Etta Bend Devotional
January 18–“Blessed shall be thy basket and thy store” (Deuteronomy 28:5).
My great-grandmother, Catherine Serepta (Tep) Barker Willis, was an outdoors person as was my grandmother and my mother. I can picture her now, wearing a long-sleeved blouse (she would have called it “waist”) and long skirts that reached the tops of her dark shoes. She wore her brown, curly hair in a bun atop her head. Tep was of English ancestry. She had strict ideas about what was proper and what was not. She never allowed her two girls, Mary Edna and Effie, to use slang; however, she ignored the adage, “Whistling girls and crowing hens always come to no good end.” Tep whistled as she went about her chores. I wish I knew what tunes she whistled. I’m sure they were melodies she had heard from her own mother, Lydia Barker, back in Georgia. My mother, too, whistled while she worked. When I heard Mom whistling, I knew that everything was OK and all was right with my world.
Thought: Children whose parents teach them right from wrong and set a good example before them are blessed indeed.
Picture by Lydia Barker
excellent
Are there some hens that actually crow?
Yes, indeed! I don’t know why but sometimes a hen will try for a half-hearted, muffled crow. Mom never did like to hear it. It was so unnatural-sounding that she might have thought it meant bad luck.