Winter Snacks and Games Sidney Saylor Farr (bio) We really didn't have winter games growing up, and often didn't have much to do. The only book allowed by my mother was the Bible. If it snowed, we played in the snow, built snowmen, and sometimes we had snowball fights. We did not come up with the idea of building snow forts for our battles. We delighted in making and eating winter snacks: cracked walnut kernels, parched corn, potatoes baked in ashes, and ripe pawpaws and persimmons. We would bake potatoes in the hot ashes in the fireplace or in the ashes of a fire outdoors. We would rake them out once they were done and eat them. When the first frost came, it would ripen the pawpaws and persimmons. That's when we would gather them and eat them. Parched corn was one of our winter snacks. We shelled ears of corn after it had dried. We put it in a skillet with some bacon fat and heated it until the corn was brown and brittle. It was delicious. I was the eldest of the ten children, so I took over chores for my mother. I collected walnuts and hickory nuts from trees in the mountains in the fall. We stored some of them whole, just as I'd found them, and also cracked some and stored the kernels. Sometimes we put them in glass containers or bags. Another treat we made was to tap maple trees to collect sap. We would boil it down to syrup and made hard candy from it. My favorite wintertime snack was cracked walnuts or hickory nuts. I quite often would get a piece of corn bread and eat it with the kernels. One favorite way to make corn bread was to sift home-ground corn, put it in a bowl with 2 or 3 eggs, pour in boiling water, and bake it in an iron skillet until the edges of the cornmeal turned brown. Usually by that time I could use a spatula and turn it over, then bake it again until it was brown around the edges. One time I was playing in the loft at my grandfather's house. I found a box that contained books and some magazines, which I latched onto right away. I read them until my mother caught on to how much I was reading, and then she would say to Daddy that he had better stop me because I was reading too much. Daddy just laughed at her and made no attempt to supervise what I read. We would play different games and make up games, as well, to play. My sister Clara was always very tenderhearted, and I egged on the other [End Page 80] siblings to play things that would get her emotional. It was very harsh of me. When I think of that today, it makes me ashamed that I was so cruel. There was a song we sang about a woman named Lilly, and it told a story of a woman who was unfortunate in many ways and died in the end. We would somehow work Clara's name into the song so she would feel it to be her story as well. Every time we sang, "Poor Lilly" and sang about her misfortunes, Clara would always cry. Of course we delighted in singing it just because it would make her cry. Being the eldest and the ringleader, I was the one responsible for anything that I could dream up for us to do or sing or say. I don't know why I thought it was fun—and it was very cruel to her. Strange how things dwell in your mind. I called Clara tonight. There were events like these when we were children playing that just stuck in my mind, and I have worried about them, but never made an attempt to deal with them until tonight. I asked her if she remembered the song and all her tears. She laughed and said she did not. While it remained in my head all these years, she had never given it a thought! [End Page 81] Sidney Saylor Farr...
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Jun 17, 2013
Sonja Arpadjan + 4
Open Access