Our
Home Ec classes were in a charming smaller brick building, much like the
wealthier folks’ homes in town, and with all the requisite rooms, but larger,
and with purposes. First and foremost
was the kitchen---long counters with sinks every eight feet or so, almost like
the chemistry lab, but ours were the outdoor-faucet types---those squat-nosed
coppery screw-a-hose-onto faucets like for washing your car, rather than the tall
swan upsweeps for filling all those science beakers and such. There
were cupboards and cabinets and a rank of four stoves, six burners each, and
when all of us got going stirring Seven Minute or White Sauce---the
already-tropical air became hotter. We’d
never heard of air conditioning yet, except for maybe at the picture show in
The kitchen had an air of past hot Summer cannings, with the shelves of the pantries filed with long lines of Ball and Mason jars of tomatoes and unsnapped beans and pickles. There was a certain scent to that area, possibly because of the many jars which had merely a little calico circle secured with a string, to dust-guard the white layer of paraffin poured onto the boiling contents below to prevent any bacteria. Wax and sugar the lasting tang of simmering home-fruit, for the countryside was then still so rural, you could stop out in the country and pick you a whole apronful of apples or peaches or fat rosy plums, with the grand prize being those thumb-size golden plums, my Mammaw’s favorite preserve, and gathered early of a morning way out in the hills toward her Home Place. They DID make a marvelous concoction, and the round, translucent whole ones suspended in that thick golden syrup glowed with a magic of their own, as if being jewels was enough, and the sumptuous taste merely lagniappe.
Another
large room held a couple of bedsteads, a few ironing boards, and wide flat counters
for learning to fold everything from diapers to bedsheets. Hospital corners on the beds, (no fitted sheets for a decade or so, but we welcomed those when they came) those
line-dried sheets flipped just so, the top sheet with the wider cuff-end turned
down a foot so as to display any monogram or fancy stitching, and the furry
chenille bedspread spread neatly tucked around and over the two pillows, with
any design military straight.
The
claggy smell of Faultless starch is unforgettable, with the few times we were
required to mix our own dishpan of the grey goo, plunge in our hands and the
pillowslips or dresser-scarves or aprons, and wring the whole mass neatly for
hanging to dry. Each piece was “sprinkled
down” with a nifty little pierced
bottle-top inserted into a Pepsi bottle of cold water. (We never mentioned the small snug rubber nipples sold for a nickel in the NOTIONS case---they fit over the lip of a Coke or Pepsi bottle for a lot of babies' milk, and nice folks didn't take notice of good folks using what they could afford). Those damp rolls were packed with all the others into a pillow case or big spread towel to go into a
cool place (or into the freezer, which we finally got in about 1954) for best
results. And the ironing---I could get
with that---I was thumping that heavy Westinghouse iron onto all the
pillowslips and smaller items when I was eight and had to wrestle the board
down onto its lowest notch---even Daddy’s boxers got a good pressing and
folding.
I had had a small lifetime of all those tasks when I started Home Ec in eighth grade, but the big room with the dozen Singers all lined up beside the LONG cutting table with yardsticks nailed around the top edges like embroidery, and the three “dress forms”---big wire body shapes in three sizes S-M-L---Sadie, Maud and Bertha, probably named in the farback days when those names were popular---who stood in the shadows, haunting the far end of the room until they were called to duty---THAT was not my favorite area. I’d tried to learn a seam on Mother’s and Mammaw’s machines, but my hands just would not learn a straight stitch, and my feet on Mammaw’s treadle would stray from the neat line quicker than you could say scat to a cat, into and out of time with whatever little black .45 Elvis record I had going. Even hems and Rock‘n’Roll are not happy companions. And Mammaw’s steadfast thumps hand on the crank and flying feet in rhythm to “Redwing” and Eddy Arnold were perfection I could never get the hang of. Still haven’t, and even though I spent many a free afternoon with Mother and OTHER Mammaw over their crochet and embroidery, my best effort became a tight little cone by the fourth row. If ever you need a Barbie hat, I’m your girl.
And I would have been happy with that. Those foldings and cleanings and cannings and recipes and bed-changings, on up to caring for an infant---on my part, up close---my only sister was born the year I turned twelve, and I spent my succeeding six years totally immersed in family life---Demi-Mom when school was not in session. I could have traveled the world as an au pair at sixteen, had we ever heard of such a thing.
We learned all the ins and outs of Homemaking of those times in the usual four years of Mrs. Ward’s tutelage and example. I clipped out a comic strip decades ago---little girl musing to herself, “All I want to do is have a family and be a good wife and mother---WHY do I have to go to Kindergarten?” And I really, until that senior year, expected that to be my life. Despite my parent’s drive and eagle eyes on my grades and excelling in all things I could, I really never gave a thought to college---those Home Ec years instilled a love for cooking and homekeeping and all things to do with family, and that was what my Hope Chest was for.
But,
there was an entirely different path set for me, outside the home, and I’m
grateful that I could experience both worlds.
And both were enhanced by my years in that big brick house that
room-by-room, taught us girls (and quite a few boys, calling it Singles
Survival) to take care of the simple and important things of everyday life.
