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.