Mamaw Sanford lives three miles out of town, down a dirt lane that turns off a gravel road. Her little white house sits at the bottom of a hill. It’s where my mother grew up and where we come visit when Daddy gets leave. The hill behind her house has dapples of white dogwoods breaking up deep shades of green. Out front, a little stream trickles by before it runs into Hell’s Creek. Mamaw has lived there alone ever since I can remember. My Papaw died before I was born, but one thing he planted remains: a row of Catawba trees that provided him plenty of fishing bait.
This spring when we visit, I explore all the outbuildings along the row of Catawba trees leading to the unused barn. The buildings are old, but the floorboards still hold. In the first building, a sort of tractor shed or garage, I find an old quilt box. Inside, the quilts are too old to be used in the house, but a treasure trove of Nancy Drew mysteries lies inside. I determine to spread an old quilt under one of the trees and while away hours solving whodunits until I am an expert detective myself.
The next building might have been an old kitchen house. Inside is a wood cooking stove that inspires my cousins and me to sweep out this little building and play house. Generations of mice have made nests in the firebox, but we brave on and tidy the space into grounds for the imagination. There’s an old blackened iron cauldron, perfect for pretending scary witch tales. (It was actually used to make soap by my grandmother, but what fun is that compared to brewing up a scary story.)
At the end of the row is the old barn open at both ends with stalls to my right and left. I try to imagine the grandfather I never knew teaching his rooster to crow for a peanut, or charming the king snake he allowed to guard against the moccasins. Out the other end of the barn is a natural spring. I run back to the little white house and interrupt the biscuit making to get Mamaw’s dipper hanging above her kitchen sink. Back at the spring, I slurp up the coldest cleanest tasting water I ever had in my mouth.
Not far away is a vernal pond my cousins and I inspect, and finding little tadpoles in abundance, I put the dipper to a new use fishing out future frogs for pets. I proudly return to the cottage with my bounty carried carefully in my skinny stiff arms. “Mamaw? Do you have a bowl I can keep my tadpoles in?” She stops cutting biscuits and looks inside her dipper.
“What in the Sam Hill are you thinking, using my dipper for catching tadpoles?” I’ve never seen Mamaw so angry. Her face is red and her usually kind and patient eyes just about pop out of her head.
“I’ll wash it up good. It’ll be okay!” I never once stopped to think it might displease folks to drink out of a tadpole catcher. What if she tells Mamma and Daddy and I get the switch?
She fusses at me a good five minutes after I get back from the ditch where I sent my little critter friends to metamorphose in a more dangerous ecosystem. I scrub and scrub the dipper ‘til my hands must be the softest ever from all the Palmolive I use. After returning the dipper over the curtain rod to its permanently dented spot on her cotton window treatment, I skulk out of view of the scowling cook. She can’t even look at me without getting mad as a wet hen all over again. I wonder how many times she’ll scrub that metal dipper before forgiving its shameful trip to the barn.
She might still be mad at me, but I get a hot buttered biscuit and top it with some Golden Eagle Table Syrup before hiding away again to solve The Secret of the Old Clock. I try not to think about what trouble I’ll get in when Mamaw tells my parents what I did.
I’m not present when the report is made, but she must have restrained any desire for vengeance on the dipper-disturbance. No one is amused by my foibles (my new Nancy Drew vocabulary term). I am spared a hide-tanning, but become a bad joke in family lore. . .
“Remember when you used Mamaw’s dipper to catch those tadpoles?” Oh Lordy, what was I thinking?
Your Turn: Two objects from my Mamaw’s kitchen I will never forget: her dipper always hanging above her sink, and her biscuit cutter—I can still see it in the drawer. What stories might you recall by thinking about such common taken-for-granted objects?
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