Wearing the Blackbelt: Hard Lessons Learned From A Simple Life

Unfinished Business

“Unfinished Business”

Every now and then my parents liked to relive parts of their childhood through storytelling. We knew the dreaded speech about the good ole days was coming when they started off with them letting us know how lucky we were.

“Shoot! Y’all don’t know how good you got it. You got it made!”

This usually came when we openly complained about having to do daily chores around the house. They would tag team us with the lists of chores they had to do. They chopped down trees. They feed animals. They washed clothes on their hands. It was hard for me to imagine Millry and Silas with dirt streets and horses and buggies. They way my parents carried on you would have thought that they had grown up next door to Laura Ingalls rather than down the street.

“All you gotta do is tote a few pieces of wood from the wood pile in the yard into the house,” daddy would say. “We had to go in the woods, chop down trees, cut the wood and then bring it in the house. And sometimes it was so cold outside our hands would hurt. But we had to do it. You got it made.”

This was supposed to motivate us into happily carrying the firewood into the house and maybe do a little extra. But I for one, still thought it was crazy and just unfair.

Why can’t they just turn on the heat from the wall like normal people? Why do girls have to carry the wood too? That was a boy’s job.

My brother rarely had to do laundry. That was a task that belonged to me and my sister. We hated it. The only advantage of washing everybody's clothes in the house was daddy's overalls. He would always leave loose change and sometimes a few dollars in them. My sister and I considered it a tip and kept quiet about what we found. But, when we voiced our dislike for the chore, sometimes Momma tried to guilt us with her hard knock life story.

“I wish I had a washing machine when I was your age,” she tell us. “Pete and me and Mae Pearl had to wash the clothes out on our hands in this big ole wash tube outside, ring them out and hang them on the line. You're just spoiled. That’s all.”

I could never understand how a childhood filled with long days of doing chores and eating foods straight from the fields could be ‘the good ole days’. While they claimed we had it made, we also didn’t know what we were missing. I dared to voice my opinion about their contradictory stories. I was, after all, just a child. Implying that my parents were lying to us, would surely get me a few swats from the switch. Contradictory or not, these impromptu storytelling sessions seemed to give my parents a bit of joy. They got so much pleasure from reminiscing about the old days at our expense. We were allowed to weigh in with our gasps and sighs of amazement. But for the most part, our job was to listen or at least pretend to listen.

My parents bragged about the happier times in their childhood. They talked about fun at school and neighborhood safety. Mostly they wanted to let us know that the prices of things were a lot cheaper than our overpriced generation.

“For a dime, you could get ten cookies and a box of chocolate milk at school,” momma always told us.

“And they weren’t them little cookies like you got now. They were big,” daddy would add, stretching his large hands out for effect.

“Uh-huh,” momma chorused. “And when me and your daddy first got married, I could go to the grocery store and buy groceries for twenty dollars and still have change!”

They took turns sharing their memories, both of them becoming more excited as they spoke. My siblings and I would just sit there and listen. I’m sure the first time we heard all of these stories we were fascinated by what they had to say. But after about ten or fifteen times, we could care less. We would just pretend to be amazed as if we were hearing it for the first time. At least, my brother and sister did. I daydreamed about being a millionaire who never had to lay eyes on Shady Grove again.