Roastener's

Summer time is the time when you can enjoy  tender  fresh corn on the cob, glistening with butter and sprinkled with salt.

Growing up in the South, I could hardly wait for sweet corn to produce its first  ears  in summer.

Our family called sweet corn  roastener's, others refer to them as, corn on the cob either way is o.k.  I reckon because sweet corn is good no matter how you fix it .

Dad  planted his corn patch  as close to the house as possible, so he could  keep an eye on it,  for some reason birds and raccoons loved sweet corn about much as people, and if you weren't careful they would take more than their fair share when it got ripe

Mother liked fixing boiled and fried corn for the family, I for one couldn't get enough,when she made it

She fried corn more often than she boiled it, because  her and Dad hadn't  many front teeth left by then and it was challenging for them to bit corn from the cob.

Us kids didn't have any problems when we found ourselves face to face with a buttery  salted ear of corn, we were much  like a type writer zig-zaging back and forth across the ear  until it was  devoured.

My sister Shirley who is diseased now,  learned  corn frying form mother and  everyone said, Shirley's fried corn was as good as Mother's or maybe even better if that was possible.

Over the years as we had our family get together's Shirley was voted often, to fix her  tasty corn for a side dish.

A pan of  corn bread.....some fresh green beans with boiled potatoes..... ripe tomatoes.....sliced cucumbers.....fried or boiled corn.....will  get your taste buds cranking like no other food on the planet, if you're a country boy like me. 

Coleman Schell

Mother's Apron

Most of the time Mother wore an apron at home and I'm pretty sure she learned the habit from her mother, Grandma Parman, who I remember always had on a  apron. 

 In the olden days, women’s dresses were worn more than once before laundering, so a apron was worn to protect the dress, but women found many other uses for their aprons.

In my day women sewed most of their aprons from flour sacks.

I can just see  Mother in the kitchen as she gathered up the folds of her apron to pick up handles of hot pans and iron skillets.  If the day was particularly hot, she might pull the underside of the apron up and wiped her brow.

Aprons also came in handy as a container for , bringing eggs in from the nests, and a convenient “container” for bringing in vegetables picked in the garden. 

 After shelling peas and beans, the apron was handy for delivering hulls outside for the hogs and chickens.

If Mother was  outside in the hot sunshine she , sometimes pulled the  apron from her waist and put it over her head to protection her from the sun.  

While sitting on the porch in the cool of the evenings, she'd  pull the apron up over her arms to keep them warm, or she might use the apron to wrap up a toddler in her lap to rock it to sleep.

Today we have our handy “wipes” and other fancy cleaning gadgets , to polish the furniture, but with a wave of the apron, Mother could whisk the dust off our meager furniture  in a hurry when she saw company coming.

The apron was a hiding place for shy children to get  under when company came to visit,  I also remember Mother saying a few times, “I’m going to turn you over my apron,” and us kids knew what she meant by that .

Mother's  apron dried tears from her children’s eyes, wiped off stains from their  faces with a little dampening of spit.  The  apron pocket served as a place for a handkerchief of some kind for runny noses, a safety pin for emergencies.

Just thinking of Mother and her aprons stir up a few old memories for me, makes me long  for another era, another world, another time when life was simple and just a new apron could make a woman happy.

Coleman Schell.