me to give Mrs.
E his best regards. I asked him to
repeat a couple of times because I had no idea what he was talking about. Needless to say she didn’t get the
message. I didn’t know what to give her.
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