 By James H. Cagle |
Granny lived in a big farm house on eighty acres that was used for farming. The house was the typical farm house for that time. It had a large front and back porch where a lot of activity took place. Porches were a good place to shell peas, shuck corn, or eat watermelon.
The front porch had a swing and some chairs. It was a lot of fun to swing on the front porch, or sit in one of the chairs and watch people drive by. On the back porch, Granny had a bathroom added. The house didn’t come with a bathroom, but when people started having indoor plumbing, they found somewhere to put a bathroom. The bathroom at Granny’s had a door that opened up on the porch and another that opened up in the inside hall. Granny still had her outhouse, which came in very handy when all the kin folk came at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Most of the rooms in Granny’s house had twelve foot high ceilings. In the middle of the room an electric cord hung down from the ceiling with a light bulb screwed in the end fixture. It had a pull chain that you pulled to turn the light on and off.
Granny’s house had a kitchen at the far end of the house next to the dining room. There were three bedrooms, a living room, and a hall that connected all these rooms.
I vaguely remember Granny having a wood burning stove in the kitchen. She moved it outside, or in the smokehouse, when she got an electric stove.
On the far end of the back porch was a well. This was not used anymore, since there was running water in the house. There was a spigot on the porch next to the bathroom that had a shelf with a pan for washing one’s hands when they came in from the field to eat.
Directly behind Granny’s house was the smokehouse. But this was used for storage because Granny hadn’t long stopped smoking her own meats. Behind the smokehouse was a banana tree and a grapefruit tree. I can remember only a few times that the banana tree had any bananas, but the grapefruit tree was loaded with grapefruit every year. Next to the smokehouse was a fig tree. This was a big fig tree! Its limbs were big enough that we as children could climb up in it and get figs. Even though Granny had a chicken coop, some of the chickens liked to roost in the fig tree. When Granny wanted a chicken for cooking, she would wait until dark, walk out to the fig tree, and take one of the sleeping chickens off a limb without it fussing. She would put it in a burlap bag until the next day, then kill and clean it.
Granny also had a crab apple tree, a tangerine tree, a pear tree, numerous pecan trees, and a couple of grape vines.
On the other side of the back yard was the barn where the corn for the chickens, hogs, and cows was stored. It had two stories. It was perfect as a fort when we wanted to play war games. One team would get in the barn and gather some corn cobs while the other team would be outside with their corn cobs. We would begin throwing our corn cobs and then start running in and out of the barn, jumping from the rear window of the barn chasing one another. Granny also had a corn grinder that would take the corn off the cob for feeding chickens. With this grinder, you put an ear of corn in the top end and turned the handle. It took all the dried corn off the cob and spit the empty cob out the front. The barn had an overhang where the tractor was stored along with some other farming tools.
On the other side of the barn was what could be called a corral, where the cows came up from the pasture to feed. From the corral was a cattle lane that went down to the pasture. The cattle lane was a fenced off lane that ran between the fields. It had been there a long time. It was deeply rutted and had large trees along the fence line. Along the fences blackberries grew. We would pick these blackberries, when they were ripe, and Granny would make blackberry cobbler.
We were introduced to the electric fence on Granny’s farm. Farmers started using electric fences because they were easier to put up, and first thought to be cheaper than the conventional fence. The electric fence consisted of driving metal poles in the ground and putting insulators on them for the electric wires, or by nailing insulators on already standing fence posts. For the electric fence to work, it could not be grounded. There would be a transformer about the size of a car battery fastened somewhere to the side of the barn, preferably out of the weather. The transformer was plugged into a power outlet that sent a pulsating current through the electric wire making up the fence.
My uncle Billy used, for better or worse, one of these electric fences on the farm. It ran from the transformer on the side of the barn down to the pasture. In spite of the electric fence, I still remember the cows getting out. You also had to check the fence line regularly to make sure there were no limbs or weeds touching it. Whenever a limb or something big enough to carry the current touched the fence, it would ground out the rest of the fence, stopping the current from going any further.
We always had to be alert whenever we were around an electric fence. Our daddy was with us, though. To get through an electric fence you had to step through the top and bottom wire without touching them. If you touched one of them, the electric current would give you an electric pop. It wasn’t strong enough to electrocute you or do any damage, but it would make you hurt yourself trying to get loose from it. If we were going through a fence and daddy was standing nearby, and we were not on our toes, he would grab the electric wire in one hand and touch us behind the ear with the other hand. This way the current flowed through him without hurting him, but shocking us. Of course we all got a big laugh out of it. But daddy knew we were after our chance to get him back.
The cattle knew how to get through an electric fence. If they had eaten all the grass, and no one came to move them to better pasture, they would crowd an unfortunate cow against the electric fence until the wire was broken. Then they all went through the break to better pasture, or the corn field, or Granny’s garden.
I once, with my right leg, stepped through an electric fence into a mud puddle. As I was bringing my left leg through, I touched the wire and got popped several times before it turned me loose. The chickens also had a problem with the electric fence. Uncle Billy put one up around the corral. If a chicken walked under it and touched it with her tail feathers, she would get popped. But instead of running from it, she would spin around and peck the wire. The electric current would cause her beak to lock on the wire. If she wasn’t discovered quickly, she could die. To check to see if the electric fence was on, you could touch it with the back of your hand. If you touched it with the palm of your hand, you had a tendency to grab the wire. But if you touched it with the back of your hand, it tended to knock your hand away.
Granny always had a garden. Her big garden was behind the barn. There she grew beans, peas, tomatoes, okra, squash, and egg plant. Cow manure was used for fertilizer. Dried cow chips were gathered and then turned into her garden spot with the tractor harrow. She grew carrots in a spot behind the smokehouse and red potatoes next to the dirt road.
At the far end of Granny’s land was a bottom. There were several pecan trees and a pond where we shot big bull frogs with our BB guns, then fried and ate their legs. They tasted like chicken. I don’t know if they really tasted like chicken or because they were cooked in the same grease as the chicken.
Granny liked to read. In those good ole days, the Book Mobile was a big air conditioned, walk in van that had shelves full of books. It came to your house from the library so you could check out books. Granny always got a few and read them in her spare time. A grocery truck came around about once a week as well. It had some can goods, a few odds and ends, and even some fish that were kept on ice.
Granny had gas heaters in the kitchen, first bedroom, and living room. When we went to stay with her at Christmas time, we would take our pillows to the heater in the living room. When the pillow got warm, we would run off to bed and curl up around our warm pillow and fall asleep. One Christmas all the beds were full so my cousin Mike and I slept on the sofa bed on the back porch. We were covered with quilts and slept soundly all night.
Granny and her husband, Sanford Levi Jones, got their farm through a trade-off. They had previously owned some land several miles on the other side of Bemiss. Their property was not big enough to farm, so they traded their little piece of land for the bigger farm that I remember. I never knew my grandfather, Sanford Levi Jones. He died when I was very little from either a heart attack or a sun stroke while out plowing with mules. But Granny, I got to know pretty well. Whenever we arrived and didn’t see her, we called out to her, and she would call back with a “WoooWeeee”. We usually found her hanging clothes on the clothes line, tending to the chickens, or in the living room watching TV while shelling peas. She was a small woman, just four feet and ten inches high.
Granny was very special to us all. We always looked forward to going to see Granny.
