In the back of my second Etta book, Remembering Etta Bend, I included a section of personal remembrances of life at Etta. These were written by Ma and Pappy Latty’s two surviving children in 1992, Susie Latty Day and Georgia Latty Cochran as well as most of their grandchildren. The following is a remembrance of my sister, Helen Day Cartwright. Helen’s remembrance was long so I’ll write half today and the last half tomorrow in this blog. This is what stood out in my sister’s mind about life at Etta:
“I remember gathering watercress for Sunday dinner when everyone happened to be there. The girl cousins, Bertie and Edna Sue and Pauline and I would take little buckets with us to the branch just below the springhouse. Ma always gave us buckets that had held Armour or Cudahey lard and empty Griffin or Karo syrup buckets. Just below the springhouse where the spring water fed into the branch, there were lots of large rocks. The watercress seemed to grow best among these rocks. We pinched the white roots off and washed it right there in the water. That was much easier than carrying buckets of water up the hill to the house. I still remember the peppery, green mustard taste of watercress.
“I remember helping Ma with the cream separator too and turning the handle while watching one large stream of white, frothy milk fill a bucket and another, small stream of soft yellow cream fill a second bucket. I think they usually fed the separated milk to the hogs. (I wonder how many of us older grandchildren really like the fashionably healthy two per cent milk?
“The cream was used to make butter, or used on breakfast cereal (oatmeal) and for cooking. Ma also had crocks of cream to take to the produce house in Tahlequah along with her crates of eggs on Saturday. All of this was kept in the springhouse. The cream was so thick you could spoon it up for a taste and hope the place you had dipped from smoothed out before Ma saw it. The cream for selling was kept in large crocks.”
(Helen’s Etta story to be concluded tomorrow.)
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