Today’s guest post was written by Brenda Kay Ledford.
Photo courtesy of Southern Appalachian Digital Collections
Memories flood my mind as I sit on the front porch. Perhaps it is the taste of buttermilk, the smell of cornbread baking in Grandma Minnie’s Dutch oven over the fireplace, or the sorghum syrup Granddaddy Bob made each fall from cane.
The family rose before the rooster crowed to tackle the hot, hard, job of stripping blades from cane. After cutting them down, you put the cane into piles and cut off the seed heads. Then Granddaddy and the boys loaded the cane on a wagon and hauled it to the mill. A mule pulled the pole that turned the mill. Cane was fed into the vertical rollers like a washing machine. Juice squeezed from the cane and flowed down a spout to the boiler where it was boiled from one vat to another. You skimmed foam off the top until it came out a nice clear brownish-red color. Dozens of yellow jackets swarmed and you had to keep them out of the syrup. Our family made 90 gallons of sorghum syrup. The labor paid off when you savored the rich, thick, sorghum on hot, buttered biscuits.
Besides making sorghum syrup, Great-Grandpa Dallas Matheson owned 300 acres of land on Shewbird Mountain. He was a farmer and grew an apple orchard above the frost line. He raised the black beauty that was so red it looked black. The Ben Davis was light with small streaks and white inside. Other apples included the horse apple, hog sweet, red June, striped May, pumpkin apple, queen pippin, pound apple, and others with no names. Each fall our family took a sled and mule to Shewbird Mountain and hauled apples to the house to store them in the cellar. Grandma and the girls dried apples on trays outside in the sun.
I ponder the good old days on the front porch. We had no air-conditioners and it was a taste of heaven resting on the porch each evening as a breeze wafted over the valley. Neighbors would stop for a visit and we enjoyed swapping a few stories as lightning bugs flashed. Brother Harold and I caught them in Blair canning jars and pretended they were our lanterns.
Many homes have no front porches now. Families are missing a wonderful slice of the bygone days.
—Brenda Kay Ledford
Reprinted from: GOOD OLD DAYS, A Poetry and Prose Anthology; Published by: Old Mountain Press: www.OldMountainPress.com
I hope you enjoyed Brenda’s memories as much as I do. She lives just up the road from me and for many years has helped preserve our Appalachian culture through poetry, storytelling, and writing. You can visit her blog here. And if you ever get the chance to hear Brenda read her writings or tell a story take it because you will certainly enjoy it.
Last night’s video: Granny Loves Cornmeal Gravy Cooked in an Iron Skillet.
Tipper
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We lived beside of my maternal grandparents. Their home had a large front porch with a swing and several wooden rocking chairs and four large water oak trees in their front yard to shade it. We would often go visit with them in the summertime evenings and sometimes help each other shell peas, butter beans or break green beans. Grandaddy always got up before daylight and would often times take a nap on his front porch after eating dinner (noontime) before going back to working in the afternoon. At onetime he had a syrup mill but it was before I was born. Hot homemade biscuits, home churned butter and sorghum syrup or molasses are hard to beat. I would catch and put lightening bugs in jars when I was a kid, nowadays I don’t see many of them, I guess all of this “development “ going on is destroying them along with so much other wildlife. I think this world would be a better place and families would be a lot closer to one another if all homes had a large front porch and more time was spent on the porch together with family, friends and neighbors.