When my mother was a schoolgirl, she would come home from Franklin Academy, get a lemon, dip it in sugar and then climb up into her tree house and read Nancy Drew mysteries.
Mother’s arboreal retreat was not the only feature of the backyard of the one-story house at 13th Street and Second Avenue North where she would live until she went away to college. There was a chicken coop, a playhouse, a fishpond and my mother’s small flower garden.
A block north on 13th Street was the McClanahan home where her father grew up. Last weekend’s tornado upended an ancient magnolia in the yard of that house. “My dad hated that tree,” Mother said. “He had to rake the leaves and he was always getting fussed at by his mother because more leaves fell while he was raking.” Her father, Blanche, was one of Johnnie and D.S. McClanahan’s 10 children.
During a recent visit with my mother, the conversation, as it often does, turned to flowers. Still a passionate gardener at 90, she said she has been putting seeds in the ground for upwards of 80 years.
“I used to take my candy money to Mr. Bishop’s store and buy flower seeds,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Bishop’s Store?” This was new territory for us.
“We loved Mr. Bishop,” she said. In those days small-town America shopped at corner groceries, also known as “jot ’em down stores.” Distinct in my mother’s memory is the barrel of dill pickles, the delivery boys on their bicycles with the deep baskets and the tall, skinny storekeeper.
“Mother would call (Mr. Bishop) and order groceries (for lunch) every morning,” Mother said. “I expect there would be two or three dollars worth. We had a delivery guy come to our home every day.”
The store was at the corner of Main and 14th streets, across the street from what is now Noweta’s Green Thumb. Also, nearby on Third Avenue North, was a neighborhood grocery run by Walter Caldwell. “Uncle Walter” Mother calls him.
I ran into Uncle Walter’s grandson in Military Hardware recently. “Yeah, I used to have to deliver groceries,” Bobby Caldwell said.
Uncle Walter stocked live chickens. “These were the days before frozen food,” Mother said. You could order your chickens from Uncle Walter live or dressed. Her mother, the daughter of a contractor from Illinois, preferred to process her own chickens.
“Mother would wring their necks in the backyard,” Mother said.
Uncle Walter had an open-sided truck, and to keep his inventory from over-heating on hot summer evenings, he would take his chickens for a ride.
Several years ago, Mother saw in a catalog a toy truck that reminded her of Uncle Walter’s. She ordered one and gave it to his grandson.
Mother attributes her good health to an active childhood. “We walked everywhere,” she said. “We walked to school and walked home for lunch.”
During the hot Mississippi summers, McClanahan families would decamp to what was known as “Family Camp,” a scattering of rustic screened cabins arrayed alongside a central dining hall off Military Road not far from Lowndes Farm Supply. The camp, on the banks of Luxapalila Creek amid a thick woods, was a child’s paradise.
During weekdays, the menfolk, most of who worked in the family contracting business, D.S. McClanahan and Sons, would head to town. The women would tend to the children, many of who would spend their days gallivanting through the woods or going with Aunt Lucy (Puckett) to the creek to swim.
In the spring and fall Mother would organize bike trips out to Family Camp. She remembers making sandwiches combining potted meat with chopped pickles and eggs for the day-long excursion, most of which was spent pedaling gravel roads.
When Mother’s brother, Tom, joined the Navy to fight in World War II, she became her father’s boat paddler on early-morning fishing trips to Lake Norris.
“He would pull my toe and say ‘us go,’ and I’d get up. The last dog he had, a black cocker spaniel, was named ‘Us Go.’
“He would fish and I would paddle him,” she said.
My mother, as mothers must be, was and is a great multi-tasker.
“While Daddy fished, I would work on my memory work for school,” she said.
At that point my mother paused, momentary lost in another time. Then she did something I’d never heard her do. She began reciting in Old English a passage from “Beowulf.”
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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