A Summer Place III

I was in Bedford, Virginia a year or two ago to pick up an old table from the Summer Place. It was in my grandparents’ house and when my uncle and I went in there to move it out we spent some time looking around the old place, now musty and mildewed but not very dusty. I suppose dust needs people or pets moving around to make it move around and settle on things.

Grandma had two kitchens in the Summer Place. She and Granddaddy called one of them the Front Kitchen and the other one was (you guessed it) the Back Kitchen. The Front Kitchen was where all the kitchen work went on. She had two stoves in there, one electric and one wood. I can’t remember anything ever being cooked on the electric stove although I’m sure she must have trusted it enough to boil the occasional pan of water there.

Anything that counted happened on the wood stove like biscuits and cooking off egg shells. I should have some folksy piece of Appalachian style wisdom here about what happened to the egg shells after they were cooked off on the stove top. The truth is I cannot recall other than Granddaddy crushing them to put in the garden or feed to the chickens or something. I do recall the smell though. It was noxious and since there was no ventilation in the Front Kitchen it persisted all day long.

There was only one hanging light bulb in the Back Kitchen and it was burned out almost all the time. If I had to speculate today I would say that it was never replaced because my grandparents saw no need to replace it since they knew where everything in there was by touch. For my brother and me though, it was a Dark and Evil place but not because anything bad had happened there. It was just dark and in the minds of 5 and 8 years old boys, dark and evil were the same thing. If we came into the house from the back door we had to pass through the Back Kitchen. I’m sure that our theory was that the faster we moved through there the less time the Evil had to get us, so we moved expeditiously, always slamming the door to the outside shut. That way, it would catch and we would not have to back track to close it thus give the dark things a second shot at us.

The Back Kitchen was also where they scabbed on the indoor bathroom that we finally got when my Uncle Buddy paid to have it installed by Sears & Roebuck. Before that addition, a night time nature call entailed a trek across the back yard, though my Uncle’s beagle pen and up to the new outhouse featuring rough cut pine boards for our voiding pleasure. Since Uncle Buddy was not terrible fastidious in his maintenance of the landscaping in the beagle pen, these night time sojourns also functioned as a chigger harvest, the fruit of which never became evident until a day or two later.

Don’t we remember the oddest things from our childhood? Anyway thanks for walking along with me on this little jaunt down memory lane….

Comments

[Pam]

Jim, my Grandmother raised my sister and me. She too had an electric stove AND a wood stove! Mighty good fried chicken came off that ol' stove and the big cast iron skillet she used! (Fried in bacon grease....back then we didn't count colesterol!)

Anyway, that was a great story you shared. I so can relate to it all! The dark and evil, the trek to the outhouse, AND the woodstove! Even the 1 light bulb!!!

In the winter, my little sister and I used to open up the wood stove oven, sit on a chair, prop our feet on the oven door and "warm" while we "waited" for G'ma to fix our breakfast! Those were the days, yes, they were!

Pam

[Nikki]

Jim, It didn't really hit me until just now how truely OLD you are. Out houses? HE HE

[Jim Brodhead]

Yep Nikk, old I am...so old in fact that I remember not only outhouses but ice cream trucks...with bells on them! And I am not afraid of them