THE HORSE AND BUGGY KNEW THE WAY
As a child on a rural Missouri farm in the mid-1940s going to my grandparent’s house for any winter holiday wasn’t much different than it may have been in the mid-1840s.
The winding dirt road that lay between my Grandparent’s farm and ours wasn’t long. As a preschooler I walked it in summer. But in winter, when traveling that rutted, snow-covered by-way, it seemed a whole lot longer.
On those grand winter occasions my father would hitch the horse, Old Dan, to the enclosed buggy that had originally been a surrey. Though the photo shown here was taken on my first day of school thoughts of winter holiday fun were never far away. Mother would place large rocks in the oven of our wood-burning kitchen stove. When they were hot she’d wrap them in gunnysacks and place them on the floor of the buggy for us to put our feet on. Pure luxury.
Don’t think we were poor or underprivileged. We weren’t. Sure, there wasn’t any television or radio. There wasn’t any running water except what ran in the creek in summer. There wasn’t even electric. It was GREAT!
For instance, on Christmas Morning after we’d opened the single present we’d received it was time for breakfast. Dad would have all ready milked the cows so there was warm frothy milk to drink. And Mom would have checked to see if there were any eggs in the hen house, and collected them before they froze. You just can’t get any richer than having milk still warm from the cow and eggs quickly snatched right from under an old squawking biddy.
It may seem hard to believe but sometimes we had fried chicken for breakfast. If not, there was thick, juicy ham slices or home-cured bacon. Biscuits were a regular item, just as homemade breads and jams were. If you were really hungry there would be pancakes swimming in thick sweet sorghum. The butter was made at home, too.
If I have you ready to run to the kitchen for a snack, hold on. There are dishes to do before we’re off on our buggy ride to Grandma’s house. You guessed it, no dishwasher. But that was all right. A house-full of little hand could come in handy. Besides, all those chores helped keep kids out of trouble. Who had time to get into trouble? Don’t kid yourself. We had plenty of time. But not this day. Not on Christmas.
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