Just wanted to share a few childhood memories today:

            My background is common.  My folks are simple country folks.  Daddy had a 6^th grade education and my mother made it to the 11^th grade.  My dad can read and understand The Bible and that is his reading of choice. They are not stupid people, they are simply happy with simple things.

Stupid picture but you get the idea.  They were very cute.  Daddy was in his leisure suit.

            There are certain phrases and saying that we used when I was growing up that never became clear to me until I was older.  My sister still kids me about my father telling me before I could start kindergarten that the test I would be given was a difficult one.  He said they would take a clean handkerchief and put it into one ear and pull it out the other ear.  If it was clean, I could begin school but if it was dirty, I could not.   I don’t remember this actually happening but to this day, I do have an affinity for clean ears.

            My father called potatoes “arsh taters”.  For years, I thought this was the name of the dish my mother cooked or the name of the hybrid of potato.  It was years later that I one day surmised that he was calling them “Irish potatoes”.

            I remember the first time my father asked my new husband if he liked “roshneers”.  We loved roshneer season.  We were eating fresh corn on the cob and calling it roasted ears.  Imagine my surprise?

            My family always had a very large garden and my mom put up everything for us to eat that winter.  We did grow one thing that we ate all of and we called them “tommy toes”.  They were cherry tomatoes or yellow pear tomatoes.  My parents still call little tomatoes, “tommy toes”.

            Another thing that fascinated me as a child was that my parents’ church on occasion had a special even called “all day meetin’ and dinner on the ground”.  I could never imagine why they wanted to put our dinner on the ground and of course, when I was older, I knew that this meant on the premises and not on the ground.

            When my older daughter was small I used to ask her if she wanted something special to eat.  I would mix up raising, dried fruits, cheerios, nuts and seeds for her to snack on.  She began to ask for “something special” and was sad if I gave her an apple or a cookies. I still think of trail mix as “something special”.

            My good friend once confided in me that her family also had funny names for various foods.  They called stewed tomatoes “train wreck”.  And so you see…my family could have been much worse.