......by Rosemary Bowery
......by Rosemary Bowery
I have vague memories of living in the small southwest, Virginia town of Big Stone Gap, in the early thirties. I was only three when we move away but I remember the small fenced yards with cows roaming on city streets. I remember going with my mother to take a pan of cornbread and some beef broth to a young single mother that lived nearby. The woman had recently lost her husband to a mining accident. She did not know how to manage her small monthly widow's check and sometimes her three small children went hungry.
"Now, Corey," My mother would say, "When you get your check don't run to the store and spend it all on loaf bread, cold cuts, pop, and candy. Buy a bag of flour, a bag of cornmeal, salt, soda, and shortening so you can bake your own bread. Also ask the butcher for a soup bone and be sure to keep back enough money to pay the milkman for fresh milk every day. If you will do this, along with the vegetables from your garden, you will be able to stretch that check and keep your children from going hungry.
My most vivid memory is of a kind lady whom we all called Aunt Alpha. I can see her now as she spread her sliced apples on top of a small shed in her back yard each day to dry in the autumn sun. One day, after the apples were almost dry enough to store for the winter, she saw me watching her through the fence, walked over and gave me a handful of apple slices to eat. I ate the apples and kept asking for more. I am sure now that she didn't realize how many of the apples I had eaten and that dried apples were tough and difficult for a three year old to chew properly.
My mother had no idea why I was not hungry at supper that evening but she excused me from the table and I went directly to bed. I awoke in the night with a bad stomach ache and called out for my mother. She came to my bed and found me delirious with fever and my stomach was hard as a rock. Daddy was getting dressed to go after the doctor when I threw up the apples pieces that had expanded in my small stomach. Only then did they know what was wrong and that I would be all right.
Aunt Alpha never knew she almost killed me with kindness.
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