Pig and a Blanket

That's my mom on the left :)

This recent cold snap had me thinking about my mom and my resolution to learn one new thing about her every time I called.  "I wonder how she kept warm in a winter like this?" I thought....and so, I found out.
Coal.  A coal burning stove heated the house room - one room - where they all gathered and lived all winter.  Her mom would put a quilt down by the stove and they stayed there all day, coloring or doing homework...in that one warm spot.
For fifteen dollars her dad would buy one ton of coal.  One TON.  It was usually enough to last all winter but some winters were tougher than others and that's when the whole family would make their way to Mud Cut Curve.  That's where the coal train would take a curve and, if they were lucky and the train took it fast enough, coal would fall off the top and land by the tracks.  Each kid was given a sack and they filled it with whatever coal they could find along the tracks.  "It was heavy!" she said of this chore.  It was cold out - and because they had no gloves or mittens, their mom would put their dad's work socks over their little hands.  At night, their mom took a brick, heated it in the stove, wrapped it up and put it in their beds to keep them warm.  "We'd have so many quilts on top of us, we couldn't move," she said.
"Once I got up in the night to get a drink from the water bucket but it was so cold the dipper had frozen into the water - it was all ice," she said.  I was about to suggest that she should've just gone to the sink but then I remembered...no indoor plumbing.  (We're so spoiled, rich, blessed.)

"I was in charge of keeping the coal bucket full," she informed me.  "I'd take my bucket out to the coal pile to fill it but I had to be careful because of the rooster.""What?  A rooster?  Please. Continue," I begged. "We had a banty rooster," she explained.  "We had no underpinning to the house so it would stay up under the porch. Every time I went to the coal pile, it chased me and attacked my legs.  I spilled half the bucket getting back into the house."

"Mom," I say...."this is heartbreaking.  How did you survive your childhood?"

"We were fine.  We were never sick.  We didn't know we were poor.  We had a hog in our closet."

Hold it right there.  

My mom had a pig in her closet.  I had to pause and let that sink in.

Not a pet pig and not a regular closet.  It's the tiny room where they hung up their salted meat for the winter.  Can you imagine having a pig hanging on a meat hook in your pantry?  And just slicing off whatever you needed, whenever you needed it?  Imagine the endless bacon.

"So you had hogs and chickens? Mom, your dad worked for the railroad but it sounds like he was a farmer," I say.

"Everyone had to have those things, and a garden too, just to live," she said.  "My earliest memory was there in that house on the front porch. My legs were dangling over the side and I was swinging them back and forth watching my daddy fix the plow."

"No," she said again.  "We didn't know we were poor."

And maybe, on second thought, they weren't.

Double Seater Outhouse

The older I get, the more nostalgic I grow.  One of my New Year's resolutions was to learn one new thing about my mom every time I called her. I thought it would be tough - surely I knew everything there was to know about her, I mean seriously, she's my mom.  Hasn't she told me everything that could possibly be told?  The short answer: no.

There are things my mom considered so ordinary (that were in fact extraordinary) that she failed to mention them along the way.  Here's a few:

 My mom was born in 1942.  She never had an indoor toilet until she was fifteen years old.

Fifteen.  Think of going through middle school with no bathroom in your house.

 "I'll never forget when Daddy finally built us the double seater," she said in the course of this conversation.

Let's pause right there.  Join hands and gather with me around this mental image of the double seater outhouse.  Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Who do you take with you to the double seater outhouse?  Do you decide to go together and if you do - what is that conversation like?  Or does one knock and then just come on in and join you on the wood?  And if they do...do you scoot over a little to make room? (Did I just say do do?) And if you do scoot over, would you get a splinter?

Who do you love (or despise) enough to let into the double seater outhouse with you?  Are there unwritten rules regarding the double seater?  Do you make eye contact?  Have conversations?

"Mom, who would go with you??" 

"My little sisters," she replied.  Of course. Come to think of it, I think that's about the only person I would head to the double seater with myself.

My mom had a cow named Tootsie. As if that's not priceless enough, she got to milk it every morning.  Not for fun or for 4H but because they needed milk for breakfast...and butter.

"Mom would strain it through a cheese cloth and we'd drink it while it was still warm.  With some peaches,"  she informed me. (Note to self: google 'cheese cloth').

That's right.  My mom was organic before organic was cool.

"Then we'd let it sour in the churn and churn it with the dasher for a while till the cream rose to the top.  Mom would pour it into the butter mold." (Note to self: google 'dasher').

That's right.  My mom was organic AND practically Amish.  

"Sometimes, if I didn't want to use the the double seater, I'd sneak to my Aunt Arzie's up the hill and use her outhouse," she explains.  

What did Aunt Arzie have that my mom didn't?  

Toilet paper. They were big time. No Sear's catalog in their outhouse. 

"Aunt Arzie never caught me," my mom continued....

That's right. My mom was an organic, Amish Ninja.

"What did you do about a bath?" I had to ask because I secretly wanted to use the information against my daughter somehow to explain that she didn't need a two hour shower every day.

"We had a tin tub," she said.  (Just as I had hoped!)

"In the winter we filled it with two kettles of hot water and one of cold and we'd get to bathe inside.  In the summer we bathed outside.  We filled it in the morning and let the sun heat it up all day."

That's right.  My mom was an organic, Amish, Ninja, Exhibitionist , Naturalist.

My grandfather never finished the house my mom was raised in.  During World War II all supplies were cut off.  He couldn't get metal or sheet rock.

"I had no ceilings.  Just the rafters," she said.  "And there was no fascia on the window sill. When it snowed, it came right into my room and settled there on the ledge."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Got a spoon and ate it," she replied.

My mom was an LPN in the labor and delivery department during desegregation.

"If a black laboring mom came in, she'd have to have the baby in the hall on a stretcher. Usually me and the nurse would deliver it.  The doctor would just come by and sign the paper work.  They wouldn't give them a room.  So I would always sneak extra gowns and diapers into their going home bag.  And when I made my rounds with the juice, I went to them first there in the hall so there would still be some good cranberry juice to choose from.  Eventually they told us to put the black babies by the white babies near the viewing window.  We had to line them up: Black, white, black, white.  This mountain man came in and complained.  He told me to get his baby away from the blacks.  So I took his baby and rolled it into the back of the line where no one could see it."

That's right.  My mom was an organic, Amish, Ninja, Naturalist, Civil Rights Activist. 

And this, friends, is after ONE conversation.  It's going to be an enlightening year.

Before she hung up she shared with me my grandmother's favorite song.  I never thought about my Grandma appreciating music.  It made me smile.

"She ran to the radio and would turn it up when this song came on," she told me.

(Note to self: Google "Red River Valley"..........and play it endlessly.)

For more wisdom from my incredible mom, read the post she left on my daughter's facebook: "When I was 14" or read her article about life in the foothills of North Carolina in Mature Living Magazine
(page16-17)