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Home Memories on Parade Meet the Family A Town is Born The Growing McCullough Family A Church Becomes a Reality A Closing Word The Man Called Guelcksie A is for Arthur The Coffin House Poet and Philosopher -- Aged Seven The Two Room School House Open the Windows and Open the Doors Sixteen Girls in White Four Girls and Five Boys The Poet in Hot Water Windows Open for Edith The Great Decision Bo Peep Epilogue Notes |
THE GROWING McCULLOUGH FAMILY As my father's business interests grew and marked his success, my mother's duties grew to keep pace with them. Imagine a house with nine rooms and five porches, seven children in all ages between twenty and two, cows to be milked every day and driven to pasture, called home at milking time in late afternoon, garden chores, meals in the big dining room three times a day, canning season, sewing, mending, ....... and no electricity for appliances or refrigeration. She was a small woman but undaunted. I never saw her rest during the day. When she sat for a bit on the front porch in the afternoon she mended clothing, shelled peas, and sang at her tasks. How well I remember her clear, pretty voice as she worked in the garden in late afternoon singing:
Clothes were washed in the open. Mittens and puppies were all over the back porch, chickens were everywhere, and eggs had to be gathered every day. Cooking was done on a big wood range, but she sang:
My father made every /\ effort [penned in] to find help for her. Once he made a trip to Walnut Ridge and found a black family of three, Jim, Mary, and teenage Minnie. he built a house for them near the big house but within a week Jim came to him with an anonymous letter telling him to leave town within three days. (I believe Alicia has never had black residents.) The solution to the help problem was chores for every member of the family. Promotions were in order with each birthday. I will never forget my delight when I was elevated from the chore of cleaning the kerosene lamps to being allowed to strike matches and light them and to carry a lighted lamp upstairs at bedtime. And so it went - from milking cows to helping a toddler get dressed in the morning, from feeding the chickens to sweeping porches. |