Page 30 - Sorghum
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Sorghum
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“You live on a farm and you don’t drink milk?”
“Nope, we ain’t hardly got enough to feed the hogs.”
The dormitory in which we lived had fire places in every room. School tuition for the seven-month year was either one dollar or a cord of wood cut to fire place size. We had lots of wood and few dollars. The state paid Dad in script during the Depression, and we could exchange it at a fairly good rate for clothes and other manufactured goods in Tupelo. We’d usually heat only the downstairs. Upstairs we had to run through the cold bedroom and jump under the covers to get warm.
No one used deodorant. We’d never heard of it. We’d only take a bath once a week because you had to build a fire to heat the water. In the winter we didn’t dare go in the ice-cold bath tub, so we’d usually take a sponge bath.
We had about two or three good snows a winter. It was before global warming. Snow would sweep down from the Midwestern plain states through Memphis and hit us, a flat shot all the way. Tornado’s could do the same. Snow ice cream was the only type of ice cream avail- able unless we went to the drug store/soda shop.
