Although it was summer vacation, I woke up just after the sun came up, because mama made me. Well, partially because she made me, but partially because there was no insulation in my bedroom and it got hotter than hades in my room. The reason she made me get up this morning was because she and Grandma Polly had already been to the cornfield and there was a whole wash bucket filled with corn that had to be shucked. It was a well run process. Grandma cut off the ends in the kitchen and sent it back to us on the porch where we shucked it, cleaning off every little bit of cornsilk. Then we sent it back in to Grandma, who rinsed it and with her sharpest knife, cut the kernels off into a huge pot, where she cooked it and then put it in freezer bags for the winter.
Mama and Grandma picked anything anyone was willing to give them out of their gardens. In addition to corn, they picked purple hulled peas, butter beans (the gray kind, not lima), squash, tomatoes or anything else they could can in jars or freeze. Sometimes they dragged us out in the fields with them. When there were pecans to pick up, we went for sure. We picked up the pecans on halvesies. We kept half of what we picked. Then we’d have to bring them home and shell them. It too, was a process. Grandma would crack them with a huge monstrosity of a pecan cracker and then we shelled them. They froze them too.
On the days that there weren’t vegetables to be canned, I usually walked up to McNeill to meet the bookmobile. It was a traveling library from the big Crosby Library in Picayune. I loved to read and would read about three books a week if I had the time, without even being told I needed to! It was my window on the world outside of McNeill.
If my cousin, Bridget, was staying with her Grandmother, she’d come over and she, my sister and I would go to the woods and build forts. First we’d pack a big lunch and put Koolaid in a thermos. Then we’d head out to the woods behind my Grandma Johnson’s house. Sometimes we dug into the side of a bank that was from where a road had been cut years ago. This would yield a nice little playhouse for a while. Other times we would take hammers, nails and boards from my daddy’s shop into the woods and build forts in the pine trees. My favorite area to build tree houses, though was my Grandma Polly’s Tung Nut trees. But as soon as she found out what I had done, she would tear them down. It was a futile effort.
We never let my poor little brother go with us. He was a nuisance. He was four years younger than me and didn’t know how to build anything yet. He had an imaginary friend named Balah. Balah ate lunch with him everyday. Yes, Mama played along and made a sandwich for Balah, too. I think that might be why my brother was fat at that age. He ate his and Balah’s sandwiches. We didn’t let him play with us, so he invented Balah. When he wasn’t playing with Balah, he was running his tricycle back and forth from our house to Grandma Polly’s house yelling, “Amamama! Amamama!” like a race car. He was of no use to us.
Linda Ann and Bridget and I would stay in the woods all day unless a thunderstorm approached. Then we’d hear Mama calling all our names frantically. It could just be a distant thunder or two and she would go crazy until we got to the house. “It’s comin’ a storm!” she’d yell as soon as she saw us coming out of the woods. Then if it turned out to have lightening, she’d line us all up on the couch. She would unplug everything in the house, including the air conditioner and fans and dare us to move. “People have been struck by lightening moving around their houses during a thunderstorm!” she’d tell us. “You stay right there until it’s over.” And we did. We weren’t even allowed to talk. It was crazy, I tell you. However, if there was no lightening and just rain, we were allowed to put on our swimsuits and run around outside, playing in the rain until it had stopped.
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