Foam Party

 

The youth at our church held a Foam Party to celebrate the beginning of the school year.  Everyone had a great time including the adults.  I joined the fun and walked into the foam. 

"You can do anything with children if you only play with them," said Prince Otto vo Bismarck (1815-1898).

End of the summer, the youth holding a Foam Party.

After plunging into the foam, I bend to brush off the suds.

It was a mountain of foam and like floating on clouds when you entered the foam.

Here's a photo of me coming out of the foam and laughing with the kids.

Carefree, getting in touch with the kid inside me, I've never had such fun!

What a wonderful way to start a new school year with the kids.

THE FRONT PORCH

 Memories flood my mind as I sit on the front porch.  Perhaps it is the taste of buttermilk, the smell of cornbread baking in Grandma Minnie's Dutch oven over the fireplace, or the sorghum syrup Granddaddy Bob made each fall from cane.

The family rose before the rooster crowed to tackle the hot, hard, job of stripping blades from cane.  After cutting them down, you put the cane into piles and cut off the seed heads.  Then Granddaddy and the boys loaded the cane on a wagon and hauled it to the mill.  A mule pulled the pole that turned the mill.  Cane was fed into the vertical rollers like a washing machine.  Juice squeezed from the cane and flowed down a spout to the boiler where it was boiled from one vat to another.  You skimmed foam off the top until it came out a nice clear brownish-red color.  Dozens of yellow jackets swarmed and you had to keep them out of the syrup.  Our family made 90 gallons of sorghum syrup.  The labor paid off when you savored the rich, thick, sorghum on hot, buttered biscuits.

Besides making sorghum syrup, Great-Grandpa Dallas Matheson owned 300 acres of land on Shewbird Mountain.  He was a farmer and grew an apple orchard above the frost line.  He raised the black beauty that was so red it looked black.  The Ben Davis was light with small streaks and white inside.  Other apples included the horse apple, hog sweet, red June, striped May, pumpkin apple, queen pippin, pound apple, and others with no names.  Each fall our family took a sled and mule to Shewbird Mountain and hauled apples to the house to store them in the cellar.  Grandma and the girls dried apples on trays outside in the sun.

I ponder the good old days on the front porch. We had no air-conditioners and it was a taste of heaven resting on the porch each evening as a breeze wafted over the valley.  Neighbors would stop for a visit and we enjoyed swapping a few stories as lightning bugs flashed.  Brother Harold and I caught them in Blair canning jars and pretended they were our lanterns. 

Many homes have no front porches now.  Families are missing a wonderful slice of the bygone days.

by:  Brenda Kay Ledford

Reprinted from:  GOOD OLD DAYS, A Poetry and Prose Anthology

                           Published by: Old Mountain Press:  www.OldMountainPress.com