Kitchen

I live 2000 miles away from most of my family with the exception of my oldest sibling out in Utah. My mother and two of my other siblings came to see me a few years back. Of course we are the type of family when something needs to be done we all pitch in to do it. This picture is no exception. We went through quite a few meals together while they were here. I wish they could have stayed longer but that is always the case. This is probably the last time my mother will make the trip. She has dementia.

Jam Session

Jam sessions are nothing new to us. We have had as many as a dozen players at a time here in our home. A guitar, fiddle, do-bro, mandolin,banjo,and bass guitar.
The men would play and the ladies would bring a covered dish of their choosing and when the men would take a break, we would all sit down to a meal. Sometimes the women would sing  or else play cards in the next room. For some reason everyone always wanted to come to our place. We met once a week. Most of the players have passed from this world already but we still have all of our memories. My husband still plays his guitar with one of the fiddle players from time to time.
(this picture taken in a rec room at his friends apartment)

In-laws

My mother and father-in-law were really something. Their names were Virginia and Mason.

My husband got into playing the guitar because of his father, playing the fiddle. They  would go to Bluegrass Festivals all the time plus of course they played at our home with others. (more on this in a later blog) After Mason retired from the State driving a plow, he dabbled in many things. He never sat still for long. He loved to wheel and deal. I can remember a time when he traded something for a tractor. The tractor was in parts that he carried out to the barn. It wasn't long and you saw him driving it out. Down the road that  went for something else. People still talk about him with some of the things he pulled on folks. When he was in a crowd, there was never a dull moment.

Virginia O'Brian was a small woman. I never saw a woman cook the way she did other then my own grandmother on my dad's side. This woman very seldom ever went by a recipe. I got quite a few of her recipes by watching her throw in a pinch of this or a dab of that. She was really a great cook. She loved to visit with people and very seldom did you not see a pot of coffee brewing on the stove. She and Mason used to go to square dances when they were younger. Virginia was crowned "The Queen of Waddington" when she was eighteen keeping the title until she passed. 
They were married fifty one years before Mason passed. She passed recently.
(photo taken years ago with their children)

Houston Papaw

This is what we called our grandfather on our mother's side. Papaw was born in Pennsylvania in 1904. (There were five other siblings.) He was a small man, standing five-feet-six with thick  white hair that he always brushed straight back. He wore dark rimmed glasses, at least that is how I always remembered him. His hands always shook from Essential Tremors that he had. (a form of Parkinson's disease)

In 1920 Papaw moved to Houston, Texas running a gas station that his brother Granville owned. This is where he met and married my grandmother. They moved back to Pennsylvania about a year
after they were married. My mother came along not long after this and by the time she was seven the family moved back to Houston.

My grandfather held lots of small jobs but eventually purchased three books and began to study for his engineers license. By the time he got his first-class stationary engineer's license he went to
work for Texaco and stayed there until his retirement.

Papaw would come to see us when the family lived out on the farm. Usually once a month with buckets of fried chicken. He also came every time a new child was born even though he said they all looked alike until about six months old. There were times when he came and helped build on the share cropper shack we lived in or repairing something. (he did this also every where we lived) If I remember correctly from what I was told my grandparents divorced when my mother was in her twenties.

I remember the last time my husband and I saw Papaw. It was on one of our many trips to Texas to see the family. I took a recorder with me to get some family history and am so thankful I did that. I never got the chance to see him again. Papaw's death was due to blood on his brain from a fall he took from his tremors. He was in his later nineties.

Papaw had a certificate from the Masons for fifty years of service and had been a Shriner for just as long.

(the above picture is of Papaw in his shriner cap and red gown)

Grandparents

Once upon a time we had grandparents from both sides we used to see. So we started calling one Rosenberg Mamaw and the other Houston Mamaw named  after the towns they lived in at the time. (this was also done for our grandfathers)
 (Houston Mamaw will be talked about in a later blog).

Rosenberg Mamaw was a very hard working woman. She would do the job of a man out in the fields and then go back to the house to bake, cook the meals, clean house and maybe even do laundry.
Lots of times she would be out weeding in her garden. I don't know where she got the energy to keep up this pace for so many years. Mamaw also had an old upright piano she used to play. She was taught to play the harmonica starting at age five. And boy was she good!

The train tracks ran by the farm. Hobo's from time to time would jump off the train and come to my grandparents door. (We lived down the dirt road from the house) My grandmother would never let them in but she would make them a sandwich. They were happy and after eating they would go on their way.
It's a good thing my grandfather  wasn't around when this happened. He was either in the fields or going into town for the daily newspaper.

I remember going with her to pick cotton. All the adults had those big fifty pound croker  sacks they had to fill. I was given an orange sack from the fruit. My grandmother would drag me down the isles along with her. I sat on her croker sack. She would pick the cotton on the top and I would grab the ones on the bottom. I remember being so proud when I got that sack full until I saw their big bags. I was only five years old at the time.

My Grandfather was a hard person to get to know. I very seldom saw him. He always carried Lifesavers in his pocket. Later we found out he was diagnosed with diabetes but never acknowledged it.
Rosenberg Papaw was a strong church goer. And was very possessive of what he owned. Whenever someone came onto the property when we were living on the farm, he would race over in his car with a shotgun to run them off.

Papaw passed away in the seventies. Mamaw survived him by several years.
(the photo above are both grandparents with their two siblings on my dad's side plus the house they were born in)

Fishing

We used to own a bass boat. My husband would go out on the Saint Lawrence River every year, knowing where all the fishing spots are being brought up along the river. I went with him on several occasions and with the family dog at the time.

There are several types of fish in the area. Northern pike, perch, crappie (what we call a poor mans shrimp), bull head (catfish to those in the southern states), blue gill, walleye, and carp (our area
being the carp capital of the world with events running every year).

I told my husband as long as he could catch them I would clean them and pack them away in the freezer. It wasn't surprising to see our freezer full of crappie by the end of the season.
(photo courtesy of Public Domain)

Entertainment

Growing up on a share croppers cotton farm you had to make your own entertainment.

I will never forget this TV sitcom "Gunsmoke". We would watch each episode as they came out. We teased Mama in later years because she would cry when Matt Dillon got shot. This is about the only time we watched television that I can remember other than maybe the "Ed Sullivan Show." All nine of us crowded around this little TV set (including my parents). 

Sometimes we would jump the cotton rows to try and catch each other. You had to be very careful not to step on the rows.

I remember a time when one of my sisters and I took a coloring book and set what few crayons we had out on the table.  Tedri took 
one side of the book and I the other. We would look at the page we were suppose to color trying to remember where everything was on the page, then we would shut the lights off and try and color the page from memory. When we were done we would turn the lights back on and judge whose picture was the best. 

Another form of entertainment was making mud pies. We would take an old discarded skillet, sift dirt through a piece of old screen wire until it was like powder, add a little water to it and form patties that we thought we were cooking in the skillet.

I can remember as we got older (by this time we had moved into the house my youngest brother now has that I posted in an earlier blog) we would ride our bicycles out the long drive to the highway and wait for a certain color car to pass before we could ride back to the house,  sometimes stopping at posts we had made into places in our minds to visit, such as the grocery store, the doctors, church and etc. We would then carry on conversations with each other. For example: "Why hello there, I haven't seen you in a very long time."etc...

This all may sound crazy to most of you but it was very
entertaining to us. It wasn't all fun though, picking cotton was not easy.