Southern Musings

Growing up, Sunday afternoons where the best. Every Sunday, our family would gather at my grandmother’s home. It rarely was the entire family. There was not enough room for that. She had ten children and if you wanted to know how many grandchildren she had on any given day, you better be ready to count and have someone double check your counting. Three of her children had over ten children each.

Sunday afternoons were set aside for family and dinner. Food was a very important part of her day to day life. Any day of the week, if you visited her the subject of food was one of the first topics of the visit. It never failed, as soon as you walked in her door, she would ask, “Have you et yet?” and you did not dare to correct her. Never would she say “eat”, she always said it like that. You never knew what you would be served, but you knew you would get something good to eat.

She would immediately start cooking as soon as she arrived home from church. She always had left over biscuits from breakfast, cornbread, beans, and stew. Sometimes, she would add fried chicken. The stew might be replaced by vegetable soup or chicken and dumplings. Dressing was another favorite of hers. For holidays, she would make a huge pan of banana pudding. The food was not usually fancy, but it was usually plentiful.

After eating, the children were all expected to pitch in and wash the dishes. Considering the fact that there were often fifteen to twenty people there, cleaning up after dinner took quite awhile. We would take turns some days. Others, we would all pitch in and hurry. Either way, the object was to get through and get outside. The front porch was our favorite hangout. If the adults went there, then we were off to the back yard to see what we could get into.

If it was summer and the weather particularly hot, we would have a car wash. We would wash our parent’s cars to get money to walk to the dairy bar. Sometimes, we would get lucky and one of our parents or an older cousin would feel sorry for us and drive us the mile instead of making us walk. It really didn’t matter to us. We simply enjoyed each other’s company. The walk would be hot, but the ice cream was waiting on us. If we were still too hot when we got back to our grandmothers, she would cool us down with ice tea.

Our Sunday afternoon business ventures were not always designed to supply us with an ice cream cone. Our grandmother never decorated for holidays. Whether it was her lack of money or simply her simple way of life, we never knew. What we did know is that she loved Christmas and Easter. As children, Christmas wasn’t Christmas without decorations and a tree. Sometimes, we would come up with yet another business venture simply as a way to get our parents to pay for a tree and decorations. We knew they knew what we were doing. Even though we could have just asked, hard work was embedded into our way of thinking. We knew you got what you worked for, so we worked for our ice cream and our holiday decorations.

A lazy summer afternoon was always in the plans. The plans had to include a time limit though. We arrived at 12:30 and left at 5:00. She had to have time to change clothes before the church bus arrived to take her to church. The week might be hectic and full of school or chores. For our parents, work may have been too much to bear. Through it all, we knew that come Sunday afternoon, we would be surrounded by food, family, fun, and lots of love. Those four and a half hours were the best part of each week.

Comments RSS