After dressing up in our Sunday best, we drove thirty minutes over mostly gravel roads to get to the closest store. Our church, one of the largest in the area, was twenty minutes away and had a membership of eighty eight people. The main attraction in our dry county (no alcohol) was the town square and the poolhall which women were not allowed to enter.
I grew up in OshKosh overalls and Levi jeans, not as a fashion statement, but as a necessity. These were the most durable clothes sold by the D & D Clothing store in town. When leaving the house, I automatically grabbed the old cowboy hat, not to be cool, but to keep the sun off my head when topping tobacco or hoing the polk weeds out of the corn field. Boots were worn, not to school or church, but around home to keep the manure and mud off my ankles.
After walking a half mile straight up hill to the bus stop, I rode the bus to school, forty five minutes away. Country schools do not meet in inclement weather, but are also recessed during spring planting and fall cultivation. Year round, everyone had work to do, regardless of his or her age.
Growing up I assumed all kids shared the same past-times. I learned to swim in a lake, explored our caves, chased chickens and cattle, raced (and one time overturned) the tractors across the creeks, and of course the hightlights of childhood, jumping off the hayloft into the wheat bin and drinking peanuts in my RC Cola as I ate my moon pie.
My father moved us to Indiana to further our lives and education. However, for me it was more of a cultural shock. The teenagers I met did not know a Charlais bull from an Angus heifer. They drank milk from a carton and didn't even have to skim the cream off the top. Their household chores did not include churning butter; they thought butter came in sticks from a store shelf. They paid money to see live animals, visit caves or swim. Their homes didn't have root cellars or smoke houses or barns. They even spoke a different language. They did not know how to change the "ole" in their own cars. They didn't know who "y'all" were and never ate out in "resternts".
Watching my daughters grow up in the city is perhaps the most difficult. Tracy is eight years old now and has not learned to milk a cow yet. She has no idea where wheat comes from. Catrina is almost seven now and still swears she lives in the "United States of Kentucky". She can't climb a fence without trespassing on a neighbor and has never played in a creek or a barn. She even complains about the long walk across the street to the bus stop. Like her mother, Tracy lays claim to being a "bona fide" country girl. But I wonder about her education as she stands in front of me in her country attire, a Levi's hat and Jordache jeans and begs me for money to go with the school to visit a farm and take a hayride. I guess she is the NEW contemporary "downhome" country girl of the 80's.
This article may not be reproduced or altered in any way without the prior permission of its author.
�1986 Senati All rights reserved.