The Red Flannel Rag

Part One

THE SETTING

Always a silence and content Or evening bronze shadows And blue fog beyond fathoming Goes with the unforgotten. Carl Sandburg (2)

***

The earliest days of my childhood began with familiar sounds and smells of

morning. I awakened to Mom calling her cows to the barn for the morning milking and

the sound of Dad stirring the slop bucket as he prepared to feed the fattening hogs. He

carried the five-gallon bucket of table scraps mixed with bran and a little corn meal up

the path to the hog pen located far from the house so the smell of pig manure wouldn’t

drift too close.

The roosters crowed at least an hour before to announce the sunrise. Other

sounds that drifted into my upstairs bedroom window depended on the season of the

year. In the early spring, the lambs on the hillside cried until they found the ewe’s full

teat. In the summer, free-ranging chicken hens followed by as many as a dozen baby

chicks wandered around the yard clucking and singing while they scratched in the dirt

for a breakfast of insects. The proud rooster father, with his head held high and his tail

feather plumes giving off a rainbow of colors in the morning sun, stood guard near his

hens and babies. In the fall the sound of rustling leaves dominated and winter often

brought the cracking of icy limbs and the drip, drip, drip of snow melting and dripping

from the house roof onto the front porch roof.

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