The weather is getting a little cooler here. The nights and mornings are at least. This is the second weekend that I’ve gotten up and opened my back door wide to let in the cool fresh air. Last weekend I was able to leave it open until 11:30am before my a/c kicked on. Today’s article isn’t about the weather though. It’s about the coffee, and eggs, and bacon, and toast and all of that and just a bit more.
As I was making my breakfast this morning, I got a whiff, all at once of the coffee and egg and the fresh air combined and it reminded me of
some of the visits we would make when I was a child. We would go visit Grandparents and Great Grandparents and we would spend the night and the next morning, almost always the adults were up before the kids. And so we would wake to the smells of breakfast.
I most remember my Great Grandmother’s place when I think of this. She was an ity bity thing and yet the woman could cook. She lived out on a farm, or big acerage by that time, in western Oklahoma. What seemed to be way outside a small town. When you went to visit her, you always stopped in town and called her first in case she needed something from the store. I’m not sure I ever remember being there when there wasn’t pudding in the fridge with Nilla Wafers in the bottom and Dr. Pepper.
So we would go to visit, and the adults would stay up talking and playing cards or dominoes. The kids would be put to bed in the big bed that required and step to get into, at least that’s how it seemed. We would lie there listening to the adults and the coyotes, or whatever it was they had in western Oklahoma.
The morning would come and we’d wonder out to the living room and if it was a weekend sometimes the cartoons would be on the tv and there might be one adult male sitting in a chair. See going to visit Great Grandma was a thing because, it often meant that any cousins or Great Aunts and Great Uncles or other family in the area often came over too. So you might go to bed with just your immediate family and Great Grandma there and wake up to breakfast with an additional bunch of people.
And so we would wonder out to where all the people were and there would be that wonderful smell of coffee brewing, eggs cooking, bacon frying and toast or biscuits and some sort of fruit, usually canteloupe. We all sat down to breakfast and ate together. It wasn’t a rush. When we were finished we all helped clear up and then a handful of people did the washing up. Great Grandma didn’t have a dishwasher so the dishes were all washed and dried by hand. It was ok though because we’d gone to visit Grandma and that time for doing the dishes was just more time for visiting and sharing news.
At the time, where she lived there wasn’t much to go do or see. In fact, unless you were going for a reunion of some sort there was no real reason to be there other than to visit with family. There had been a lot of farming out there at one time and probably still was. I think there were even some oil wells. It wasn’t like it seems to be today where you breeze in, say hello, and sort of rush off. No we’d go for the whole weekend or nearly. And we visited. Sometimes we would be there to help with a big project too.
The kids might get a little bored listening to the adults, we would go out and play some or we might color or draw. No Nintendos or things like that to distract us and isolate us. We heard the conversations and stories about people and events. I don’t remember many of them though, I suspect they were about relatives that I had only met once or twice. If we were particularly restless we could go out and play. That mostly meant we had to stay in the yard which was fenced in. There were poles out there that I think rope or such was strung between for the washing to be hung up on to dry. They weren’t too tall except they were taller than we were so we might try to climb them to hang from the top bar or something like that. I don’t remember what we would play at, I do remember the stickers and the chiggers.
Great Grandma’s place had stickers in the grass. You could walk across the yard and the stickers would jump out and grab a hold of any cloth around your ankles. That meany stickers in your socks and your pants legs. They didn’t always hang there out in the open. They would get on the inside of your pants there around your ankles. You could send a fair bit of time picking the stickers out of your clothes. At certain times of the year you also had to deal with the chiggers. These tiny little bugs that would get on your skin right around were your socks were and they would sort of get in your skin and then would itch like a son-of-a-gun. They were as bad as mosquitoes. You knew it was a chigger bite and not a mosquito because even before you started scratching at it there would be this little reddish dot right in the middle of it.
Great Grandma also had an outhouse. She had indoor plumbing and she had an outhouse. It was a working outhouse too. I remember on of the trips we made to Great Grandma’s was to replace the old outhouse. Yep, we went down there with my Parents and Grandparents so they could build and dig her a new outhouse.
When the adults were outside we got to go play in the yard outside the fence. That was fun. At one time Grandma had had chickens that laid eggs so there was this big old building, or so it seemed, that had been setup to house chickens and the way it was built you could easily collect the eggs from the bin. There was an old tractor out there too. We would climb up on top of it and play like we were driving it.
It’s amazing the memories just the smell of something can bring back. Think I’ll go enjoy my coffee and picking the stickers out of my socks now.
Cheers.
Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.
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