Granny's Pantry # 5: The rock garden

Granny's Pantry #5                     

If you walk out the double front doors of Granny’s house at High Rock, and wander left toward the thin stretch of trees guarding what once was the summer vegetable and flower garden, you will see large rocks in a group to the left of the pathway. This magic place is called the Rock Garden. Whether the rocks naturally occurred together or were placed there by artistic design as land was cleared on the farm, I can’t say—I think the former. But I do know that the Rock Garden, coupled with childhood imagination, turned the inanimate objects into a manor-without-walls.

TV (on left)

This was a house where you could walk among or upon the furnishings, all depending upon your whims and agility. Big enough to accommodate a family of two, my sister and me, the rock home was well appointed. The kitchen area sported a refrigerator (don’t remember a stove), the living room had a sofa, easy chair, TV (looked just like one), and piano w/bench, and the bedrooms provided each of us with a recognizable bed. (Mine was somewhat tall and slanted, but Janie’s was flat, moss covered and inviting.)  There was also a somewhat vague set of bathroom accommodations.

Comfortable seating

The Rock Garden manor was all stone and fantasy, but as real as my present home is to me now (and much easier to maintain). The rock grouping is still visible not far from the house at High Rock. I can go there any time I visit, but I rarely take that pathway any more. Why would I need to be reminded, in my adult self, that the place is simply an intriguing gathering of rocks when I can visit my mansion in the wild in my childhood memory any time I choose?

Refrigerator?

 

Piano (on right) & Bench

Janie's Bed

 

Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.  Isaiah 26:4

 

He only is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken.  Psalm 62:6

Granny's Pantry # 4: Granny Cole at home

Granny's Pantry # 4

Granny             

Farm house standing a century

Down the cedar-lined dirt lane.

Peacocks and guineas greeted comers

Or warned homefolks.      

Granny’s bedroom—safe in storms

When the lights went out for good.

Clean white cloths on the table

Boiled potatoes

Corn off the cob

Chicken fresh from the yard and fried

Churned butter—ripe fruit jelly

The biscuits...Oh, the biscuits!

Flour scented pantry                            

Flowed with homemade treasures-

Sweet muscadine wine

Homemade grape juice

Pound cake to smear with peanut butter

Peanuts to parch

Strawberry custard pies—my favorite

Blackberries picked by the calf pasture.

She served all that

And rich harvest soup. 

Out in the garden                   

Orange and yellow gladiolas waited

To enter and stand tall in crystal vases.

May-pops mid rows begged to be burst.

Butter beans shelled ‘til our nails were sore.

Family feasts—                                                                                             

Table sagged from one more covered dish.   

Granny could do anything and make it look easy.

Milk cows – make soap

Stuff sausage at killing time

Cook hog fat for cracklins and lard

Talk politics

Piece quilts

Sell eggs to the neighbors

Sew fine fashions from feed sacks

Boil Granddaddy’s muddy clothes in a pot in the yard

Shuck corn

Kill varmints

Pluck chickens

Feed wheat threshers

Take in boarders building the dam.                       

----  ------  ----

I could do anything, too.

With her, I was free.

Stay up half the night watching old movies

Sleep ‘til ten and eat cake for breakfast.

Only 1 rule: “Don’t stand on the well!”

I did and lived to tell.

Auctions and revivals

Sunday afternoon visits and church.

Christmas stockings embroidered with my name

Filled with soap and walnuts,

Toothpaste, an orange.

----  ------  ----

       My granny could do anything but live when she could do nothing more.

Faced with the thought of that…

She said goodbye.           

                

 

Well reported of for good works;
if she have brought up children,
if she have lodged strangers,
if she have washed the saints' feet,
if she have relieved the afflicted,
if she have diligently followed every good work.

1 Timothy 5:10

 

Granny's Pantry # 3: The house at High Rock

Granny’s house never had a formal, fancy name. My sister, brother and I called it High Rock (for the settlement nearby named for a large rock outcrop above it on the side of the Flat Swamp Mountain range)...or just Granny’s. It sits on a Century Farm about a mile from High Rock Dam in piedmont North Carolina.

The house at High Rock

The house is the latest home place of our branch of the Cole’s back through Granddaddy Albert Milton. His bride, Freda Mae Morgan, came from a farm across the river in Rowan County. This Cole farm house was built about 1890 by Grandsir Jim (James Milton Cole--Albert’s daddy). Jim’s daddy, Grandsir Tom Cole, built an earlier house on a rise closer to the Yadkin River. This house site is now only remembered by a scattering of bricks and the old kitchen, which was moved to become the wheat house behind the newer High Rock house. The current farm is part of land acquired through land grants in 1779 and 1984 to the 3 times great grandfather of Albert Milton Cole—the land grant hangs on the wall in the living room.

                                The High Rock house sits at the end of a long dirt lane, lined by cedar trees, between two fields.

An avenue of ancient boxwoods leads to the front door.

Looking from front porch

There once was a plainer façade on the two story front, but Granny Cole wanted...and got...the architectural changes of four square columns, shuttered windows and a slate front porch. The back of the house has one story and has tolerated an enclosed side porch, bathroom addition (an upgrade from the outhouse) and kitchen expansion (that for years housed both Granny’s wood and electric stoves) making life more convenient over the last 75 years or so.

 

Granddaddy’s been gone since 1967 and Granny since 1994. Aunt Ruthie lives there now, but much of the time…she doesn’t know it and is trying to get home. My heart pulls me back every few weeks, and I make the hundred mile trip to where I also used to live. I’ve conditioned myself to the changes, and we’re still adding to the memories.      

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is  temporary, but what is unseen is eternal 
(II Corinthians 4:18)

Granny's Pantry #2: It's just the train.

Granny’s Pantry #2

Granddaddy and Granny Cole farmed about 200 acres mostly between Lick Creek Church Road and the Yadkin River in Davidson County, North Carolina. A rail line ran the length of the property near the river. Their old, two story farm house was located  about a quarter of a mile from the tracks. Going to Granny’s was one of the “funnest” things I did as a child and staying there for days and nights while Mama and Daddy traveled or during summer vacations was my own small taste of Heaven.         

Sometimes I would crawl in with Granddaddy, but he snored. I would have to wake him up and let him know (I’m sure he appreciated it), so he would turn over, quit snoring and I could go to sleep.

Other times Granny and I would find a bed upstairs in one of the bedrooms where she always had multiple beds set up for visiting family members. Granny always got up early to fix Granddaddy breakfast before he went out to plow, and I always slept late. But I wanted to know when she left me in the morning…maybe I would get up, too. So, I remember reaching out my leg to touch hers before I went to sleep so that I would feel it when she moved her leg to get up. It didn’t work.

Granny’s house was large, and in the day time, a wonderful place to make my own while she went about her farm chores. At night, the big old house surrounded by pastures and woods could be a scary place. Strange noises came from the direction of the river—roars and bumps and screeches—and suddenly Granny’s was not so safe anymore.

“Granny,” I would whisper, “what’s that?”  In my young mind, the possibilities were unnamed but endless. And it didn’t just happen once or only to me. The sounds could change or the time when they happened could change. It was enough to prompt the question again and again, from me, my sister, my brother—we all heard those noises and over and over—separately—we would ask. “Granny, what’s that?”

And Granny would answer, “It’s just the train.”

What was frightening and unknown to us was familiar and recognizable to her. Those switching and revving and braking and backing up noises that made the trains of the HPT&D railroad sound like monsters from the night represented old friends to her—ones that were daily visitors to her world.

And now, sometimes when an obstacle of life comes up in our adult world, we’ve been known  to repeat Granny’s explanation to make ourselves feel more secure. Whatever it is out there…it’s just the train.

How much more comforting to remember are the responses of my Heavenly Father to the questions and fears of my life:

Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear.

Isaiah 65:24 (NIV)
Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You.
Psalm 56:3 (NKJV)