Just Close Your Eyes, You Are There

Imagination is a wonderful thing. It can take you any place you want to go. Sometimes, just as a sort of mini-vacation, I close my eyes and zip back a hundred years to Etta, Cherokee County, Oklahoma. The place I go is my grandparents’ farm. It is Sunday morning, July 13, 1914. Levi and Edna Latty (Ma and Pappy to most of their grandchildren) have been up for a long time and so have their four children, three girls and a boy. Pappy has milked the cows, the milk has been strained, and is in stone jugs in the springhouse. Ma cooked breakfast a long time ago, sausage and eggs, biscuits and gravy. Those feather beds that are wonderful to sleep on have been exchanged for straw mattresses for the summer and are much easier to spread up. Feathers tend to have minds of their own and quilts spread over them have humps here and there. My grandmother used a broomstick to smooth out those stubborn uneven spots.

This is Sunday, so the farm work is kept to a minimum. Whatever day of the week, though, horses and mules, milk cows must be fed. Chickens, too, require a scattering of corn. And, the house cats get their share of the cream. The farmhouse is already warm, but windows and doors are open to catch any vagrant breeze that wanders through and the porch is shady and cool. I hear the chickens in their yard, the guineas whose friendly ker-chuck comes up from the creek. The horses snort down in the barnyard and the cows move out to graze in the pasture. Most of all, I hear and see the people going about their chores or sitting down to rest a mite with a glass of cold buttermilk in hand. And, I love each one and am grateful for the heritage they left for me, the heritage of my family from Etta Bend.

A dear cousin sent me a group of pictures the other day. One is of the old home place at Etta. The yard is full of people as everyone seemed to congregate at the Latty farm. There are no names on the back of the picture and some of the people I don’t know and can only guess at. The man on the horse and the woman holding the bridle could be Uncle George and Aunt Etta Forrest. Who they and a few others are remains a mystery. But, Ma and Pappy (Levi and Edna) are young, probably twenty-eight. They are standing in the yard gate and beside them is their oldest daughter, Alice, at maybe eight years of age. Two men on the porch may be Ma’s father and grandfather, possibly. But those are just guesses.

Anyway, it’s a snapshot of the farmhouse and the Latty family who lived there. It’s where my mom and her sisters and brother grew up. It was usually a quiet place but it was a very busy place. And it’s a lot of fun to visit, even if it is only in my imagination.