| Memories |
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| Excerpts from an original manuscript by Aunt Alice in 1977. Aunt Alice was born in January of 1906. |
| Four of us, my older sister Marian, younger sisters Mae and Claudia and myself found a dead cat under our house and I was frightened because it's eyes were still open. One morning, mama began making the bed and a snake was lying across the pillows. I remember playing on the wheat straw and chewing the wheat grain until it became dough in our mouths. Marion and I would put on old clothes we found in the attic. I had on a pair of high top shoes and we were climbing peach trees. I fell out and one heel of that old shoe caught on a limb and I was hanging by one foot up in the tree. We lived on a farm most of my early life and I went to the field when I was five years old. Marion baby-sat with the younger children. My daddy told me if I would pick fifty pounds of cotton, he would give me a nickel. I picked fifty-five and I carried that nickel in a tobacco sack longer than I can remember.. Once we lived three miles from school and Marion and I had to walk to school. We had to pass this old man's house and he had a turkey gobbler. If we had anything on that was red, he would chase us. We would run by his house as fast as we could run. We had to cross an iron bridge and one day it was thundering and lightening. We were afraid the lightening would strike us if we were on the iron bridge, so we waited until the lightening and tried to run across the bridge before it thundered. Once, we lived near a pond and daddy worked at a dairy. He fished a lot in the pond and one day he took me. I caught thirty-nine perch that day. We would go to a reunion at our grandfather's every year and we went in a wagon. One year the mules ran away with us, the wagon was bouncing across the field and before daddy could stop them, the wagon hit a stump. For a while we lived close to a store run by Mr. Charlie. The men would gather at Mr. Charlie's store and have a lot of fun. Mr. Charlie had everything in the store from white chambers on down. One day all the fellows there took one of the white chambers and poured Coca-Cola in it and floated some bananas in it. Everytime someone would come in the store, they grabbed their spoons and started eating out of the chamber. We raised our hogs to kill before winter. Once, I took the hog's bladder and blew it up, tied it with a string and put it away until Christmas. On Christmas Eve, I told mama I was going to bed. I went out the back way, put on some old clothes and a false face, put some rocks in a paper sack and that bladder in a tote sack. I came in the front door and gave the children some of these rocks. They thought it was candy and put them in their mouths. I began to dance around. I threw the tote sack down, jumped on it and burst that bladder and it sounded like a shot- gun. I ran out of the door and daddy said "Who was that anyway?". |
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