FAMILY – AT WORK AND AT PLAY

Although we were now in a home of our own, we were not emotionally removed from the home or the rearing of our grandparents. They were still close by and we spent much of our time with them. Two of my mother's siblings were in our age range and we grew up more as siblings than aunt and uncle and our grandparents continued to treat us as one family.

An event that occurred routinely in our lives was "washday" when my mother and my aunts would gather up the clothes to be washed and we would head out with the cousins to spend the day at the "pond" in the middle of the woods. This was somewhat of a "community wash house" I suppose as there was a big black iron pot set up where a fire would be built for heating water and boiling the clothes. The pot was surrounded by a large area of ground that had been cleared from many a footprint having worked on it.

Of course it wasn't the work that went on on washday that attracted us children. It was the huge trees that bore "Tarzan-like" vines that we took turns swinging over and dropping into the pond as we played the day away while the wash was being done. Before returning home we would have a nice bath with Grandma's homemade soap and don a fresh set of clothes that had been washed and dried at the pond in the woods!