REMEMBERING AGAIN

Every year I quilted a quilt that I had pieced in my spare time. Shelling all of the peanut seed by hand sitting around the fireplace at night. When we were not shelling we would read a book, each one taking turns reading aloud. And when the boys went to Reddick school they brought home books from the library to read--I think I read all they had. The boys loved roasting peanuts in the ashes of the fireplace while shelling peanuts. Sometimes we roasted sweet potatoes there too.

It was during the war II that we had such a hard time. We couldn’t get sugar or flour and we made coffee out of sweet potatoes cut in tiny blocks and made into coffee substitute. There were several things used for coffee, one was parched wheat--but we liked “sweetpotato coffee” best. Shoes were hard to get and everyone learned to half sole and repair their own. Most everybody had a “shoe last”. It was a stand that had several sizes of iron shoe forms to fit stand and shoes. Mama said her father made shoes for the whole family, he also made chairs and sold them for money. Everyone made baskets of white oak. First Papa would find a straight oak that would split easy. They could tell by looking at the outside grain if it would split easy. Wilbur made our chair bottoms and all of our bushel baskets to use for the corn and peanuts. Mama carded cotton and wool when I was a girl to make quilts. She had wool “cards” and cotton “cards”. Cards were an oblong square with fine teeth that when the cotton or wool was pulled between them into a thin layer and layed out in a smooth layer until there was enough for a quilt. Sometimes we pulled the cotton seed out of the cotton by hand. The wool was washed and boiled in the wash pot then dried before being carded for a quilt.