This long weekend is off to a wet start. Rain puts me in a nostalgic mood and I think of what a rainy morning may have been like on the Latty farm when my mother was a young girl. My grandfather always went to the barn to milk while the morning was still as dark as night. He’d carry a kerosene lantern with him to hang on the barn wall. Then, carrying the foaming buckets of warm milk, he’d climb the hill and take the milk to the kitchen to be strained into jars.
This early on the dark, wet morning, a kerosene lamp would be sitting on the kitchen table as the family ate breakfast and the girls washed dishes afterward. With rain shaking the leaves of the walnut tree outside the window, Susie would probably grab a book as soon as she had finished making her bed and drying the dishes. She’d settle down close to a lamp in the front room and lose herself in a world of make believe.
Outside, a few chickens would venture from their house, led by their trusted rooster. Then, as raindrops pelted them, they’d hurry back into the henhouse, ruffling their feathers to shed the rain and muttering their complaints.
Looking east from the high porch of the house, the road was a rocky, soggy ribbon winding its way between house and barn. East of the barn, the little spring branch ran down toward the river, gurgling out from the spring house which was a refrigerator for the morning’s milk.
Rain is like that–sets me to remembering and thinking about other stormy spring days and the people that I find there.
Those days were not easy, but those living in them had no idea of what would evolve in time!
That’s true. That was the life they knew at that time.