Chapter 34
Those little stands which seem to spring up all over creation at this time of year have shut their doors now. Evidently the last of the firecrackers have been popped and things are back to normal until another year.
Unlike tradition, our midsummer holiday is probably the quietest one WE spend. There’s a simple explanation!!
Fourteen years ago, the first Fourth of July my husband and I spent together, turned out to be a disaster. We made it through the entire day and then in the late evening we went swimming with some of his Yankee relatives.
They were swimming in a creek—diving out of trees. All that was missing was the swinging grapevine and alligators. Charles, my fiancée at the time, asked if the water was deep enough to dive. His cousin said it was. But those people call falling out of a tree flat on their faces diving.
So, he DIVED right in!! His feet were still sticking out of the water when his head made contact with the rock bottom.
This cute little blonde came helping him out of the water. That was one time he was very fortunate to have blood already dripping down his face! Thirteen stitches and ten days flat on his pack in traction convinced him that the water was NOT deep enough to dive!!
THEN a year later when we had been married about eleven months, we decided to move to Oklahoma. It just happened to be on JULY 4 when we reached Tishomingo AND Charles met his mother-in-law for the FIRST time!!
It might not have been so bad if she hadn’t baked her famous, scrumptious hot buttermilk biscuits for the first meal. Yankee people do not make BUTTERMILK anything, so he’d never been exposed to such things. ’Course he didn’t HAVE to ask right out loud if they were SOURED, either!!
My mother had never ever heard anything but glorious praise for biscuits! The southern boys I had dated even had said they would marry me on the spot if I could only cook biscuits like my mother.
It’s a mighty good thing that looks don’t kill or fry!! Poor Charles was condemned to that fire—the one seven times hotter’n this weather we have been having—right after he was to “drop dead”! And all that without utterin’ a single word!!
So, we spend our July holiday as quietly as possible. No more swimming accidents, no more FIRST meetings, and no more buttermilk biscuits!!