© By Abraham Lincoln. All rights reserved.
My mother and I took a train from Dayton, Ohio to Hinton, West Virginia. We went to visit my grandpa and my two uncles and we stayed with them.
The house was back on the side of a mountain. You had to drive through fields, after opening and closing gates, and then, let the car wheels creep over the bank of a creek. Once in the middle of the creek, the driver drove downstream and then up on the other shore and up onto the road on the mountain. It was down that road a short distance where my grandfather lived.
When I walked in the front door I was astonished to see his walls papered with old newspapers and that the colored comics covered the four walls in the living room.
After a lot of talking and visiting, my mother and I went to bed and climbed in on a feather tick mattress. The next morning I woke up with a red rash — my mother said I had been bitten by bed bugs. She took the old mattress outside and used some coal oil to soak the feather tick seams and between the sun and coal oil we were not bothered again.
My uncle did most of the cooking. The day we arrived he began breaking and frying eggs. He had a huge iron skillet filled with grease that fried-out of fresh bacon or side meat (I can’t remember which) and the eggs floated around in the grease that had to be at least 1-inch deep. He filled the skillet with eggs. He said he always ate a dozen for breakfast and what was left over would be fed to the hogs.
There were two or three flat iron pans were filled with what he called, “pan bread.” He told mother that he made enough to last all day. To eat it we broke off chunks to dip in egg yolks; or dunk in the coffee — my grandpa used a chunk of it to soak up the grease on his plate. I got butter on my chunk of pan bread.
He asked us if we wanted some coffee and we all did. He poured our cream off that morning’s milk; and grandpa passed a bowl filled with sugar. My uncle poured lots of cream into his coffee and that turned the coffee-color to a creamy tan. It was good coffee.
On Sunday, grandpa listened to a preacher named, “Armstrong” and when it was over the radio was turned off. A light over the old kitchen table was turned on long enough to eat a meal and then was turned off to save electricity.
The toilet was outside and for a privy it was in good shape and didn’t smell bad. Water was at the end of a rope in a bucket down in the well.
The vegetable garden was large and filled with ready to eat vegetables. The garden was a relief from winter’s potatoes and hog jowl. Grandpa’s pigs grew fat on leftover eggs and the milk from the cow — fresh, whole, milk was dumped into the pig trough every day.
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