By Gelene Simpson
May 13, 2008 12:38 am
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Several people have asked me for a copy of an article I wrote about my mother. I have decided that it is easier to write another one. Besides I like to write about my mother, as all of you know by now.
If you look at the pictures of my mother, you will see that she liked to wear hats. She even had a story about a hat that she wanted to buy with some money she made picking cotton when she was young. I can really identify with this story because I remember my first pair of high heels that I bought with my cotton money. A person had to want something really badly to drag that heavy sack around and get down on his or her knees when the back pain of bending got too hard to bear.
Anyway, Mother had a hat all picked out, but her daddy discouraged her from buying it. He said it wasn’t good enough. Mother said she suspected that he just didn’t want to turn over the money to pay for it. What little I knew of Grandpa, I think she was right. He thought he was being generous when he gave up a penny, which he called a “copper.”
Another thing Mother loved was going to sales. She loved every kind of sale. It could be a garage sale or even a fire sale, but she especially loved sales on cloth to sew. Two of her favorite expressions were “piece goods” and “dress goods.” Of course she liked it best if the cloth was on sale for three yards for a dollar. She liked dress patterns, too, but she didn’t really need a bought one because she could look at a dress in the show window and come home, find the parts in other patterns she already had, or just cut one out of newspapers or a brown paper sack.
When I was young, we called pillow slips “pillow cases.” Mother liked transfers that she would iron onto these pillow cases to embroider if she ever had time from cooking, washing and ironing. And some of her favorite things to sew were aprons. She could rip up an old cotton skirt and fashion it into an apron faster than we would wink an eye.
She really liked bonnets which she called “bunnets.” She made all kinds. There were huge sun bonnets with cardboard strips encased in the elongated sides to make them stand out and really shade the face. Long hours of working in the field when she was young and in the garden when we were growing up made that bonnet the most useful one for her, although she liked the frilly ones, too.
She really thought a great deal of cotton mill cloth. She claimed it was tough as iron, and, to the best of my knowledge, I believe she was right. We still have some sheets made of it even after all these years.
Mother saved all lace trimmings from worn-out garments and cut off all buttons which she kept in a button tin with a lid. She carefully removed all working zippers and kept them for future use also. All the worn out garments were immortalized into quilts. Thus we slept every night in winter under our family history.
Granny, our daddy’s mother, taught Mother to sew; so she was undaunted even when faced with yards and yards of circle skirts and full net petticoats so popular in the 1950s when I was in high school. Even after I married and lived in Andrews, she made me a really dressy aqua taffeta sheath dress with a big ruffled flair around the bottom. It fitted me perfectly, although I didn’t get to see it until it was already finished. I was teaching in the seventh grade that year, and I wore my new dress to the party my husband Harrell and I sponsored for the seventh graders. Well, where else was there to wear it in Andrews back then?
Mother loved to grow fruits and vegetables, and she especially loved to can them or put them up in fruit jars. When our cousin from East Texas would bring us a load of tomatoes. Mother would be so excited that you would have thought it was Christmas. She also loved to make grape juice from the wild grapes from over east. She had spent her childhood in East Texas, having been born in Brownsboro, and I think she missed living in sandy land. But still she and Daddy managed to grow peaches, plums, berry vines and a huge fig tree. I really loved Mother’s fig preserves, and my husband could not resist the pickled peaches she made every year.
I have often wondered what Mother would have tried to save if the house had caught on fire. I think she would have tried to rescue the sewing machine, the quilting frames and the picture of the cotton mill hands taken in the 1930s. It was kept in a cardboard tube and would have fitted under her arm.
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Gelene Simpson is a Daily Sun columnist. Her column appears Tuesdays.
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