What Mama Told Me About My Grandmother...

I never saw my Mam'aw Coalter. She died in 1939. That was a little more than five years before I was born. When I was little, Mama told me several things about her own childhood and her relationship with her mother. I got the distinct impression that during Mama's childhood, the world was a different place than what I knew. They didn't have any modern conveniences like we did.

In reading back over this blog, I see that history has, as it often does, repeated itself.

1.  A. Remember I told you when I was a kid, we didn't have air conditioning in vehicles.

     B. Mama told me she was nearly grown before they even had a motor vehicle. If the whole family had to go somewhere (church? the store?), they rode in a wagon. The only school bus was a wagon pulled by mules. (I have another story about that that I'll tell you pretty soon...)

2.  A. Remember I told you how Mama and Aunt Berl did the laundry in Pine Bluff with a wringer washer, and hung it out on the clothes line?

     B. Laundry for Mam'aw Coalter was a monumental job which was necessarily done outdoors. She built a wood fire under a huge cast iron kettle, filled it with water from the ditch or creek (carrying it in a tin bucket, many trips), put in lye soap she had made herself, boiled the clothes in that iron kettle for awhile, dug them out with a pole, put them in a #2 tin washtub half full of more water hauled by hand from the creek, rubbed them on a rub-board (a wooden device with corrugated metal on one side which would help get some stains out of dirty, muddy clothes but could also take the skin off the knuckles), then "rinsed" them in another #2 tin washtub half full of more water hauled by hand from the creek, wrung them out by hand (twisting/squeezing them tightly from top to bottom, letting the water drip back into the tub), and THEN hung them out on the clothesline.

After we came to California, as Mama told me more and more stories about her mother, I day-dreamed that I knew her, that I was showing her our house and all our modern conveniences, like a gas stove (she had always cooked on a wood stove, even in the hottest summer days). I would strike a match to light our gas stove (we didn't always have pilot lights, certainly not the little tic-tic-tic electric ones like is on my current gas stove), and I would whisper to my invisible imaginary Gram'aw, Olivia Coalter, "See, this is the way we light our nice modern stove burner..." and I would imagine her eyes getting really wide, her mouth forming a round "Oh..." as she watched, fascinated.

3. A. Cleaning floors: When we lived on Cecil Avenue, we bought a Kirby vacuum cleaner. That salesman touted all the gadgets and add-ons of that vacuum cleaner and told us it would even pull germs out of mattresses that might make us very sick if we left them in there... (I'm smiling. I'd never heard of anyone dying from sleeping on a mattresses that didn't have the germs vacuumed out of it...) I thought that must be the best vacuum cleaner ever invented.

  B. Mama said Mam'aw just swept and mopped the pine board floors with a mop you had to wring out by putting your hands down in the muddy water.  (When I cleaned house with that Kirby, I always talked to my invisible imaginary Mam'aw Coalter, "... See, Mam'aw, this is how we clean house in these modern days..." and she was always greatly impressed...I wonder what she would think of my harvest gold with dirty brown in the grooves un-mopped floor in my current kitchen on South Barcelona Street? Hmm. Well, at least I can't see the chickens walking around underneath the house. I'm totally smiling.)

Mama also said her mother really liked apples. Papaw always saved a few dollars from the cotton crop money to buy apples for her and the children for Christmas. There was no "What do you want for Christmas?" in the Coalter house. In good years, it was an apple each. In bad years, it was maybe a few pecans for the youngun's but for his wife, always an apple.

The school bus wagon is another story...