Ruby Addell
You
can decide on the time frame of these occurrences. Probably not long after the
depression. Ruby Adell was a worker, there is no doubt about that. In those
days, living on the farm; it was a matter of survival. You would carry water
from the windmill. Everyone drank from the same long handle dipper, from an open
pail on the back porch. The wash – water for the No. 2 Tub was carried from
the well. Scrubbing the clothes (dresses and shirts made from flour sacks); on a
rub board, had to be done early in the day so the clothes could be rinsed and
hung on the line to dry. Also, some of the family might be needing the tub for a
bath around sundown. Those poor folks had to eat fresh vegetables in the summer
along with fresh dressed and fried chicken, from the yard, fresh peach cobbler
and a cool glass of buttermilk. Forgot to mention; The women made their own lye
soap in a big black kettle set on a wood fire. The big old pressure cooker was
used to preserve foods in jars for the winter. Things like green beans,
black-eyed-peas, corn, and tomatoes. Peach and apricot preserves along with
grape jelly were a welcome sight in the spring, before the new crops had time to
produce their fruit.
In
the fall, everyone would go to the cotton patch and pull boles. You didn’t
pick it, for that was too time consuming. “A man will work from sun to sun,
but a woman’s work is never done.” And we haven’t even talked about the
kerosene stoves and coal oil lamps, the kids having whooping cough, measles,
ring worms, and chicken pox. These things came a little later on for Ruby.
by Claude Morgan