Can we talk?

Dixie

         My grandmother Dixie was number 13 of 14 children. Basically her older sisters raised her. Her mother, the original Dixie, died when she was 12. I don't know when they gave her the same nickname, or maybe she had been "Little Dixie" prior to her mother's death. When I researched the family tree, I found another Dixie among her cousins.

         They lived on a farm and had a small apple orchard. They had a vegetable garden, but raised tobacco to sell. The apples were for eating, cooking, and making apple butter. Her father developed asthma that prevented him from working in the fields by the 1930's. By then Dixie was married and raising children. The only ones left on the farm were her invalid father, her brother who came back from the first Great War with a desire to drink instead of work, whenever possible, her oldest sister, and a brother who was kicked in the head by a mule in his youth.

         One sister married the dairy farmer next door. He died young and left her with the care of one child and 500 acres and a herd of cattle. Various members of the family would come at harvest time to help. They'd make apple butter in a big copper kettle on an outdoor fire. A mule was used to help stir a big wooden mechanism to prevent scorching. They'd can it, and split it among themselves. Between jobs, various ones would live on the dairy farm and make it run until a job presented itself somewhere else.

         Grandpa John couldn't walk the fields, but he could do crafts. He took up caning. He caned chair bottoms and made baskets. These sold very well and made some money for them. There was no welfare back then.With all those kids, he needed extra chairs, so he made stools from trees they had cut, and stretched leather or rubber across the tops.He was handy even before he got so sick.

         The married daughters always went home to visit whenever they could. They'd help each other out. My dad went to one of these aunts every summer after school was out. That's how he fell in love with three of them in particular, and stayed close to them and the drinking uncle. He'd go out to visit them and would find Uncle Hubert by following the beer cans left in the woods. He learned how to separate cream, how to hitch a mule, and many other things. He had a lot of freedom running through the country and playing with his cousins.Every August, he'd cry when it was time to go back to the city before school started again.

         Dad, like a lot of country folk, loves to tell stories. My brothers and I have heard his stories over and over. Somehow we still love them and love to hear them again.