The Red Flannel Rag

The noon meal was bird-egg beans, homemade bread, ham or sausage, canned

peaches, and fried potatoes. The evening meal was bird-egg beans, boiled potatoes,

canned peaches, and ham or sausage. In season, they substituted homemade

applesauce, dry-land cress gathered from the cornfield, and green beans. Sunday dinner

was the same, but in larger quantities to feed us when we arrived after church.

Over the years my mother introduced banana cake and fruit pies into their diet.

It was as if they had discovered a pot of gold; they loved her desserts. She got tired of

baking for them so she tried to teach Aunt Lena. It was the most frustrating thing Mom

ever tried — she could not teach Lena how to bake a pie. Mom always liked to talk about

how backward my dad’s folks were when it came to changing their ways or learning new

things. She and I discussed it quite often. She rather liked my analysis of their problem

when I told her their brains were like a coffee cup. You can pour only so much coffee

into a cup before it runs over when it reaches the cup’s capacity.

I estimated that their brains had reached capacity early in their lives. Since she

dared not arrive for Sunday dinner without dessert, Mom griped a lot about the

situation while she baked a cake or some pies as the weekend approached.

I first remember visiting Grandma Molly and Grandpa Austin when they lived in

a two-story log house in Hopkins Gap near Little North Mountain. The Shoemaker

River ran just back of their porch. They rented the house from Bryan and Edith Conley.

Electricity had not come to Hopkins Gap, so Grandma Molly used a springhouse

to prevent her food from spoiling. The springhouse was a small log shelter built over

one of many cold-water springs that trickled through the rocks on the sides of ridges all

over Hopkins Gap. Some remnants of these little log structures remain visible today;

but they are no longer used to prevent food from spoiling.

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