Dogpatch Tales

By the third day of the late spring storm - no power, no lights, no water - we had pretty much exhausted our conversation and creativity. We were card and board gamed out, dominoed to distraction, headachy from reading by candlelight, restless and bored. From the depths of his recliner - half asleep with the cat he liked to claim he had no use for - peacefully nestled in his lap, my daddy commenced to speak. When I was a barefoot boy on the farm......he began and my mother groaned loudly, Not again, Guy!

My daddy opened his eyes and gave her a woeful, reproachful look. When I was a barefoot boy on the farm....he began again and my brothers threw up their hands in protest, Not another barefoot farmboy story, they pleaded, but he just sighed, cleared his throat, and in his best morality tale voice continued, We were dirt poor and there were twelve mouths to feed. We didn't have modern conveniences or electricity or running water. The cat woke and stretched, sinking her claws contentedly into his side. And, he said with a slight flinch as he disentangled her paws and cradled her with one arm while scratching her ears, We kept cats outside. Now, as I was about to say.... my mother sighed heavily, leaned her head back and closed her eyes in resignation. My brothers began squabbling over a box of toy soldiers. I listened sleepily, never quite sure of whether I was hearing the actual truth or a fable, but entertained nonetheless. I often suspected that he exaggerated for effect or to make a point or because he enjoyed making things up, testing how far he could go before having his veracity challenged.

We all had to take turns in the outhouse, he said solemnly, and wash up with well water we drew from a bucket,

then milk the cows and feed the pigs and the chickens. And that was all before breakfast, he paused again to rearrange the cat, which was beans and a crust of bread with maple syrup from the sugar mill.

Had to walk five miles and back to the schoolhouse, then come home and do chores like tend the garden, help your grandmother put up preserves or mow the back pasture, pick apples or shuck corn or cut firewood. Why, we worked from sunup to sundown and never complained. The cat yawned, shifted her position slightly and went back to sleep. Yes, sir, my daddy said with conviction, times were hard when I was a boy on the farm.

These were what we referred to as his Dogpatch Tales, a collection of life lessons to make us appreciate what we had, how to overcome adversity, and be grateful for the world we lived in with all its marvelous labor saving inventions and short cuts. Your grandmother washed clothes with lye soap and a washboard, on her hands and knees by a stream. Churned her own butter and spun her own cloth. Poor as church mice, we were, and we knew how to do without. Why, when I was a barefoot boy on the farm, we worked our fingers to the bone and at the end of the day, all we got was .....This was when my brothers would shout in unison, Bony fingers! and my mother would remark, Another day older and deeper in debt. My daddy would do his best to look wounded at this unseemly and cynical interruption but there was laughter in his blue eyes and sometimes he would give me a wink.

I don't know the truth of his life on the farm although I do remember a washboard and spinning wheel and there was a well by the back door as well as cows, pigs, and chickens, a few apple trees, a vegetable garden and a root cellar. By the time I was a child, there was running water and electricity and a real refrigerator in a corner of the kitchen. Much was still homespun and handmade, but storebought had made its way into the farmhouse slowly - a steam iron, a black and white television and a small radio, a chain saw for the firewood and a sewing machine that plugged in and made my grandmother smile every time she used it. The children she raised, despite hardship and poverty, made their way in the world and had better lives - they grew to be content, unselfish, hard working and self sufficient - it makes me all the more sure that there was more truth than fiction in the Dogpatch Tales.