By Dr. Curtis Varnell
It was mid-May and school was already out and a long summer-time vacation stretched before us. Time on our hands, a rural community filled with a host of kids my age, and plenty of things to keep me occupied. With warming weather, my thoughts were on the swimming holes just waiting for my visit. Our favorite spots featured descriptive names; the blue hole, half-bushel, and the bluff hole. The half-bushel was one of my favorites. Located on shoal creek, it featured a half-bushel basket sized hole located about twenty foot up on the surrounding bluff. Filled with cold spring water, one could dive from forty-foot outcropping into the azure blue water below. Bobbing from the top, you came up gasping and wondering how you ever got the courage to try that and declaring that you would attempt it again.
Thoughts of sleeping in, long hours of baseball games, playing board games, and visiting the libraries to collect and read Zane Grey westerns were quickly dispelled by my much more practical mother. First of all, we were not going to sit around and watch channel five T.V. all day. By the way, that was the only channel we received unless you turned the antenna, held your thumb in the air just right, and rotated your body 45 degrees. Even then, the picture resembled a Colorado snowstorm. We were certainly not watching those day time soaps. The Edge of Night, Days of our Life, and others were not appropriate for children of that time. At four o’clock, we might be rewarded by watching Laramie, The Big Valley, or Wyatt Earp.
As June and July arrived, the house was unbearably hot and the water cooler came on. Those operated in reverse of air conditioners and placed moisture into the house rather than removing the water. The outside box was filled with well water and a huge fan pulled up the moisture and blew it into the living room. Sometimes, dad placed fifty-pound blocks of ice in the water and we enjoyed the cool breeze for short periods. My grandparents moved their beds out onto the cooler screened in front porch and us kids sometimes slept on pallets on the back porch.
My mother’s practical solution to having five growing kids for the summer? “Get outside the house, find you something to do, and don’t come back in till dark!”
More often, she not only told us to get outside but had a list of things to do. Mowing the lawn with a push mower, picking and preparing snap beans, or going with my grandmother to pick blackberries. I loved being with my grandmother and I also liked the blackberry cobbler but I hated picking those berries. We usually left out early in the morning, long sleeved shirts, boots, and a hat and smelling of the bacon lard smeared around our wrist and ankles to keep off the chiggers and ticks. What insects it didn’t exclude from our bodies were washed off in an outside bathtub full of cold water and purex when we got home. Everything in those blackberry patches stung, bit, or had thorns. Birds liked the berries, snakes liked the birds, and sticking your hands into the brush pile would yield numerous scratches plus encounters with wasps, snakes, and on one occasion, a black bear. Valor gave way to discretion and we left the berry patch to the large intruder. We picked and deposited the berries in gallon lard buckets. My grandmother could pick gallons while I picked quarts. If we got more than she wanted to can, we sold them to neighbors for one dollar per gallon. That was a mornings work for me but it would buy me a pop kola, hamburger, chips, and an ice cream at Lila Needham’s grocery in Scranton. I would even have money left over.
Church was a constant in rural Arkansas and the center of community affairs. As if Wednesday, Saturday, and a two-service Sunday wasn’t enough, we added a weekly Bible School and a revival that might last a couple of weeks. With all of our chores, work, and church, we certainly had little “idle” time to get into trouble.
