Sweet and Savory

My sister and I walked to the one room school when we were little girls. We wore feed-sack dresses. It took at least two matching sacks. This was not always easy, because Momma bought chicken feed from Uncle Dee’s hardware store. Sometimes, he has to get a ladder and climb way high to find a matching bag of feed. Momma like enough fabric to make good gathered skirts, and puffed sleeves. She liked to have enough to make deep hems to be let out. These dresses were bright and colorful. They took starch very well, so collars and cuffs were stiff. The skirts rustled as we walked. The skirts smelled nice with Satina, which was melted into boiled starch. This made the fabric nice and smooth when ironed, and it smelled kind of perfumed. My dress was soon less crisp and clean, but it started the day nice, and I loved those dresses.

As we walked to school, I hoped that it might be art day. The teacher would go to the tin cupboard and select wonderful things. The best was the paste. We had two kinds. LePages was in a gallon jar, and a smaller glass jar held another kind that was slightly runny and kind of sweet. LePages was not sweet, but somewhat savory. My friend, Joyce and I got squares of linoleum to put over our desks, probably due to the cavalier way we used paste. The jar of LePages was passed around with an old ruler tongue blade to get the most paste. Sometimes, I had to stand up and dig the tongue blade down elbow deep to dig out the moist stuff and avoid getting dried crusts nearer the top of the jar. Once I had a nice gob of paste, I placed it on my linoleum, hoping this would be enough to complete my project and also satisfied my appetite. We were not to “taste” the paste. It was not good for us! It would make us sick! When I think of the viri and bacterium growing in this rich medium it causes me shuddering. We had the same jar of LePages for the 5 years I was at that school!

Well, Hah! I didn’t get sick! Neither did I get sick from the water fountain. This was a stone barrel, into which a pail of well water was dumped. A silver pipe led from the barrel to a perforated china dish. A mouth piece was attached to the silver pipe and the water drained into the dish and down to a bucket on the floor.. The water did not bubble up out of the mouth piece as it was supposed to. It ran rather limply and lazily into the china dish, and you must put your mouth down over the pipe and suck to get a bit of a drink. Sometimes, after art class, I needed some water!

The next best thing about Friday was the Reekly Weeder. The true name of the newspaper was the Weekly Reader, but we never stopped to think how we pronounced it. Even the teacher called it the Reekly Weeder. It was a real newspaper printed on real news print paper, and it was full of items of interest of 4th and 5th graders. It had puzzles and pictures, and everyone got one. I folded mine up with my art project and put it in my lunch pail to take to Momma.

At home, Momma carefully removed the art. Generally she set it aside in a warm place to finish drying, and she tried to un-stick the Reekly Weeder as well and spread it out to dry. She remarked that some paste took a long time to dry, and by the way, was that possibly paste on my dress as well? I carefully checked it and agreed it surely might be! But I knew it was savory paste—the best kind of all!

Return home